You're listening to the Paranormal UK Radio Network and this is six Degrees of John
Kiell. Hello and welcome to the six Degrees of John Kill podcast. I'm
your host, Barbara Fisher. This evening, I'm talking with Alexandra. We've
spoken with her before, early on, fairly early on. She is a
shamanic practitioner and an anthropologist, and tonight we're going to talk about the similarities
between alien abduction scenarios and experiencers and shamanic initiation among shamanic practitioners. Hello,
Hi Barbara, that's good to see you again. You two, thanks for
having me back. No worries now, if anybody hears any like little dog
Shortles, it's because Alexander has a really cute dog who sometimes wants to add
her you know, feelings on the matter. So if it happens, it
happens, don't worry about it. So the reason I brought this topic up
with you is I was I went underwent shamanic training with one of your same
teachers, and so we have that in common. And you know, alien
abduction is something that I of course know about, but for a long time
I just kind of went it's over there. I'm not going to look at
it, you know. So, I mean, I've read Whitley Strieber's book
Communion and the second book, Transformation, and a couple of his other books.
I did read some of Bud Hopkins books, but I was I was
very distraught when I read the transcripts of some of his some of his work
because he was asking under hypnosis, which he was an artist so probably shouldn't
have been hypnotizing anybody, but under hypnosis he was asking leading questions, the
same exact leading questions that I was taught as a journalist to kind of ask
and sort of manipulate a KG source into saying what you knew. They knew
but they didn't want to say. So I was like, you're basically giving
them information and they're spouting it back at you. That's not that's not no.
So for the longest time, I pretty much, you know, oh,
that's the X Files thing. I'm not gonna you know, bother about
it. I didn't read much about it. I didn't pay attention to John
Mack. Mostly, I just didn't read about it. And fairly recently within
the past year, a friend suggested, he's like, you know, you
really should read some of the more interesting stuff. He said, you know,
because I agree with you on Bud Hopkins and David Jacobs. He's like,
they're no. He was like, but there's there's some cases that are
really really unique and really strange. And he said, and I think with
your with your experience with shamanic work, it's gonna sound familiar. And so
that's what I did, and then I started seeing things going oh oh oh,
okay. So when you when you talk about shamanic initiation or shamanic journeying,
can you explain kind of what that entails to the listeners. Well,
it's a big question. Sometimes I just tell people when they ask me what
it's like, I'm like, have you seen the movie Scared It Away?
Because it's a lot like that. So let me see, what would you
like me to approach it from the point of view of my personal experience or
sort of the anthithological literature on shamanic initiation. Go ahead and start with your
experience, and then you know, we can kind of go well, as
Mercia Elliott says, or as Michael Harner says, these are the steps,
and then we can go right. Okay, So you know, like you.
I didn't pay a lot of attention to the UFO abduction stuff either,
and I'm looking forward to learning more about it tonight because I do listen to
all the right podcasts. I listened to this one and Strange Familiars and Where
did the Row Go? So you know, I hear people's accounts there.
But when I was a kid, I was really really scared of UFOs and
alien stuff, and so I just didn't want to go there. I was
super into Berry the folklore and mythology and spirits and ghosts and all of that,
but I was scared to death of aliens. Right. So anyway,
I come from a family that on my mom's side basically has done a lot
of cunning cunning craft type stuff, and so when I was a kid,
it was always accepted that people in my family have the ability to you know,
see spirits or have you know, quote unquote psychic abilities or something.
So I was never pood food for any of that. But my mom didn't
want me to go there because over time, every generation it had sort of
gotten more and more something that you keep quiet about. And because I also
was a major nerd, my mom was like follow the academic path because that
is a safe round. And I did, and I went all the way
through to the PhD. And I never had any sort of a plan B.
And when I got well into my graduate school period, I started to
get really depressed. And when I what started to bring me out of that
depression was when I when it occurred to me that the things that I had
started to think about as like flaws in myself, such as being very sensitive
and open to things, and you know that actually these could be strengths just
in a her context. And I started to consider that although I really loved
the academic work, and I love art, anthropology and archaeology, and I'm
really passionate about that, but I started to think, maybe I need to
find some outlet for this other side of me, because it wasn't allowed to
come out and play within academia. And so then I well, just as
I was about to finish up, my mom got really sick, and so
I hurried up and finished my dissertation defense and finished writing the dissertation, and
I moved back to California where my mom was living, to take care of
her. And at the time, I thought, you know, it looked
like she might have you know, weeks or months to live or something.
She was in intensive care at the beginning, but fortunately she ends up living
for another four years. And I was her careacter give her during that time.
And I know this sounds like I'm not addressing the question, but I
am. You are You'll get there. Being a care of youver is incredibly
stressful. And it was like twenty four seven, three sixty five, and
there was this constant like is today going to be the day that she dies?
Kind of thing, and my mom were very and I were very close,
so you know, I was really I'm so grateful to have had that
time, but it made me lose a bunch of hair, honestly. I
mean it was very stressful. So I started meditating to try and cope with
the stress. And when I was meditating, I started having these spontaneous I
guess you could call them sort of visions, but they weren't with my physical
eyes. They were with like my mind eye. But they were not something
that I deliberately called up. Like when we talk about day dreaming, you
know, that's we usually imagine something or somebody is fantasizing or they're deliberately imagining
something. And this was more like a dream and that it came spontaneously,
but I still had my waking consciousness, so it was a lot like a
very lucid dream. And the stuff that I was seeing was really weird.
And little by little I started to these creatures and beings that would appear,
and sometimes they would also show up in my dreams, like my sleeping dreams.
They'd say things to me, and they would usually turn out to be
very wise in the longer, and they didn't start out by, you know,
demanding anything. Oftentimes it would just they would just sort of show up
and leave me wondering what the heck was that. I actually had a friend
when I was in grad school. I mean, we're still friends, but
when we were in grad school together, she did a workshop on shamanic journey
and her area of focus is Anglo Saxon, England, and so she for
her this you know, related to her research and that she was doing,
and so she told me about the experience and she kind of, you know,
she just holds space for it, kind of like, well, that
was really interesting. I don't know what to make of it, but that
was fun and cool. I couldn't do it with her because I had to
teach at the time they were doing well. Anyway, my research was all
my dissertation research was on mirrors in basically all across temperate Eurasia, so from
Britain to Japan and in late prehistory pretty much. And so if you've read
any of the ethnographic accounts or like you were saying, elliotte, if you've
read any of those works on shamanism, you will have read about how Central
Asian and Siberian shamans often have mirrors as tools and as part of their regalia.
So as I was doing this research that I was also doing research into
shamanism, you know, related specifically to the mirrors. Well, so when
these spontaneous things started happening, there was a part of my line that was
like, this looks a lot like you know, some of those accounts that
I've read where you know, people start getting a call from spirits. But
that can't be happening to me, I mean not as a little old man,
right. So I kept up with it even after my mom had passed
away. I was still meditating, and I didn't I didn't try to discourage
these things or anything, because I was curious about them and I. At
one point I had a classic shamand journey happened during one of these. So
I saw this hole in the ground at the foot of a tree, and
I knew I was supposed to go into that hole, but it was dark
and scary, and I said, I just spultaneously said who's who, guide
me down this hole? And this guide appeared and said I will, and
we go down the hole and then it was full of all kinds of just
really weird stuff and I was like, oh, so that's what that's like.
And again, you know, this thing of like going through the hole
into the earth that sit down into the lower world. That is just a
classic testbook kind of experience. And then meanwhile I started having spontaneous dreams and
appearances of a a person who could shape shift but basically appeared like a hag,
kind of you know, your classic fairy tale hag. And she would
tell me things that you know, turned out to be true, and she
wouldn't tell me who she was for years. She made me work for that.
And then at the same time, I started getting sick, and it
was you know, your basic chronic illness type thing, you know as pains,
trouble, sleeping exhaust just really bad conic fatigue. Went to the doctor.
Nobody could diagnose it. Mostly they weren't even really interested in trying.
Honestly. There was a lot of just kind of like shrug, well,
you know, everybody's tired. It's like, yeah, everybody's tired, but
most people don't find one flight of stairs and then have to lie down for
a while, especially when in their thirties, you know. And so at
some point again there's this part of my mind that's going you know, it
sounds a lot like that whole thing where you get sick, you get the
call from the spirit, then you get sick and nobody can fix it,
and what do you think about that? I'm like, I don't know,
but that can't be happening to me. And just when I finally was sort
of coming around to like, there, this is way too much coincidence to
just be I think this actually is happening to me, my cousin said to
me, Hey, I'm gonna take this workshop, this like shamanic workshop.
Do you want to do this with me? And I was like, yeah,
I think I better. And so that was how I connected with the
teacher that we have in Commons and since then I've done the full apprenticeship and
completed that. So it was just kind of funny because if I didn't have
that anthological background, I probably wouldn't have known where to file this information to
speak. And so when this happens to people who don't have that background,
I can imagine it being even more traumatic. I mean, getting chronically ill
is about it to begin with. But I feel I was very lucky because
I had a way of contextualizing, and I I also I did my grad
work in Minnesota, and there's a large among community in the Twin Cities and
they still have practicing shamanic traditions, continuous traditions, and you know, I
had friends who they're you know, they would have to excuse their students from
exams because it would be like, oh, you know, my brother's going
through the shamanic in issues where illnesses, so the family have to be there.
So that was like a thing that happened. So I was aware that
this, you know, it's still a real thing that is still happening to
people all over the world all the time. No one it does, it
makes it makes perfect sense. And uh, one of the one of the
ways I've looked at at the commonalities of shamanic practice or initiation and spontaneous UFO
abduction experiences, because of course these are processes. It's not just a one
and done. Usually it's a continual communication with a non human intelligence. One
of the things that I think, particularly in the Western world, is most
of us don't have a living shaman, living shamanic tradition to point to look
at understand see. I mean, we don't even have movies about it so
much in the West. I mean there's a few, but mostly no,
there really isn't You have bits and pieces, you have some folklore. How
many people actually study that, not very many. But I feel almost like,
you know, we did our best to get rid of those practices because
they were quote unquote primitive, and we were all scientific and materialist and we're
way too logical, so we don't need that. We're all you know,
the Christian Church tells you this, this, and this is true. There
it is boom cut off, done and to the point where, now you
know, atheism is more Western than you know Church anymore. So we kind
of just shut off our spirits. And you know, if you have traditions
with communication with spirits and then you cut it off. That doesn't mean the
spirits are going to go away. And if you even if you don't believe
in them, they're not going to go away. Yes. Yes, It's
like I don't believe in Bigfoot, while Bigfoot believes in you, buddy,
and he just walked in front of your car. It's like, you know,
what do you say when you have just you know, a normal person
suddenly wake up and there's these little guys with you know, big heads and
big eyes and a bright light. What do you? What do you do?
There's no context for that, and that that's that's where when I really
started looking at some of the more unusual experiences, I could find the threads
that went with my shamanic experience and other people's shamanic experiences and go, oh,
wait a minute, wait a minute, something is happening here. So
one of the things that I just saw that was really interesting is there's a
folkloreist called Thomas Bullard does great work, and he's done a lot of comparative
folklore with UFOs and UFO abduction. Essentially, he thinks of it as an
emergent folklore that describes something that's older than what we think it is, and
he says that UFO experiences have these these stages in common generally not all the
time. But there's the stage of being in captive, captivated or captured and
you know, so you're abducted. There's an examination, and there's physical procedures
that's often where you get the implants, or there's surgeries that are done,
or psychic surgery or sexual contact of some sort. Then there's a conference where
they talk with you, and this isn't all happening in the same instance,
it's sort of a it's steps. Then they give you a tour of their
quote unquote ship, which sometimes is overtly made to be like a ship,
but in other cases. There's a really famous case with Strieber near the end
of his first book where he talks about going into this into the craft and
it was dark and it was dank, and it was damp, and it
smelled funny and it smelled kind of like dirt, and I was like,
dude, dude, that's the underworld. But yeah, so you get a
tour, and sometimes it's not really a ship, it's just some chamber.
And then you have otherworldly journeys where you fly on the ship quote unquote,
or you go through these long hallways and you come to these lands that are
all these different colors, and I'm like, oh, that's that's celestial stuff.
Sometimes there's castles made of crystal and I'm like, oh, yeah,
I've heard about that too. And then there's usually a message you have a
job. You can be a healer. If you listen to what we say,
you can help other people. And people come back changed, and a
lot of people become vegetarians or vegans. A lot of people become activists for
human rights or animal rights or both. Some people come back pacifists, and
most of them come back with some kind of ecological awareness that they didn't have
before. And I'm sitting here going, wow, that's Mother Earth talking to
you right there. I don't know what else to say. And so what
I started looking at it that way? I remembered what Michael Harner said.
You know, you have your selection where the spirits come and say, oh,
hey, we'd like they did with you. You know, Hey,
we're over here. Hey come in here and talk to me. Hi,
I'm looking at you. So you have the selection. Then you have an
initiation, which sometimes involves dismemberment or some kind of you know, opening up
of the head or the chest and putting things inside like sacred stones. So
that's you know, that's just like those UFO implants. Sometimes they exchange organs
with you, so spirit will take something out of himself and put into you,
and then you have magical flights. You go into the upper world realms
and talk to other spirits and you talk with higher entities and you come back
with a job. Yep, and you don't, No, you do not.
And it's the same way with so many times when people have said to
the quote unquote aliens, the grays or whatever, you have no right to
do this to me, they say, we have every right to do this
to you. Yeah, you know, I actually asked my spirit teachers about
this, and now this is just my personal notes, as I'm not saying
that you know, this applies for everybody out there. But they said,
I was like, why do you wreck our lives when we don't accept the
call? And they said, well, we only kind of sort of partly
wreck your life. They said, we call you in multiple lifetimes. If
you if you're being called in this lifetime, you've probably been called in another
lifetime, and we will keep calling you until you accept, and then once
you accept, will keep calling you still, but like calling you. But
they said, the thing is, if you accepted the call in a past
life, guess what you still are committed in our view. And they said,
the thing is part of the reason your life gets so wrecked is that
once you've stepped into that agreement, you can't go back to living a normal
life. And the metaphor that they gave me was that as a drum is
to a shaman, right, Who's because frequently we used drums too as a
sonic driver to inner trance. Right. They said, as the drum is
to you, you are to us. And they said you are basically hollowed
out and you're given a very loud voice so that you can transmit from us
to other people. And we will beat you like a drum, so that
you know, we will beat you so that that voice you know comes out.
And it's they from their point of view, and from what they tell
me, the need is so urgent that they don't have time to epp around
and find out. And but it's not always that they're just being jerks about
it. It's just that one. And I've known this from my own personal
experience because I at one point, after I had accepted this and everything,
I had a little tip with one of my spirit teachers and I was like,
screw you guys, I'm going home. And they were like, ha
ha ha, you can't see you can't go home, like this is home
now, and I very quickly realized they were right, because you can't.
You know, once you are doing spirit work, you can't just go back
to like working your office jobs. I mean it's not to say that you
can't function or anything. You can, but it's like, you know,
you're going to be doing stuff that, especially in modern Western society's regarded as
really really weirder. And if you try and hide that or to in order
to fit in, or you try to somehow you know, deny it,
it just and that's why I got so incredibly depressed in grad school. And
I mean I was we're talking suicidal ideation. It was a really deep depression
because you know, at my job, I'm like seeing spirits out of the
corner of my eyes and stuff, and yet I'm in this world where I
don't dare admit to that because I will lose all my credibilities. It's funny.
I listened to the Weird Studies podcast and one of the posts was saying
that it's, you know, in some ways so silly that in academia a
lot of times what is what is seemed to give you the credibility to talk
on a subject is the fact that you've never experienced with which is so backward,
but it's absolutely true. It's absolutely true, especially if you're in a
science or science adjacent Yeah, and so that you know, that was why,
like internally psychologically, everything was falling apart for me. And I think
possibly part of the reason why in in the West and modern times, why
the initiation often seems to go along with your life just falling apart, is
because in traditional societies that had a continuous shamanic tradition, there were all of
the protocols in place to train people and guide them through the initiation. There
were ritual ceremonies and all this kind of stuff, and we don't have that,
And so a lot of the initiation plays out both on the spirit level,
but it also like it manifests in your in your life. Yeah,
so you don't just do an underworld, you know, journey in the it's
not just like your spirit journeys to the underworld, but like in metaphorical senses
sometimes or even literally because sometimes people having here to have experiences and stuff.
But the time that I was caring for my mom was very much a kind
of a death experience because as I said when I mentioned that I had no
plan B, what I was going to. What I'm bringing that back to
is that by caring for my mom, I had to leave my academic career.
There was no way I could go back into it because I couldn't participate
in the stuff that you need to do to become a professional. I couldn't
go to conference as, I couldn't publish papers, I couldn't do research.
I couldn't even whip my dissertation into shape to publish it, which is standard
practice. It is freely accessible, but it's not like portally published. And
that was a huge grief for me, and not just because I really love
archaeology and anthropology, but because my whole identity was in that. You know,
I was an academic. I was like a fourth generation academic on my
dad's side, and that was just what I was going to do. And
I had to completely like die to myself basically, and there was also this
experience of being of like helplessness where it's kind of like there's nothing I can
do to really change my situation. This is what it is. I mean,
I guess technically I could have just told my mom Sia, but I
wasn't gonna do that. That wouldn't be right, and and you know,
I loved her very much, so so there was this sort of this I
really perceive, and it's not the only initiation I've been through, because really
I feel like it's just kind of one after another thing. But there's like
the first thing that happens is this experience of kind of the old you dies
and then you are like kind of burial phase and like decomposition where the old
you is dead but the new you hasn't come into being yet, and you
feel really disoriented and very just like what is happening? Really? Then?
Am I what does it of this mean? And there's no point in starting
any new projects, There's no point in trying to reinvent yourself at this point
because you you can surrender to the helplessness and just go with the flow,
which makes it easier somewhat, but it's going to happen regardless, and then
there's a sort of believer and that's when you come into your new phase of
life and you can sort of presume being that that active an agent in your
life. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. One of the one of the things
that I think is very interesting when we talk about initiatory experiences, and one
of the one of the things people have said to me, it's like,
well, it's not exactly one to one, and you know what, what
are these these UFO initiates supposed to be doing. What is their job?
And I'm like, well, they tell you what their job is. You
know, there's there's some people like Ted Rice, who became a psychic and
he's he was, well he is, he's still alive. He's very very
accurate it with his with his readings, and as he went back through his
life and looked at it through a different lens, he realized he had been
essentially educated to do that from the beginning. And he never really had a
normal life. You know, his started in childhood, so he was he
was essentially put together and and there's some initiative activities that happened. He's he's
in a book called Masquerade of Angels, and he wrote it with doctor Carla
Turner, and she did research into abduction scenarios and abduction experiences because she had
the experiences herself and her whole family did. And so one of these experiences,
he finally near the end of the book figures it out and he said,
you know, I was a child and I watched them pull a body
out that looked exactly like me, and then they gave me this drink and
said drink this. And I'm like, oh, here we go, here
we go. Don't drink stuff and fairy, don't do that, you know,
And he did because he was given really no choice, much like you
were given no choice and there's no right of refusal, as you say,
so he drank it and he died. He became paralyzed. He fell down,
and then he said he was floating above his body, and he watched
as they dismembered his body, and then they used this black box to pull
his soul out and put in the box, and then later on it was
taken from the box and put into the new body. As soon as I
read this, I'm like, oh, it's just like when bear takes you
apart and put you back together again with extra stuff, right. You know,
it's just a more more sort of technological looking version of that. And
you know, he was like, I came back and I was really sick
when I when I you know, came out of that dream or whatever it
was, and I was really sick for like, you know, five six
months, and my family, you know, was worried about me. I
was always having fevers and they couldn't figure it out. And I'm like,
uh huh, yeah, okay, the shamanic sickness. Yes, yes,
this happens. And but his story is so it's so not your typical UFO
abduction story, and yet there are so many parallels with the shamanic story.
You know, these these stories just go together really interestingly. And one thing
that really got me is he has an experience with reptoid beings the end of
the bipedal alligator headed nasty people, and they do nasty things. They're terrible.
All I could think of was the part in one of Michael Harner's books
where he said, you know, I went into the underworld and I met
up with these terrible creatures. They had, you know, these big alligator
teeth and the big heads, and they're following me around and they're all like,
you're terrible, we own you, will eat your soul, you know,
and all of these awful things he said. So when I came back,
I told the shaman, I'm like, these guys, it's my favorite
response. He just laughed and said, oh, them, it's just them.
They do that. Don't listen to them. They want you to listen
to them and and feel bad and and do the wrong thing. They're just
trying to make you do the wrong thing. Ignore them. They're just those
guys at all. I was like when I read that book, I was
like, oh, Ted, man, it was those guys. Yeah,
definitely those sides. Yeah, yeah, I've had a few brief run ins
with those guys. They didn't appear with the reptilian form to me, but
same same vibe. Yeah, you belong to us, we created you.
Yeah, they're mean. But at the same time, if you run into
them over and over and you have support from your spiritual allies, you kind
of go, oh, yeah, there you are again. That's nice.
Away it's yeah. And there's another there's another story. It's from a documentary
called Witness of Another World. If you ever get a chance. I think
it's free in a couple of places on the Internet, and it's about the
UFO experience of a young boy in Argentina. He was from a gaucho family
on his dad's side, on his mom's side. He was related to some
of the indigenous people who were who had shamanic practices going back forever, and
he as a boy, had been told by his father, hey, go
get the horses, and so he goes out with his horse to get the
other horses, and he gets lost in a fog and as he's going through
the fog, he comes up to a a hut, a weird hut,
and it was on stilts and there was weird lights. And he looked up
and there was a ladder to get in there, and he saw his dad,
grandfather in there, along with some other beings. And he tied his
horse to like one of the struts or the legs and went in and you
know, he talked with his grandfather and then he came out God on his
horse, who was really freaking out and not happy. And he went back
without the horses, and his dad was mad at him, and you know,
took a belt to him and yelled at him, and he was like,
but I saw this thing and there were lights and I don't know what
happened, and my horses has freaked out. His horse died like a few
days later. Yeah. Yeah, so there was something not good happy opening,
and it just the whole experience really just shut this kid down. And
doctor Jacques Filat was one of the first Westerners to talk with him about this.
This was back in the seventies and he had his wife Janine with him,
who was a child psychologist, and so he was really happy he had
brought her because she could help this child and they spoke with him, and
what ended up happening over you know, a period of like thirty or forty
years, he just ended up becoming a recluse. He had a farm.
The only person he really saw was his mother because she lived with him and
he had his animals, and that's who he interacted with. That whole like
UFO thing just it it just destroyed him essentially personally. Well interestingly, a
documentarian found out about him and was like, you know, let's see what
happens if I bring doctor Valet back. Let's see what happens if we you
know, if we talk to people on his mom's side of the family,
and what ends up happening is doctor Valet remembers him, of course, and
he remembers doctor Valet. They talk. He will not talk about the exact
instance. He just kind of talks around it because he's still upset about it.
And his mother's people said, bring him, bring him to his ancestral
village, bring him here, and they do, and they initiate him and
he can talk again, because that's what they said. They were like,
this is what we do. That was a spirit and it was coming for
you, and that's why you haven't been able to do anything right because you
didn't understand the call and you weren't able to talk with your ancestors the way
we do. And so they taught him and they initiated him and it essentially
healed him. So yeah, all those spoilers people, there's so many spoilers,
but it's been out for a while, so I figure you've seen it.
But it's very much if you didn't think of it as as UFO related
at all, if you didn't know anything about it, you would see it
as a shamanic story absolutely or even it's very similar to a lot of the
fairy folk who are two you know, they get abducted by the faeries,
they disappear, they come back and they're faery doctors now and they heal people.
Or like Bessy Dunlop, who was one of the women in England or
Scotland, and she ended up getting prosecuted for witchcraft, which is why we
have a record of what happened to her. But she was just walking along
one day feeling bad because life was not going well, when a spirit comes
to her. Now, this spirit said that that he was actually a deceased
human but he lived in the fairy realm and basically the Queen of Fairy had
sent him to be her familiar and like help her out with stuff. But
she was basically like, oh wait, I don't want any part of this
my lifestyle, a lot of my blace right now. And he's like,
yeah, well you don't get to say no though, so so you know,
I mean, yeah, you know, Josh cutchins so like you already
know that there are these parallels, but it just it blows my mind that
how similar they are and that they happened in such a similar way, even
within this context of the society, that meaning the modern last you know,
that doesn't for these things to be real. Yeah. Yeah. One of
my favorite, you know, fairy things that happened in the twentieth century was
supposedly not even a fairy thing. It was Joe Simonton, the chicken farmer,
minding his own business when he comes upon a landed quote unquote UFO and
little little, little Italian looking guys were cooking pancakes and they asked for water
and he gave it to him. And I'm sitting here going how many stories
are there of fairies coming up to the door asking for water or grain or
whatever, and then they gave the dude some pancakes and flew away. Well,
Joe didn't ask for that for one thing, and what is he supposed
to do with that? But it wasn't. No, they were crappy and
they had no salt, which again, fairies don't like salt. So yeah.
Yeah. And and that's another thing about UFO occupants. They're always trying
to get you to drink something or eat something, and I'm I'm always kind
of like, I don't know about that. Maybe you shouldn't, I don't
think so. Uh, But yeah, that's that's one of the things that
you know, maybe the fairy lore was our last in the you know,
Anglo Saxon West and Celtic West that we had that was shamanically involved. And
when we've you know, finally destroyed that and turned it into nursery tales and
ignored it for the most part, that's when we started getting I don't know,
UFOs and aliens and and all that. They get framed in this materialist
sort of way, the technological, instead of looking numinous or whatever, because
there's no in the loud real so just put on a new skin and show
up in a way. It's like, oh g. Some of my favorite
ones also are from the fifties, similar to Simonon And there's a couple of
Italian stories where women are either you know, wandering around in the mountains and
picking flowers, and you know, the woman takes her stockings and shoes off
so she can wait in the creek and and she's mining her own business walking
around and there's this egg shaped vehicle, you know, sitting on three legs,
and these little guys wearing space helmets and capes because that's a thing whatever,
run up and they you know, they steal her flowers and they yank
or stockings off out of her hand and run off. You know. I
was like, there's another Italian lady who was putting her wash on the line
and they stole stockings and ran off. And then they were in the same
kind of like egg shaped and they had these, you know, these helmets,
and I was like, that's the early when they were like, oh,
we're space people, and they just weren't really good at it. You
know, they hadn't they hadn't figured out what space people do yet, they
hadn't watched enough of the you know, nineteen fifties movies. They're supposed to
have tentacles and stuff. They didn't, or maybe they just thought they were
icky. I don't know. Uh. Yeah. So when you when you
look at all of these stories, I mean I like to look at them
as stories in a way, and then analyze the motifs that you see.
So I'm kind of a Thomas Allard person. I like to, you know,
dig in there and realize that these these tales have been with us for
a very long time, and the spirits have been calling people for a very
long time, and in a lot of ways, I feel as if there
there has to be some kind of way to bridge the gap between modern shamanic
practitioners in a Western model and UFO abduction and kind of at least get an
exchange of information, you know, I think that would help. Yeah,
we're really those of us who were brought up within a modern Western cultural background.
And that's a lot of people, including even people who are actually indigenous,
but you know, their lands have been colonized by you know, this
or that empire, and so like it or not, they were, you
know, forcibly brought up within modern Western modernity and all of those culturally specific
trainings and more and rituals of initiation and all this. You know that that
smooths the process of initiation, and without that, it's all on the spirits
to do all of that. For us, they do most of the training,
they do the initiation, and it's it makes it just a lot more
difficult because you have to you know, it's like you have to reinvent almost
almost every time when you're talking about individuals. That's got to be tiresome.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, And it's very psychologically difficult for the person who's
going through it because You'll notice if listening to people's accounts of their unexplained experiences,
you know, whether it's big foot or ghosts or UFOs or what have
you, there's this performance that you'll hear people go through over and over and
over again, which is, well, I'm a skeptic, but or I
used to be a skeptic, butuck. And so the little ritual performance that
you do is where you say that you didn't believe in this kind of stuff
until the preponderance of your experience got to be so big that you simply couldn't
deny it anymore. And so you had to concede that there's something going on
here. And we have to go through that because it's like, you don't
you have no credibility within sort of Western what I think of as like meta
culture. You know, you have no credibility if you just straight up say,
oh, yeah, you know, I've been't thee in spirits of the
little kid they were having any doubt about it? Yeah? I do too,
And but even so I still put myself through that by doing that whole
Well, this can be happening to me. I mean I never pooh poohed
that this happens to people in like indigenous cultures, that wouldn't you know,
I totally take it for granted that what they're describing is what they're experiencing.
But surely that couldn't be happening in me. And so you know, even
I had to go through this thing. But it's such a least of time.
It's such a waste of time, and it's so silly when you look
at it from a bigger perspective, in that when you look at cultures globally
and through to time, this tiny little phenomenon of the past few hundred years,
in this tiny little corner of what claims to be a continent but is
really more just like a weird, bumpy peninsula that sticks off the end of
Asia by e Europe. And really it wasn't even everybody there. It was
like the landowning, educated white male, you know, elite essentially, who
decided to adopt this absolutely crazy perspective that the stuff that takes up such a
huge percentage of human experience everywhere and every wind is not real. And I
mean to say the best to say the best phrase, this is like an
understate. But it also just when you look at it from that perspective.
It's like, I mean, I'm not one to say that just because a
lot of people believe something that makes it true. But there's no denying that
this is a normal and natural part of human experience on the global scale.
And for this one tiny little corner of people in this very very very short
period of time to think that somehow they have a more accurate assessment of what
constitutes reality is delusional. It is delusional. It is like a societal mental
illness, and we're all trying to basically wake up out of that societal psychotic
break with no help, with no help societally speaking. Yeah, one of
the things that I find it, I mean, it's even comedians see it.
Eddie is Ard, you know, he talked about how Europe made these
huge empires by going into other people's countries and smacking a flag in it and
going it's ours now, and they're like, we live here, and it's
like it doesn't matter. Do you have a flag? No, No,
it's part of the British Empire. You know. It's like that is so
just psychotic. Really, I'm just going to march into a country full of
people, and because I'm European I'm gonna take it over. And that's that's
just how it worked. And then all of the beliefs that came with the
colonization were better than the beliefs that were already there, and so they tried
to beat those beliefs out of people. And I yeah, yeah, that
that also. It's one of those I guess it just comes with the whole
idea that you can just walk into somebody's living space and say it's yours now.
I guess, so that everything is yours now, your thoughts are mine
now here, have my thoughts there, you go, They're better than your
thoughts, you know, have have my philosophy, it's better than yours.
Wow, it's just it's yeah, it's really crazy. And it's amazing that
there are still so many Indigenous people that still keep trying to help us,
I know, right, and I you know, to some extent, I
think that there are just genuinely good people, and to some extent I think
they're just like, my god, you guys are so dangerous, Like we
have to snap you out of this for the sake of everybody, because you
are just ruining it for everyone. Yeah, which is absolutely true. And
there's still spirits keep trying to help us too, and but you know,
we're so busy pretending that they don't exist that we don't listen to them.
So yeah, it's it's it's like a mental illness and a spiritual one at
the same time, and we are Tyson Young Paporta calls it a civilizational curse
that we are basically living under. And we're all haunted because we in the
whole process of denying that anything that's not physical exists, we have also neglected,
you know, generations worth of ancestors and genocided a bunch of people as
well. There's yea of untended dead around And so is it any wonder that
we have so many people going through mental health problems and just experiencing this existential
despair? Yeah? Well, and it's also the issue that we didn't believe
in psychology until recently either true, you know, and and the way that
we treated mentally ill people was you know, I mean sixteen seventeenth century.
Oh just stick them in a dungeon and chain them to the wall and let
rich people pay to point fingers and laugh. Wow. That helps. That
does a good job. Nice well done, very therapeutic. Yes, uh,
you know it if you look at the way that even today mentally ill
people are treated, it's it's shameful. And it's not like we haven't known
better for a long time. So it's kind of you know, when when
the Athens Lunatic Asylum was built, it was built to be humanitarian care,
and it was built on a humanistic basis, you know, all of it,
from the architecture, from the treatments, from the food, from uh,
you know, having them work the farms so they were doing something productive
and learning skills. All of this was meant to be compassionate care. And
it lasted for about ten years and then it became overcrowded and awful and you
know, but so that was what it was right after the Civil War,
so it was the eighteen sixties. So we knew better for a long time,
and it's just that that we would backslide and we come to capitalism I
think as being part of the problem. Oh yeah, because everything has to
make money. It is in the servi of making money and continuing to make
money and power. And while that's going on, mind you you know,
after the the Civil War, we were expanding into the West and committing genocide
on a large scale. So you know, if people wonder what evil spirits
look like, that's what it looks like. That is what it looks like.
I mean, okay, it's my salty opinions, but yeah, it
looks like capitalism. It looks like thinking you're entitled to just commit mass murder
because you would really like that patch of land and there's somebody inconvenient on it
already. I mean, yeah, it's also doing things like killing the food
supply on that patch of land that was keeping that patch of land good and
alive, because grazing cattle is not the same thing as as bis and and
that's how you get the dust bowl, and then you have the depression,
and then you have to have a world war to get out of that.
So now we've had a history lesson on top of everything else, solutions somehow
always end up being even worse than the problem that they were supposed to solve.
I know, yeah, it's just it's just ridiculous and and it just
it seems to well, it serves a very small number of people, is
what it does. So one of the things that I was going to say,
and there's also other other commonalities that I didn't really talk about. In
UFO experiences, there's often animals being cited in places that are unusual, like
you know, on a UFO, but also like outside of people's windows looking
in, and they usually have very large eyes because that's that's the grays.
And I was like, you know, most of the people who do alien
abduction before they knew anything about shamanic practice, we're like, oh, well,
these are screen memories. You know. Yeah, think you saw an
owl, but you really saw a gray and that's what it was. Or
you think you saw a deer, but it really was a gray because they
got big guys. And and I'm like, oh, but you know,
shamanic practice, deer have always been, you know, deeply involved with humanity.
Owls have always been deeply symbolic in just about every culture, whether good
or bad or both. You know, rabbits the same way, these these
and of course in shamanic practice, we have animal spirits or spirits that can
be shaped like animals that can also shape shift themselves. So of course you
know I'm reading this this you know, oh, that's just a that's just
a screen memory that they implanted in your head. And I'm like, are
you sure. I mean, maybe the animal was just involved. I mean,
this is a thing about about animalism, right, is we are intricately
enmeshed in this web of relationships with all the beings and they and as it
is, you frequently will hear said about animism. It's like the world is
full of persons, only some of whom are humans, And in fact,
humans are a minority of the persons who are around. And there are animal
persons, there are spirit persons, there are plant persons. Sometimes there are
geographical persons like rivers and mountains and so on. And what makes them persons
is that they have a consciousness and an agency of their own. And so,
you know, the shaman. You'll always hear it said, well,
the shaman, you know, works for their community. And some people will
say, well, you know, you can't call yourself a shaman because that's
something that the community has to designate you. And in a traditional culture that's
true, but it's a little bit more tricky here in the West because a
large part of your community is denying that any of those exists. But what
has been impressed upon me is that the community is also all these other beings.
Yes, and you work for them too, because you know ideally what
your mission sort of is, or I mean, at least this is how
it is presented to me. And maybe this it's not true for everybody,
but is that you are trying to create a dynamic equilibrium where everybody can flourish
together. And it doesn't mean that there's no death and there's no suffering or
anything like that. You know, death is there's life, and there's anti
life, and death is part of the dynamic equilibrium. But what's not part
of the dynamic equilibrium is, for example, of killing all buffalo, killing
all the people who live on land because you happen to want it, that's
anti life. And yeah, so I have no problem with the idea because
I see a lot a lot of the spirits that ideal would do if you're
as animals, and I have no problem with the idea that they actually are
animals. Instantly, my mind is like, but what even is an animal?
You know, I don't know, But but at the same time,
you know they do. They can't shape change a lot, and maybe that's
just a skin that they choose. Because you know, I really like animals
and I am more trusting of animals than I would be of spirits presenting as
human most of the time. Probably, And yeah, I'm I'm a lot
that I'm a lot the same way. So it really seems actually like a
lot of people who end up getting this call to practice is in the shamanic
practitioner as kids are very inclined to kind of wander off in the wood and
talk to the animals and the plants, and in interestingly, I have read
that as well for indigenous cultures. It's not just kids in the West,
but and so that's sometimes in indigenous cultures that have intact shamonic tradition, that
is recognized as a sign that that kid is probably a potential candidate. It
all depends on whether they actually get that calls to the spirits, which happens
only when they actually don't. But but they're kind of seen as life and
now that one's probably gonna get that call. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I and yeah, how many of us were wandering around in the woods talking
to the trees and the you know, the animals, And I hear that
over and over again. This is like something I have in common with so
many people who get attracted to a call to this path. Yeah, yeah,
yeah, it's it's in fact, one of the I mean, one
of the things that I remember, even as a small child was I trusted
cats and dogs more than I trusted most human people. You know, I
could. And I also judged human people by how dogs and cats and other
animals reacted to them. Absolutely. I still think that's a pretty good indicator.
Oh yeah, I mean that's to this day. But even as a
really young kid, I could trust the sense of animals around a person.
When I was really little, we lived in the country. And I'm originally
from northern California, and we lived in a rural area. It's kind of
I like to call it the part of California that nobody knows exists, because
it's not it's not the beach, it's not the Bay Area, and it's
not the mountains, and it's not the one country like in Tweed, and
but it's really rural. And we had a little, you know, five
acre, but you know, and I would just kind of go around and
like I was really interested in trying to learn the names of plants and things,
which is still something that I I'm really interested in. And but as
a kid, it was it wasn't just like I would like to know what
the taxxonomical binomial of this plant specises. Who was like, I want to
know who this person is, right, And we had dogs and my parents,
And to be fair, this is really more my dad because he he
was kind of hands off his very His feeling was that dogs are perfectly the
same sinners and would keep me out of trouble, and they did so if
he wasn't home. And so I would just like walk around with the dogs
and you know, hang out with the animals and and the plants, and
we've learned their names and all that kind of stuff. And I mean that's
pretty close to my idea of paradise. So yeah, that's that's a lot
what I did at my grandparents house. So yeah, as long as I
had the dogs with me too. That if I had all three dogs,
I was fine. Nothing nothing bad would happen, and they would tattle of
me too if I went something I wasn't supposed to, so which I did
anytime. My dad wouldn't be paying close attentions often. Oops. Well,
I suspect that I inherited my ADHD from him. So there's a certain tendency
to be inattentive. But interestingly, that seems to also be something that's fairly
common among people who end up all the path. It's certainly not like a
required qualification, but it's definitely not uncommon. Yeah. Yeah, I would
think that some of those different, differently connected brains would be, you know,
part of the whole gestalt of what we're talking about. People who experience
you a foe abduction and people who experience shamanic spirit calls, that sort of
thing. Yeah, I figured that that all sorts of spectrums are involved.
Yeah, yeah, because yeah, absolutely. I remember this one time where
my friend was just looking at me like are you grated? Because I was
saying I was really surprised by how much traffic there was on East Date Street
on this one day, and she was like, well, it's like the
Friday before Halloween or something like that, on holiday, and you know,
everybody's out shopping. And I was like really, and she's like, how
do you not know this? And I was like, well, how do
you not know what faith the moon is in? I mean, I know
that I don't know, so no, I can't keep track of what day
of the week it is, So yeah, yeah, that that tendency to
be kind of you tune out a lot of the stuff that you need to
do or know in order to function within capitalist society, which is a challenge.
But you are very sensitive to a lot of the kind of sparkles you
know that that are what I think, you know, life is really all
about, right, yeah, the important stuff exactly. There's another interesting thing
that I wanted to ask you about with well, okay, so John Kiel
back in the sixties noticed this. He was one of the first people who
really started noticing that UFO experiences, UFO abductions were very similar to things like
fairy abduction, and that there were all of these commonalities between psychic occurrences and
UFO witnesses, like you know, he was one of the first people to
say, well, you know, we can't. I mean, we've been
staring at the UFOs and getting the descriptions of what they've done, and we've
watched them do their things, but that doesn't really tell us anything. The
only thing that we can actually learn from with UFOs is what the people who
witnessed them or experienced them experienced during that time and then afterwards. And he
said, if you ask any UFO experiencer about their past. There's weird things
there. Grandma was a psychic. Let's see so and so saw ghost.
There's a poultergeist that came into the house. Right after Mom and Dad saw
the UFO. Something started leaving the doors open and unlocked. The TV goes
out at the same time every night, blah blah blah, and it just
goes on and on and on. One of the things that he noticed and
that he began to say in some of his writings was he believed that the
only quote unquote materially real part of a UFO experience was the light. Most
of them start with a light in the sky that then seems to turn into
a solid craft. And he said that there was something about the light that
was communicating with the witnesses, the people who saw it, and that the
rest of the experience was somehow communicated either directly psychically or it was an imaginal
kind of dimension where he called it paraphysical. So they could be physical sometimes,
but they're not the times. One of the things that is interesting is
I've never had an experience in shamanic terms with a strange light like when I've
been doing underworld journeys or anything like that. On the other hand, I
can just walk you down the street or whatever and see a weird light,
and I've been seeing them all my life. So I was wondering if you
knew of any kind of anomalous light phenomena through shamanic experiences or that you've read
about. So I was thinking about this, and I have read references that
sort of say in passing that there was some sort of light phenomenon that was
observed by the person who was having the shamanic initiation call or something like that,
but I haven't actually seen any that go into detail about it. But
I'm just trying to think, like, where do I even start, because
there's so much that could be said about this. Clearly, from everything from
folklore to artistic representations. Light is heavily involved in this, and it's everything
from like depicting holy people with halos, two lights in the sky, lights
in the woods. I do have one of my spirit my main spirit teachers
sometimes will appear as just light and then we'll take on a more human light
form, although that wasn't part of my original experiences, but something that I
thought might be kind of interesting as more like background context to this is when
I was doing my dissertation research on mirrors. Obviously, mirrors are shiny,
that's like part of their technological nature, and archaeologically a lot of the context
that we find mirrors in our burials. Now, partly that's just survivorship bias,
because burials tend to be underground. Sometimes they're in some sort of building
that's made of stone or something like that, and that to some extent will
protect them. But there's also obviously clearly something going on where mirrors are deliberately
placed in burials, and it's very common for archaeologists to just be like,
well, yeah, you know, it was like a precious object because it's
it's a big chuck of metal, and you know, so it was like
part of their fancy possessions, and so of course they were buried with it.
Or sometimes you'll get well, of course it's a woman's burial, and
you know women in mirrors, right. But when you look at for example,
Japan, you have these burials that have dozens of mirrors, and they
will be in many cases propped up vertically along the sides of the coffin so
that the reflective side is facing in towards the deceased person. Those mirrors are
doing something that's not just hey look at me, Look how rich I am
and I have all this metal. There's clearly a purpose that those mirrors are
supposed to beople filling. So as I was researching this's what's the deal with
mirrors and the shininess and all that. Well, there's an archaeologist named Nicholas
Saunders, and he wrote a whole series of articles. Keep going off on
other topic now, but he wrote a whole series of articles looking at different
shiny materials in the Americas and comparing the archaeological finds and stuff with folklore and
anthropological descriptions of cultures in the Amazon and Mesoamerica and so on. And what
he talks a lot about is that there was all over both North and South
America there is this common theme of shininess, which is to say, reflecting
like being associated with spiritual power and spiritual qualities. And this was part of
why when the Spanish arrived in the America, and of course they were all
like obsessed with gold and stuff, and they were, you know, in
some of their writings they talk about how shocked they are that they can get
gold from these people in exchange for just some glass beads or something, you
know, broken bits and mirror and like that from Europe. Well, what
Saunders is saying is, yeah, but those things had equal value from the
perspective of the people in the Americas because they're all shiny. So this this
shininess factor connected not only human made technologies like mirrors and things made out of
metals, but also things like feathers, shell, pearls, and stones,
water, and it forms this really complicated web of symbolism and analogy. And
you know, this thing like obsidian is connected to jaguar eyes because you know
they both have this shiny property. And I think that that reaction is not
just limited to the cultures of the Americas. There's something about shininess. Humans
are like crows that way, right, There's something fact that sparkled and that
can actually be used in its own right for inducing altered states of consciousness that
then allow for easier communication with spirits. There was a really interesting article that
I read in grad school. It's the author's names are Lindstrom and Christopherson two
thousand one, I think, and they were looking at what's called animal style
art during the migration period in Scandinavia. So the migration period it's so called
because it's when Germanic speaking people's started moving around Anglo Saxones to England, well,
the Angles and Saxons to England and people into what's now modern day Germany
and so on, and so this is like after the Roman Empire has basically
fallen, and now there's this opportunity for people to like reshuffles basically. And
so if you think about what Viking art looks like, you know, with
the intertwine, dragon type cercent looking pieces, and also you know we see
that like in Ireland for example, and there it's actually getting there from Scandinavian.
So in this article they make the argument that this style of art is
actually a kind of a hypertext that either is itself a tool for accessing altered
states of consciousness or it sort of encodes experiences that happen in altered states of
consciousness. And they say that, you know, when we see these things
now, we see them in brightly lit museums or photographs and books and so
on, But how you would be seeing them in ancient times, well,
during the daytime, it would be in sunlight, but at night it would
be by firelight, and that moving light that comes from firelight creates a sense
of movement in the art itself, and if you kind of stare at it,
you can actually go into kind of a light and not state. And
one of the things that they say in the article that I found really interesting
is they said that, you know, we often talk about people who are
more easily slipped into those kind of states, as though they're more gullible or
more susceptible, but they said that actually it correlates in psychological studies with people
who have actually really resilient mental stability. And so a lot of during that
particular period in Scandinavia and also in Britain, a lot of the places where
like the main context where you would see this art is on these big broaches
that were found in burials mature women. So there's something about these women that
you know, yes, in a sense they're wealthy because they have a chunk
of expensive material there, but perhaps these are also people who who know how
to read this text so to speak. They know they can either use it
to enter that trance state perhaps, or they can perhaps use it as almost
like a mnemonic to recall the lore that was obtained originally in that trance state.
And so I mentioned all this because all this has to do with light.
It all has to do with our relationship to light and and and and
surface. And this is something that humans have been deliberately playing with or ever.
We love shiny stuff and we love to make it more shiny. You
know. My migrants school advisor wrote this book called How Ancient Europeans Saw the
World, and he has a section where he talks about this lighting issue,
and he one of the things he mentions is that the shapes of ceramic vessels,
things, things that are flat or square, tend to have a very
the side that catches the light is just kind of a flat lighted area.
Besides that aren't catching the light are just sort of flat shadowed areas. But
when you have curved surfaces, they the light plays over them. And he
talks about how the shape of iron age pottery in Europe it's very curvilinear.
It's really you know, it's narrow based, and then it swells way out
and gets narrow again and it comes out again. And he talks about how
he took like a little flashlight and played with changing the direction and a light
and stuff and watched how the light played over it, and he said,
it's really mesmerized my own experience. When I was doing my research. I
went to the British Museum and I was looking at the mirrors from Britain there
and this will forever be one of the greatest experiences of my life because they
have a room that is hidden behind a door that looks like a bookcase,
and you get to go in the back room and like look at these artifacts
and they are amazing. One of the mirrors from a cycled hoolecomb, where
the pandle attaches to the mirror plate, there's this basically little face. And
there's been a little bit of debate about is this a cat face? Is
this an owl face? Maybe perhaps it's meant to kind of change between the
two. But the standard way to take photographs for archaeological publications is to have
the light coming from above, and I think it's to the left of the
artifact. And when I actually was able to handle this mirror and change the
direction of the light, that face completely changes. I don't think there's any
doubt that it is intended to change, but changingness is part of the point
of it. So like I do think it is a face of a Eurasian
evil owl, but that's just my personal opinion. So there there, and
you think of you know, Celtic art too, and it's got these very
purvilinear kind of design that all of this has like light and movement built into
it. It's a technology for engaging with that. And I so I think
that they're even in Europe and in Asia, not just in the America's and
probably African too. I just don't know as much about it. There's this
and Oceania and Australia. There is this connection of light with the these luminous
beings. I have to say that we is living here in Appos County are
blessed with an abundance of a weird light Khama, Yes we are. I
never had any of the sorts that I could see with the naked eye until
living here, and then I started to see the fireflies that are in colors
that fireflies don't come in m and they don't necessarily blink on and off light
fireflies. Yeah, they're really pretty. Probably they are, no guessing,
but they're very pretty. Yeah. Yeah. The native Americans always said no,
no, no, no, don't follow those. It's interesting when you
were talking about the use of light and art animal based art. One of
the things I read about fairly recently was in the Neolithic caves in France that
have the beautiful paintings. The cave paintings, a lot of them are very
far underground and in these places that are fairly inaccessible, and in order to
paint them, of course, there had to be torches so that you could
see to paint them. There was no way natural light was, you know,
getting back there. And so some people have studied what it looks like
when you bring torches in, and the play of light and the shape of
the wall because of course it's not perfectly flat, and the way that they
shaded the animals makes it look like they're moving, and so that it's almost
like that's our first movie, you know, that's the first time that a
movie was made. But it's also of course I start thinking, I'm like
fire in underground oxygen and breathing, and all I could think of was,
you know, I wonder if anyone went into an altered state of consciousness from
slight hypoxia, because and then you know by the end of the paper they
got to that. I'm like, okay, so I wasn't. I wasn't
the super smart one who figured it out. But it's one of those things
that could be some sort of initiatory experience. There underground, water will flash
up with light, and that had to have been an amazing thing, and
also bioluminescent fungus and in cave systems, and that again had to have been
something that was that was amazing, and bits of pyrite in the sandstone are
in limestone sending the sparkle had to have been an interesting thing. And then
you know the little firefly guys that aren't really fireflies. I mean, who's
the first one who followed them? And everybody else was like, well,
we're not going to do that again, so that it becomes this tradition.
Well Jim followed him and look what happened. Hell never saw him again,
and so now we're not going to do that. And of course the experience
of entering into a cave is also part of these shamanic lower world underworld journeys
that people have, and there's also acoustics that are weird in underground. One
of the archaeological digs that I went on as an undergraduate is at the site
of Chavine and Peru, and so this is a a preting of site and
it's in the Andes, and it's very interesting because there's in their artistic styles,
there's a mix of elements that are from the Amazon, like jaguars and
things like that, and then from the other side of the Andes, which
is you know, mostly desert and coasts, right, and they were a
big, you know, hub for trade, and it seems like people would
come from all over the place to this site, which is I mean it's
twelve thousand feet up in the mounts. It's up there. It's not easy
to access. Even when I went there and they created these they're they're not
technically underground because what they did with they've built mounds up and then they built
passageways into the mounds. I believe there are some passageways that actually do go
underground, but mostly they're within these mounds. And man that the it really
plays tricks with your head is the way that founds bounce around in there.
And they were very sophisticated with putting in little fence for air and light to
get in and so there's one chamber, there's a passageway that goes to a
chamber, and that has the thing in it called the Lanson, which is
basically like a slab of rock that is kind of like a narrow triangle in
shape, but it's carved all over with this being that's gotten thangs and like
serpent hair, and there's a lot of their imagery involves, you know,
like intermediate hybrid human snake, human jaguar, human, mountain lion kind of
imagery. And man, if you saw that fitting by torchlight, that would
scare the bejeebers out of you, or it's not scary, depending on how
you were prepared, it would be like awe aspiring, because even seeing it
with a little bit of electric light was very awe inspiring. And I know
that the professor that I was working with then as an under at the has
has written a lot about sort of the acoustical features of these passages and how
that could potentially be used in basically giving people these initiatory experiences. And we
do have imagery and that fight where people are actually probably not people, maybe
these spirits or gods or something or carryings and pedro pases, so that's pollucinogenic.
And so there's there's some other images that seem to have mucus running out
of their nose, which is there are Amazonian in the agians that you take
as a snuff and they cause you to just like produce tons of others.
Basically it's pretty gross looking. But so it seems like they might have been
using in theagens that we're both you know, from the from the Amazon,
from the rainforest as well as from the desert side. And so you know
that again, if you're in a dark passageway and there's or or there's flickering
light and there's crazy sounds of water sounds and everything, that's pretty trippy.
Yeah, definitely, Yeah, definitely a change of consciousness. Yeah. Well
New Grange is like that, the passage and New Grange. That chamber has
weird acoustics that will bounce your voice around, so if you chant in there,
it starts to sound like you have extra voices with you. And of
course it has the opening that light comes in and and you know, illuminates
the whole place once a year. So yeah, I've never been inside New
Brange, but that's that's a bucket list thing for sure. Yeah, yeah,
for for reels, and then there's up lost the thought it went away
went flying away. Oh yeah, okay, So in theogens, one of
the things that I've always experienced with in theogens is light light effects, and
not always everybody else does, but it's one of the things that I do
notice, and I will see the flashes of light, you know. The
very first time, I was like, it's a corneal like abi abrasion.
It's just look, I don't know. And then I was like, girl,
no, you're fine. You can't always get rid of that twentieth century
logic that's you know, stuck in there, and so you start getting freaked
out. But yeah, I always saw light. I've heard that a lot
from people talking about light and color, and of course color is a property
of light. Really, so yeah, oh yeah. I Actually I have
had experiences with a couple of in theagens, but they were not They're not
the standard ones that you think of, right, and only one of them
was intentional SOPs. Yeah. Yeah, And it's it's not that I it's
not so much that I chose not to it just I have not had an
opportunity too. I don't view those things as purely recreational. M yeah,
yeah, and so, but the context in which I would have had the
opportunity would have been one where it was not h There wasn't be no opportunity
to to have the I mean in the agen right it's about it literally means
like it. It brings the divine right, and that would not have been
happened, so except except with the one that I did do intentionally, but
that wasn't That one wasn't a didn't produce visual effect. So yeah, yeah,
but I have heard this, yeah, you know from people that they
you know, might is part of the especially with monstros I've heard of that.
M hm yeah, flashes of light happen with with this, although most
of the time most of what I've ever seen has been without that. So
yeah, you know, yeah you do. That's just kind of how I
don't need in the ages to see this stuff. They kind of make it
easier easier. Yeah, they're they're they're regardless, So mm hmm, that's
definitely true. Do you have anything else you want to dig into in this
regard? So, I mean, as you can tell him. Obviously,
I could go on pretty much endlessly about anthological stuff and shaman stuff. I
can't think of a specific thing that we have like left unaddressed. Yeah that's
cool. Well you can always come back. I will definitely have you back.
There's a lot of stuff that we got into that I'm like, oh,
we could go for another you know, hour or two on that.
So yeah, I took notes and so I would love to have you back.
Well, I would love to be back. I love these conversations.
I'm actually I I liked I write a lot, and I'm not saying I
write well. In fact, I don't. I write well. All of
my practice, all of my writing has been academic, and so I can
write that style, but it's not exactly the most readable. And I have
not yet found a good voice that's sort of like not super dry and boring,
but yet you know, scholarly. Some people are still good at that,
and I I really struggle with that. But I'm planning on I'm probably
it'll probably be a sub stack, not paywall, but just to write about
some of this stuff, so if anybody's interested in that, I don't have
it up yet. I'm also working on my website, but I am crippled
by perfectionism. And so it's not ready yet, but I can give people
my email address if that's okay, if anybody's just interested in this or if
they want to be advised when that stuff happens. So my email is Forrest
Weird work at Google or gmail dot com. Sorry, so it's f O
r E F d w y R d w r K Forrest work and just
shoot me an email. I'm happy, clearly uppy to talk about this stuff,
and I'll let anybody know if I actually generate any public writing on it.
I'm also going to be teaching a workshop on how to do shamanic journeying.
Uh. It's should be November fourth, and that will be somewhere in
the Athens area. But it's a possibility that it could be hybrid as well
if people zoom in. But we it's limited to eight students, so it's
kind of like, let me know if you're interested. Because all right,
well, thank you, Oh you're so welcome, thank you for having me
back. Well that's all for this week's episode of the Six Degrees of John
Keel podcast. If you have any questions or thoughts about the podcast, or
would like to come and talk about your experiences of the Paranormal. You can
contact us at six d j K six seven at gmail dot com. We
promised to even answer you and we are always happy to hear from you.
Thank you,