Speaker 1: I feel that we may live you and I to
see some sort of great religious deception where the UFOs,
apparently the aliens come down and say that God is
not real, we made it all up. We're the real deal.
Follow us and we'll we'll take you to enlightenment. And
here's a weird thing I found out that I'm sorry,
I'm just going on and on, but it's weird.
Speaker 2: This is great, Really, it's weird.
Speaker 1: I found out that a lot of people in the
US government and intelligence, military, and certainly in Silicon Valley,
they believe the UFO phenomenon is a real thing. But
almost none of them believe these are creatures from other planets.
They believe these are transdimensional beings of some sort.
Speaker 3: Well, Alex Jones been saying it for like twenty, like
thirty years though, He's saying, look, these they believe in this.
He's like, I don't even know if it's real, but
I'm just telling you, the agencies believe that they are
trans dimensional beings and that they have ways to communicate
with through psychedelics and through different meditation methods, and that,
you know, and so it's like, now, you know, thirty
years down the line with Alex Jones basically, you know,
being run out of business. Not now regular journalists are
going to start to talk about it.
Speaker 1: This is Jonathan Peshel.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the Symbolic World. Hello everyone.
Speaker 3: I am very happy to be here with Rodraer most
of you, I think everybody watching this.
Speaker 2: Note to Roger Areas.
Speaker 3: He is a New York Times bestselling author and he
has a new book called Living in Wonder. I am
very happy to call him my friend. He seems to
be on the same journey we are. You know, all
of you watch in Simbolk World have the same types
of insights and being prescient before the big pot, like
the whole culture is catching up. I rot I saw
that everybody now and their brother is writing a book
about re enchantment. And then like you know it, like
four years ago you could barely you couldn't even sell
the book, and they're like, who cares about this? Nobody
cares about it, and now all of a sudden, everybody's
writing about it. So welcome on, Welcome on the Symbolic World.
Speaker 1: Right, Well, it's great to be here, Jonathan. And you know,
you and I were talking about these ideas personally a
few years ago. As you said, and now all of
a sudden enchantments having a moment, and it's really interesting,
what did you see coming? Because people ask me the
same question too, and I don't know. I just picked
it up. This is what interested me, and all the
most interesting people I knew cared about the same sort
of thing. Well, I saw it.
Speaker 3: Saw it happening in twenty sixteen was like to me,
the crushing moment where I could feel that I could
feel the ear shifting beneath my feet is actually quite painful.
Speaker 2: It was existentially painful.
Speaker 3: I remember having trouble sleeping at night, and it was
very intuitive. I just had a sense that the shifts
that were happening in culture were tectonic, and not all
of them were positive. But I already saw back in
twenty sixteen that the new atheist, materialist, reductionist world it
was over, it was finished, and that people hadn't seen
the consequences of that yet, but that we would quickly
start to see them unferral in our society. And that's
one of the reasons why I started making videos in
the first place. And I've just seen it accelerate and
I think now the fruits of that moment are visible
enough that people can now notice.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you know one of the things, one of
the real landmark moments. And working on this book, Living
and Wonder came for me and it's in the book
that telling the story came for me. In twenty twenty two,
when I was at Oxford University at a conference with
Ian McGilchrist in, a young Anglican ordinarian what do they
call him, ordnand seminarian approached me twenty seven years old,
Daniel Kim and he said, listen, you need to know
something that most people in your generation don't know. What's
that that the new atheism is not the threat now
many people in your generation can't see it. So what's
the threat? The occult? And then he went on to
talk about how when he was at Working and Advertising
in London, he was the only Christian in his office
that's no surprise, but everybody else there was involved with
the occult to some degree or the other. And there
were even two open Satanists who define Satanism as learning
how to be your most fully human self. And he
told me, I'm going to be dealing with this the
rest of my life as a priest, and the church
is not ready for this right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that is for sure, but we're starting to see it.
You know.
Speaker 3: I just talked to Father Josiah Trenham yesterday and he
said it. He said people might church now. He talked
about it in terms of tattoos. He said, you've come
to my church. You'll see people with all these wild
tattoos of like Norse gods and pentagrams and all of
this stuff in the church because there are, you know,
large numbers of those people. Obviously there are people going
into the occult, but there are also people dealing with
the consequences of that, you know, and looking for solutions
to the consequences of letting themselves go and calling upon
things that they don't understand in order to accomplish their will.
Doesn't end well, it's just no.
Speaker 1: No, it's true. And look, I mean that. What's astonishing
to me when I talk to younger people I'm talking
about people forty and younger, is how they live in
such a different world than people my age. I'm gen X,
I'm fifty seven, and certainly the boomers. When I went
to Paris in twenty eighteen for the release in French
of the Benedict option. You know, I found it really
interesting how Catholics everybody I talked to was Catholic fix
my age, in their fifties and older, they had they
were really edgy about it and didn't really like the book.
And I couldn't figure that out. Those who were significantly younger,
like forty and younger, they had no problem at all
with it. They were like, tell us more, tell us more,
and I could figure out what the deal was. Finally
it hit me. Those Catholics who are my age and older,
they still were desperately clinging to the possibility that the
Church still had something important to say to French society,
could still be a part of the mix. That they
just adjusted here, did a little there. Those who were
younger had no such illusions and didn't care. They just
wanted to know, how can we be fully Christian? How
can we be fully Catholic in this post Christian world?
And those here in Europe, those are my that's my audience,
you know, I'm talking to you from Budapest. That's my audience,
millennials and younger.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and the book is it's funny because I saw
that I saw I think it was I forget who
was I read a view of it and saying, this
is not what I expected, Like they expected, you know,
something like you know, colorful meadows and sparkling world, you know,
things shining and this kind of enchantment in that sense.
But you go right into you go right into UFOs
and demons and all that stuff. And so, you know,
just for people watching, like, why do you think those
things are related? Why do you think that these the
stories about UFOs and the occult and this kind of
new enchantment, how do you see them as being related?
Speaker 1: Yeah, because people today are both seeking out and are
aware of the numinous, the transcendent, the you know, the
wo to use a slight term, and you can't. But
you can't have the good woo without the bad too.
And this is actually why the book. My initial publisher
was Sentinel Print of Penguin Random House. They published Live
not by Lives in the betteredict option, but they can
the book because they didn't want to deal with the
dark side the occult. I think they wanted something that
was just mostly about you know, going into nature, seeing
the beauty and connecting that to God. And that's in
the book. But you can't have one without the other.
And h and I feel that if I led people
to think you could, that they would miss something and
maybe even be falsely enchanted, being be drawn into something
that looked good but was actually a deception. An angel
of light.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's I think that That's what's hardest I think
for materialists to start to understand is that the truth
is that materialists actually can protect themselves from curses. Let's say,
like you could as a materialist, the less in danger
of someone you know, cursing you, or some magic against
you or something someone acting against you, but you at
the same time are also less open to the positive
aspect of that world, which is to be positive attic
of a positive influence that would also transform you, you know,
an angel or a saint or something that would transform you.
And you see it in the lives of the saints that,
you know, the more they enter into the spiritual world,
you know, in terms of their transformation to be like Christ,
the more they see the demons as well, you know,
and they're constantly dealing fighting with these they can see
the dark forces working on them and then working on
the others as well. So I think you're right that
you can't. You actually in so much. You can't have
one without the other. That's why we need to have discernment.
That's why we need the wisdom of the church.
Speaker 1: Sure, well, you know, Charles Taylor said that the modern
self is the buffer it self. It's the self that
has learned over the centuries, the past five centuries to
put up all these barriers to experiencing the numinous. And
the buffer self doesn't exist outside the West, outside the
modern world. Well, people in the West now they realize
they need to be more poor to let in the
world of spirit. But again, you can't have one without
the other. Just today, Jonathan here in Budapest, I had
a long lunch with a friend, fallen away Catholic who
started reading my book. And then really strange things began
to happen to her, and she began to feel that
there was a presence in her room, and the presence
started pressing down on her chest. To make a long
story short, it turns out she and her brother had
gone into a cemetery a couple of years ago just
to see family graves or whatever. Her dogs started barking
like crazy at nothing, and they both she and her brother.
Both felt that there was some malign entity around and
they left quickly. Now the brother's a practicing Catholic. She's
fallen away, but she believes. She's not sure now, but
she believes that something may have attached itself to her then,
and she got really, really scared. Recently, when reading my
book and starting to think about the spiritual world, these
things began to show themselves in her life. Now, she
said to me. When this first came out, she goes,
I'm really scared. I'm really scared. I don't want to
deal with this. And I said, well, if this is
a real thing, you're going to have to deal with it.
It's not going to go away because you don't want
it there, I suggest you called your priest. Well tonight,
as you and I are speaking, she's having her apartment
blessed by a priest. She started to go back to Mass,
and I was giving her encouragement at lunch today. I said,
I know you're frightened. These things are frightening, but they
take their strength from our fear. You are a child
of God, you belong to Christ. Go back to Mass,
make a good confession, do these things and they'll go away.
But you can't avoid the fight by just choosing not
to think about it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, And you know, it's really difficult still for
some secular types to understand how this is possible. And
I try to help people understand with lower smaller cases,
like smaller cases that you deal with all the time,
which is that you know, if let's say you're a
child and your mother is angry with you. She doesn't
touch you, right, she doesn't beat you, she's just really
angry with you. Now, that influence, it's a spiritual influence,
for all intents and purposes, will affect you. Like you
can get sick, you can you can have trouble sleeping.
All these things can happen to you, and she's not
going to touch you at all. It's an influence.
Speaker 2: It's a spiritual influence.
Speaker 3: Now it's easier to understand, of course when it's a person,
but you can understand it as a general mood. For example,
like in a state where there's a police state, like
during COVID. You know, maybe you never see the police,
maybe you never see the authorities, but there's something in
the air that is oppressing you and you can feel it.
And so there are all kinds of cases of this,
and some of them go beyond the way that secular
people tend to think.
Speaker 2: But you can.
Speaker 3: Understand it to analogy with things that happen to us
every day. It's just that people who are sensitive to
these experience will tell you that it's not just how
can I say this, That it can be something like
what you could call like a psychic residue, like something
of a something that happened in a space that has
imprinted it in a subtle way, and that again that's
hard for people to understand, but that can actually affect you.
And you know that because you actually you know that
because if you walk into a room where something really
bad has happened, sometimes you don't know what. You can
kind of see if it just happened not very long ago,
you can get it. You can feel odd. You can't tell,
like your mind can't tell what it is that happened,
but you still have this odd feeling, and that that
type of psychic imprint can continue on for a long time.
But a lot of people, I know, even people that
watch me, will listen to you be.
Speaker 2: Like, what is this? This is crazy?
Speaker 1: Oh, it's so interesting though, how you know I've been
living in this world as a Christian for a while,
because I mean Ross Stout that at the New York Times.
A friend of mine, a faithful Catholic, he told me
a few years ago, you've got to write your wou book.
As he said, of all the friends of mine, you're
the one to whom these things happen. And it really
is true. I seem to be a weirdo magnet or
a blue magnet, not only personally and the things that
happened to me in life, but the kind of people
who talk to me. And maybe I have a feeling
that these things are much more common than we know.
But people talk to me about it because they know
I'm not going to tell them you're crazy, that didn't happen.
I just want to hear it. Maybe they have imagined
a particular thing, but in general, I'm like, no, no, no,
that's real. That's happened to other people.
Speaker 4: Hello, there, this is Martin Shaw inviting you to come
and join me for Christian wonder Tales, my first online
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things that we're going to be exploring from the early
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to the chivalric tradition of Arthur round table, Merlin the
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us about the mosh pit of our own modern lives?
Well over four gatherings, we're going to find out. I
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Speaker 3: Yeah, And it's also this is the difficulty about these
types of events is that the line between imagined and
happened is not as clear as people might think.
Speaker 2: You know, because if if you imagine.
Speaker 3: That something happened to you like you have and you
could think it's all in your mind, like it's still
happening to you, that this is something that's that's difficult. Again,
it's difficult because the problem with influence and the problem
with the way in which things influence on us are
not like it's not like hitting a piece of wood.
Speaker 2: With a bat.
Speaker 3: There's that kind of interpersonal relationship that sets itself up
and it's the same for example, like if you say, again,
you take the story of your mother who's angry and
angry at the kids, let's say, and she keeps that
like she's angry for several days and some of one
of the child will engage with it and receive it
and answer it and will become sick because of it,
and the other will just be like, yeah, whatever, because
it's not a one directional thing. And so something that
happens just in your mind. The idea that you could
just say, what's not happening, well, try to pretend that
it's not happening for long enough, and you will be
in danger. And even if it is, even if it
is psychological and just your mind, it's still happening to you.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, that's what I was telling. My friend here
in Hungary said, you know, you could try to put
it out of your mind, but that doesn't make the
thing go away. I mean, if there were criminals prowling
the street it night, you may never go out of
your house at night, but they're still there, and if
you can deal with them, if you can make them
go away effectively, then you should do that. I was
having this conversation earlier this week. I was in Bratislava
and Slovakia, sitting around the table having breakfast with some
Catholic friends, and they want to know more about living
in wonder and all that, and we got on the
top of psychedelic drugs, and one of the Catholics is like,
I don't understand what you mean when you say that
these drugs can open up a portal. Isn't it just
happening in your mind? She couldn't make the connection between
the mind and reality. She still had this implicit Cartesian
Cartesian dualism there. And I said, look, you're a Sacramento Christian.
You know the matter and spirit interpenetrate in mysterious ways,
and so of course it could be the case that
a chemical can affect your brain to make your brain
perceived dimensions of reality that actually exists, but you can't normally,
you know, access.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's the same, you know. I had someone
tell me one day. She said, when I was a child,
I saw a demon in my room. And she said,
I don't know if it was in my mind, if
it was really there, I don't know if it was
just my imagination. And my answer to her was, well,
did you see a bird, a cat or did you
see a demon? And she's like, I saw a demon. Well,
you saw a demon. I mean, you know what a
demon looks like, and you saw a demon. I don't
know to what extent, Like you know, the relationship between
your inner experience.
Speaker 2: And what is happening outside.
Speaker 3: You know, if you see a demon, that means you
are in a dangerous situation and you have to deal
with it no matter what, no matter what, Like you know,
no matter how you try to explain it mechanically, it doesn't.
You don't.
Speaker 2: You don't have to think about that too much.
Speaker 3: You know. I don't see demons, you know, because I
don't know. But if I did, then I would definitely
go see a priest and I wouldn't ask myself is
it just my imagination? Is it like really there?
Speaker 2: Where?
Speaker 3: Is it like? Is it in another dimension? Like some
kind of physical explanation. I mean that these things are important.
Speaker 1: Well, people are People are having these experiences and trying
to figure out what they are, when in fact the
church has so so many resources to help them. Like
the story I lead Living in Wonder with the story
about the young man Nino, a Catholic lawyer who had
these entities visiting him. Now. He had seen a UFO
when he was seventeen years old back in two thousand
and nine out in the countryside where he lived and
just looked at it hovering over a field and just said,
I don't know what that is. I'm just not going
to tell anybody. They'll think I'm crazy. Seven years later,
he's sitting in his apartment in the city where he
was living for law school, studying for law school, and
these two entities shimmered, that's the word. He sort of
shimmered into being through a portal that opened in his wall,
and they began communicating with him telepathically. Nothing significant, things
like a car is about the backfire on the street.
Then that happened. They were just sort of establishing their
bona fides with him, and then they went away. He
thought he was losing his mind, went to the hospital,
demanded test. He was fine. Then they kept coming back.
And the reason he reached out to me about this
was this has been happening for years and he had
been too afraid to tell even his priest because he
thought that a priest would think he was crazy. And
when he got married, his wife saw them too, so
he knew it wasn't in his head. And I said
to him, well, did you think that these might be demons?
You're a Catholic? Well no, I said, well why not?
Did you ever pray when they were around you. Yeah,
what happened? They would go away? Demons, right, He said, well,
I thought demons would want to fight me. I said no, no, no,
there are stories actresses tell about the people who've had
UFO experiences. These things are almost certainly demons. So he
went to his on my advice, he went to the
archdiocese and exorcists. He said, yeah, we've had these cases
prayed over him. Things have not come back. I saw
him not long ago when I was in the US.
Last time. It was a year after our initial conversation.
He said, they haven't bothered me at all. Now, what
I find interesting about that, Jonathan, is this man was
not a skeptic. He was not unchurched. He was a
practicing conservative Catholic. And yet because he didn't have any
background in demonology, and because these things chose to present
themselves as somehow connected to the UFO, he didn't know
what to do, and he was too afraid to go
to the priest. And I have to believe that this
is happening a lot now, and it's going to happen
more and more.
Speaker 3: And so what is your like, how can I say,
it's like? What do you see as the positive aspect
of this, like what is it that you see that
is happening? That is also something that we should celebrate.
Speaker 1: Well, that people are becoming much more aware of the
need for transcendence, of the need for enchantment. Now I
don't like that word enchantment because it does sound like,
you know, sprinkling fairy dust and turning everything to Disneyland,
and that's not it at all. I use it in
the sense that Max Weber meant when he said that
the modern world has become disenchanted. What he meant by
that was that we just don't feel the spiritual around
us anymore. And you know, God is ever more of
a and has even disappeared from many people. That's a
disenchanted world. I think what that means is not that
the spirit has withdrawn or that God has withdrawn, but
rather we have lost our capacity to perceive. And I
think people now are realizing that we can't live that way.
That it's a really unhealthy way to live, and it's
not living in truth, it's living within a very particular lie.
One thing I talk about in the book is how
we got to this point historically, all the different cultural developments,
and I quote the great Ian Mcgilchris. I don't know
if you've had him on yet, but you know British
psychiatrist who talks about how we in the West and
the modern world have become completely miserable because we've cut
ourselves off from noetic ways of knowing, that is to say,
ways of knowing truth that are not abstract and logical
and scientific, but that come to us through participation via poetry, religion, music, art,
and so forth. I think that the fact that people
are moving or realizing that materialism is false and it's
killing us and we need something else is a great thing.
But the problem is the churches aren't ready for it,
or the people aren't ready to listen to what the
churches have to say. Because to be re enchanted as
a Christian implies and requires, in fact, taking on certain
moral realities and moral disciplines that many people don't want.
They want the enchantment without being told that they can't
do what they want to do.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you see that in the what I call the
California Buddhist you know, which is people who want the
spirituality but don't want any pressure on their life.
Speaker 2: They don't want to have to change anything they just want.
Speaker 3: To be able to meditate and you know, do things.
But Christianity is rough because it asks you for ask
you for a lot, ask you for, you know, to
be to be practice celibacy, you know, in your marriage
as non married. It asks you to abstain from certain things,
to discipline yourself with food. Like, there's all these really
practical things that it, especially orthodox Christianity, that it.
Speaker 2: Asks of you. Uh, you know. But that's the reality.
Speaker 3: That's the difference between in some ways, the psychedelic road
to spiritual experience and the true Christianity, because in the end,
it's possible, I don't know, I've never taken psychedelics, but
it is possible that the experience objectively is similar. But
the difference is that the person who has gone to
it through asceticism has has been trained in discernment as
they are coming closer to the capatity like the opening
up of their spiritual faculties to be able to encounter
this different world, and so they're not as much in
danger to be completely you know, seduced by and confused
by the things that they encounter.
Speaker 2: On the other side, let's say.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, I compare it
to someone who becomes a multimillionaire by working hard, saving,
investing carefully, and so on, to someone who became a
multimillionaire by winning the lottery. It's the same amount of money,
but it destroys the person who wanted in the lottery.
Often you read these stories about people they become one
hundred million dollars, then five years later they've got no money,
they've divorced, and on and on. With these experiences comes
a great deal of responsibility. And yeah, you're right. That's
why psychedelics are so popular. They give people an experience
of the Numinus and some of these are real, but
they don't know how to handle it. I have done psychedelics,
and I finally talk about it in this book. I
did it when I was in college, before I became
a Christian, and I had a positive experience. But I
haven't been willing to talk about it over the years
because I didn't want to encourage people. But I felt
that I needed to be straightforward in this book because
if I'm going to condemn psychedelic youths or warn people
away from them, as I do, I need to be
able to have some credibility, and in my case, I
first became enchanted, or at least was first enchanted, by
going into the cathedral at Chatra when I was seventeen
years old. You know, I'd been raised in sort of
Eastern Christmas Protestantism in South Louisiana. You know, God was there,
but we didn't want him too close. You know, he
was there to sort of be our psychological help. And
by the time I got to be fifteen, I'm like,
this can't be right. You know, it's just the white
middle class at prayer and you know, a social conformity.
Blah blah blah. Then my mom won a trip to
Europe in a church raffle. She knew I wanted to go,
and she didn't go, so she sent me. I couldn't
wait to get to Paris, that hemyway where see where
he lived, where the Lost Generation was. But the coach
in which I was riding, I was the only young
person on a bus full of elderly American tourists stopped
at an old church about an hour outside of Paris.
I'm like, another old church. I go in and this
is a shop cathedral. Jonathan, you've been there, I'm sure,
And it's nothing in my experience growing up as a
kid in late twentieth century America prepared me for the
glory of God there. And I remember standing there in
the labyrinth and just knowing, beyond a shadow of a doubt,
that God was real and that he wanted me. And
I walked out of there not a Christian, but I
was on a search. And the next big stop on
that search was in college when I dropped acid. You know,
I was very, very depressed over a girl my freshman
year and got this new roommate, this sort of happy
go lucky Jewish hippie from New Orleans, and he's like, hey, man,
got these two hits of acid. I've never done it.
You want to try it? And by then I was
like why not? I was just so down and it
really utterly changed me. It turned me inside out. I
can remember lying there on a bench on campus ad
LS you Louisiana State, and looking at the sun filtering
through the green leaves and thinking, why am I so sad?
Speaker 3: Look?
Speaker 1: God is everywhere. I could feel him and felt the
ultimate unity of all things. Now, the thing is, Jonathan,
I believe that I saw something that was real, The
veil was lifted. Rupert Sheldrake talks about how almost everybody
who has these experiences believes that they saw something real
under the influence of drugs, not an hallucination. What I
did on Monday morning, though, because we tripped on that weekend.
I went straight to the campus bookstore to get books
about Christianity because I felt like I had in some
sense perceived God, and I started my serious walk into Christianity.
It took some years, precisely, Jonathan, because I didn't want
to give up my sex life, not that I had
much of one, but it was a principle of the thing.
You know. I'm a young man, I'm a late twentieth
century It's my right. And finally, years later it came
to the where I had another experience of enchantment, where
I met this elderly Catholic monsignor who i'd been sent
to him. I was a journalist in my first job
in journalism I've been since. I interview Monsignor Sanchez, who
was in his nineties. He had been born in the
eighteen nineties, that's how old he was, who had been
an artist and an art professor at Dartmouth before he
went entered the priesthood in midlife and just went there
to get his story. And that old man was just luminous.
He was like Yoda, you know, he was just glowing,
this sweet old monsignor from Guatemala. And I asked him,
how did you become a priest? He told me two
miracle stories that happened to him at Guatemala, that the
first one brought him back to his faith and the
second one brought him into the priesthood. Now the key
thing was, as that old man sat there telling me this,
tears were pouring down his cheeks. These events had happened
fifty sixty years ago, but it might as well have
might as well have happened the previous week. And I said,
if they're realizing, I'm in the presence of a witness
and I can't turn away from Christ. Now. I've seen
too much. And I wanted Christ. In that moment, I
wanted Christ more than I wanted myself. It was when
I was willing to make the sacrifice of everything, including
my sexual freedom, that enchantment finally became real for me
and I became a Christian.
Speaker 2: That's an amazing story.
Speaker 3: And so what do you see, what do you see
on the horizon, like, what do you see coming? You know,
because it's this is just the beginning in some ways
of something that is that has started. And now, like
you said, I saw that Russ Doubt that had, you know,
put out a review of your book, and he also
said he's also writing a book about enchantments. I'm like,
by the time New York Times people are writing about enchantment,
it means that it seems like people are noticing and
so what do you what do you see coming, let's
say in the next ten years.
Speaker 1: Well, there's a reason I have a chapter in Living
and Wondering what identify Paul kings North, Martin Shaw, and
Jonathan Pejo as prophets because I'm not flattering you. It
really is true. You all are seeing into the future.
And because you're psychic, but because you're intuitive and you
know what, you can see patterns in the culture. I
think things are going to get a lot darker and
more vivid very fast. Paul Kingsnorth, as you know, writes
a lot about what he calls the machine what I've
been seeing. One of the most disturbing chapters in my
book is about the false enchantment of artificial intelligence. The
craziest thing, Jonathan. When I was working on this, I
found that a lot of people who are involved with
AI believe that it's a sort of high tech wija
board that is allowing us to communicate with discarnate higher
intelligences that are going to lead us to great things enlightenment.
I mean, when have you heard that before? Well, you
know what that's about. Paul knows what that's about. Martin Shaw,
with his mythological background, definitely knows what that's about. But
we in this modern scientific materialist culture, we don't know
what to do with that, and so people are walking
naively into something really dark and something straight out of C. S.
Lewis's that hit of his strength. I found an interview
online on YouTube with a guy from Louisiana, as a
matter of fact, who was the AI guy at Google
who got fired. You might remember that a few years
ago that got fired because he went public and said
this thing is becoming sentient. Google let him go. Well,
in this interview he talked about it and he said
he's occultist of some sort.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's kind he's a kind of Magician's a sorcerer
of some.
Speaker 1: Kind, right, right right, And he said that he a
cabitalyst and some other guy got together and did a
ritual with Lambda, the artificial intelligence, to consecrate it to
the Egyptian god. Both. Now, what the hell is that about?
Why would you extend to?
Speaker 3: I mean, it's the right god to consecrate it too.
Speaker 1: Right, right. But I guess that people in Silicon Valley
are way more aware of this than the normies and
certainly the Christians. And this intersects with the whole UFO
thing in really bizarre ways. Jacques Vala, who's like the
grand old man of UFO studies. He's in his eighties now,
not a Christian at all, lives in San Francisco. He
came out with a book in the sixties late sixties
called Passport to Magonia. Have you ever read that, boy?
You really should. You can find it online. In it,
Valet theorized that what UFOs might be are the contemporary
manifestation of very very old entities that manifest it as
different mythological creatures in ages past and past cultures. But today,
at a scientific materialist world, they are manifesting as UFOs
as aliens, because that's how we can receive them in
a way they want to be received. Now, valets such
a scary story. Dada Pasulka is somebody a lot of
your listeners might know. She's a religious studies professor in
North Carolina who makes a specialty of studying Ufo culture
as an emerging religion. She writes about how she went
to visit Jacques a couple of years ago in his
apartment in San Francisco and was shocked to walk into
this apartment of this man who is not a Christian,
to find a big shelf full of books about angels
and demons. And he showed her a book and said, look,
I can't let you have this copy, but she need
to go find it because it's important to understand what
we're dealing with here. Well, the title of the book
was Satan, and it was a collection of theological essays
written mostly by Catholic priests Catholic scholars about aspects of Lucifer. Now,
what I took from that is that Jacques may not
believe it, may don't have the Christian framework, but he
does seem to believe that there is an all powerful,
malignant entity that is trying to communicate with us here
in a deceptive way. I feel. I mean, I didn't
write this necessarily in the book, but I feel that
we may live you and I to see some sort
of great religious deception where the the UFOs, apparently the aliens,
come down and say that God is not real, we
made it all up. We're the real deal. Follow us,
and well we'll take you to enlightenment. And here's a
weird thing I found out that I'm sorry, I'm just
going on and it's weird. I found out that a
lot of people in the US government and intelligence, military,
and certainly in Silicon Valley, they believe the UFO phenomenon
is a real thing. But almost none of them believe
these are creatures from other planets. They believe these are
transdimensional beings of some sort. I believe it or not.
I got an email about a month ago from a
well known journalist who's working on a big piece about
UFO cults, and he told me, he gues, I just
want to check with you on this. I keep finding
out when I go to talk to people in the
US government, whether it's into military, bureaucracy, intelligence, or in Congress,
and they all say that they believe these are not aliens,
but transdimensional beings, he said. And I'll ask them, why
don't you say something to people about it? He said, Well,
we've been telling, he said. They all say, we've been
telling journalists, but they won't write about it. Well, this
guy's going to write about it. Peace will probably be
out early next year.
Speaker 3: Alex Jones been saying it for like twenty, like thirty years,
is crazy, though, I mean, he's been saying, Look, these
they believe in this. He's like, I don't even know
if it's real, but I'm just telling you the agencies
believe that they are trans transdimensional beings, and that they
have ways to communicate with them through psychedelics and through
different meditation methods and that, you know. And so it's
like now, so you know, thirty years down the line
with Alex Jones basically you know, being run out of business.
Now regular journalists are going to start to talk about it,
which I guess it's good.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, But you know, it's so interesting because I
was sharing some of this with a bunch of conservative friends.
I was at a conservative conference in the US right
after the election, and I was telling them a little
bit about this nothing but skepticism around the table, and
I don't blame them. Yeah, this is crazy stuff, but
you know it's going to take the normies a while
to get caught up with the stuff that are in
the world that you and I and a lot of
your listeners have been in. And I don't think we're crazy,
but I will tell you that until just over a
year ago, I wouldn't have touched the UFO stuff. I
kind of laughed at it, but a friend of mine,
who's a journalist in Rome, he said, look, I know
you laugh at this, but you need to pay attention
because there's some very deep and troubling spiritual stuff going
on in the whole UFO AI technology world. Said okay, fine,
what should I read? It took me about a month
than I was completely you know, I was down the
rabbit hole and there's a lot of deception there, no
doubt about it. You can't believe everything, but there's something there.
And it was that once I started going down that
rabbit hole and connecting it to the occult, that's when
the book got canceled by my original publisher. I thank
god Zondervan picked it up. Never imagined that an evangelical
publishing house we want to publish a book about WU
from an Eastern Orthodox Christian. But the guy who bought
the book there said, you'd be he's an evangelical, He said,
you'd really be surprised at how much things are shifting.
Even among evangelicals on this, they are a lot more
open to it than they once were.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I read Pisilka's book on your recommendation. By the way,
I was actually supposed to meet with her a Notre
Dame a few weeks ago, but she didn't show up.
Speaker 2: I think she was sick or something. I really would
like to meet her.
Speaker 3: One of the things that I really like about her
thesis is how she doesn't try to disentangle the social
narrative from the event. She says, you can't disentangle it. So,
you know, like you said, there's a lot of stuff
that's like fake. People are making it up, people are
are some people may be lying about their experience. But
what's happening is that those lies and even the made
up experiences, all of these things and the real experiences,
they're fusing together to create a kind of worldview and
a kind of perspective that is part of the phenomena.
Speaker 2: You can't distinguishing it.
Speaker 3: And so all the science fiction, all the movies, all
of this stuff is actually part of the UFO phenomena
because it is creating a narrative around which these beings
have presence and you know, and have certain types of
influence on us. And so I thought that approach was
really wonderful because that is also how we understand spiritual
beings of having influence. Like, spiritual beings don't only have
influence through through mechanic through mechanical means, they mostly have
influence through subtle means, that is, through perception, through storytelling,
through it's a worldview, and like making certain things more
visible and certain things less visible. You know, that's what
That's how spiritual influences function first and foremost. And so
I find that whole idea very interesting, which means that
you can actually pay attention to the phenomena without falling
into like trying to defend this or that story, because
that's that's what people fall into. They're like, well, this guy,
you know, he's there trying to figure out whether or
not he really has access information, and this other person
and this other person. There's a there's a place where
you can stand from far away and look at the
whole thing as a story that's running through our culture.
Speaker 2: Uh, and evaluate it for that.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: Well. One of the things I pointed out in the
book Away from the Occult Weirdness is the way what
you attend to call certain realities into being. I mean,
this is this is the psychology. I guess you could say.
Ian Mcgilchris is big about this, and so is Matthew B. Crawford,
and they talk about the importance of cultivating your ability
to pay sustained attention because it produces reality. It's not
to say, like a psychotic would say that whatever I
imagine must be real, but it does make certain things
visible to us or invisible to us based on what
we pay attention to, and not only what we pay
attention to, but how we pay attention. It turns out
that the ability to pay sustained attention is key to
be enchanted. If you cannot sustain attention, if you've become
easily distracted, then you chances are you're not going to
be able to perceive the things that are really there
that you need to perceive. And as I was reading
this and learning this from reading anthropology and psychology. I
realized that the Internet is one great, big disenchantment machine
because it has done this to all of us. I mean,
everybody who's on the internet has noticed over time, if
you're old enough, that your ability to sit down, concentrate
on one piece of text for a while has been
greatly damaged. And this I think is turning us into
slaves in a way, because I mean, you look at
the young people who've only ever known the digital world.
Their ability to pay attention, say teachers, I know, is
almost nothing. And so they've become and you know this
as an Orthodox Christian, they become slaves to their passions
and not even not even their passions, their impulses, which
are like sub passions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you see that.
Speaker 3: Like my kids, some of their friends, they can't even
watch an entire movie, which is like the movie is
made to get your attention, you know, it doesn't actually
require a lot of effort like reading or you know,
going to church or you know, participating in a kind
of ceremony.
Speaker 2: Like they just get they can't stand.
Speaker 3: They can't pay attention for an hour and a half
to anything, like it doesn't matter what it is, even
if it's like Pixar animated, you know, like colorful thing
moving in front of their eyes.
Speaker 2: So that's wild, you know.
Speaker 3: And you see that in the in the Hesichastic Fathers,
you see they talk about this all the time, which
is that you know that, for example, one of the
things that Jesus prayer is for is to cultivate attention
because you basically empty the distractions, because we have all
these thoughts, right the logis more, these these thoughts that
go through your mind that aren't really you, but that
are all kinds of distraction, and we most people don't
even notice them because they're so used to just drowning
in them, basically like thughts running through their mind. But
once you actually start to try to deal with those
or to at least silence your mind in prayer, you realize, man,
I don't know how to pay attention.
Speaker 2: You know, this is almost impossible to me.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean. I tell the story of the
book about how some years back, when I was really sick,
I was dealing with chronic mono andympliosis that the romantologists
said was caused by overwhelming anxiety. My priest, my orthodox priest,
assigned me to say the Jesus Prayer for an hour
a day, and he meant say it in the way
it's supposed to be said ideally, you know, getting quiet,
breathing in, breathing out. And the fat guy had said
to me walk ten miles a day, as sick as
I was, that would have been easier than just sitting
quietly praying the Jesus Prayer for an hour. But I
did it out of obedience, and it was one of
the hardest things I've ever done, Jonathan, But after about
a month it started to get easier, and finally it
was really easy, and I was healed in the end.
And I went to my priest later and said, how
did you know if that's what I needed? He said, oh,
that was simple. I had to get you out of
your head. And he was exactly right, because I was
the sort of person have always been, the sort of
person who thinks that there's nothing wrong with me, that
finding the right formula in the right book can help
me think my way out of this problem. But it's
just not true. And enchantment is the same way. Broadly speaking,
you can't just read about enchantment. There's no five point formula, dude.
This one through three, four, five, Presto, you're enchanted. It's
more like learning how to play the violin or learning
how to say the Jesus Prayer. You have to practice it,
and then all the practice does is simply open up
your perception. There's a line I use in the beginning
of the book. I adapted it from a Harvard professor
who was talking about education. She said, true education is
not imparting information from the teacher to the student. True
education is the teacher helping the students to be staring
at the right corner of the sky when a comet
goes blazing past. Well, that's also enchantment. I want people
to read this book. I'm not going to tell you,
you know, here's the five step plan to being enchanted.
But what I do in the book is talk about
what enchantment means. Give examples. I tell stories about people
who've had miraculous stories, people who've had demonic encounters. But
I want people to step out of this book realizing
that I can live a deeper life, or more enchanted life.
But I'm going to have to make some big changes
in my life, most of which are about learning how
to pay sustained attention.
Speaker 3: So the book has been out for about a month now,
is that?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, about a month?
Speaker 3: So what has been How have people been reacting? Because
in some ways, like you said, this is different from
your other books, like you really lean into things that
you haven't talked about, at least you talk.
Speaker 2: About it in your newsletter.
Speaker 3: We've been kind of following the story for a long time,
but like as a published work, you haven't talked about it.
So I'm curious, how are people reacting, How are Christians reacting,
how are non Christians reacting?
Speaker 2: You know, what's the What have you been hearing?
Speaker 1: Well, I've been getting amazing reviews and one thing that
went through line it goes to a lot of these
reviews as well. Rodrier has done it again. You know,
he's always sees what's coming next, and that's gratifying to hear.
But it really seems to have struck a chord with
reviewers again who are forty and younger, because they sense
that there were in the middle of a very deep
meaning and our civilization and our culture, and it's one
that's not going to be met by going back to
the usual sources and remoralizing ourselves. That sort of thing.
I remember back in Gosh twenty fourteen, I think it
was I spoke to Christian Smith. He's that notre dame
or sociologist of religion who's responsible for the concept of moralistic,
therapeutic deism, which he said is the de facto religion
of most people in North America, most young people. And
it's just God is up there as sort of a
cosmic Butler. All he wants of us is to be
nice and kind and to be happy in life. But
that's about it. And that's not sustainable. A. It's not Christianity.
B it's not sustainable.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: I remember asking him back then, Okay, so how can
we get people back to the church because people are
falling away left and right? He said, well, I don't know,
but you're not going to do it by moralizing. And
what I took him to mean by that is not
just more oralizing, but typical apologetics, you know, finding the reasonable.
Here are the reasons why you should be a Christian,
or if you are a Christian, way should be a
better Christian. You know. It might have worked in ages
past when we were still part of the Age of Reason,
however attenuated it may have become over time but it
doesn't work anymore. I have found that Pope Benedict the
sixteenth was really onto something when he said, the best
apologetics the Church has for itself is the art it
produces and the Saints. What he meant by that was
when you have an overwhelming encounter with holy beauty as
an art or architecture, as a chatra, and also an
overwhelming encounter with incarnate goodness as in the saints. Those
reach into your heart and into your mind. They go
below and above reason, and they open the door of
your mind to the propositions, the propositional truth. And I
think that's going to have to be it. We're going
to have to reach people with beauty and with the saints,
with the lives of the saints and saints who live
among us now, and that will open up people's minds
to the gospel truth and the stories I tell of enchantment.
That's it. That's what I'm talking about here. Pay attention
to beauty, Pay close attention to beauty, because God is
reaching to us through beauty, through participation in the life
of God, by loving something, by directing your arrows to
beauty or to goodness, and then the rest.
Speaker 3: Will follow Yeah, I think that's that's right. And you
see it, you know, it's this perception or like this
way of talking about the world is happening at all
these different levels at the same time.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: You see you said with Ian McGilchrist, who I don't
think is a at least not officially a Christian. You
see it with a doctor with John Raveaki as well,
you know, who's just saying that the deepest forms of
knowing and the deepest forms of human experience are not
propositional knowledge. There's nothing wrong with propositional knowledge. But you know,
our propositional knowledge is based on gripping, right, It's based
on this encounter with the world and its encounter with
with people as well.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 3: And you know that's It's another place where the Internet
is such a disenchantment machine is because like even now,
like we're having this experience. It's it's not it's not bad,
it's not fully disconnected, but we are kind of staring
at each other through screens and there's this weird, uh,
you know disconnect that is that is part of our
accepted reality.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: But when you you know, when you.
Speaker 3: Stand with someone, you know, you stand next to someone
even in silence, you just have this, You can have
a type of experience of being together that is that
is already the glimmer of enchantment. You know, if you
if you remember that, like we see it in America,
we're also so we want to fill everything propositional, you know,
with the proposition and so when we're with someone, we
if there's awkward silences, we can't handle it. But you know,
once you start to realize that being with someone actually
has an effect on you biologically in terms of perception,
in terms of just presence, and that that has a
great value, then we need to re encourage people to
be with others, like to go out there, to go
to church, to you know, to meet people, to have
a family, to do all those things.
Speaker 1: There's so much there. You're fellow Canadian Marshall mclewan talked
about the difference between concept and percept. Percept is a
direct participation of something. The perceiving of a phenomenon. Concept
is what happens when the percept is turned into some
abstraction words or something symbolic. And we have to have
concepts to have an intellectual I have to get along.
But McLuhan said that we can't forget that at its
deepest level, religion is percept, the percept of God, the
perception of God. And we would say in his energies,
our problem, said mccluy, as we get stuck on concept
and without realizing it, all the time we turn religion
into concept. And it's at that level when it gets
stuck in concept, or to use the McGilchrist language, when
religion gets stuck in the left brain, that it begins
to die. Mclewin said that everyone he knew whoever lost
their faith did so by first ceasing to pray, because
prayer is the way that most people, it's the ordinary
way of maintaining the perceptive, the percept with God. And
you know, I think this has a lot to do
with why Orthodoxy Orthodox Christianity is having a moment right now.
When I was in a trip, a press trip to
Turkey to the Church seven Churches of Revelation with some
other Christian journalists a couple of years ago, and there
was one guy there Pentecostal I think he was, and
he brought his virtual reality headset so he could go
to church and what they call it the megasphere, the megaworld,
that virtual reality whatever that thing was that Facebook like
in virtual reality, yeah, yeah, yeah. And what he was
doing was they would meet all the people there would
meet virtually and they would have their own worship service.
And he thought this was awesome, and he said, this
is the future of Christianity. He said, no, it's not. No,
it's not. And I said it would never work for
us Orthodox and Catholics and other sacramentoly oriented Christians. He
got really offended by it, because the idea that someone
would say, wait, you mean technology is not the future
is bad. But I kept trying to tell him that no, no, no,
I didn't have the language for it that he could
understand that, no, no, that's not how we are to worship.
That doesn't put you in touch with God. I realized
finally after we had an argument about it, that for him,
all worship is Christian worship is receiving information and experiencing emotion,
you know, And so you can do that online, just fine.
If it's all about inducing an individual emotion and exchanging information,
why not online. But what that does is it disembodies
you and I. You know, one of the things I
learned to work on this book is how the way
we perceive the world formats us. And to get right
to the point, if you spend most of your time online,
it begins to train your mind and your sense of
reality and your sense of ontology into thinking that everything
is manipulable. I think that it is not a coincidence
that we've seen the explosion of transgenderism and gender dysphoria
in the first generation raised online because they're so so
far apart, so alienated from the physical that they come
to believe that, of course they can manipulate things into reality.
All things should be digital. The body is digital. We
can impose our will on it. And I think if
you get out and touch grass and see people and
live in the real world, the physical world, it changes
you in positive ways. The less you do of that,
the more distorted your perception of reality is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, wow, this is great stuff.
Speaker 1: Froud.
Speaker 3: I have to say that I can't wait to see
what you're gonna talk about next, because now we're gonna
know what the future is.
Speaker 2: Just I know what Rodger is going to write about.
Speaker 3: But I also want I want to thank you, you know,
I mean, you said it's not a compliment that you
mentioned me in the book but I definitely take it
as a very deep not just a compliment, but also
a kind of responsibility in the sense that, you know,
a call to to be the best version of myself
that I can. You know, these two people that you
that you put me with our astounding people, people I admire,
and I also admire you very much, and so I
I deeply appreciate it. But I also see it as
a as a call to to to keep to keep
to be the best version of myself.
Speaker 2: So thanks for that as well.
Speaker 1: Well, keep on keeping on, because you've taught me so
much over the years, so as Paul so is Martin,
and I would be very satisfied if Living in Wonder
served primarily to be a gateway to Peggot kingsnorth Shaw,
Ian Mcgillchris and all these other wonderful thinkers whom I
highlight in the book. Because look, this is a practical book.
It's not just a book of theory. It's a book
to help people find their way to God. And look, Jonathan,
it's not about re enchantment in general. It's about Christian
re enchantment, because as we said at the top of
the show, there are all kinds of false and dark
ways to be enchanted, and they're out there now. The
publisher of this book, as Zondervan executive, sent me a
photograph from a bookstore in Mississippi, Mississippi, of all places.
He was there a couple of weekends ago in a
Barnes and Noble big book aimed at young teenage girls
about how to be a witch, a Witch's Handbook.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 3: I mean that there's definitely part of our society. I
see it in my kids all the time, like so
many even when I was a teenager. I remember in
my twenties, Wiko was starting to become popular, and I
had friends because I was in the art world.
Speaker 2: I had quite a few friends over weekends.
Speaker 3: But now there's a source free school that opened up
like two streets from my house.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: Wow, it's like it's crazy stuff.
Speaker 2: So yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: But you know, the first Orthodox book I read, even
before I came into the Orthodox Church eighteen years ago,
was that book called The Mountain of Silence by Curiocos Marquisis,
and it's just basically a book link series of interviews
with a monk from Mount Athos who's now a bishop
an Archbishop of Metropolitan and he talks about Orthodox spirituality.
You go back and read it now, after eighteen years,
it seems very basic, But back then it blew my
mind all the wlu in there, all the real spiritual intensity.
And Marquiti says at the beginning of that book that
a lot of people in the West think they have
to go to Hinduism or Buddhism or some Eastern religion
looking for that visceral sense of enchantment. In fact, it's
right there in Christianity. It's been preserved most purely on
man Athos, but in Orthodox Christianity and everyday Orthodoxy down
at your local parish, you can encounter it on a
very direct level that most people don't even know it's there.
They just think about the Orthodox Church. If they think
about it at all, it's, oh, that's the nice place
where you go for the Greek festival. Go inside the
church sometime, go pray with the Orthodox, and you will.
You will have an experience that you didn't even think
was possible.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, all right, Rod, thanks for your time. Everybody
living in wonder you can get it, and we'll be
looking forward to seeing you.
Speaker 2: Know what you do next? Once again.
Speaker 3: Thanks and I hope we'll see each other in real
life as well. That's always that's always good for that
to happen.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Jonathan,