Ed Dames, retired U.S. Army Major and remote viewing expert, reveals Project Starman’s June 2024 field exercise testing claims of Bigfoot as teleported entities via a 10-foot-tall ape-like species linked to hostile "controllers" on a distant moon. He warns of ex-Soviet nuclear threats undetectable by conventional means, stressing remote viewing’s unique precision. Richard Tarnas counters modern skepticism, citing archetypal astrology’s correlations—like Pluto-Uranus conjunctions shaping eras like the 1960s—and argues that planetary cycles influence collective consciousness, from policy timing (e.g., Nancy Reagan’s astrologer Joan Quigley) to relationship harmony. While mainstream science dismisses both remote viewing and astrology, their patterns suggest deeper cosmic connections, urging humanity to engage with evidence rather than suppression. [Automatically generated summary]
I am going through a very, very, very deep, mysterious force in my life that I've never been through before, namely grief.
And it's it's boy, I'll tell you, it's weird, folks.
As you know, I'm sure you know, I lost Ramona and I lost such a big part of me.
So I go through these jags.
They come and go like ocean waves, building and crashing.
Surely I miss this woman of mine.
Anyway, I've done a whole bunch of things.
You may notice in the webcam photo that I look a little different, normally wearing all black.
Not today.
In fact, we'll see who can notice what in the webcam.
How about leaving it that way?
Let's see who can notice any difference.
I sound like a woman saying, what do you notice?
What do you see different?
Anyway, on my webcam shot, that's me, and I'll put up the picture of this little Abby Dose, crazy Abby Dose.
You know, this little cat of mine likes water.
And I'm not kidding.
When I say he likes water, I mean he really likes water.
When I'm running water in the sink, he will amble on over and throw his head under the water.
Now, that's not a cat-like thing to do.
He throws his head under the water.
And I go, you little dope.
Anyway, he's just a blast.
All right, coming up in a moment, down to Biz, the world's foremost remote viewing teacher.
Edward A. Dames, Major, U.S. Army retired, is a decorated military intelligence officer, actually an original member of the U.S. Army Prototype Remote Viewing Training Program, the one the CIA ran, remember?
He served as the Training and Operations Officer for the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency's Psychic Intelligence Collection Unit, and currently serves as Executive Director for the Matrix Intelligence Agency, a private consulting group, the technical consultant for the feature film Suspect Zero.
I saw it.
It was a very good movie.
Suspect Zero worth seeing, believe me.
A Tom Cruise, Paula Wagner production.
Ed coached Sir Ben Kingsley, who was, by the way, superb in that part, and played the role of an FBI remote viewing instructor in the movie as well.
Short, but, you know, there was Ed.
Tonight, we're going to be talking about a very unusual topic, actually, for Ed.
Very unusual.
We're going to talk about Bigfoot.
And so I'm very much looking forward to that coming up in a moment.
It's not, and I kind of squandered a little bit by looking, using the military team to look at Enigma in those days, and I hit on the wrist a few times.
And so I was a bad boy and used the team to look at a few things, and Bigfoot was one of them.
I want to talk about Bigfoot because it provides some context for my capstone project, which is coming up in June after 22 years, and that's Project Starman.
And I'll start by talking about Bigfoot, Sasquatch.
About two years ago, I mentioned to you that a team of my professionals took a look at this particular enigma that we call Bigfoot.
And when trained remote viewers, and there are many trained remote viewers now, when trained remote viewers focus and work using stringent protocols, when they take a look at Bigfoot, inevitably a trained viewer will sketch a long rectilinear device seemingly out in space somewhere.
It's intimately connected and associated with this phenomenon that we call Bigfoot, which led me to believe that this device that we've seen before in conjunction also with Chupacabra, El Chupacabra, this thing actually serves as some type of, we thought at the time, as some type of a projector assembler taking carbon out of the out of theory, that it takes carbon somehow and reformats it into something that looks like this thing that we call Bigfoot.
And the device itself is connected with entities in a place that is very, very distant.
Any idea at all, you know, assuming what you're suggesting is, or have viewed as correct, of the motivation of the creation force behind this thing out there, this, I kind of think of an obelisk out there in cold, dark space doing these projections.
That's, you know, kind of what you set up in my head for me.
The motivation is simply to be able to discern, to gain the insight, to develop a tool, a higher consciousness tool, to look behind this Wizard of Oz projection and see what is actually creating the enigma.
That is laying the groundwork, it's setting the groundwork for two things.
One, it's forcing the development of a focused consciousness tool, in this case remote viewing.
It's forcing the development of a higher consciousness tool to see behind the enigma, behind this conundrum, this facade.
And that in turn is setting the stage for contact with a higher intelligence, a la Starman.
A la Starman, yes.
Because what we found now is that we're able, instead of building a device like in the movie and those kind of things, the protocols that are demanded are simply to go to a place that's designated as a contact area, which we did.
We discerned this, we described it, we know where this place is, and we're testing that hypothesis in June.
I think that this animal called remote viewing that we've pushed to the limits over the last 23 years, I think it's good enough to demonstrate that we can evolve into something that...
We're not evolving biologically and we're not evolving socially, that's for sure.
But Ed, why do you think or imagine that, for example, contact with, say, a Bigfoot, which you're saying is a projection, would lead you the next step Or several steps of the way toward the intelligence that created this and then contact that might warrant intervention.
When you get behind the Enigma itself, the projector, they know when you're looking at them, which means that they, I mean, we are talking 2001 monolith type of entities.
They know that you know you can see behind the Wizard of Oz facade, and you can tap the Wizard on the shoulder and say, mm-hmm, I see you.
That changes everything.
It changes the relationship of people to them, to what we call the controllers.
And then something else is going to change, and we're hoping that contact will demonstrate that.
It's pie in the sky, but we've worked 23 years to do this and give it a shot.
And short of that intervention, short of success and real contact and intervention, the hope for mankind is, it seems to me, if half of what you have predicted comes true, slim and none.
For instance, how much control does a country have on certain weapons?
And if some of the control is looser than the security on, let's say, a nuclear reactor, a power plant, there are weapons up for sale, and that's a big problem.
So how do you bring fire down on something like that when it's in a fire?
Do you have any idea what a paradox would produce?
When you talk to Dr. Michio Kaku, he believes that a paradox, if actually done, would simply create another universe where that paradox would play out in its own way.
It's my personal view, Ed, and I don't remote view, as you well know, that consciousness may turn out ultimately to be a power greater than atomic energy, greater than anything man has ever discovered.
And I could be totally all wet on this, but I think someday that's where all of this is going.
I would like to know how powerful consciousness really is.
Mass directed intent.
I'd like to know how powerful it really is.
You know, I did a number of experiments, and then I began, I think, appropriately, to check it out because I realized I had something real on my hands, and I didn't know what the hell I was doing.
So, I would like you to make a list, and at the top of it, put examination of consciousness and how powerful it ultimately is, I'd like to know.
I don't know if that's something you can do, but if you can, do it.
Well, as I've said years ago, a point's going to be reached where we, for instance, just with regard to agriculture, where crops can no longer be grown the way we've traditionally grown them because of vicissitudes and the weather.
The weather's changing so rapidly, far more rapidly than meteorologists would ever imagine.
Nevertheless, these changes are really coming upon us quickly.
I don't think there's a whole lot of disagreement out there about this anymore.
I did a program years ago with Matt Lauer on NBC, and he kind of sniffed and chuckled at what we were talking about, Whitley and myself.
And I've always been curious all these years when and if yet the light bulb has gone on above Matt Lauer's head.
I really don't know, but there have been so many stories confirming what I told him then that I'm sure he's had his moments of consideration of what I said.
I don't know if you ever saw the show I'm referring to.
You mean to say, well, let's zero in on that for a second.
Would it be possible for a remote viewer, because this really is remote, I think, remote influencing, that's what it sounds like, to seduce a female while she sleeps?
A group, if they were trained the right way, could actually intrude into the dreams and keep and actually disturb sleep of someone, but that's about as far as it could go in reality.
And I'll describe that at the end of the movie, too.
Actually, what I know is from my experience, the KGB, when they had, it's now the FSB, but when it was the KGB, the Soviet KGB had an extra sensor team.
and they actually did on my intrude upon bob monroe's dreams bob monroe rob Robert Monroe, yes.
Bob screened and vetted our recruits for the program.
That's what we used him for.
But the Soviets thought that he was in charge of the remote viewing program because we were sending so many people down to Nelliesford, Virginia, to experience things like out-of-bodies and altered states.
Robert was right into the program, and we sent potential recruits through the Monroe Institute, the Gateway program that Robert had put together, and we then interviewed them when they came back.
I wasn't able to achieve out-of-body, but I did discover that there is a part of people, and this was totally new to me, that there's a part of ourselves, our personalities, and our essence that exists in another realm.
Essentially, it's as if a part of us, a doubleganger, was somewhere else operating all the time, meeting people that in reality our physical being would meet, let's say, five years from now, meeting them now in this particular time, if that is even relevant.
That there's something that goes on totally outside of our awareness, our conscious awareness.
And that's what I ran into, validated by other people, saying, I saw you in an altered state talking to this person over here, someone who I would not meet for five years, for instance.
No, but when others validate that for you and say, I saw you, for instance, when I was in an altered state, I saw you talking to this particular person.
And then five years later, when it exactly matches, those kinds of things, you begin to actually, you can almost perceive this other realm, which is very bizarre, actually.
But you know that the dimensions, the parameters of what we think we are in terms of conscious awareness go way beyond what most people in their day-to-day life think.
I interviewed a whole bunch of people on Out of Body, and there were many, many confirming real-world stories that, yes, somebody saw me 2,000 miles from where I was.
There was a conversation.
I was there in a sense that they recognized.
And, you know, in the real world, some of this you could nail down.
Yes, I have a clinic in Las Vegas every six months for people who have learned on the DVDs and want more specialized training, higher, higher-level skills.
I think the conviction that cats or whales are not conscious, are in some sense mechanistic unconscious automata is, I think, a very temporary and local prejudice that came up in the modern period, and it's completely unshared by any society outside of this one.
And I think it could only be maintained, that conviction could only be maintained by really narrowing our consciousness in a sense to believe that.
And I think the people, well, just to finish, a lot of the, I think, cutting-edge research that's happening right now in animal behavior, for example, where people are really spending very long amounts of time in an extremely patient attitude and interaction with various species,
I think are just finding they're uncovering many more signs of emotion and of purpose and all the categories that we associate with human consciousness in some form.
Okay, a lot of people say that human consciousness is all there is, that only an awareness of self is real consciousness, and that's why they ascribe it just to human beings and rule out everything else that walks around on two or four whatever.
Yes, and I mean that it seems implausible to me, and I think the people that I are spending the most amount of time with the least prejudice and the most, you know, to use the phrase that Barbara McClintock, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist, said, you have to have a feeling for the organism in order to understand it.
You have to have a, and she was working not with animal species, but at a much finer level of biological studies.
But it was, even she recognized that you have to overcome a kind of barrier between the subject and the object.
You have to enter into the reality of what you're studying.
As I say, you know much more about it than I do, but from what I've heard, it seems to me to be one of the ways in which researchers are uncovering signs of a kind of force, a force field in a sense that all human beings and probably more than human beings participate in.
Well, The Passion of the Western Mind was a book that I wrote actually while I was in Big Sur in the 1980s.
And that book set out a history of the Western worldview from the ancient Greeks to the postmodern.
I wanted to basically give as clear a narrative history as possible about what went into shaping the assumptions with which we currently view the world and, in a sense, tell the drama of it.
Well, an enormous factor, for example, was the Copernican Revolution, which in a sense everything led to it.
Greek philosophy, the medieval scholastics, the Renaissance intellectual atmosphere, all these fed into this extremely powerful moment of transformation that Copernicus and then Kepler,
Galileo, and then finally Newton kind of climaxed that in that period we basically went through the destruction of the cosmology that virtually every other society prior to our own lived within,
namely the belief that we are on a stable, centered, fixed Earth, and that this is the center of the cosmos.
And suddenly the Earth is a planet and it's a totally different universe because not only is the Earth moving, but the entire view of the cosmos as embedded with meaning and purpose that somehow human beings could know,
understand, participate in, that was radically transformed to a new universe which eventually brought forth the idea that the universe has no intrinsic meaning or purpose.
It's a random mechanistic phenomenon and human beings are a kind of oddity, isolated oddity of consciousness.
And to continue the theme that you began our conversation with, the outcome of the Copernican and then the scientific revolution more generally is a worldview in which human consciousness experiences itself as being so singular,
so unusual, such a kind of random accident that has popped up in a world that is seen as being intrinsically unconscious and purposeless and impersonal.
So that's the, we all grew up, we all in the growing up in the 20th century with our modern educations, we all grew up within a universe in which our deepest psychological and spiritual aspirations and needs and so forth were viewed as taking place inside a cosmic container that was entirely indifferent to those aspirations.
And that's the basis of the whole existentialist crisis of the modern period.
I think that's probably too cut-and-dry or simple a question to give a cut-and-dry simple answer, but I could give a response that reflects more the...
I think that the planets and the sun and moon and their movements seem to, in their alignment, coincide in a meaningful way with the experiences of individuals as well as collective humanity.
as I think virtually anybody is with a 20th century education, that astrology is the most ridiculous.
Of all the new paradigm perspectives, it's the one that is most immediately worthy of rejection and even scorn.
I've been studying it for about 30 years because I've been on the radio as a talk show host.
And I can tell you without reservation, without question, that when there is a full moon, Richard, the calls get dramatically different when you're sitting taking calls just from the general public about whatever.
They get dramatically different.
I mean, agitation levels are through the roof.
People get sort of a little bit manic.
There is, without question, anybody who works in a hospital can tell you what I'm saying is true.
There's a correspondence between the movements of the planets and the Sun and Moon and human experience.
I mean, that's the basic thesis.
But the kind of evidence that we now there's many, many people doing very serious research in this area, even though it's not studied, with few exceptions, it's not studied and taught in the universities.
Yes, there's several quite good programs that have emerged in England, at Bath Spa University in Bath, England.
There's a program there and here in the United States.
I and Stanislav Groff have been teaching courses in this at the California Institute of Integral Studies as well as at Pacifica.
There's also a Kepler College in Seattle, Washington, that has built a whole kind of classic Renaissance liberal education that's centered on astrology much as it was.
I've been to the Vatican, and I remember walking in a very important building at the Vatican and seeing this giant monster globe that was divided into the signs of the zodiac, Richard.
And it stopped me in my tracks.
I went, my God, I'm in the Vatican, and here are the astrological signs on a giant globe.
And it was actually taught in the medieval Catholic universities as an essential part of the, usually the medical faculty was the one that was teaching it.
And then definitely in the Renaissance, of course, it just saturated the artistic sensibility at that time.
So you're right.
It's always been with us in one form or another.
and the emperors and the popes always had their astrologers.
But I think the question as to whether the planets rule us is a fundamental one, because the
issue of determinism or fatalism, where somehow where the planets are when we're born, fundamentally rules our existence in a way that we're unable to do anything about or the idea that where the planets are at any given time affects me or, affects the world in such a way that we're sort of helpless puppets, yes.
And I think actually a sound knowledge of the correlations, of like knowing what kinds of things tend to happen under what kinds of planetary alignments, actually is a liberating rather than an imprisoning or constraining.
So I think we've established, Richard believes that there is an effect by the moon most strongly and then by the planets to a lesser or different degree.
And so I wonder, Richard, whether you think that is it too simplistic to say that free will does trump what the planets otherwise might have in store for you or bends it a little or something, but doesn't eliminate it?
And I think that thinking in terms of the one trumping the other, that seems to, that reflects more looking at it as a zero-sum game.
In other words, as if the planets are affecting us.
By the way, when I say planets affecting us, I don't really think of the, I don't believe that the planets have a causal relationship to our experience.
I think rather they are more like signs in the same way with a clock.
The clock doesn't make it, when the hands of the clock are at the place where it says it's 11.30.
The clock is not causing it to be 11.30.
It's reflecting the fact that it's 11.30.
And it's the same way with the planets.
The planets seem to be, I think it's more, that's a kind of outmoded way of looking at it, that the planets are causing the patterns of human experience that we notice coincide with the planetary movements.
Rather, they, I believe, are signs of them.
They are symbols of what's happening.
Now, to think in terms of the planets, the planetary influences, let's call them, I think actually the influences are coming from a kind of archetypal level of the deep consciousness and unconscious, what Jung called the collective unconscious.
And I think, Art, when you say, does free will trump the planets, I think that presumes that it's one or the other, or it's a kind of wrestling match between them.
But if one instead looks upon these archetypal forces, to use a Jungian frame of reference, it's more like the human being can play a more or less conscious role in participating in how they are expressed.
What I'm rather saying, I think where the resistance, and I think it's a healthy resistance, to astrology as being deterministic doesn't come from something like that, where you recognize certain personality characteristics and the fact that you're a Gemini.
Rather, it comes from a sense that I have no choice in how I'm going to express, in this case, let's say, the range of ways in which a Gemini could express itself.
I happen to look up your birth chart since your birth date is on the...
And so in looking at that, I was able to see that your sun and Mercury, which are in conjunction in Gemini, which has to be probably the position that is most at home with being able to speak for several hours an evening before millions of people.
But in addition, both the sun and Mercury are in a conjunction, a triple conjunction in your chart with the planet Uranus.
It's a few degrees over to the side, but the three of them are all together in Gemini.
Now, one of the most powerful set of correlations in all our evidence in these years that we've been studying this shows that the planet Uranus seems to be correlated with a principle of freedom,
of rebelliousness, restlessness, a certain almost sometimes even a kind of brilliance of innovation, a desire to break out of orthodoxies of any kind.
Well, when a person has a son-Uranus conjunction just by itself, this tends to be a real rebel, you know, and it can express itself anywhere from being a juvenile delinquent to being a rebellious scientist like Galileo, who also has a son Uranus.
Yes, well, anyway, look, these things do seem to be, I guess it's self-evident.
I'll say self-evident.
I cop to everything just about that it says about a Jonahi.
So that seems, on the face of it, Richard, to be an incredibly strong force.
Now, maybe we can modify our behavior at the macro or even micro level, but at the end of the day, it kind of nails you down.
That is to say, where the planets and everything were at the moment or the instant of your birth, it seems to be an extremely powerful force, and Western culture and science is in complete denial about it.
Yes, I think much in line with a lot of the other themes that you treat in this show, there are certain areas of evidence and research that are just so threatening to the Orthodox worldview that is maintained by our kind of cultural high priest, so to speak.
Yeah, and when something is genuinely threatening, then that's when the greater amount of ridicule and resistance is activated because they can tell something there's a strong sense of threat.
First of all, I think recognizing that there is a relationship between, you know, my experience and who I am and where the planets were when I was born and where they continued to go in the course of life in relationship to my chart.
That's what's called transits.
Recognizing that correlation helps me to see that I live in a cosmos that is in some way meaningfully focused on me as an individual and on all human individuals.
And also, in some sense, it's focused meaningfully on the earth.
And this gives a whole different sense of that what we live in is a different universe than the void of meaning that we're taught that we live in.
Yes, and that was one of the reasons why when I was asked to come onto your show, and I remember John talking to me about your show.
And we had many discussions about these issues, and one of the ways in which he saw a commonality between our work was that, you know, as he put it, both of us were in the business of blowing the Western mind, as he put it.
He was extremely sympathetic, he was a person who had a deep heart, and he listened to people who were telling stories and sharing their experiences that were just outside the bounds of what was allowed to be possible for any other psychotherapist.
And he had the courage and the compassion to listen to them.
And he also not only treated them as worthy of being listened to, but he also let their messages somehow transform his sense of what the universe was about.
Yeah, so do I. He had too many people telling him such similar stories, and they'd had no common connection before they were reporting these experiences.
Now, I think in terms of his effectiveness in the world, he might have been a little bit more effective had he been able to maintain a slightly more distanced or slightly less obvious, if he didn't seem to have bought it quite so obviously, I think he might have been more effective, Look, he bought it.
I understand that you're saying in the real world, perhaps he would have achieved more credibility by seeming to keep more distance, but that would be sort of intellectually dishonest, right?
And in order to, I think, you know, when he began his work, he used the phrase, this is an authentic, that is when he began his work with the abductees.
He said, this is an authentic mystery.
He said, we don't, you know, they bear all the symptoms of having actually had these experiences.
So something is going on.
And what it is, we don't know.
But something is going on, and these people bear listening to very seriously.
So I think that starting point was very effective.
And I remember that when he used that phrase, it was even published in the Harvard.
But can't you understand, Richard, how that for a researcher like him, when it passed the bar of whatever skeptical entry he made into it all, and when it really passed that bar and he became convinced that this is really going on, then I don't know.
Yes, but as I listen to you, I hear great caution in much of what you say, and so your survival in the academic community, I think, is much more assured than his was.
Well, I'm not worried about, I mean, he was teaching at Harvard, and that was a more difficult situation to be in.
I'm in the West Coast with a more liberal surroundings and people.
I mean, my classes in this country...
Sure, but they can't fire me.
Anyway, my main point is that I fully sympathize with why John became so passionate about it.
think that he might have just been a little bit more measured in that one book in particular, Abduction.
I think that was probably the one that...
Yeah, a little bit more would have been more effective or politic.
But that was John, and one of the things that made John a great man is that he fully went into, whether it was anti-nuclear activism or the work that he did, even as a biographer of D.H. Lawrence when he won the Pulitzer Prize.
Well, the reason I brought up John was that both John Mack and I were convinced that the belief that is so widespread in the modern scientific community that human consciousness is the only consciousness around is a delusion.
And that in fact there is forms of intelligence that transcend the human, that are around the human, that the cosmos itself seems to be informed by an intelligence.
And the form it took for him was especially through the conviction of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence.
But he also was very much into the research that I was doing as well.
We often discussed his birth chart and transits and the other astrological research that I'd been doing.
The passion of the Western Mind, Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our Worldview, and Cosmos and Psyche, Intimations of a New World View.
So anyway, Richard, I loved President Reagan.
I thought he was one hell of a president.
I really liked him.
But that issue aside, Nancy Reagan, his wife, consulted, it was widely known, she consulted an astrologer at every critical juncture of her husband's presidency.
If it was not the right time for a summit meeting or not the right time to address the nation on a certain subject, then it wasn't done based on astrology.
I mean, that's pretty well known, Richard.
Do you think that Mrs. Reagan was out to lunch, or do you think that she contributed to a successful presidency?
I mean, actually, even before anyone knew that she was, publicly anyone knew that she was having these consultations, a lot of astrologers were writing in the journals.
I remember reading in the British Astrological Journal, that there was an uncanny skillfulness to the timing of Reagan's actions and statements, as if he knew when to do it to kind of correlate with the best planetary alignments.
But in addition, there was that, you probably know about this, there was that interesting, the astrologer, what was her name, Joan?
Well, anyway, the astrologer encouraged Nancy Reagan to influence her husband towards a more open attitude towards Gorbachev and said that his legacy see, Nancy Reagan, I think, combined both this, you know, consulting with the astrologer with a high anxiety about wanting her husband to go down in history as a great president.
And one of the things that she got from Joan Quigley, that was the name of the astrologer, she kept getting from Joan Quigley this encouragement to influence her husband towards being a more peaceful oriented if somehow he could bring peace between the Soviet Union and the United States and not drive things towards a nuclear,
let alone an apocalypse, but even the tensions that were so increasing in his first administration.
And so I think it's just one of those kind of ironies of history that an astrologer both helped the timing of a lot of his actions and statements, but also seems to have influenced him in a direction that we're all grateful for now.
Well, yeah, but I'd say that moving from the brink virtually to let's bring it all down and change it, even though we have current world day horrors, the horrors of the world aren't gone by God.
And the advisors who have written about it since, it just drove them crazy that this astrologer had this influence on Nancy Reagan and this influence on Reagan.
I think a competent astrologer who also had a good heart and a good political sense and was discerning in a number of ways would definitely be, I feel, much better than if they didn't have it.
There's an expression from the ancients that's come down, a sentence.
It said, a sagacious person improves the workings of the heavens as a farmer improves the workings of nature.
And so there's what that dictum was trying to say, among other things, is that by knowing the state of the cosmos, by understanding the archetypal dynamics of that moment, one is in a better position to be able to live intelligently and creatively,
knowledgeably, in relationship to the whole, rather than be, in a sense, kind of blindly acting from an unconscious position.
Well, in most ways, other ways, Nancy Reagan was an extremely strong, sensible, aware person who you would not think would be given to flights of fancy, which is how many people would describe taking the advice of an astrologer.
I mean, it just seems mysterious that she would get in that direction.
Do you have any behind-the-scenes story about how she got to where she put that much trust in astrology?
And the imagination is an essential part of discernment of astrological understanding.
I'm not Talking about imagination as a mere subjective fantasy that's being projected out there, but rather it takes a, in the same way as a great artist like Shakespeare draws upon the imagination to create very compelling works, an astrologer requires an imaginative intelligence to be able to see patterns and recognize them.
Okay, but Hollywood aside, and the West Coast even perhaps aside, otherwise in Western culture, it's been so marginalized now over the years, astrology, that it's hard to see, despite the anecdotal bits of evidence you gave me about where studies are going on, that it's really going to make there's going to be a renaissance.
I don't feel like there's a renaissance just around the corner.
In fact, I think we're probably going to go through, just apart from this particular question about astrology, just generally speaking, we're in a pretty dark period in the world.
There's a lot of, I don't have to say to anybody, just how much tension and violence.
And also, we're dealing with extremely difficult ecological situation that is almost everything that the current powers are doing is worsening it.
So the direction we're going seems to be one in which we're probably, unless there's some very major changes made very quickly, we'll probably be going through some pretty powerful destabilizing circumstances.
It's kind of a different subject to be off on, but I guess I can't resist.
I've been noting now for some time, wrote a book called The Quickening Myself, the weather changes, the environmental changes, the degradation, the stronger storms that we're having, the more violent weather, the North Pole and South Pole virtually melting.
I mean, all of these incredible things going on around us.
I'd love to get him on here for about three or four hours and just get him to open up because you know there's a lot there and you know it'd scare the hell out of you.
Fortunately, I just read today in the New York Times that the head of NASA has basically said we need to be transparent in NASA and that the kind of suppression that has happened in the past, he's calling for a different culture.
We'll see how much that is enacted.
But at least it was the complaint that the scientist made has registered in a certain way, at least.
And I think if he was really willing to open out that we would have one hell of a show because you'd hear a lot of things that just haven't been said yet.
Maybe he's the kind of guy like Mac, maybe like you, who's, well, Mac anyway, who's got enough passion to just say the hell with it.
I think we'll have an open, free discussion about what's really going on with the American people.
Well, I think something that might be helpful for me to insert here into our conversation is the book that I've just published now, Cosmos and Psyche, that is the book that sets out the hundreds of pages actually of astrological evidence, that is, of evidence showing correlations between planetary alignments and human history.
And unlike the earlier part of our discussion where we were talking more about individuals and a birth chart, what's it like to be a Gemini and so forth, this is much more focused on the book itself is actually focused on the bigger picture of what I call collective archetypal dynamics and what world history goes through these large epochs in which a whole culture or many cultures throughout the world seem
become informed by a particular, like the zeitgeist, a certain spirit of the time.
And for example, from 1960 to 1972, there was a conjunction of two of the outermost planets, Pluto and Uranus, were in conjunction, the only conjunction of those planets in the 20th century.
And those planets have the archetypal meaning.
When they come together, their meaning has to do with a tremendous empowerment of this Protean impulse towards rebellion and freedom and innovation and radical change, similar to what I was talking about in your own personal chart, because you're born with your son on Uranus in conjunction.
Well, the whole world, in a sense, Got a very potent version of that for over a decade from the beginning of the 60s into the early 70s.
It was, and in some ways, we still look back on that period as being unique in our lifetimes and with no immediate precedent before or after.
Well, what alerted me to a pattern was when I recognized that those same two planets were in alignment as well during the French Revolutionary period of 1787 to 1798.
And we see right across the board all the same historical qualities of political turmoil and this tremendous push to make the world new, technological and scientific advances, artistic innovation, rebellion of all kinds.
And when I started going through history, I was just quite stunned by how consistent these correlations were.
And I'm just mentioning, in that case, these periods of political...
Well, there's several things going on at once, but one of the biggest alignments that is, I think, shaping things right now is the Saturn-Neptune opposition, which is almost completely opposite in character from the one I was just describing, the Pluto-Uranus conjunction.
Saturn opposite Neptune, this is about a three- or four-year transit.
And the meaning has to do with, I mean, usually it accompanies a period often a sense of social and even spiritual malaise, a kind of sense of uncertainty, often a discouragement,
a sense of a great gap between one's ideals versus the hard facts of reality, which can often give, at times even a sense of depression and grief can accompany those periods.
At the same time, there's a great deal of focus on finding ways of bringing greater, like the social safety net, for example, and focus on health and on medical and social issues involving a kind of social compassion.
Music One thing I can promise you we're not going to do when we open the lines in the next hour is we're not doing any horoscopes.
I'm sure that you've all concluded by now, and appropriately so, that this is a far more wide-ranging discussion.
And any more than I don't put a lot of stock in what you read in the newspaper as far as your horoscope is concerned, we're not going to do any individual anythings from an astrological point of view, but rather your question should be directed sort of in the vein of what you've been hearing in the general aspects of the planetary mechanics and how they affect who we are,
what we are, what we are at a very basic level.
Now, let's go back to the question.
We looked at a period in the 60s and 70s, and I think pretty well agree it was all that.
And then we're in this malaise now, sort of a malaise, right?
And kind of a weird time.
And so then astrology should certainly, in some respects, be predictive.
Yeah, let's look a little bit more at the present time.
Another major characteristic of this particular alignment, the Saturn-Neptune opposition, is a tendency for there to be, it often coincides with the later periods of a war where there's a great sense of kind of physical and spiritual exhaustion, the sense of being caught in a quagmire.
Both like the Vietnamese War in the Vietnam War from about 1971 to 73, that period is when there was a Saturn-Neptune opposition, when MASH, for example, was made, and there was that whole sense of a kind of quagmire that one was caught in.
Both world wars also ended under the last couple of years of them had that same Saturn-Neptune opposition or Saturn-Neptune in what we call hard aspects.
And then we're getting into a period between 2008 and 2011 when there's going to be what is called a T-square, where you have three planets in either an 180-degree aspect with a third planet in space.
It's a period, I mean, the kinds of things that you would expect looking over history at this alignment, this configuration, is a period of pretty significant destabilization of our political structures, social structures, economic, ecological, I suspect more this time than in earlier eras because that's what's up right now.
Depression of ahead of it is a critical period, and I don't think it's predefined how bad it will be, but I think it's going to be quite challenging.
Now, the bigger picture going from, like we're just starting a big alignment that is going to go all the way through the rest of the, up through all the way to 2020, through the whole 2010, the next 15 years is going to have Uranus and Pluto in a square alignment.
Now that's the first major dynamic aspect between the same two planets that were in conjunction in the 60s.
They're now again coming into this square alignment during this next 15 years.
And that suggests that a period of considerable empowerment of reformist forces, forces for change, for radical change, for innovation.
It won't be, it's likely to be fairly stressful with, particularly in those years 2008 to 2011, I suspect there'll be more than the usual conflict between, let's call, you know, the old and the new, the forces of reaction versus the forces of change.
But depending on, you know, what we bring to it, I think there's going to be quite some of the excitement and the sense of a new horizons opening up that we all experienced in the 60s or we have heard about as we were born after that period will be, I think, again emerging in these next years.
And I think, I mean, you, I know from the work that you've done have a pretty strong sense of just precisely how challenging it could be because of the environmental factors that have been set into motion.
Well, on a more positive note, if we can have enough people conscious of what's at stake and where the energies are, one can bring out more life-enhancing ways for these energies to be expressed than otherwise.
Yeah, I think if enough individuals can become aware of what's happening and kind of bring their consciousness together to both act and what is sometimes called subtle activism,
put their mind in attunement with each other and moving towards a more, as I say, life-enhancing way of acting in the world, I think we could have a very different situation.
Some years ago, Richard, I was somewhat reckless as I stumbled into this whole directed consciousness thing, and I was excited, and I began to be aware as we conducted experiment after experiment.
These were amazing things, Richard.
I'm not Josh in here.
We had millions of people concentrate very hard during breaks on the program just as a mass experiment to see, for example, if we could bring rain to Texas in an area where there was nothing but forecast for complete drought, not a chance of moisture, up in western Canada, same deal.
And about a total of nine experiments.
And Richard, it just totally freaked me out.
We created rain.
I mean, rain within hours.
Clouds began to form, and there was no basis for them, according to the meteorologists.
And rain fell in areas that we wanted it to fall, that we concentrated on it to fall.
It happened.
It freaked me out totally to the point that, and I was toying around with the weather, and people were starting to say, let's give a hurricane a shot and all the rest of this sort of thing.
And that's where I quit.
I said, good God, this is real.
It's obviously some sort of real power, and I have no idea what I'm doing.
I'm stumbling around In areas of complete ignorance.
You basically were tuning into a kind of shamanic power that you and but unlike the shamans of other cultures, you had at your command, so to speak, millions of people to magnify the effect of your thoughts and intentions.
And it was, I think probably you rightly recognized that it was larger than you knew how to handle.
Did you ever have any tribal shaman on the show to discuss this particular program?
It would be interesting to get somebody who, because there certainly are people out there who have are part of a for example I've had Hopi elders on the program.
I mean, I did some programs that were so wild that I had to have a translator on the line talking to these Hopi elders, and I would love to run this whole concept by them, so it's a pretty good idea.
It seems like it would be a natural, because you see, they have the experience of working with these kinds of energies, these kinds of intentions, and you have this magnified, technologically magnified power, you know, from all the people that you have contact with and can get intending with you at once, that it might be, and it would certainly be a good conversation to have.
Well, I think what we're both looking at here is the fact that human beings participate in a kind of what we call an anima mundi, you know, the world soul.
There's a kind, and one can think of it in more scientific terms, as a collective force field with many different possible ways of manifesting.
Yeah, we'll call ourselves the Borg Club or something.
Listen, let me drag you backwards for a second and a basic question that I probably should have asked an hour ago, at least.
And that is, we've talked about the effect a lot.
What we haven't talked about is the causative factor.
I mean, for example, is it when we're talking about planetary alignments and meanings from that, are we talking about gravitational effects, in your opinion, or what are the mechanics, the actual mechanics involved in the influence?
Here's where I would use John Mack's phrase that it's an authentic mystery.
I don't think anybody really knows.
But I would be personally surprised to discover that there was a purely physical sort of something like electromagnetism or something like that that was causing these correlations to occur.
I think it's much more likely that the universe is so fully integrated that the heavens and the earth, the planets and human beings and human consciousness are all coherently part of a single universally ordered system.
You see, when you talk to a real astronomer, for example, there's a gigantic chuckle factor there because they know what the gravitational effect of, oh, for example, Mars is.
They will concede the moon is a big one.
But for the other planets, they become so infinitesimal that they do chuckle, Richard, at the possibility they're affecting it.
So that would mean there would have to be some other That's right.
It's, I think, and actually I would also chuckle at their tendency, that is these chuckling scientists, their tendency to always view things through the lens of a kind of a billiard ball game.
Yeah, and I think it seems to be much more plausible and comprehensive an explanation if we see the universe as a fundamentally interconnected whole and that it's informed by a kind of creative intelligence through and through that extends through every level.
Well, quantum physics, for example, doesn't obey the rules of Newtonian mechanics.
And I think what we're looking at here, I think, is something it's more mystical.
There's a beautiful paragraph from Plotinus, the ancient philosopher, who talked about, he said, the stars are like letters which inscribe themselves at every moment in the sky.
Well, listen, I buy it completely because I feel it and I know it in my heart.
But, you know, we've got these damn scientists and...
Well, maybe theoretical physicists like Dr. Kaku, who's a frequent guest on this program, certainly he says things, and he's one of the most brilliant minds in the world.
He says things that really, frankly, back up an awful lot of what you're saying.
And he seems to say them in a way that he gets away with them.
He talks about other dimensions, but he can apply real physics to his reasoning.
Music By the way, my thanks to a listener in Petaluma who said, hey, Art, contact info.
Here's contact info for the NASA client, or rather, climate scientists you wanted to interview.
Dr. James E. Hansen at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
He's the one, all right.
I really would like to interview him.
There's something about a long-form talk radio interview in three or four hours.
You can really get to the bottom of someone, and boy, wouldn't he be worth getting to the bottom of.
He's the one colliding with NASA right now and what he wants to say and what they don't want him to say.
At least that's the alleged difference.
Pretty controversial, and that means to me that, you know, after a couple of hours of an interview with somebody like that, he wouldn't be able to help himself.
That's got information about it, and you can get it straight from Amazon or even better, at your independent bookstore, which needs all the support we can give them.
I just read and read and read and read, though I haven't done it lately most of my life, and I'm sure that I will come right back to it since it's such an effective way of going away, as it were.
All right, I would like to go to the lines and allow the general public to ask you questions, all except for the one that will get them fried.
Richard, and I say today because I agree this is the only time of day when you could, I'm having this kind of conversation.
I'm awed by the fact that we are having such intelligence and human conversation on large media, considering all that we've gone through in the last few years.
And the zeitgeist is such a prominent part of the way I think about the way we humans interact.
And art, I was actually privy.
I was certainly part of the listening and the perhaps influence audience when you were going through those incidents.
You were heard.
Oh, amazing.
No, I believe that's true.
And we describe, I'm kind of a functionalist in the way we think about God and how we describe God.
And I believe that that collective human spirit and the zeitgeist.
Richard, I think you've quite intelligently articulated this on the air.
And I'm just proud to have people talking about this in an intelligent fashion.
Richard, however, you know, you talk about the zeitgeist, and you've kind of countered, you know, Art, I know you've ascribed to the convergence, you know, the convergent validity of that, of the...
My question is, do you feel like the zeitgeist is a collective way of us describing our, All right, then take off with it because he wasn't going to quite get it out.
I think what you're asking about is is the zeitgeist something that we as individuals are so connected with that in some ways it overcomes the sense of our separativeness as individuals.
And I think that's true.
I think there's certain moments that it becomes vividly true, such as on nine eleven when everybody is taking in this extraordinarily extraordinarily traumatic experience and the world is as one,
as it were, or for a more sustained period, just take the 1960s, when clearly something was in the air and we all were participating in it no matter where we were, no matter what side of the battle lines we were on.
We were experiencing something that could only be described, I think, as a zeitgeist.
Now, if you go to Princeton and you look at the graphs of 9-11 and then the graphs of many other world-class impacting events, and you realize that they started to go off the chart in many cases 30 minutes or more before the events occurred,
I guarantee before you're through looking at the evidence, in my opinion, you'll have a chill going right down your spine, or you'll be saying, I knew it.
The machines often aren't picking up anything, but the animals are.
In this case, it sounds like Princeton's got some machines that are picking up on the zeitgeist in advance of any causal event that could otherwise be seen as being the factor.
But you had a question about Catholicism and the Jesuits.
unidentified
Well, it stood out in the introduction, to my mind, and the ensuing conversation suggested that there was a lot that may have lent weight away from the faith of Catholicism, at least potentially.
And I was wondering how that might have occurred given your Jesuit background.
Well, you know, the Jesuits were very good at educating intellectual rebels.
Galileo and Descartes and Voltaire were all Jesuit educated, because they specialized in giving the students a variety of perspectives and studying both sides of questions and so forth.
So they weren't, basically the Jesuits are the most liberal of the orders in terms of their intellectual approach.
Now, Catholicism and Christianity are complex institutions and religions.
And while we're very familiar right now with their conservative and reactionary forms, whether it's the Christian right or the conservative popes that we've recently had and currently have, but there's other sides to Christianity and Catholicism.
For example, Martin Luther King is a great Christian whose civil rights activism was totally grounded in his Christian idealism.
And I think just in terms of our discussion tonight, astrology was something that, say, as great a Catholic theologian as Thomas Aquinas fully accepted the validity of astrology.
Well, I was about to ask, Richard, if you think that any past or present popes were, to a large degree, and I'm not a Catholic, my wife was, but do you think any of the recent popes or any popes at all have been to one degree or another influenced by astrology?
In other words, is it alive and well at high levels in the church?
Well, there's no question that, I mean, the Vatican had court astrologers, just like every king and emperor did in Europe in the medieval and Renaissance periods.
So if we're talking about that era, there's no question that they did.
More recently, I wouldn't say that they do in the last, I would guess, I don't know, but I would guess in the last century or two centuries that that hasn't been true.
But wouldn't study and confirmation of what the Catholic Church followed in all of those days have been recorded and passed down as wisdom that you think would survive, even if Not openly and publicly.
In answer to the question that the caller brought in, I think it's one enormous commonality that we need to look at is that between Christianity and astrology, is that both of these perspectives look upon the world as being ultimately informed by a creative intelligence,
whether you call that intelligence God or a cosmic mind.
It ultimately is seeing a certain creative order to the cosmos and that has a transcendent sovereignty.
And in that sense, there's a great deal of commonality between Catholicism or Christianity and astrology.
Of course, there's potentially a gigantic difference between whether God did the creating or some other very wise intelligence did it, because we have this whole idea about an afterlife, and one would seem to suggest, yeah, and the other would perhaps suggest, well, not necessarily.
But the question of an afterlife is one that, I mean, I personally am very comfortable with the idea that after we die that there will be other modes of being that our consciousness in one way or another will enter into.
I don't think that the...
And I don't think that the conventional Christian dogma about it, where there's just one form that it go to heaven or hell, that kind of thing, I think is probably a pretty constrained and unlikely scenario.
But I think the larger confidence that more is going on than we see in this lifetime is well taken.
I was just, you know, I'm really of two minds on this, and I sense even in, and I'm not speaking for art, but I sense in art there's a little bit of split brain thinking in this, which I'm following, and I might be wrong about that,
but it seems to me that on the quantum level, when you said that, when this was mentioned, I feel that I tend to agree with almost the singularity, universality, you know, quantum mindset of how this is applicable.
But then there's the science part of my brain, and it's not judgmental, it's just what I'm stuck with.
There's the science part of my brain that says, can this be used in any predictive way?
I think astrology is ultimately not concretely predictive, that it's rather archetypally predictive.
And that's the big difference between the way much astrology was practiced in the past and where much of our modern resistance is well founded.
I think if I were...
I think any of us that are genuinely interested in understanding the universe with an open mind, it takes the encounter with this evidence and looking at it oneself and not if I just heard somebody talking about it, I would be resistant.
How many of the supposed great intuitives, Richard, that described the future, and there have been many famous ones throughout the ages who, perhaps, in a language that would be difficult to read so we wouldn't get in trouble, did it, or in many other ways Accurately predicted the future.
How many of these guys do you think used?
I mean, if you used astrology in the manner that you've described tonight, and you were very sharp, even brilliant, and you were sort of up on the politics of the world and the economy of the world and the trends of the world and put that together with astrology, you could seem to be amazingly predictive.
But you're talking about also a different, the other kind of person that you're talking about has a clairvoyant capacity, an ability that's an intuitive capacity that is different than the astrological perspective that I've been working with myself.
I would not describe myself as being clairvoyant or having that.
No, but clearly you can see how a person with just a brilliant person using astrology with everything else could appear to be and would be in fact brilliantly predictive, accurately predictive.
Though generally they would be, I think, describing strong tendencies, likelihoods, rather than describing concrete specific events that are going to happen in a kind of absolute sense.
Richard, I really wonder, what do you say to the skeptics out there, the scientists who laugh at you and laugh at astrology and laugh at the whole concept of it?
If you're on a talk show somewhere and you're in a debate and you've got to come up with a snappy answer, what do you say?
Their response is very much like when Galileo had his telescope and the Aristotelian professors and some of the priests were unwilling to look through the telescope because they said they already knew what was out there and so they weren't going to look through it.
And that's not genuinely a very good scientific, it's not a genuine scientific attitude.
let me ask you this then do you put any stock into a newspaper or website horoscopes based on a But yeah, I'll go ahead and answer it if you want, Richard.
If I could compare it to, let's say that's like modern medicine's relationship to a snake oil salesman is the relationship of true astrology to your average sun sign horoscope column in a newspaper.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Richard Tarnasai.
unidentified
Thank you.
I was fortunate enough 12 years ago to analyze 4.2 million birth dates in L.A. County and compare them with domestic violence, restraining orders, and divorce rates.
Well, yeah, I was on a voter fraud analysis, but anyway, you came up with a tremendous correlation between a lack of divorces and domestic violence.
And I'm going to throw out some astrology terms.
You can explain them.
There's just three.
When the woman's moon sign, it was either conjunct or trying with the husband's sun sign, there was very little domestic violence or divorce, and the same with the husband.
It's very important in a relationship.
You wonder why so many of these celebrities in your relationships don't work out?
Because you can be sleeping with literally a toxic vibration, but it's more important to have the woman's moon sign compatible with the husband's sun sign and vice versa than it is to have their sun signs compatible.
And you have 144, 12 sun signs, 12 moon signs times, 144 arch personality types.
You know, I have been so focused on my own historical and psychological research that while I look at those studies, I don't focus on them in particular.
And part of the problem with a lot of those studies is that, you know, by I think there's a resistance of this kind of evidence to statistical analysis.
Because statistics, it's not unlike some of the other topics that you treat on this program, like how are you going to statistically prove the likelihood of life on other planets or the existence of extraterrestrial beings interacting with human beings.
Or your, in fact, I wanted to ask you this, your own experience, your conviction that there's some kind of life after death.
These kinds of things aren't, I think, easily subject to statistical analysis.
Oh, you can do a survey on how many people believe in something, but can you do something But I was talking about the reality of astrology or the reality of life after death or the reality of extraterrestrial.
I was wondering how comfortable Dr. Farnas feels with the yogic ideas that a single human consciousness has more than one level, particularly in terms of subtle bodies, subtle bodies such as the astral and perhaps higher.
And then also what I've found is that those structures act like a kind of a computer program in that unless we make free will choices, we seem to get a kind of a default of an old consciousness pattern on individual levels as well as group consciousness levels.
Like with a computer program, you can type in your instruction or select A, B, or C, and if you don't make a selection, you hit the enter E, you get the default?
I mean, then basically you're the unconscious puppet of the structure as you're the same.
Yes.
You're very good at putting these things in clear, simple to understand terms.
unidentified
Oh, thank you.
Now the other, I guess what I was leading into is the whole idea of free will versus fate with what's coming up in the next few years.
You mentioned the aspects about the T-Square and the Pluto involvement with all of this.
I won't get really astrological here, but Pluto seems to be very much involved in mass consciousness shifts.
And like in the mid-60s, you had mentioned that 64 through 66, we had the Beatles coming onto the scene and the whole going from the 50s into the 60s nuclear family and then free will and free love and all that.
And we have these Pluto aspects coming up now.
We're looking at, I think, the potential to make some big changes.
And if we don't do anything, if we sit back and kind of let things happen, it looks like we might get the default.
I guess my question would be how much, in your opinion, how much do you think we can make a change here in these upcoming, say, five to ten years using those Pluto aspects?
Well, I want to be cautiously optimistic simply because I feel that a certain amount of optimism helps the game along in a positive direction.
But if we get another very reactionary administration that essentially is blind to the need for making changes and keeps going in the default position, I think we will have little grounds for optimism.
Oh, boy, did your politics just come out and fight.
unidentified
But don't you think as the people, the citizens, that we can use that Pluto energy also to kind of work with that administration, work with it as putting it kindly?
And we sometimes have to remind ourselves that if you go back to the 60s, even though we recall it as having all this emancipatory energy moving towards freedom and rebellion and so forth, the presidents that were elected then were Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.
Richard Nixon in 1968 at the climax of the counterculture.
So I think you're right to bring up the fact that there can be a difference between who's elected president or where the administrative power is versus where many individuals and even a very large part of the mass consciousness can move in contrast with the established power.
So we're like a very frequent sine wave in the bigger picture.
But still, one can imagine the rest of the scenario just based on what they observe with the moon, because it's really radical from a human point of view.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Richard Tarnas.
unidentified
Hi.
Hello.
Hello.
I had a quick question about if you're born in the middle of right on the edge of two different signs or whatever, does that have some sort of effect on you?
And yes, the astrological tradition has always held that you get a kind of participation from both the qualities of both signs when you're right there in the middle.
And then for a doctor, Michelle Goquilin was a French scientist who did statistical studies for many years and has great statistics on the various signs and what they're capable of.
And my question is that the moon is a timer, so are the slow-moving planets.
We astrologers use them as timers.
And Mostradamus used mostly eclipses and fixed stars.
Have you yourself studied anything or done much investigation?
Because we know that the solar eclipses and the fixed stars also play a major part in understanding astrology and how it works?
Yeah, I think my research has focused on the outer planet alignments and also what are called transits to the natal chart.
I believe that there is a great deal of value in studying eclipses, as you were saying.
And you also brought up the Gokalan evidence, which is their research was quite extraordinary using thousands and thousands of birth charts in a very rigorous way, and it has withstood numerous replications.
So that's the one set of statistical quantitative method experiments that has stood up to time over and over again, and it stands as a kind of anomaly for the mainstream scientific community as it's tried to reject it because it's very good science.
It's very rigorously done and has continued to be replicated.