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Feb. 4, 2006 - Art Bell
02:27:42
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Richard Tarnas - Archetypal Astrology - Ed Dames - Bigfoot and Nukes
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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, uh, it's, boy, I'll tell you, it's weird, folks.
As you know, I'm sure you know, I lost Ramona and, uh, I lost such a big part of me.
So I go through these jags.
Um, they come and go like, uh, ocean waves building and crashing and 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 Abydos, crazy Abydos.
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. Deems, 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, 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.
Ed Dames, welcome back to the program.
Thank you.
Good evening, Mr. Bell.
Good evening.
I read, and Ed a long time ago sent me his military record, his whole military record, the 214 and more.
And he did everything he said he did in the military for the CIA.
He remote-viewed.
Our government paid for it.
About 20 million bucks or something, I forget.
Actually, that's not a lot of money, you know, Ed, for the government.
It's not, and I kind of squandered a little bit by using the military team to look at Enigma in those days, and I got hit on the wrist a few times.
I can clearly see that doing what you did, it would be impossible, impossible, not to drift and want to look at the biggest questions that man has.
Indeed, indeed.
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.
You've been talking about Starman since we've been interviewing, which is now a very long time.
9.4 years.
9.4 years.
Alright, buddy.
So, Starman's now about to happen.
It is in June.
First big field exercise.
If that's a success, then I'm going to invite you on the next... Alright, tell everybody what Starman is.
They may not know.
Let me provide some context first, because I think out of context it would be confusing, if that's okay with you.
It's okay with me.
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.
Device?
A device, yes.
Now that doesn't sound like the hairy creature we've all come to know and imagine we love.
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, 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, this was our 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.
Wait, entities, I've got to stop you there.
When you say entities, do you mean as in extraterrestrial, or do you mean as in what we would consider spiritual?
We actually are, we do not know.
We can't even sketch them.
In the military we call them the controllers, because they seem to run everything, from galaxy to galaxy.
We can't sketch them.
The world that they live on, we would consider very hostile.
It doesn't have an atmosphere.
The terrain is broken.
It almost looks like a moon.
And yet, they own the technology beyond our camp.
Wow.
And they are associated with this particular device that we thought projected things like the chupacabra.
Associated with, as in, probably constructed and built?
Yes, it belongs to them and they use this thing to project these enigmas down here.
And that's why... You have talked in the past, Ed, on many subjects of projection.
You know, so this must happen quite a bit.
I can think of three or four instances where you suggested some anomaly we looked at was actually a projection.
Indeed, indeed.
Because things like the big leaf impressions in mud and snow, it actually has a density, it has mass.
But I thought it was a construct.
However, recently we began to look at some of the newer photos, re-looks, some of the photos that are available.
And I just had this funny feeling that those photos show more than just a mass of carbon.
When I remote view it a second time, I see that it has emotions.
That this thing is really living.
Make a long story short, this projector out there is more than... it isn't a projector.
And it isn't really an assembler either.
Wait a minute, you said this projector out there isn't really a projector.
Right.
It isn't a projector in the sense that I described it two years ago.
With more research, it is like a teleportation device.
But it does more than that.
This Bigfoot phenomenon, it is a real creature.
It is a real Gigantopithecus, or whatever you want to call whatever lived in North America a while back.
It's real.
And it really is a representative of that particular species.
A 10 foot tall, sort of an ape man.
So, what I was interested in is where is this thing picking this particular gigantopithecus up and transporting it into real time, temporarily, because it goes away.
I mean, the tracks disappear and you never get to see one of these things.
No, it actually has what I think most people listening to this program would call paranormal aspects to it.
It either disappears or it does something that You know, earth-trudging creatures simply wouldn't do, so there's an aspect of what we would call paranormal.
Agreed.
Agreed.
To use contemporary vernacular.
But, this thing, what I wanted to know next was, where is this teleportation device picking up this creature and transporting it from?
And it turns out, nowhere, that the thing is canned, actually canned, as well as chupacabra.
The device itself somehow cans the essence of the creature and projects it.
That's why it looks so lost when it's on the ground.
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.
Yes, that's the hypothesis behind Project Starman.
Any idea of the motivation?
Yes.
Oh, rock on!
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.
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've found now is that we're able to, 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.
In June?
We have a spot in North America, in the continental United States, and it's very unique.
What is your expectation?
What do you believe will occur in June?
I don't know.
What are your hopes?
Are you talking about contact in June?
I am talking about contact.
My hope is intervention.
I'm hoping that a higher intelligence will intervene on this planet because we're going down.
There is that, Ed.
And if we turn the conversation there, it's going to get kind of dark.
But on the other hand, let's go there for a second.
I mean, so much of what you have described ahead for us, Ed, is very dark.
Correct.
Very dark.
And is it really your expectation that before the worst happens, there will be an intervention?
I don't think there will be unless we, corporately, can demonstrate a higher intelligence ourselves.
That's my belief.
Well, then I think we're doomed.
Negative.
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.
Evolution's in the mind.
We're not evolving biologically, we're not evolving socially, that's for sure.
Our technology... We don't seem to be.
Our technology, as you mentioned, is indeed evolving.
Perhaps it'll get to the point where the dummies running it will finally invent something big enough to extinguish us, either on purpose or by mistake.
I totally agree.
I totally agree.
That is what I see too.
That is almost... that's the direction we're heading.
We've leaned so far in the material world that we've forgotten human potential.
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?
Because they know that you can see them.
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 the control what we call the controllers and then something else is going to change and we're hoping that contact will demonstrate that.
Well, 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.
I agree.
I agree.
In fact, I have to pull the plug on this project because I'm being pressed to the wall on a nuclear terrorism issue.
Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait.
You're being pressed to the wall by Several countries, actually.
The problem that we had in intelligence, and I worked at celestial levels of intelligence, Office of the Secretary of Defense, and I had all of the clearances and the tickets, worked on all the really sexy black projects.
We couldn't find a nuclear terrorist device if it was... There's just no way.
I don't care how much money you poured into it.
Why not?
The only way to find something like that is to have detectors that could do it.
The only option we have is... Wait a minute, what about RVing?
That's what I'm saying.
That's the only option we have.
Oh.
Alright, well... In terms of... I think a lot of Americans, Ed, want to know, so whatever work you've been doing on nuclear terrorism, let's have it.
What do you see?
What have you seen?
What do you know?
I'll just give you a general overview.
Please.
There's a ton of money out there, there's a ton of hatred towards the U.S., and there are unscrupulous people in the ex-Soviet Union who have things for sale.
You put those three elements together and you have the sum of all fears.
That was slick.
The sum of all fears.
Yes, it is indeed the sum of all fears.
And so, tell me Ed, is there one or two or more loose yet from the old Soviet Union, from Russia?
I cannot talk about that.
Oh yes you can.
No.
Sure you can.
There's two problems.
One is you have devices that are already fabricated.
And two, you have devices that can be fabricated, which are much more difficult.
I'm just saying that the market is there.
Well, we all know they're fabricated.
They've been fabricated for years.
They've existed for years.
And we know the old Soviet Union, now Russia and elsewhere, it's leaky.
And there's probably going to be some sold.
I want to know if they have been.
I can't talk about it, Art. I really cannot. I cannot talk about that.
Why the hell not?
Because the tips are hand.
Well, look, I will not press you for specifics.
What I asked you is very general, and that is whether there's any nuclear weapons loose yet.
I mean, there's been plenty of speculation about that in the media, so you're saying only that yes or no to that question.
It depends on what you mean by loose.
Some of them are looser than others.
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 or a power plant, there are weapons up for sale.
And that's a big problem.
So how do you bring fire down You're not going to destroy national security at all by telling me whether or not one is actually in the hands of terrorists right now.
Because I won't ask you beyond that, but I mean I want to know if there are nukes on the loose.
No, they're not on the loose.
Nukes are not on the loose.
And by saying that you mean not in the hands of terrorists.
Yes, but it looks like it's heading that way.
Thanks for the answer.
I really wanted that, and I don't know if it makes me feel a whole lot better, but at least temporarily a little better, and I hope to hell you're right.
But remote viewing is the only game in town.
It's the only thing we had.
It was a tactic of desperation to begin with, and now it's the only game in town to be able to remote view.
Ed, how are you going to know?
If suddenly the wrong person is in possession of a nuclear device.
Hold your answer.
We're here at the bottom of the hour.
we'll be right back the price i guess of living in this day and age is that uh...
we have to worry about things like nuclear weapons
in the hands of people who want us And so that's what we're talking about.
It says they're not loose, as in the hands of Osama and company, yet.
Yet, I guess the key phrase.
Is remote viewing able to look ahead, Ed?
And does your yet mean that you understand that they will become in their hands?
The yet that I used to qualify our earlier discussion, it means that There are people willing to sell weapons for the right price.
That's what I mean.
That there will be a facade of security was down or something like that.
Alright, well my understanding is remote viewing looks into both the past and the future with as much ease as the present.
So the question was, is one going to get loose?
I have not looked.
I'm too concerned with the now to mess around with the future.
And the future, there's paradoxes out there on the horizon, too.
So I concentrate on the present.
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.
Let me give you an example of a paradox in my work.
Okay?
Sure.
If I were to remote view, let's say I were to remote view where you would eat your next dinner, the place where you would eat the next dinner.
Yes.
Now there's two assumptions there.
There's two preconceived notions.
One is that you'll be alive to eat dinner.
Right.
Two is that you'll go someplace to eat dinner.
But let's say that you're going to eat dinner and you're alive to do so in the future.
Now, I can do that as a trained remote viewer.
Anybody who's trained as a remote viewer can describe where you will eat your next dinner.
But if there is any inkling in terms of consciousness that someone will tell you what the results are, Then you won't be able to do that.
Your remote viewing data will be incoherent.
You're telling me what?
That merely viewing what I am going to do will set up a paradox causing me not to do it?
No.
If I'm going to tell you what the results are and allow you to change where you will eat dinner... That creates paradox.
Then there's back talk through time.
It creates a paradox and I can't remote view where you will eat dinner.
And the results then of that paradox are not so serious as a new universe.
Well, in terms of just pure consciousness in my work, no.
It isn't.
But in terms of high-energy physics, I don't know.
It scares me to think about.
And we think in our work that there's a point where I call the pre-quantum field, where mind really does influence energy and matter.
As you know, I've experimented with telekinesis and psychokinesis quite a bit, and so we see something going on there at a level That exists prior to what physics can observe at a level in the matrix itself.
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 totally agree with you.
You're preaching to the choir.
Yes.
It has to be focused and coherent, though.
It has to be focused and coherent.
You have to know how to use it.
And that's the direction we, in our world, at least in this age, did not take.
We took the material route.
Yes, we did.
And we're not aware of really what human potential can do.
Maybe that's a good project for you, Ed.
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 chicken out because I realized I had something real on my hands and I didn't know what the hell I was doing.
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.
Okay.
It's on my list.
I understand.
I think a lot of people want to know.
We messed around.
We played around.
We got actual results.
It totally freaked me out, and it still does.
And so I see this as a great power, maybe even something that would prevent some catastrophic occurrence otherwise.
Who knows?
No, I think it could.
All I'm saying is that it has to be in unison, it has to be directed, it has to be controlled.
And we can't even get our act together corporately, you know, in terms of global warming.
And I don't know what the threshold value is for people and directed consciousness to do certain things.
Do you see the story on the guy getting censored talking about global warming?
Did you read that?
No, I did not.
You didn't?
It's like, was NASA's top guy on the subject.
The top guy on the subject.
Oh yes, I did read that.
And they stepped on him like a bug.
I did indeed read that.
I really want to follow up on that.
I would now very much like to interview him, actually get him on the air.
Let's cause some trouble here and see if I can get him to open up because I want to know what he really thinks.
What do you really think?
We're talking now about the warming and the weather changes on the planet.
Hello in the Northwest.
Seem rough up there this morning.
Well, as I've said years ago, a point's going to be reached where, for instance, just with regard to agriculture, where crops can no longer be grown the way we've traditionally grown them because of the weather.
The weather's changing so rapidly, far more rapidly.
The meteorologist would ever imagine.
How quickly is it actually going to lead to serious agricultural problems?
Ten years.
Ten years.
That's fast.
That's very fast.
And we're talking many, many, many people dying of starvation.
Many more than are dying presently in Africa, for instance.
Water, for instance.
The water is the problem.
There's just not going to be water where it used to be.
Nations will fight over water.
I can see that coming.
I can see fights over water.
Maybe even wars over water.
I don't know.
But certainly, it is the absolute basic thing that man must have.
Before anything else, you've got to have water.
We've looked at it as a commodity that's readily available for four centuries, and that's going to change.
We won't be talking petroleum in the future, we'll be talking water.
And nevertheless, these changes are really coming upon us quickly, Ed.
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, you know, 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.
No, 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.
I didn't see the show, but I'm certainly familiar with your book, The Coming Global Superstorm.
Yeah, well, we were on the NBC show, and anyway... I don't watch television.
Yeah, that's right, you don't.
But you did agree to appear in your movie!
Actually, I'm making another movie, sort of an esoteric love story.
I'm helping out on that.
You're going to make a love story?
Believe it or not, yes.
I'm a technical consultant on... A love story.
Now, it's a little out of character there, buddy.
No, it has to do with former government side spies trying to seduce females when they sleep, that kind of thing.
Oh?
I'm doing the back end, too.
I'm being interviewed.
You mean to say, uh, 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?
Would such a thing be possible, Ed?
A group, if they were trained the right way, could actually intrude into the dreams 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.
The movie is based on the book, The ESP Affair.
The ESP Affair?
Really?
So in other words, the real premise is going to be somewhat fictional then?
Correct.
Correct.
Okay, I'm sure that several young pretty ladies out there just went, whew!
Well, somewhat fictional.
Okay, give me the real bottom line.
What would be possible?
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 en masse intrude upon Bob Monroe's dreams.
Robert Monroe?
Robert Monroe, yes.
The Institute.
And he came to the Army Spy Unit.
Bob screened and vetted our recruits for the program.
That's what we used him for.
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.
So you used the Monroe Institute officially?
No, it was unofficially.
Robert was right into the program.
We sent potential recruits to, through the Monroe Institute, the Gateway program that Robert had put together.
And we then interviewed them when they came back.
All of them, Ed?
Yes.
Wow.
That's a headline.
Including myself.
Including yourself?
Yes.
So you went through the whole Monroe Institute program?
I went through the program with Paul Smith.
Paul Smith in my room.
Really?
Really, really, really?
I've never heard this before.
What were the results?
Well, we're not talking remote viewing here.
We're talking about attempting out-of-body and altered states, in order just to experience a side of ourselves.
For me, it was unconscious.
What's an unconscious?
Oh, no, I see the connection.
I mean, I see why that training would be valuable in what you do.
And so, for you, what were the results?
Were you able to achieve out-of-body?
I wasn't able to achieve out-of-body, but I did discover that there is a part of people, 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 doppelganger, was somewhere else operating all the time, meeting people that, in reality, are our physical being, would meet, let's say, five years from now.
Right.
Meeting them now and in this particular time, if that is even relevant.
at the pit for something that goes on totally outside of our awareness our
conscious awareness and we that's what i ran into validated by other people
saying i'd call you in altered state talking this person over here
someone who i would not need for for five years for instance
so described to me uh... the benefit uh... that
you felt there was for people who were going to uh... do the kind of work you did the in going to the monroe
institute How does it relate to, or how does it benefit remote viewing?
It expands your reality.
It expands your reality and it validates the fact that consciousness is, well as Bob used to say, you're more than your physical self.
It validates that quite a bit.
Boy, I hope that's correct.
I really do hope that's correct.
I've had experiences that have suggested that to me, Ed, but you just can't rule out the living human brain.
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.
I know.
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.
Yeah, I've really got to do more interviews on out-of-body.
I'm going to line up, I think, a couple of guests on out-of-body.
I haven't done that in a long time.
Now, I tried to train that, of course, because that was desirable.
That was why I went.
as the operations officer for the first by you know what i wanted out of that
training was to be able to train them so that we could use it for intelligence collection all i
all i can tell you is this uh... i interviewed a whole bunch of people on out of
body and there were
many many confirming real-world stories that
yet yes somebody saw me uh... two thousand 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.
I mean, it does seem real.
This out-of-body thing does seem real.
It's real.
But we just couldn't control it for military use.
That's the problem.
For instance, if I would say, OK, Private Wilson, you know, I've come back from an altered state, what went down?
Can you tell me about this transporter, erector, launcher, and this woods in Czechoslovakia?
Oh, sir, well, no, but man, it was the greatest thing in the world.
I said, Wilson, I really need the information about that.
Tell.
And the experience was so profound that they would forget the details.
By the way, most of those that you trained, Ed, were they privates or were they almost all officers?
They were a mixed bag.
There were senior non-commissioned officers, there were army civilian intelligence operators, and there were officers.
Got it.
All right.
It's a short hour, Ed.
It's almost over.
And as always, I want to give you a chance to plug whatever you want to plug right now.
I'm a teacher.
I'm a professional educator.
I teach on the web at LearnRV.com.
And if you're interested in the products themselves, there's a toll-free number to dial.
And you can buy those products, and you will learn remote viewing.
Well, go ahead.
Give your toll-free number for heaven's sake.
866-607-8439.
Get a set of DVDs.
My instruction.
DVDs.
Systematic, very, very thorough instruction and you will become a remote viewer.
And you can choose to look at whatever you want to look at.
Well, that's pretty inviting, alright.
And I've talked to many of your students in the past, Ed, and they have high praise.
That's the truth.
Every single one of your students, it is called here, has always had high praise for When, Ed, do you do it anymore in person?
I know you've got the DVDs out, but are you conducting any... 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 level skills.
It's called a skill enhancement clinic.
I just had one two weeks ago in Las Vegas.
Oh, wow.
Every six months I do that.
Well, listen, buddy, I want to thank you for being here.
And of course, you will be back.
We'll do a show with you, I'm sure, not too far distant in the future.
Thank you.
My pleasure.
Yes.
Let's take care of it.
So nice to have you.
Thank you.
Good to be here.
You were born in Switzerland and spent time at Big Sur.
Gee, you've been in some beautiful places.
Those are both beautiful places.
Big Sur, I particularly was in my adult years, so I have much better Now, memory of it, and it's really one of the most beautiful places in the world.
It is.
It's one of the prettiest places on the face of the globe.
My God, it's beautiful.
Anyway, it's good to have you, and I think I want to ask you, what do you think, can you define, or attempt to define, consciousness?
Well, you don't start off with very Difficult questions, do you?
No, I don't.
You'll have to put up with me.
I'm pretty directed when I'm interested in something and you know I mean I read this and it says study of consciousness and so it's a damn good question and I know it's probably not answerable so just you know do the best you can.
Well, I think first of all consciousness is a mystery.
It's something that we all experience in our every moment.
It's what we're embedded in.
In a sense, nothing that we believe exists, exists outside of the medium.
Everything that we experience is experienced through the medium of consciousness.
You bet.
It's a kind of oceanic uh... realm that were we're just immersed in all the time it's kind of like uh... consciousnesses the uh... where the where the fish in in the ocean in the thing that uh... human beings are are in consciousness i have five uh... cats kitty cats are they conscious i believe so i'm uh... i also believe so uh... that
The conviction that cats or whales are not conscious or 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.
I think the people, just to finish, a lot of the 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 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, 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.
She was working not with animal species, but at a much finer level of 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 to enter into the
reality of what you're studying.
You said a mouthful there.
Once you get to know the organism, the cat in question, for example, I just used that.
There's no question in my mind, Richard, none whatsoever.
Those creatures are as conscious as I am.
And so therefore, I believe that consciousness is widespread.
I think that I think that it may turn out to be one of the greatest powers on the face of the earth, particularly directed consciousness, and we talked a little bit before the program, you weren't all that familiar with the Princeton work, but I think you know enough about it now, and it sounded like a bell went on, like you'd done some research in this area before and heard about it, so what's going on there is just incredibly exciting, Richard, very exciting.
It seems to me so.
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, I just have this feeling it's going to lead down a whole new road.
As we discovered nuclear energy, we're kind of beginning to discover consciousness now.
It may be some years before it really comes into vogue.
There's something really big going on there, and so I guess I'll end it there, but I did want to press you a little bit on it.
Let's move on to your books and what you really want to talk about, and what is it you really want to know?
What are the arguments made in your books?
And let's review what we've got here.
Cosmos and Psyche, Limitations of a New Worldview.
And The Passion of the Western Mind, understanding the ideas that have shaped our worldview.
Both very interesting subjects.
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.
It's a kind of epic drama.
All right, give me an idea.
What does go into shaping all that we are now?
What are the main things?
Well, an enormous factor, for example, was the Copernican Revolution, which, in a sense, everything led to it.
Greek philosophy, 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 it.
In that period, we basically went through a 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.
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 grow up, we all in the, growing up in the 20th century with our modern education, 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 To those aspirations.
And that's the basis of the whole existentialist crisis of the modern period.
Are we ruled by planets, by the sun, by those masses that circle with us and about us and around us?
In other words, we're headed down this astrological road, I guess, astrology, it mentions here.
That's a straight-on question.
Are we ruled by these bodies?
Is there really something to astrology?
There certainly seems to be at some level.
There seems to be.
And many people are devoted to it as giving the answers to life, important life questions.
Where certain planets are at certain times in the Sun.
Are we ruled by those things?
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... Are they big influences?
Yes, 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.
And this is a conclusion I came to after, I've now been studying this for 30 years, and it was an astonishing for me perspective to enter into because I was convinced, as I think virtually anybody is with a 20th century education, that astrology is the most ridiculous, absolute bonk.
It's of all the new paradigm perspectives, it's the one that is most immediately worthy of rejection and even scorn.
Not really though, alright.
Richard, listen to me.
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.
So, there's no question about it.
When the moon is full, it affects human beings.
Period.
And that's probably the most well-known effect that many people recognize in their everyday life, and I think we all do.
Absolutely.
So, astrology is nothing more than an extension of that.
If one affects you, and I think most people believe it's true, then the others, to perhaps a different extent or in a different way, also affect you.
And that is astrology.
That's right, that 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.
So that's changing.
Is it changing?
Yes, there's several Quite good programs that have emerged in England at Bath Spa University in Bath, England.
Really?
There's a program there and here in the United States.
I and Stanislav Grof 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 built the whole kind of classic renaissance
so what's old is a little education that centered on on astrology much as it
as it was also what's old is new in other words uh... it's back in vogue to
be studied uh... i've i've been to the vatican
and uh... i remember walking in a very important building
and 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
here are the astrological signs on a giant globe
And it just hit me like a rock!
So, it's always been with us, hasn't it?
That's right, 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 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.
Puppets, yes.
You don't believe that?
That's right, and I think actually a sound Knowledge of the correlations, like knowing what kinds of things tend to happen under what kinds of planetary alignment actually is a liberating rather than an imprisoning or constraining.
Alright, we're at a break point here.
We have to break, Richard.
so hold on right there so i think we've established richard believes that uh...
there is there is an effect uh... by the moon almost strongly and then by the
planets to a lesser or different degree and i 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?
Right, it 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, you know, 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 1130, the clock is not causing it to be 1130, it's reflecting the fact that it's 1130.
Right.
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.
I think, Art, when you say, does free will trump the planet, 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.
Well, let me drag it down probably a little bit by saying this.
I'm a Gemini, Richard, and I've read several good books that describe the general traits and personality aspects that can be expected of a Gemini.
I must say that the general truths listed for a Gemini, traits and so forth, seem incredibly convincing.
In other words, when I read my sun sign characteristics, it nails me to a T. Now, that does seem like a strong force.
I mean, it seems like a strong, established Truth of some kind.
It doesn't mean it doesn't dictate any specific behavior at any specific time, but darn it seems real!
Yes.
No, I'm not in any way doubting its reality.
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 happened to look up your birth chart since your birth date is on the... Oh, did you now?
Yeah, it was on the internet, on the Wikipedia.
Well, I'll be darned.
In looking at that, I was able to see that your Sun and Mercury, which are in conjunction in Gemini, which have 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, it shows that the planet Uranus seems to be correlated with a 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.
Yeah, that's me.
Well, when a person has a Sun-Uranus conjunction just by itself, this tends to be a real rebel, you know, from the right And it can express itself anywhere from being a juvenile delinquent to being a rebellious scientist like Galileo, who also has a thunder.
Yeah.
Yes, well, anyway, look, these things do seem to be, I guess, self-evident.
I'll say self-evident.
I cop to everything just about that it says about a Gemini, 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 the 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.
You used the right word, threatening, by the way.
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.
Ridicule has been part of my life, Richard.
I live with it and I know about it.
I don't give a damn.
How about that?
How did you manage to forge such an indifference to it?
Um, I'm not sure.
I guess, you know, 20 or 30 years of exploring areas that people considered either ridiculous or dangerous or, I don't know, a whole variety of things.
I mean, it's just been tossed at me so much that I've formed a force field around myself.
And I expect ridicule.
It's part of what I do.
I don't care.
That's very admirable.
I don't know if it's admirable.
I just don't care anymore.
I'm going to explore the areas that I wish to explore, whether anybody likes it or not.
I guess that's a pretty bad attitude, huh?
Well, it seems to me you've managed to come up with sufficient armor that you can make your way through life so that you're doing what you're supposed to be doing.
Yeah, in other words, the armor was necessary, Richard.
Yeah, no, I can believe it.
So, what should our attitude be about this knowledge?
You know, we're kind of what we are, and yes, we can move around within that realm, but not all that far from it, really.
Well, I see it a little bit differently.
First of all, I think recognizing that there is a relationship between my experience and who I am, and where the planets were when I was born, and where they continue 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 You know, what we live in is a different universe than the void of meaning that we're taught that we live in.
John Mack was a good friend of mine.
Oh, I interviewed John many, many times.
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 he We had many discussions about these issues, and one of the ways in which he saw a commonality between our work was that, as he put it, both of us were in the business of blowing the Western mind, as he put it.
Blowing the Western mind, yes, indeed.
By the way, what did you think of his work?
I thought it was very courageous.
He was an extremely He was 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.
He did?
And he also not only treated them as He was worthy of being listened to, but he also let their messages somehow transform his sense of what the universe was about.
In other words, put it another way Richard, he bought it.
That's right.
You believe he bought it, right?
I do, yes.
do yet yes or no he had too many uh... he had too many people
telling him uh... that they'd had
telling him but similar story and they'd had no
uh... common you know connection before they were
uh... reporting these experiences Now, I think in terms of his effectiveness in the world, he might have been a little bit, uh, more effective had he been able to maintain a slightly more distanced or slightly less, uh, obvious, if he didn't seem to have bought it quite so obviously, I think he might've been
Yeah, but he'd have been less honest.
Look, he bought it.
He believed what he heard, and so I'm kind of with him on this.
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?
Well, there's two ways of doing it.
One is, I'm not suggesting that he would say anything that he didn't believe, but I'm saying that if he... He was too passionate for you, huh?
Well, not for me.
Not for you?
No, but for the rest of the world.
We both came out of Harvard, and I watched what happened to him at Harvard, and he suffered, you know, basically a kind of starboard.
Oh, he did?
And in order to, I think, you know, when he began His work, he used the phrase, um, this is an authentic, that is when he began his work with the, uh, abductees.
Yes.
He said, this is an authentic mystery.
He said, we don't, you know, they are, they bear all the symptoms of having actually had these experiences.
Uh, so something is going on and what it is, we don't know, but something is going on and they, these people they're listening to, uh, with, with, uh, 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 If this is really going on, then I don't know, I guess I can understand the kind of passion.
Yes, no, I can fully, I mean basically I've gone through the exactly parallel situation with my own research in a similarly controversial area.
And I too have come to be convinced of something that I am now passionately 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.
Right?
Well, that's to be determined.
You mean there may be trouble ahead, Richard?
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 on the West Coast with a more liberal surroundings and people.
I mean, my classes in this area... They're listening to you all over the country, though.
Right now, for example.
Sure, but they can't fire me.
Anyway, my main point is that I fully sympathize with why John became so passionate about it.
I think that he Might have just been a little bit more Measured in in the in that one book in particular Abduction I think that was probably the one that a little more circumspect.
Yeah a little bit more would have 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 he fully went into a 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, Richard, what made him effective on this program was that he was so damn passionate about the whole thing.
It had passed that bar.
It was obvious that he believed there was a real phenomena going on here.
I mean, it came through loud and clear.
So that made him a real hit with radio audiences for good cause.
Well, in the... I think, let's see, 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 it's... and that, in fact, we... that there is a...
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've been doing.
Was he able to convince you that there was an extraterrestrial presence and that is what was being experienced?
Did you become convinced of that yourself?
Yes, I was.
And I had read enough of that kind of material beforehand and that I Didn't have any strong resistance to it.
So when he when he started telling me about it, I felt that this is something that it wasn't.
It wasn't a shock.
In fact, it was more of a shock for him than it was for me when he first was entering into it.
All right, here's a really good question.
This is really a good question.
Richard, welcome back to the program.
Oh, let me plug your books again.
The Passion of the Western Mind, Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our Worldview, and Cosmos and Psyche, Innovations of a New Worldview.
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
that 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 think she contributed to a successful presidency
I thought you might think that. I mean actually even before anyone knew that she was
publicly anyone knew that she was having these consultation a lot of astrologers were writing
in the journals I remember reading 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 correlate with the best planetary alignments.
But in addition, you probably know about this, there was that interesting astrologer, what was her name, Joan?
I don't recall.
Well, anyway, the astrologer encouraged Nancy Reagan to influence her husband towards a more uh... open attitude towards Gorbachev uh... and said that his legacy Nancy Reagan I think combined both uh... this you know consulting with the astrologer with a with a high anxiety about wanting her husband to go down in history as a great president I'm sure that's true and she uh... and one of the things that she got for Joan Quigley that was the name of the astrologer uh... she uh...
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.
No question about it.
Uh, and so, uh, I think it's just, you know, one of those kind of ironies of history that an astrologer both, um, helped the timing of a lot of his, um, actions and statements, but also seems to have influenced him in a direction that we're all grateful for now.
Oh, no question about it.
Um, Richard, how you, you probably, you might not know the answer to this, but how big an influence did that astrologer have on our national policy?
At that time?
Yes.
Well, you know, it was subtle, and there's a hundred other factors that were going into what, you know, what that policy was.
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.
But the Cold War is over.
Yeah, the Cold War is over.
And it happened on his watch, and you obviously believe then that astrology moved him in that direction.
It was one of the influences, and I suspect it was a larger influence than any of us knew at the time.
Yes, that's what I think too.
I know, I know, I know.
They made a big deal out of it.
Would you say that you would feel safer with any president who is taking the advice of a competent astrologer?
on from reagan i know i know i know uh... big if they made a big deal out
of it and uh...
would you say that you would feel safer with any president who is taking the
advice of a competent astrologer as a tricky question
uh...
i think i'll get in trouble like john right where it's over 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.
But it's so easy.
Astrology can be abused as much as any other... Of course, of course.
I know I said competent, and I'll add moral, ethical.
Okay, well if you put those together, then I think it would be a great addition to, not only addition, it would deepen the perspective, it would be a more skillful way of formulating policies.
And the world would be less likely to blow up.
I would think so.
There's an expression from the ancients that's come down, a sentence that said, the skillful, a sagacious person improves the workings of the heavens as a farmer improves the workings of nature.
And so there's, and one of the, what that dictum was trying to say, among other things, is that by knowing the state of the cosmos, by understanding the 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, you know, 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?
I think it comes from the years that she spent in Hollywood.
I mean, Hollywood and California was generally much more... California generally and Hollywood in particular was a place where astrology flourished and in the years in which she was You know, in her younger years, she consulted astrologers, as did many actresses and actors.
And why do you think it's of specific interest to Hollywood?
Why do you think it's of great interest to Hollywood?
That is curious.
Yeah, I think... Good question.
I think, just generally speaking, there's a kind of larger metaphysical flexibility out here in the West Coast.
Well, yes.
I suppose, yes.
So there's that, but then also people in the arts generally are more at home in the world of the imagination.
That's a good answer.
And the imagination is an essential part of discernment of astrological understanding.
It's not 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 work, an astrologer requires an imaginative intelligence to be able to
That's OK.
That's a very good answer.
OK, 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, you know, a renaissance just around the corner.
Do you disagree with that?
No, I don't think it's around the corner.
In fact, you know, 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 it to anybody, just how much tension and violence and also we're dealing with extremely difficult ecological situation that is... Oh yes.
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.
Couldn't agree more.
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 and We don't see them, or very rarely do we see them or talk about them.
It's almost as verboten as astrology.
That's right.
Yeah, it's a huge blind spot, and I think there's thousands of people like us who are aware of it, but unfortunately those thousands of people are not editors of the major media.
That's right.
That's right.
There are some stories that get out.
I mean, you know, the top guy at NASA is getting clobbered right now.
I'm sure you've probably read about that, haven't you?
Yeah.
I want to interview him.
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 He 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.
Oh, I'm sure it has.
I'm sure it has.
And again, I would like to get him on the air.
If he was really willing to open up, 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.
I'd like that.
It would be a healthy thing.
Yes, indeed.
Well, anyway, back to astrology, I guess that's our center topic tonight.
Again, I'm asking, is there any chance of a renaissance, a real renaissance?
Well, I think something that might be helpful for me to insert here into our conversation is the book that I just published now, Cosmos and Psyche.
Yes.
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, you know, a birth chart, what's it like to be a Gemini, and so forth, this is much more focused on the... 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 the whole culture or many cultures throughout the world seem to become informed by a particular, like the zeitgeist, a certain spirit of the time.
And so, for example... Is all of that driven, too, by the same planetary bodies?
That's... I had a feeling that's where you were going.
Exactly.
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 Promethean 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.
And it was really something, wasn't it?
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... Richard, I have no idea where the planets are right now, but I'm curious.
How would you contrast today's world and the dynamics as compared to that period of time?
Well, there's several things going on at once, but one of the biggest alignments that is 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.
It began in late 2004.
It's been very strong 2005 and 6.
We'll go on for another year.
And it's meaning for the world?
The meaning has to do with, usually it accompanies a period of often a 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 uh... finding ways of uh...
bringing greater uh...
uh... like a the social safety net for example and focused on health
and uh... medical and uh... social
uh... issues of of it can be involving
kind of uh... social compassion one thing i can promise you we're not going to do when the
uh... when we open the lines uh... in the next hour
we're not doing any horoscopes Oops.
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 newspapers 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 questions 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, Richard.
Yeah, let's look a little bit more at the present time.
Another major characteristic of this particular alignment with 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 physical and spiritual exhaustion, the sense of being caught in a quagmire, both like the The Vietnam War, from about 1971 to 1973, 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 years of them had that same Saturn-Neptune opposition, or Saturn-Neptune in what we call hard aspects.
Well, it's clearly shaping up again.
Yeah, it's... You can feel it moving, Richard.
It's coming quick, and the administration should be aware of it.
There is a building You see, I went through, I was in Vietnam, and I went through what happened in the aftermath and all of that, so I'm very well aware of how it happened.
And it's not anywhere near yet that sort of level, but it is, if nothing changes, clearly headed there.
So that's the next couple of years, 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 the third planet in... Two planets are in 180-degree opposition.
Meaning?
And then the third planet is in a square 90 degrees to the other two.
And it's very rare for any of the outer planets, any three, to get into that T-square.
It happens very rarely.
And the last time that we had what we're about to have, this Saturn-Uranus-Pluto T-square, was that period between late 1929 into 1932 and 1933.
Oh my god.
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.
You think there could be an ecological depression ahead?
Well, what would you mean by... I could see an ecological... Well, I'm just grabbing at the word depression now.
I mean, I think it's 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 2018, 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, particularly in those years 2008 to 2011.
I suspect there'll be more than the usual conflict between, let's call it, 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 horizon 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.
That's kind of, I don't know, I guess that's a little bit exciting.
However, the more immediate is somewhat concerning.
It is.
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.
Yes.
Absolutely.
I have a very, very strong sense of it, and so it's a little depressing to hear you confirm it.
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.
Do you think, this is a big question, do you think that it's possible that directed mass human consciousness could mitigate what you're talking about directly ahead?
I completely do, yeah.
You do?
Yeah, I think if enough individuals can become aware of what's happening and 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 joshing here.
uh... 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 uh... forecast for complete drought not a chance of moisture up in uh... western canada same deal and and about a total of nine experiments in richard Uh, we, it just totally freaked me out.
We created rain.
I mean, rain within hours.
Clouds began to form, uh, and there was no basis for them.
According to the meteorologist, 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 I was, 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.
I see what the situation is.
You basically were tuning into a kind of shamanic power that... I don't know.
But unlike the shamans of other cultures, you had at your command, so to speak, millions of people to magnified the effect of your thoughts and intentions.
Yes.
It was, I think, probably you rightly recognize that it was larger than you knew how to handle.
Did you ever have any tribal shaman on the show to discuss this particular...
Not...
I've had them on, certainly, but not to discuss this particular topic, no.
It would be interesting to get, you know, somebody who... because there certainly are people out there who have, you know, 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.
Yes, it certainly would.
And I guess it sort of winds around your topic just fine, really, doesn't it?
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 of, and one can think of it in more scientific terms, as a collective force field with many different possible ways of manifesting.
That's good.
And the more consciousness that we bring to the task, the more we're going to be Able to direct and I would not so much.
Create our future, but co-create it.
That's in itself a good question, Richard, and actually not one that I answered, but I think I have a pretty strong idea.
In other words, is a single directed consciousness as powerful as millions of them?
And I think the answer, I'm pretty sure the answer is a clear no.
No way.
That you get thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions concentrating on something, you get real action.
I mean, there's a difference between a single, highly developed consciousness and many that are just kind of kindergartners at it.
But I agree, there's something about the pure quantity that's going to make a big difference.
Yeah, we'll call ourselves the Borg Club or something.
Listen, let me drag you backwards for a second on 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, 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, something like electromagnetism or something like that, that was causing these of 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 But not gravity, Richard.
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, 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.
I don't think it's anything like gravity, and so I would chuckle myself.
Okay, good.
It's, I think, and actually I would also chuckle at their tendency, that is the chuckling scientists, their tendency to Always view things through the lens of a kind of, you know, a billiard ball game.
Well sure, it's the only lens they have.
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.
But we want to understand the mechanism before we can begin to grasp and teach it.
We need to understand the mechanism, and right now they only look at gravitational influences, and that's not enough of a mechanism, so... But thinking in terms of mechanism is, right there, a mistake.
That's the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm that always thinks in terms of mechanism.
Well, we are stuck there, buddy.
Well, to some degree, I'm stuck there.
Quantum physics, for example, doesn't obey the rules of Newtonian mechanics, and I think what we're looking at here is something 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.
Everything in the world is full of signs.
All events are coordinated.
All things depend on each other.
As has been said, everything breathes together.
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... We do, but good scientists are willing to look at Well, theoretical physicists like Dr. Kock, who is 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.
Yes.
So Jan, you're beginning to get a little bit of help, maybe?
Yeah, I think so.
The whole idea of non-locality, for example, that comes out of quantum physics is very relevant to us.
And also, I think if you... Let's think... Now here, let's go back to the primal cultures and the shaman that we were talking about.
When they see two eagles cross the horizon, And a baby is born at that time.
Yes.
yes see that as being significant by the way my thanks uh... to a listener in petaluma said
uh... they are contact uh... info here's contact info for the nasa clients
uh... rather reclimate scientists who wanted interviews
doctor james e hansen and
At the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
He's the one, alright.
I really would like to interview him.
There's something about a long-form talk radio interview and, you know, 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 on 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.
He'd say exactly what he thought.
Richard Tarnas, welcome back to the program.
Your books are available, you're supposed to plug where they're available.
Can you get them on Amazon, places like that?
Yeah, they're available on Amazon.
You can also, you can just go to CosmosandPsyche.com 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.
They certainly do.
Well, I do that.
I'm a gigantic reader.
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.
Alright, 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.
Okay.
So let's try it.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Richard Tarnas.
Hi.
Yes.
Hello.
Hello, this is Jim.
I'm calling from Cedar Falls, Iowa.
How are you today?
I'm alright, Jim.
Richard, and I say today because I agree this is the only time of day when you could have this kind of conversation.
I'm awed by the 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 not part of, I was certainly part of the listening and the 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.
true and I and I you know we describe I'm kind of a functionalist in the way
we think about God and and how we describe God and I believe that that
collective human spirit and the zeitgeist to Richard I think you've you've
quite intelligently articulated this on the air and I'm just you know proud to
have people talking about this in a in a intelligent fashion
Arnie, do you have an actual question?
Yes, I do.
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, or the convergent validity of that, of the... Your question, sir... My question is, do you feel like The Zeitgeist is a collective way of us describing our... I don't think we are separate in our... You're not doing my question, are you?
I think I'm getting what you're saying.
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 of our separateness as individuals.
I think that's true.
I think there are certain moments that it becomes vividly true such as 9-11 when everybody is taking in this extraordinarily traumatic experience and the world is as one as it were or for a more sustained period to take the 1960s when Because 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.
Probably you'd be saying, well, I knew it.
It's something like, it reminds me of how animals, for example, are able to sense prior to an earthquake that something's about to happen.
Yes, indeed.
Same thing.
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.
Well, I love evidence, and boy, I'll tell you, it's hard to refute.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Richard Tarnas.
Hi.
Thanks, Art.
And good evening, Dr. Tarnas.
I have your book in my hand, The Passion of the Western Mind, and I noticed in his introduction, Art mentioned your having been educated under the Jesuits.
That's right.
And having heard the ensuing conversation, I wonder then, Induction would suggest that you were brought up a Catholic, not necessarily, but that's what one might... No, I definitely... I came from a Catholic family, the eldest of eight children, and I was Catholic right through high school and my education.
So then when I went to Harvard in 1968, that was probably the beginning of a more...
ecumenical, let's say, approach to life, but I still have a great deal of regard for, at the same time, a great deal of criticism of the Catholic Church and Christianity.
Well, I thought the eight sounded kind of Catholic.
That's right.
But you had a question about Catholicism and the Jesuits?
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.
Yeah, that's a really good question.
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 You know, their intellectual approach.
Now, you know, 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, 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 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.
What about... More recently, I don't... I wouldn't say that they do in the last... I would guess, I don't know, but I would guess in the last, you know, let's say century or two centuries that that hasn't been true.
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?
It's possible.
There's a lot behind the scenes that we don't know about.
Tell me about it.
I would just guess that it's probably not It played a major factor in recent centuries, though it played an enormous role in earlier centuries.
But let me just answer one other question.
I'd be more suspicious.
You think it's around, like with Reagan?
I do indeed, sir.
And you could be right.
In answer to the question that the caller brought in, I think it's one An 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.
Or it wouldn't certainly offer the promise of it.
Right.
Well, there are differences, 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 can't... I don't think that the... I too believe that.
And I don't think that the conventional Christian dogma about it, where there's just one form that it can 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.
Well taken, indeed.
All right.
You're on the air with Richard Tarnas.
Good morning.
Thank you, Lord.
Good morning, Richard.
Where are you, sir?
I'm calling from Ontario.
Ontario?
Okay, cool.
Go ahead.
Richard, I was just curious.
I can hardly hear.
I'm sorry.
Can you hear me any better now?
Yeah, I can hear a little better now.
Okay, I'll even do better.
How about that?
Alright, that's really good.
So keep it at that level and rock.
Thank you.
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 a science part of my brain that says, can this be used in any predictive Is there a practical way to use this?
I'm with you.
Yeah, I have the same question in mind.
That's really my question, and thank you.
You're very welcome.
Sure, good one, too.
I think astrology is ultimately not concretely predictive, that it's rather archetypally predictive, and that's the big difference between, I think, 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, when it takes the encounter with this evidence and looking at it one self and not
if if I just heard somebody talking about it I would be resistant how many of the supposed great
intuitives Richard that described the future I am
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 in many other ways accurately predicted
the future arm 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.
I think that's right.
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 Or apparently so.
Yeah, there's an intuitive capacity that is Different than the astrological method 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.
That's right.
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.
Well, then one might want to put it in quatrains, for example.
That's right.
I imagine that you were thinking of Nostradamus.
As one, yes.
Among others.
I think that's one.
I mean, why not just fog it up a little bit?
Because that gives you a little fudge factor.
Yeah.
But you still look as though you're right on, and in fact you are.
So do you think that astrology was mixed in at that point, for example?
Yeah, there's no question.
and i think uh... astrology and of course uh...
uh... divinatory or clairvoyant capacity were were intertwined
richard i wonder uh... really wonder what do you say too
you know the skeptics out there in the sciences who laugh at you and laugh at
uh...
astrology and laugh at the whole concept of it
If you're, you know, 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?
In my case, I would urge them to look at the evidence that I've compiled in my book, Cosmos and Psyche.
And they'd say, what evidence?
Well, they haven't looked!
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.
Don't disturb my vision with reality.
Exactly.
And so I would just encourage them to have an open mind and to look at the evidence.
All right.
What do I have to do, I guess?
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Richard Tarnasi.
Hi there, Art.
It's a pleasure to speak with you.
I'm Brody from National Park, New Jersey, and I'm listening on Streamlink.
I just had a couple of yes or no questions for your guest, and then one final question after that.
It'll be hard for him, but let's try.
All right.
First of all, isn't it true that as with beauty, the meaning of the stars is in the eye of the beholder, Dr. Tarnas?
Say that again?
Isn't it true that as with beauty, the meaning of the stars is in the eye of the beholder?
In part.
Well, that wasn't... I know it's not yet to know, but... In part, okay.
Okay, let me ask you this then.
Do you put any thought into newspaper or website horoscopes based on... You're almost going to get electrocuted.
But yeah, go ahead and answer it if you want, Richard.
I don't put a lot of credence in that, no.
All right.
Well, I almost pushed the button, too.
If I could compare it to our, 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.
I was hoping by now they'd caught on to that one now, so anything like that.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Richard Tarnas.
Hi.
Hello.
Yes, hello.
Yes.
My question, and I hope this isn't out of the scope of your guest, I've been in and out because I'm working, but in regard to life on other planets, you know, we always talk about life in regard to what we feel life is.
Isn't it fully possible that life means something else?
Oh, I'd say hell yes.
How about you?
Yeah, that sounds exactly right.
Hell yes.
Terrence McKenna was a good friend of mine, and I think he was often on the show, if I'm not mistaken.
Oh, of course, Terrence was on many times.
And didn't he say, I imagine he said something about an Italian restaurant?
Oh, yes.
Yeah, why don't you share that with the caller, because that was a great line.
The caller's gone, but I mean, oh, what an incredible human being he was.
Yes, we've lost both Terrence and John Mack in these last few years, two people who You were good friends of mine and we're frequently on the show.
It's been a great period of loss.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Richard Tarnas.
Hi.
Thank you.
I was fortunate enough 12 years ago to analyze 4.2 million birthdates in L.A.
County and compare them with domestic violence restraining orders and divorce rates.
Really?
Yeah, I was on a voter fraud analysis.
And anyway, you came up with?
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 was either conjunct or trine 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 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
that it is to have their sun signs compatible.
And that's and you have one hundred and forty four twelve sun signs, twelve moon signs times
one hundred and forty four arch personality types.
You're only going to get along with thirty-six of them.
All of that was just on the tip of my tongue.
Thank you very much.
That's a pretty massive study.
It would be nice to see it printed up.
I bet you would.
Do you collect that kind of thing?
I mean, those underpinning studies that at least move you in the right direction?
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 by I think there's a resistance of this kind of evidence to statistical analysis, because statistics, it's kind of, it's not unlike some of the other topics that you treat on this program, like the, how are you going to statistically prove the likelihood of life on other planets, or the existence of extraterrestrial beings interacting with our, 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.
I don't know if I... I mean, you know, they do a lot of surveys on these kinds of things.
Oh, you can do a survey on on how many people believe something, but can you do
something...
I'm talking about, just like you can do a survey on how many people
statistically believe in astrology, but I was talking about the
reality of astrology, or the reality of life after death, or the reality of
extraterrestrial life.
Well, it seems to me, though, that some of those studies with numbers like that couldn't do your cause any harm.
No, no.
That's why I said it would be very interesting to see the numbers.
Yes, on the International Line, you're on the air with Richard.
Hi.
Hi there.
Thank you very much for taking my call.
Yes, I ought to say Dr. Tarnasano.
Anyway, go ahead.
I was wondering how comfortable Dr. Tarnas 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.
I'm very comfortable with that.
I think anybody that has done sufficient interior exploration would agree with that.
Well, thank you very much.
You're very welcome.
Take care, sir.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Richard Tarnas.
Hi.
Oh, hello.
This is Sandra in Ohio.
Art, you had mentioned something about afterlife and questioning that.
I've been a professional astrologer and medium for 20 years with a sideline in biomolecular medicine and medical research.
Yikes.
Yeah, I know.
I actually wanted to make a couple of comments and then ask your guest his opinion on those comments.
First of all, Just a general comment.
Astrology seems to show energy structures, and then we have the opportunity to play within those structures and use our free will in that play.
Right.
That sounds good.
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.
Does that seem to make sense?
I'm not getting the default part.
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 key, you get the default?
Yeah, that's good.
And then basically, you're the unconscious puppet of the structure.
Yes.
You're very good at putting these things in clear, simple-to-understand terms.
Oh, thank you.
Now, 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 bite.
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 us, putting it kindly.
Absolutely, and we sometimes have to remind ourselves that if you go back to the sixties, even though we recall it with 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 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.
Well, thank you for the established power.
Before you go, are you sure you don't want to do the rest of the show?
You're just right.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Richard Tarnas.
Hi.
Hello, Art.
Yes, sir.
It's the first time calling here, and that's the first time I've tried.
Okay, well, you've got a big cell phone echo, so you're going to have to get to your question pretty quickly.
Yeah, I'm in a hallway.
I'm on a cell phone, in fact.
Yeah, sounds like you're in a dungeon, but go ahead.
I was just wondering that, Richard, you mentioned that the moon has a power over the human being.
I was just wondering what kind of effect has that had in human history?
Was the question about the moon?
Yes, the moon, and how much effect it's had, looking more at all of human history.
That's a pretty interesting question.
Well, the major historical epochs have coincided with the outer planetary alignments, because those last for several years at a time, while the Moon is something that goes around the Earth every month, and every alignment of the Moon lasts only a few hours.
So, in terms of the major historical epochs, The moon is a minor factor compared with the outer planet.
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.
That's right, and it's a constant presence, though it seems to, more in terms of Daily experience.
It's something that affects more the moods of the hour, so to speak, rather than the zeitgeist of an epoch.
Yeah.
Got it.
East of the Rockies, you're on there with Richard Tarnas.
Hi.
Hello.
Hello.
I had a quick question about if you're born, like, in the middle of, like, right on the edge of two different, like, signs or whatever, does that have some sort of effect on you?
I'm not mean to ask advice like that.
No, it's alright.
Look, the question stands.
That's what's called being born on the cusp.
That's right.
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.
Sort of a split personality, you know the way to put it.
Or a kind of blend.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Richard Tarnas.
Hello.
Good evening.
It's such a pleasure to speak with both of you.
I'm a long-time listener, but a first-time caller.
I'm also a professional certified astrologer through the American Federation of Astrologers and the Association of Great Britain Astrologers, and I cannot wait to read Dr. Tarnas's book.
And a short, brief question.
We're coming to the end of the show, so real quickly.
I will be very fast.
Okay.
Manifesting, I've listened to you for years, and manifesting is all due to intent.
And when your intent is pure, so will your manifestation be.
And I hope you continue with the mass consciousness.
And educating people towards the pure intent.
There's no choice.
It has to be continued with.
It's just a matter of how we do it.
Anyway, go ahead.
And then for a doctor, Michel Gauquelin was a French scientist who did statistical studies for many years, and he has great statistics on the various signs and what they're capable of.
And I was, my question is this.
The Moon is a timer, so are the slow-moving planets.
We astrologers use them as timers.
And Nostradamus 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 is focused on the outer planet alignments and also what are called transits to the natal chart.
I believe that there's a great deal of value in studying eclipses, as you were saying, and you also brought up the Gokulam evidence, which is their research was quite extraordinary, using thousands and thousands of birth charts and 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
It's very good science.
It's very rigorously done and has continued to be replicated.
Richard, have you noticed that through the whole night, because the show's over now, I haven't asked you once what happens when all the planets align?
We'll save that for the next program.
Richard, it's been a pleasure.
Thank you for having me on this extraordinary evening.
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