Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States yesterday, proving the long-awaited QAnon prophecy false. It’s the perfect time to talk about where mystical or deceptive knowledge comes from, how it works, and what happens when it fails. We may never know who Q was, but we can take a close look at a core feature of conspirituality technique: the transmission of secret knowledge. Welcome to our channeling episode.Today we discuss three Q-adjacent channellers: JZ Knight, Lorie Ladd, Elizabeth April, and also Paul Selig. What do they say they’re doing? What does it sound like? And where can we go to figure it out? Derek looks at consciousness studies through the lens of Rodolfo Llinas, Stanislas Dehaene, Michael Gazzaniga, and other renowned researchers. Julian reviews the philosophical arguments of Daniel Dennett and Susan Blackmore. Matthew plays angel’s advocate and interviews Professor Susannah Crockford about her anthropological fieldwork amongst the New Agers and channelers of Sedona. TL;DR: “There’s never a single answer for anything.”In the Ticker we look at a tragic anti-vax related father-son murder-suicide in California, anti-vax groups grifting PPP money from the feds, and the Anons, exiled even from Parler, suffering from the collapse of their dream of a Great Awakening. Show NotesFather-son murder-suicide over anti-vax stressThe Trump administration bailed out prominent anti-vaccine groups during a pandemicScientists Investigate Spiritualist Mediums: Why Some People Report “Hearing the Dead”Hydroxy-pusher Simone Gold arrested for part in Capitol SiegeQAnon will be scrutinized by National Intel AgenciesParler refugees prepped for DoomsdayQAnon implodes onlineQAnon admins nuke then restore threadsQAnauguration meltdownArg
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Conspiratuality 35.
Séance Science.
Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States yesterday, proving the long-awaited QAnon conspiracy prophecy false.
It's the perfect time to talk about where mystical or deceptive knowledge comes from, how it works, and what happens when it fails.
We may never know who Q was, but we can take a closer look at a core feature of conspirituality technique, the transmission of secret knowledge.
Ladies and gentlemen, and everyone in between, welcome to our channeling episode.
Today we discuss cue-adjacent channelers Jay-Z Knight, Lori Ladd, and Elizabeth April.
And we'll also look at Paul Selig.
What do they say they're doing?
What does it sound like?
And where can we go to figure it out?
Derek looks at consciousness studies through the lens of Rodolfo Linnaeus, Stanislas Dehaney, and Michael Garzaniga, and other renowned researchers.
I'm going to consider the magnetic god helmet and the role of the brain in intense spiritual experiences.
Matthew, of course, plays Angel's Advocate and interviews Professor Susanna Crockford about her anthropological fieldwork amongst the New Agers and Channelers of Sedona.
Too long?
Didn't read?
There's never a single answer for anything.
In the ticker, we look at a tragic anti-vax related father-son murder-suicide in California.
Anti-vax groups grifting PPP money from the feds and the Anons, exiled even from parlor, suffering from the collapse of their dream of a Great Awakening.
This is the Conspirituality Ticker, a weekly bullet point rundown on the ongoing pandemic of messianic influencers who spread medical misinformation and sell disaster spirituality.
I have a very tragic story from here in California about a nine-year-old boy named Pierce O'Loughlin, killed by his father, Steven, who then appears to have killed himself.
Now, according to the legal spokesman for the boy's mother, it seems that the father had undiagnosed and therefore untreated mental illness.
The Daily Beast reports that prior to what transpired, the boy's mother had petitioned the court for full custody of Pierce, based in part on his father's refusal to have him be vaccinated.
She said the father had gotten involved in 2012 with a new age group that has what she describes as a cult-like stance against vaccines, and also believes that the government is using mind control on civilians.
With the custody trial looming, O'Loughlin agreed to the young boy being vaccinated as required by his school, but then enacted this murder-suicide on the following day.
Of course, this is an awful and complex case and apparently might involve mental illness, and we offer our condolences to the family.
It perhaps shows, too, how for unstable people drawn into cultish conspiracy theories, an intense psychological identification with misinformation can be lethal.
This is clear on the larger scale of the events at the Capitol, and in this case, on a more individual scale.
This man needed urgent professional help, not indoctrination into anti-vax militancy.
For me, it raises the question that's pertinent this week.
If the charismatic leader or leaders and the social group one has bonded with proselytize ideas that sound and indeed are unhinged, disconnected from reality, like the government using vaccines for mind control, or that the leader has magical powers, or hears the disembodied voices of the Galactic Federation inside her head.
The question is how much untreated mental illness will also be perpetuated within that kind of group.
Are the guardrails of conventional society around being able to identify and support those in need of appropriate care at that point completely dismantled?
If the model of awakening or spiritual sovereignty includes taking on board profound and consequential distortions of reality, then I say we have a subculture inadvertently designed to be a pathology amplifier.
Well, first off, you can never tell your audience who's going to find you and whether or not they have mental illness, so I want to be clear on that.
But I do wonder, when you see instances like this, and if they keep proliferating, will any of these groups take responsibility for the messaging?
Because that's something we've just lived through for four years with Trump refusing to take any responsibility for anything.
And one of the most beautiful moments about this week was the moment of mourning that happened the night before Biden and Harris were sworn in.
That's a recognition that what we have lost.
And I wonder if the groups that were, specifically in this case, these anti-vax groups, ever take responsibility for what they're peddling and some of the consequences down the road.
Well, we're also speaking to, according to the Beast Report, of what the ex-partner describes as a cult-like group that the deceased father was involved with.
And, I mean, that doesn't bode well for accountability, for sure.
And it also, for me, begs the question as to whether The group's ideology was transcendental enough that the murder-suicide was actually a viable escape from a, you know, just a damnable circumstance that he couldn't imagine a way out of.
But what an incredibly horrible story.
It's very difficult to listen to as a parent.
In your research, Matthew, and Jillian might know this as well, have you ever come across a cult leader who ended up renouncing and saying he was wrong or she?
Only partially, and in a kind of like opportunistic way.
So usually there, I can think of two instances.
So Reggie Ray, who led Dharma Ocean, which is a breakaway group from Shambhala, issued a longish statement in response to an open letter issued by his students that detailed decades of emotional and financial and spiritual abuse.
And then after, I think, moving to Hawaii or something like that, he came out with a sort of reconstruction statement that said, well, you know, I was kind of forced into The apologetic position and it really wasn't that bad and here are all of my excuses for it and this is why I'm still a good spiritual guy.
Somebody named Kula Dasa has recently made the same kind of flip.
He's a famous meditation teacher.
But no, I mean the answer is pretty much not.
Robert Augustus Masters also is an interesting character who Admits to have been a cult leader and has apparently reformed, but there are some questions around that as well.
So, yeah, it's pretty rare.
pretty rare.
In one of the more infuriating misuses of funds from the Paycheck Protection Program, over $850,000 was handed out last year to five anti-vax groups.
The National Vaccine Information Center, Mercola Calm Health Resources, LLC, Informed Consent Action Network, Children's Health Defense Company, and the Tenpenny Integrative Medical Center.
And And shout out to Imran Ahmed, an original guest on this pod and founder of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, whose group uncovered this information and fed it to the Washington Post, who covered this story, which you can read in the show notes.
So in December, the Small Business Administration had to release data on the PPP program, which was meant to help small businesses survive the pandemic.
And of course, being the Trump administration, it became a massive vehicle for Grift.
Now let's note that $335,000 went to Joseph Mercola, the undisputed king of Grift.
$1,000 went to Joseph Mercola, the undisputed king of grift. - Amazing. - Besides being a prolific spreader of disinformation about vaccines, a fear that he then monetizes by selling supplements, Mercola has, like Zach Bush, questioned whether HIV causes AIDS.
He's claimed that mobile phones cause cancer, and he's been sent a number of warning letters from the FDA for falsely marketing products numerous times.
And he also claimed just this last year that nebulized Now, the Informed Consent Action Network receives three-fourths of its funding from New York hedge fund manager Bernard Seltz, and his wife Lisa is one of the two leaders of that organization along with Dell Bigtree.
So think about that for a moment.
This family is worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and they're skimming from a fund designed to help family businesses try to survive the first major pandemic in a century.
But it fits in well with a theme we consistently cover on this podcast.
Watch what they say, and then watch what they sell.
And if it isn't clear enough by now, Antivax is big business.
And really, these organizations are only doing the most American thing imaginable, exploiting a weak system for their own gain.
That's what unfettered capitalism allows for and, you can argue, even demands.
More only pairs nicely with more.
And these organizations, being pumped full with millions of dollars whose donors barely feel it, still want even more.
So I have a question about who is administering the Paycheck Protection Program and did these anti-vax organizations just apply under shell companies or did the admins not know who they were?
According to the Washington Post reporting in that story, the SBA did no vetting whatsoever.
from the FDA out against them, I would hope that somebody at SBA or the PPP would go, okay, wait a minute, let's vet you for a moment.
According to the Washington Post reporting and that story, the SBA did no vetting whatsoever.
They were just sending out money and that's where you get, and this isn't only limited to anti-vax, but this is an article that came out due to a FOIA request by the Post or by, might've been Ahmed's group, to get that information because they weren't just, they weren't saying who was getting all this money, to get that information because they weren't just, they weren't Of course, this happened in the restaurant industry.
It was supposed to be small organizations and then Shake Shack, who did give the money back.
But still, everyone was just trying to get money.
And I also want to add that, no, they were not hiding their identities.
And in fact, in the article, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
says, he pivots to basically say, oh, we weren't allowed to get money.
Now you're going to tell us something to the effect of, because we don't agree with the mainstream narrative that we're not allowed to get money for this.
Yeah, I was going to say, you're assuming a level of bureaucratic integration that is just not there.
All of these different groups are not talking to each other.
There's also, I can imagine, a bureaucratic anxiety around trying to get the incredibly small amount of cash doled out in a timely fashion, and hoping that throwing money at people will help in some way.
Of course, of course.
And then in addition to that, I bet some of these some of these individuals and companies have, they have people whose job it is to figure out how to very quickly jump on opportunities like this and get money.
Next up, Dr. Simone Gould is arrested, according to the Daily Beast.
I'll just read from the article.
Simone Gould, 55, was among three Los Angeles residents who were arrested on Monday in connection with the insurrection of the Capitol.
So there's two colleagues, Gina Bisignano and John Strand.
Now, Gold garnered national attention in July when she organized a press conference on the steps of the U.S.
Supreme Court to condemn pandemic lockdowns and rave about how hydroxychloroquine works as a treatment for COVID-19.
Now, Gold made a similar speech during the January 6th insurrection, confirming to the Washington Post that she was indeed photographed holding a megaphone on the rotunda floor.
So, not in front of the Supreme Court, but actually inside the rotunda where I guess her colleagues were smearing shit on the walls.
In a 30 second video, Gold can be seen speaking in the rotunda while two police officers stand behind her gesturing at her and others to leave.
While most of her speech is inaudible in the video, Gold can be heard saying, I'm a mom, and quote, massive medical establishment.
So I just want to point out the obvious here, which is that this could have been any of the influencers we've covered.
It could have been Willis.
He could have gotten right in and made a speech.
It could have been Brogan, Northrup, Tom Cowan.
It could have been Zach Bush.
Anybody who would have been able to tolerate or rationalize the violence of entering for the chance at a photo op.
Kind of made me think of how influencers in general will often endanger themselves just for the peak photo opportunity.
You know, so thinking more about Willis, like what's really the difference between him risking pepper spray and the yoga model balancing on a cliff, right?
I have to jump in.
Did you see Colbert at all this week?
No.
So he featured a woman in Texas who's a real estate agent.
Is this the one who flew in on her private jet?
I don't know if that's the case.
Okay, he didn't say that in this segment, but she was holding up the phone facing herself and saying that they're taking over the government and this is how she sells houses and pitching her reality company right then and then live streaming it so that people are seeing it.
That's how absurd it is.
She was asking for a pardon too, wasn't she, from Trump?
Final hours?
I think many of them were trying that.
This is how I'm going to work for you.
You should hire me because look at how brave and intrepid I am.
But I just wanted to say too, the woman you're talking about is one of the most prominent of what were called the frontline doctors, right?
Simone Gould, yes, right.
So that received a lot of attention and she was sort of the person who was up front most of the time really making a stand.
She was and they were really frontline optometrists or something like that, weren't they?
I mean, I'm actually trying to remember accurately, like, they weren't epidemiologists, obviously.
Well, certainly not epidemiologists.
I mean, it made me wonder, too, when you said that thing about her colleagues smearing shit, if she would have seen that, she might have said, well, that's a fecal transplant for the capital.
Also, just to put this in perspective, you mentioned Gina who owns Gina's Eyelashes and Skincare.
I ride my bike past that shop all the time because that's the area I ride to get up into the mountains regularly.
You're talking two blocks from Rodeo Drive.
So just to give you an understanding of the sense, a woman flying in on a private jet, then you have someone else who's working in prime Beverly Hills real estate.
The level of privilege that we're talking about with these insurrectionists, and the fact that they ask for pardons, I just, I really, this merging of social media and politics is going to be dissected for a long time when you look at all these characters who are involved.
Not being an Angeleno, Rodeo Drive sounds like it's a very expensive place.
Oh yeah.
It's where all millionaires and billionaires shop.
So if she runs the nail salon there, these are like $400 appointments or whatever?
Oh, I'm sure.
Yeah, that's the most expensive retail real estate in Los Angeles.
Well, listen, I just wanted to say one other thing, though, which is that this sort of, I don't know, as we're talking about the confluence of social media and politics in the influencer space, is really powerful, and I don't think it is politically defined either.
I mean, all of this stuff really makes me think of my late friend Michael Stone, whose politics were totally different, and he would have totally hated these clowns.
I can't believe that he's not alive to see this stuff.
But he was a real screen grabber, scene grabber in the same way, but from the left.
And back in 2010, at the G20 protest in Toronto, it was the site of a lot of vicious street conflict and people got kettled and traumatized by the riot police.
It was a horrible scene.
But Michael had this idea that he would lead his meditation congregation to a spot close to the front lines and sit down in a meditation circle and do Zen.
But he also made sure that there were really good photographers around.
So that went up on social media like right away.
And then a year or two later he was teaching at a yoga teacher training program in Montreal during the Occupy Movement and he brought the class out like unannounced.
He just said, let's go out to the protest.
And he brought them all out so he could give kind of a speech about engaged Buddhism from the street podium.
And again, you know, there was a videographer he made sure was right there, which is all to say, I think we have to look really carefully at just the influence of influencer culture, which is essentially opportunistic and parasitical.
And social media is like this meta world in which the performance of activism is thought to be or felt to be as important as the activism itself.
Now, like, I just want to reiterate that Michael Stone did not, absolutely did not incite violence.
you know, unlike Willis.
But nonetheless, there's this performative impulse that can really degrade the, I don't know, a more stable work of politics.
Okay, next up, increasingly militant parlor refugees and anxious QAnon adherents prep for doomsday.
This is a great NBC article from Ben Collins.
I'll read a little bit of it.
Lisa Norris got a panicked phone call Monday from her brother He told her to buy a ham radio.
The radio, he explained, would be one of the few ways they could communicate once President Donald Trump launched his plans to take permanent power.
Quote, we were dancing around the subject and then he just brought up that on the 20th, you know, the truth is gonna come out, Norris said.
He was just going on and on about how we needed to have ham radios because we're not gonna be able to talk on regular phones and everything's gonna be dark.
Trump has no such plans, but in the fractured QAnon community which has turned to a variety of smaller messaging apps and YouTube to keep spreading conspiracy theories, evidence-free reports of a nationwide blackout and impending martial law on Wednesday have become a real last stand for true believers that Trump will be president after Inauguration Day.
I love the ham radio stuff, this kind of like fantasy about returning to retrograde technology that would I don't know, be coherent with a golden age in which you could receive more direct messages.
Like Trump will communicate through telegraph, through like paper cups in spring.
We've been kicked off of everything else though, right?
We've been kicked off everything else.
So we've got to regress back to this.
The other one that I saw was that stay attentive to the emergency alert system.
That's how he's going to reach all of us.
And then once the inauguration has been surrounded by the National Guard and all of the Democrats have been arrested, then their trial in which they confess all of their crimes that have now been exposed will be on every TV screen for everyone to see at that point.
Right.
But you know Biden wasn't actually sworn in, right?
Right.
It was a shadow government right now being run from Florida.
So let's be clear on this, Julian.
I do think that the technology piece is a little bit of a preview of some of our channeling themes, because after all, the dominant conspiracy in U.S.
political life is that there is a boatload of people who believe that Trump is communicating with them directly, giving them instructions and speaking into their souls.
And I think we have to think about what this means for them to be so suddenly cut off.
It's almost like going deaf in a way.
And lastly, we have very, very sad news from the QAnon inauguration watch parties.
So, this is taken from an article posted to Huffington Post, in which the various online streaming watch parties attended by QAnons, usually through telegram channels, were reviewed by Researchers and disinformation analysts.
And, you know, what they found was this real-time unfolding of disillusionment, usually emotionally extreme.
People saying, we've been played, we've been had.
This is all as the minutes are counting down to noon or 1145 or something like that, whenever Biden actually put his hand on that enormous Bible.
And, you know, there's comments about how they have nothing now, how they have, you know, been abandoned by their family and friends.
And, you know, also as I'm looking at these screenshots from Telegram, it was just so distressing to see that The isolation and the alienation of this online fever dream, it's coherent with the toxic emotions that I think we associate with trolling, you know, contempt, hatred and scorn.
But when it comes to grief and loss, they only have, they still just have emojis, right?
And so they have like weepy yellow faces that don't really dignify what they're actually saying.
And so it's just sometimes the internet really steals people's dignity away.
But I also thought that it brings up this really good opportunity for us to review something we've touched on before, which is the failure of prophecy work that originates from Festinger and his colleagues.
And this is where we actually inherit culturally the concept of cognitive dissonance.
So, Marc-André Argentino and Amarnath Amarasingham have summarized this famous work in an essay that's directly related to QAnon that we'll post to the show notes.
And what they review is that Festinger and his colleagues studied an apocalyptic cult in the 1950s that believed the U.S.
would be destroyed by a flood.
Now, it wasn't, of course.
The appointed date came and it went.
But then they did fieldwork to ask how the group was coping with that broken promise.
And they revealed four ways in which a group will attempt to resolve cognitive dissonance.
So we can look at this in QAnon terms.
So they will spiritualize by saying that what was initially thought of as a visible real world occurrence may not have happened.
But that it was something that took place in the spiritual realm.
And actually, when we talk about Lori Ladd later, she actually directly says that as part of her origin story, that she used to believe when she was 13, 14, 15 years old, that Ascension was a literal phenomenon and now she realizes that it takes place on the internal plane.
And that's also what happened with the 2012 Mayan.
That's exactly what happened when the day came.
Everyone was like, oh, it actually did happen in that capacity.
But you only noticed if you're awake enough.
Right.
It happened inside you in the chakras or something like that.
Or in the dimension that you can tune in on, right?
Because I think often the internal is externalized in these sorts of metaphysics as being some other literal dimension, right?
So the second thing, so spiritualization is number one, but groups will also propose that the broken promise was actually a test of faith, that the prophecy was never actually going to happen but is in fact a way for the divine to weed out true believers from those who are And of course, the people who are still believing, they will be hanging on.
And then there's, of course, human error, which is kind of simple.
The group argues that they didn't get the math right or something like that.
They didn't read the signs correctly.
And then, of course, there's blaming others, which is the group argues that they themselves never stated that the prophecy was going to happen, but that this is how outsiders interpreted their statements.
And so, really, the joke's on them.
So, we'll post that article to the show notes.
It's really useful.
The Jab, our weekly segment on the crucial COVID vaccine and the misinformation conspiritualists love to spread about it.
As the vaccine rollout continues, albeit imperfectly, across America, so too does the circulation of scare stories and social media memes claiming very high incidence of serious side effects.
This can be really unsettling.
But here's the problem.
These claims rely on figures from the wrong source.
A couple weeks ago we talked about the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, and its relationship to the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, usually just called the Vaccine Court.
As you might remember, VAERS is an open website where anyone can report whatever they want to.
Think of it as an enormous digital warehouse put in place to gather any and all anecdotal claims.
It's purposely set up this way so that the data analysts can look for trends that might warrant further research.
It also shows good faith on the part of the government in giving the public a place to have their reports be registered and considered.
There's no barrier to entry and no evidentiary standards limit what gets reported.
Okay, so far so good.
The downside of this though, as Paul Offit, infectious disease physician and director of the Vaccine Education Center says, is that the data in the VAERS system is very noisy.
It includes a lot of temporal associations that are not necessarily causal.
Scientists understand this distinction between correlation and causation.
VAERS is a starting point for examining as-yet-undiscovered potential problems with vaccines, but it's not a source of accurate data on actual vaccine side effects or injuries.
The website even notes that it contains unverified reports that anyone can make.
What's more, the CDC and FDA strongly encourage health care providers, public health officials, and the general public to report any possible adverse event so that it can be checked out.
The key distinction I mentioned before between correlation and causation becomes even more important the larger the numbers are at play.
With vaccines, those numbers of doses delivered is really enormous.
The thing to understand is that a background percentage of all human beings are at some point going to develop various conditions or have medical emergencies within any window of time anyway with or without a vaccine.
So establishing whether or not receiving the vaccine had anything to do with their later symptoms or health crisis is where the science comes in.
Unfortunately, heightened suspicion around vaccines caused by anti-vax misinformation also makes a lot of people more likely to assume a vaccine was to blame when they get diagnosed with something new in the weeks or months thereafter.
But what science does is look very carefully at the raw data, look for patterns, and then seek to refine our understanding via further experimentation.
As always, that process is ongoing.
But so far, The more refined data shows that, with the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine for example, the most common side effect, at around 84%, is temporary mild pain or swelling where the shot went in.
62% of people experienced fatigue, 55% had a headache, 38% had some muscle aches, and a smaller percentage had fever symptoms.
None of that sounds particularly pleasant, but these are all signs that the vaccine is working as your body builds an immune response.
Those symptoms can last anywhere from a few hours to a couple days.
As with all vaccines, there are severe allergic reactions, but in less than 1% of the population, and those can usually be resolved fairly quickly because they usually happen immediately after receiving the vaccine.
Vaccines are subject to independent safety monitoring boards and safety data are continuously reviewed by the FDA and expert panels.
So here's today's takeaway.
Don't be spooked by social media posts that reference high numbers coming from VAERS of adverse reactions.
That's a bit like listening in on an FBI tip line about violent crime and deciding that all of your neighbors and family members must secretly be cold-blooded killers.
It's not the case.
For real data on this topic, go to the CDC.
The quest to understand consciousness is really a modern reframing of an age-old question. - Amen.
Who am I?
Although trying to understand the organ that leads to consciousness, and its 100 billion neuronal connections, and its relationship to the rest of the nervous system, and the nervous system's feedback loop with the rest of the body, and the body's relationship with the environment it interacts with is challenging, we've made a lot of progress in the last few decades.
I've talked in previous episodes about the necessity of defining terms.
Consciousness is a wildly speculative word, even though neuroscientists have similar working definitions.
And just like I turn to medical professionals when seeking information about vaccines, I read cognitive researchers when trying to understand consciousness.
Though people like to talk about all animate beings having consciousness, which is certainly possible on varying levels, but not really the point here.
And others even talk about inanimate forces and ideas having consciousness, which we have no proof of whatsoever.
I'm going to focus on human consciousness.
Tell me if you've heard this or even said it yourself.
Well, science doesn't have an answer for that.
Or, it's unexplainable by science.
When I've pressed some people on these statements, it turns out that they usually haven't read much if any neuroscience literature.
And I'm not here to tease apart subjective experiences and anecdotes.
I share one sentiment that all the researchers I've studied agree upon.
Consciousness is body dependent.
And if you start there, you can unravel a lot of the conspiritualist mysticism that we talk about and will be talking about during this episode.
In one of my favorite books on the topic, Eye of the Vortex, Colombian neuroscientist Rodolfo Linneas frames it succinctly.
The nature of mind must be understood on the basis of its origin, the process of its becoming, by the biological mechanism of trial and error endlessly at work.
The mind, or what I shall refer to as the mindness state, is the product of evolutionary processes that have occurred in the brain as actively moving creatures developed from the primitive to the highly evolved.
Linnaeus points out that even single-cell organisms, which predate nervous systems, had to predict where to move in order to find food, and to avoid becoming food.
Unlike reflexive actions, which are unconscious, prediction is goal-oriented.
And this skill has continued from these simple life forms all the way to us.
It's simply impossible for an animal that lives seven or eight decades to wrap their heads around billions of years of evolution, so we tend to think this is how we landed here.
Now prediction implies movement, as in moving toward food and sex and away from danger.
But it also implies thinking.
Linnaeus points out that thoughts fire motor neurons.
This is why, for example, athletes envision the movements necessary for their sport, because the same neurons fire whether they're thinking about movement as when they're actually moving.
They prime their bodies for movement with thought.
We all do this.
Linnaeus believes thinking is actually internalized movement.
I mean, has your mind ever raced away from you?
Our brains are fascinating, yet mysterious.
For example, this organ doesn't feel pain even though all pain originates there.
And this is telling because our brain is responsible for the creation of identity even though you can't localize your eye there.
But that's the thing.
Just because you can't feel it in your head doesn't mean that's not where your reality is constructed.
The field of consciousness studies is heavily indebted to the work on split brain patients that Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga conducted in 1962, in which they showed that by splitting the brain in two, you actually produce two entirely different consciousnesses.
Sperry continued this line of work and won a Nobel Prize for it in 1981, while Gazzaniga continues working on the problem of consciousness today.
And when I talked with him in 2018 after the publication of his book, The Consciousness Instinct, He told me that even though we feel like we have an uninterrupted sense of consciousness, it's actually an illusion due to thousands of relatively independent processing systems that harmonize in such a way as to produce what we call consciousness, our awareness.
That makes consciousness an emergent phenomenon, the result of a number of disparate parts coming together to create an entirely new product.
Let's look at one example of this emergence.
Since this episode is about channeling, we'll consider out-of-body experiences.
This is often a first line of defense in the debate against an embodied consciousness, the feeling that you can float away outside of your physical body.
This is also an example where someone will say, I left my body and science can't explain it.
Okay, so maybe not explain in full, but in 2007 researchers at University College London produced the first OBE, a feat that has been replicated a number of times.
Now this instance was the result of crafty video camera placement, but other labs have done it by holding magnets over specific parts of the brain.
What that means is that anybody, You or me, right now, can be induced into having an OBE, an out-of-body experience, and there are multiple mechanisms for doing so.
We usually call OBEs spiritual, but as Gazzaniga told me, that's also an illusion.
We remember past events based on whatever happened before the event and whatever has happened since the event.
And when we're confronted with feelings that we don't know how to communicate, we automatically think that they're unexplainable.
That's simply not the case.
And that's why I take issue with this notion of channeling.
Nothing in modern research supports it.
When people who claim to hold this power say they can't be tested by scientific methods, they're being disingenuous.
Or, they just don't want to be called out.
Those voices in your head?
There are voices in your head.
We all have them.
That's a feature of consciousness.
Sure, it's a bug for some people, but most of us learn how to manage that voice.
I've done enough psychedelics in my life to believe that voice to be other.
But I've also done enough reading to understand that nope, it comes with this operating system.
In fact, most of what we know about consciousness comes from brain disorders.
Diseases of dementia, sure, but also split brain patients, temporal lobe epilepsy, schizophrenia, imposter syndrome, there are many.
Most people admit disorders like these are a hardware problem.
Treating disorders as biological issues informs us how the software, consciousness, is distorted, and potentially how to treat the issue.
But if you believe consciousness is produced externally, then you're effectively saying individuals with brain disorders somehow didn't get the right download?
Religions and bigots try to explain such disorders away with metaphysics, but there's only one direction such a train of thought heads in, and it's never anywhere good.
So most of what we experience occurs unconsciously anyway.
We only feel off when our homeostasis is out of whack.
Otherwise, our bodies take care of everything we need, which frees up this thing called mind to dream up the wildest stories imaginable.
And that's awesome.
It's a feature worth celebrating.
But we also take ourselves a little too seriously.
Out of all the billions of animals this world has produced, we feel like we were injected with something special, and we can see the tragedies that that has created in our environment.
Our operating system has also evolved a peculiar penchant for exaggeration.
I love religion and mythology, even though I don't consider any of them to be rooted in fact.
These stories are responses to environments dreamt up with the knowledge base available to our ancestors at that time.
And today, we have a different knowledge base, just as we'll have another one in a hundred years.
And I also love science fiction.
I just don't confuse the narrative invention of an alien race with a belief that I'm chatting with them.
Derek, it's a great summary, so thanks for putting that all together.
But you gotta tell me about the split-brain experiments.
What did they show?
What were those about?
Well, you know our brain is identical on both sides and it's split in half by the corpus callosum.
It's connected by.
It's connected by, exactly.
But that doesn't mean that both sides of the brain have the same functions.
So what Gazzaniga did under Sperry's Tutelage was they were working on splitting the callosum in order to prevent epileptic fits.
And what they noticed was that this asymmetry, it showed that information from the right hemisphere did not penetrate into the left and vice versa.
And one example that's later, and it might actually have been Ramachandran who I know, loves as well and covered on Monday's bonus episode.
It might have been his work, but they showed that imagine having your left eye covered by something.
Well, this was actually blind sight.
This was done with people who are blind in an eye.
So in the right eye, they'll show say a chicken And in the left eye, they'll show a shovel, but they're blind in the left eye, so there's no way they see the shovel.
And then when the researchers asked them to make a sentence about it, they would say, the chicken needed to have his shit scooped up.
And so, there's an implication of a shovel.
And so, really, the split-brain work was showing that you can actually have two different consciousnesses that communicate with one another or are completely blind to one another at different times.
It's absolutely fascinating.
And really, the whole field of cognitive neuroscience is thanks to Gazzaniga's work.
Yeah, and so one side, what the research shows that's really fascinating in terms of the philosophical questions, right, is that one side of your brain can know things that the other side of your brain doesn't know, and vice versa, if the corpus callosum is severed.
And it's almost, one of the famous quotes from Sperry is that it is, As if, and in fact not even as if, there literally now are two consciousnesses, in a way two selves that know different things and may have different feelings and opinions about things once you've split that corpus callosum.
So Ramachandran in one of his speeches, in one of his public talks says, well you know it's very interesting if you believe in a soul then you might say well does the split brain patient now have two souls and when they die depending on what they believe does one go to heaven and one go to hell?
Okay, now does this start to address the very subjectivist problem that I've heard some people raise in relation to this whole discourse, which is that, well, you know, all of these scientists, they're using something called consciousness to study consciousness, and so really how can not consciousness itself, whatever it is, be the first underlying principle that really kind of, you know, it's unspeakable.
Like, how does that begin to address things?
Or does it?
I have a thought here, and these of course are very hotly debated topics in philosophy of mind and in the culture of psychology and neuroscience.
Even though they're hotly debated, the side of the line that most of the academic debate, the vast majority of the academic debate is happening on is the side that says consciousness is a An emergent property of neurobiology.
That's what fits all of the data that we have so far.
But one way I like to think of it is like this.
Consciousness, in a way, is an umbrella term that we have for all these different functions of the brain that arise in our conscious experience.
So we have this conscious experience, which is sort of a space into which the unfolding stream of our experience arises, but we have no access within that space to the underlying workings of the brain for the simple reason that it has no evolutionary value to be able to, you know, in fact, it would get in the way if you were aware of all of the different chemical and neuronal firings and things that were going on that give rise to experience.
So it would drive you mad, right?
Exactly, exactly.
So a really simple way of framing it that I just thought of today is think of a mixing board, right?
And this mixing board has all these different inputs, and the inputs are things like sound, vision, memory, planning, desire, instinctive impulses, right?
They're all converging into this one place where they have to be blended together and prioritized, amplified, taken down in the mix, depending on what's happening in the moment.
When we talk about consciousness as if, or even a sense of self, as if it's this discrete thing that has to be explained in a kind of simple equation, often I think that's a problem of language, when really what we're talking about is several different brain functions, multiple different brain functions that all come together in a way to give us this seamless, absolutely incredible, unique experience of being conscious.
The fact that that experience of being conscious doesn't include an awareness subjectively of our neurobiology doesn't negate the fact that all of the data we have so far shows that neurobiology is the defining process.
Out of which consciousness emerges.
If you have a brain that is intoxicated, diseased, injured, all the different things that can happen in the brain, you then have problems.
You have diminishment.
You have distortion.
You have, in some cases, psychiatric disorders or neurological disorders as a result of damaging the neurobiological tissue.
Now, you could say, well, but the neurobiological tissue might just be, you know, receiving consciousness from somewhere else.
But so far, there's no data that has supported that ever.
Right, well now there are cultures that say that, and this is what I wanted to bring up, because both of you are plant medicine guys, and both of you are familiar with the ayahuasca culture that we covered in that previous episode.
And my understanding is that with a practice like that, what's the term, Derek, for the Corandero.
Corandero.
So my understanding is that the corandero has the feeling that they are receiving the song from another place or from the plant itself and in that sense that they're channeling.
Now, what do they think they're doing and will they use or be happy about using the language of neuroscience to describe what they're doing?
Not to my knowledge, not at least in my experiences.
So let's look at there are two major threads of ayahuasca ceremony and I've only participated in the Shipibo tradition which basically you're giving a set of syllables which in the moment then you create a language and then there's always room for even Improvising on top of those syllables.
But the idea is they don't have an inherent meaning except for in that moment.
And the coronadero believes that he or she is transmitting some sort of healing Essence through these syllables as they sing to the group or when they call you up individually for your personal song.
That it has some frequency or resonance that is going to heal whatever you've come into the ceremony for.
I have never encountered any sort of Any sort of neuroscience languaging with the people that I know in these circles, but then you have people like Charles Graub, who I've interviewed for my book, who did the first sanctioned Western Americans research on ayahuasca, and it has a lot of therapeutic utility
And that was take away the mysticism and just look at brain function and addiction and how these people actually operate, like taking different physiological measures.
So, some people do think of it in those terms, but usually not the people leading the ceremony.
And this is the nature of human culture in general, okay?
We have experiential, phenomenological, artistic, right?
All of these different things that generally have fallen under the heading of the humanities, that they're not concerned with scientific examination.
They're concerned with experiential, philosophical, aesthetic, spiritual meaning and experience, right?
Which is beautiful.
And so out of those disciplines, you don't naturally have arising sort of more science-based explanations, especially science-based explanations that have only become available since we've developed instruments for really being able to look, you know, say at brains, for example, with fMRI scanners.
So you wouldn't expect it to be there.
And all cultures from across the world have had various kinds of beliefs about what is happening when they're having certain spiritual experiences.
Now, if you add on top of that various brain conditions where you may have naturally occurring intense altered states or the intense altered states that arise from psychedelics, It makes perfect sense that from an experiential standpoint, the explanation would be, I went into another realm or I heard voices from another place.
A lot of what is going on is areas in the brain are getting amplified, connected together in novel ways.
You're having a completely new experience of what it is to be a conscious being under the influence of that altered state, whatever has created it.
To me, these things can fit really well together as long as we're clear about certain demarcations and relationships.
And you said amplify, but I want to also point out one of the main markers of psychedelics with the serotonin is shutting down the parts of your brain normally associated with identity.
Yeah, so that's the other thing, right?
And we know this also from studies on meditation.
Andrew Newberg has done fascinating studies on meditation and fMRI scanners.
The moment they became available, I think his first work is 2011 through like 2014, and what he shows is that as you learn how to practice certain meditation techniques, there's a shutting down Of receiving information, say, from the boundaries between your body and the rest of the world, say, of your experience of time and of your location in space.
So naturally, what happens?
All of that stuff shuts down and you say, I'm in this incredible state where I'm one with all things.
I am merged with the universe.
There is no time.
It's all been an illusion all along.
Well, yeah, that's a profound, beautiful experience that may have all sorts of benefit in your life.
But the fact is, you're still sitting in your room on a cushion with your eyes closed, and your brain has gone through some set of changes.
So, I'm bringing up the question from the kind of post-colonial framework of what happens when we use, you know,
Certain frameworks to boil down or to resolve or to explore experiences that either demystify them or disinculturate them in some way, or make them a part of perhaps a psychedelic industry, which I think you've referred to before, Derek, and being concerned about.
That, of course, once the pharmaceutical industry gets involved in psychedelics, there's going to be lots of changes and things are going to be commodified and so on.
And, you know, I remember, I think it was a year or more ago, probably only two years ago, that I finally came across a stat for the number of scientific papers published in the world that are written in English, or the percentage.
Have you come across this yet?
That it's actually 95% of scientific papers published in journals globally are written in the English language.
And the person who pointed this out was saying, imagine what this does to the capacity for cultural understandings or diverse cultural understandings of, you know, You know religious experiences that are now being framed in scientific terms and so on so I guess what I want to ask both of you is Do you see any problem with?
You know those that you know in the plant medicine community because I think you're familiar with that Do you see is there tension in discussing?
This phenomenon from two different angles, or will you what happens when you run into a person who says you know?
The language of neuroscience does not represent or encapsulate the experience or the reality of my ancestors.
Well it doesn't, of course it doesn't.
Please keep it away from me.
And in fact, if you insist that that's what it is, you're killing them all over again.
What I'm about to say will probably be seen as part of the colonialist mindset, but I really believe that whatever culture developed these systems would have progressed in the manner we have.
Amitav Ghosh, who's one of my favorite novelists, points this out in his book on climate change called The Great Derangement, where he points out that the steam engine was being developed in Asia before Europe.
And if China would have had the steam engine before Europe and gotten global domination, climate change would have quickened because of the massive population density in that area.
So I don't get down with this idea that it's only a colonialist mind view.
In fact, if you look at the mindset, if you look at a predominant amount of the research doctoral students in America right now, most of them are immigrants.
So, I understand that there's this like, Western science fascination that we have, but these sciences have been developed.
We know that mathematics was created in Muslim countries, what are now Muslim countries.
People have been pushing boundaries of knowledge for a long time in different areas, and I think you still end up at pretty much the same place regardless of the culture that pushes it forward.
Would it look different if it was in the Chinese language, in Mandarin instead of English?
Possibly a little bit, but you look at what's happening with AI and with gene splicing right now in China, it's pushing forward past what America has the guts to do at this point, and not in a good way per se.
So, I think this level of development isn't dependent upon one specific framework.
Look, it's so fucking complicated, right?
We're talking about aspects of our history, aspects of culture, and colonialism, and racism, and the progress of science, and the tension between scientific understandings of the world and more religious understandings.
This has all been this complicated tangle of issues for so long.
For me, it's a mistake to conflate the scientific worldview with colonialism.
I understand the ways in which oppressed peoples legitimately would feel that the aspects of their culture and of their religion that they hold dear were being insulted or taken away by someone putting a scientific lens on it.
And I think that's a completely inappropriate thing to do on an interpersonal level, on a cultural level, on a social level.
I'm not going to go to South America, for example, and tell shamans that the religion, They're doing it wrong and they should use neuroscience and use scientific language.
Of course not!
But in the context of an intellectual discussion that's drawing on philosophy and what we do know from science and psychology, these are all things that we're going to discuss and regardless of culture, regardless of the time that we're talking about in history, there are certain Things about the world that are discoverable through science that are true no matter who is looking.
And that's just a tough thing we sort of have to reconcile ourselves to if we're going to integrate a scientific worldview.
Well, one last point then, which is if we set the cultural and the colonial issues aside and think more psychologically for a moment, we were discussing over Slack earlier today, Julian, the problem of It's an ambivalent term, right?
which is, you know, it's an ambivalent term, right?
We have, well, actually, a positive term for a loss, I would say, would be disenchantment.
And so, I think there's a lot of people who are confronted with the neuroscience perspective on spiritual experiences, and they feel immediately disenchanted.
They feel as though they are therefore, I don't know, they're...
I don't know, meat puppets or something like that, or they feel a reduction in their free will or something.
That all of these wonderful experiences that came from a kind of networked connection with the rest of the universe that made their lives meaningful are somehow reduced or taken away.
So, yeah, how do you feel about that?
Well, you know, Richard Feynman is this incredible physicist, a very interesting, colorful character that some people may have heard of.
You know, one of the true geniuses of the last couple hundred years.
And he has a fantastic moment from an interview that has been turned into a YouTube video that I encourage anyone to look at that has fantastic animation.
And he says, you know, I have a good friend.
I have a good friend who's an artist, beautiful human being, you know, creative, poetic, spiritual person.
And he says to me, when I look at a flower, I see something that's just absolutely beautiful and sacred and divine.
And it inspires in me, you know, poetic, poetic creativity.
But when you look at it, you just have this reductionistic attitude about it.
And Feynman says, I just, I just don't get it.
Because when I look at that flower through the lens of science, my reverence and my wonder and my fascination with all the deep layers of understanding what's really going on with that flower and how it therefore shows up in the world the way it does that makes us admire its beauty so much.
It's just, it only expands the sense of wonder.
So my sense generally is that there are stages that we go through I think as we as we develop as we grow as we learn and a lot of those stages require letting go of cherished ways of seeing things and that can be scary but on the other side of that I think I would I would just say to people
I have a kind of faith that there is wonder and beauty and sacredness that remains even in the crucible of the kind of examination and healthy skepticism that we often suggest here.
And you have to listen to Feynman, not just read him because his thick Brooklyn accent is fantastic.
But I'll just say that from my many psychedelic experiences, I concur with that sentiment.
It doesn't take away from the wonder and beauty that I have while in it just because I know that it's brain chemistry.
That only adds to it later on in so many ways.
So, I know on our Facebook page, for example, some people have said, well, you just haven't had that experience.
It's like, no, I've had some things that I cannot provide a framework for right now, even now, years later, but that doesn't mean that we will not develop techniques to better understand that moving forward.
That's what evolution is.
That's what science does.
And it did not in any capacity take away from my experiences while I was having them.
Derek, in your great segment, I'm really glad you ended with exaggeration because I think that's a key part of this puzzle.
And I want to say first, in light of what we were just talking about, for all of our spiritual listeners, all of our yogis, meditators, mind, body, healing practitioners, psychedelic initiates, and you know, all three of us fit into at least one, if not several of those categories.
None of what we say today means that there's not an immense value, beauty, and potential in the healing and transformative experiences of the states of consciousness that our practices make possible.
On the contrary, I would argue that the more seriously we take the inner life that is explored via these techniques, the more we indeed see interior experience as the domain of the sacred, the less we then feel compelled to invest in perhaps overly literal or oversimplified interpretations of these experiences in relation to the outside world.
The really difficult thing about spirituality is that it has always existed in a kind of marketplace in which the temptation to exaggerate or overreach in those interpretations is very strong.
Customers simply find the allure of paranormal and supernatural claims very intriguing.
So, for example, we can offer meditation as a way of learning to pay open and curious attention to the workings of our mind, to cultivate skills like equanimity, insight, enhanced body awareness and emotional intelligence, and less identification with our conceptual ego.
That's a lot.
But it's not as effective of a sales pitch as claiming meditation will allow you to travel out of your body and beyond the material world into a domain of pure spirit or give you powers of manifestation or immortality.
And we actually see that type of pitch as going as far back as the history of yoga does.
And some will say that this magical thinking lens is just an early stage, but sadly, I've seen very few who've bought into it completely ever transition completely out.
much.
As an example, again here, one of the most popular words in the modern new age and yoga scene is manifestation.
We're all familiar with the idea that you can create your own reality through the power of your mind.
That concept has always seemed disconnected from actual reality to me, but when I ask my yoga friends about it, they usually respond by saying, oh no no, it's not about magical thinking really, it's just about goal setting and being positive, you know, believing in yourself.
I like those things too.
So why call it manifestation?
I ask.
Usually what follows then is an anecdote that illustrates their firm belief that the universe actually really does give you what you ask for if you know how to do it right.
Which, I'm sorry, to me is a bit like saying that sometimes in life things actually do go your way.
I mean that's nice, but you're not saying much.
I have a simpler and more streamlined explanation for why they call it manifestation though.
It sells better.
It has more juju.
It's got glitter on it, a whiff of essential oils.
It's just sexier.
You know, any mundane coach can sit you down and help you work on identifying and accomplishing your goals.
But the secret art of spiritual manifestation, now that will grant you access to the true abundance of the universe.
This has the special power to magnetize all of your dollars right into the pockets of those offering a more sizzling promise of how to magically get what you want on the material plane.
And it's also a classic form of spiritual bypass in ways that I think add to people's suffering because if the answer to your poverty or loneliness or depression or marginalization or low self-esteem is learning how to manifest by the power of your mind, then you only have yourself to blame if and when it doesn't work.
But I know, we're talking about channeling today.
I have a strong hunch that for the vast majority of the ever-increasing percentage of people in New Age circles claiming to be channelers, it's quite similar.
They have a set of ideas they've picked up around the scene, and it's books, seminars, videos, etc.
Perhaps they even have their own spin on those ideas, but so do lots of people.
You know, yoga teachers, other Instagram influencers, everyone in the sector really traffics in these declarative pronouncements about the universe and higher consciousness, manifestation, awakening, and the ultimate significance of the times we just so happen to be incarnated during.
The amazing cosmic portal that opens now apparently every time the sun enters a new constellation.
So, with everyone talking about that stuff, no one is really an authority.
One effective way to stand out is to express the same familiar metaphysical platitudes, but either claim you have heard them internally from a sublime source, or to speak as if you've been taken over by that source, be it an archangel, alien, ancient king, or just a spirit with a name that sounds somewhat like it comes from ancient Egypt.
Throw in some prophecy and a hard-to-pin-down new accent or odd speech pattern if you really want a lot of attention.
Channeling and things like mediumship or being psychic sizzle because by some sleight of hand the willing believer is ushered into a new room in the house of their lives in which a host of metaphysical, supernatural, spiritual beliefs are quickly assumed as obviously true based on their confidence that they're being presented with the utterances of a being from the other side.
To me, though, this is the antithesis of what I see as the promise of awareness practices or mind-body-inner-work.
You know, empathically intuitive conversations are beautiful and can be healing and revelatory, creating space for healing touch, meditation, breathwork.
Any number of practices or methods can be legitimate and honest, but they just don't have the same shimmer, shine, and price tag as they do when merged with paranormal claims.
One of the most problematic aspects of this is the intensified halo effect that believers will often project onto the channeler, an illusion which usually confers some sense of special spiritual advancement and insight, and can then overlook dysfunction or abuse, or just being way out of their scope of practice or expertise.
As with guru claims of enlightenment or actual personal divinity, the power over others that channeling can give to people who are both gifted enough performers and cold-blooded enough manipulators is immense.
So I want to talk about Jay-Z Knight as an example, probably the most famous and successful channel of our lifetime, if not of all time.
She was born Judith Darlene Hampton in Roswell, New Mexico in 1946.
She has since the late 70s claimed to channel a 35,000-year-old Lemurian warrior named Ramtha.
Knight lives in a 12,800-square-foot home in Yelm, Washington, on the same 80-acre estate as the Ramtha School of Enlightenment, founded in 1988, which as of 2014 employed 80 staff members and attracted more than 6,000 which as of 2014 employed 80 staff members and attracted more than 6,000 students a year, an estimated total of between 50,000 and 75,000 students just So lots of people do stuff.
Do other kinds of courses via audio programs.
An elite group of students are reportedly charged as high as $5,000 per day to receive teachings directly from Ramtha as channeled by Ms.
Knight.
Now, it seems the exact financial details of her operation are closely guarded, but we do know, for example, that sales of books, DVDs, and audio programs in 2007 in the U.S.
alone brought in profits of $2.6 million.
But that's nothing because in 2008, sales of these media and tickets to live seminars expanded massively to now be in the markets of 20 different countries.
Ex-husband of Jay-Z Knight named Jeff Knight and her former personal bodyguard Glenn Cunningham have said that the Ramtha School of Enlightenment is a cult, And that Jay Z has always just been acting.
Former students have accused her of brainwashing and mind control and of using intimidation, like the assertion that failure to remain loyal to Ramtha would lead to becoming the prey of...
Wait for it, the lizard people!
If we had time, I could list all the abusive and dysfunctional dynamics via accounts of former students, but listeners can look those up if you're interested.
There's a lot.
While channeling Ramtha, Night has also been recorded hatefully ranting about Jews, Mexicans, blacks, and gays.
And wouldn't you know it, she's also a big player in local politics and has notably donated over $70,000 to the GOP and Trump groups in 2019 and 2020.
Dr. Northrup, eat your heart out.
But the bottom line for today, Channeling is big business and there's a huge market for it.
Jay-Z Knight just sitting in front of people sharing her spiritual ideas without the theater of being possessed by an ancient Lemurian warrior spirit never builds an empire quite like this.
And on that note, I think we've got to run a few minutes of her famous appearance on the Merv Griffin Show in 1985.
I think Derek has it cued up.
So here's where she's gonna do her thing. - The beloved master.
You are well this day in your time.
Yes, thank you.
Sit down here.
This is that which is called television.
The tube.
To capture a moment forever.
You were a little tough to wake up today.
Were you sleeping when we got to you?
Wake up?
Were you sleeping?
What a slumber entity.
I am never in slumber.
Awake at all times.
At all times.
It is a wondrous place here, Entity.
And you're my first 35,000-year-old guest.
To that which is called I, Entity B, an enigma, and what is 35,000 years old?
You're a scientist, is the term?
They have not found the great civilizations yet.
They will.
Your home was Atlantis?
That was a place that at which I lived, but I was a pilgrim from a land called Mu.
What is your most important message that you want everyone on this planet to hear, to know?
Is there one That which is termed as it were indeed God, which have been misunderstood, which have been taught to live outside of your being, is within your being.
That which is called Christ is within your being.
So profound.
Oh my gosh.
Let me just, can I just intro this?
So from the video clip that we have, which will be in the show notes, she actually goes through probably a 45 second induction act where she slumps down into her chair and then seems to fall over in sleep.
And of course, she screws up her own act because Merv doesn't use the word sleep or doesn't use the word slumber.
She repeats him quizzically as though he had said the word slumber.
And what is the accent?
Is it like, I'm thinking, who's the little alien guy who's the cartoon in the Jetsons?
I can't remember.
He kind of walks around and orders people around.
There's also a little bit of Natasha from Boris and Natasha.
I mean, the thing too, for anyone who's not familiar with her, is that's always how she starts.
And so there's a lot of her fans in the audience.
I actually clipped down some of the cheering because it goes on for a while, but she has a lot of followers in the audience.
And what she does is whenever she channels Ramtha, she goes through her whole kind of performance of all the different body movements and stuff.
And then when Ramtha comes through, he always says, Indeed!
And the whole crowd responds back, Indeed!
And that's the sign that now Ramtha is in the building.
Wow, right.
incredibly um bad and and like implausible and and he she had a very sympathetic interviewer with Merv who's who's an entertainer uh he was never really a total comedian guy like uh Johnny Carson uh but he was interested in transcendental meditation and he had uh Maharishi on twice in 1975 and 77 I think um but like It's hard to imagine.
It strikes me, here's something I just thought of, right?
That in a way, this type of channeling, okay, what she is doing represents the intersection of very bad acting that would never make you any money, and very bad spiritual philosophy that would never ever make you any money, combining because of this ruse of channeling into something that makes you a multi-millionaire.
Yeah, but why?
Why are two terrible skill sets, how do they somehow like alchemize into big bucks?
I don't get it.
How did she recruit?
When people believe that what they're seeing is someone from 35,000 years ago who is a disembodied entity talking through you, there's a certain market for that of people who just find that absolutely compelling.
Right.
And they're willing to give up, you know, they're willing to give up a lot in their lives for it.
You know, one thing that I want to point out before we move on to our contemporary, of course, Jay-Z Knight is still around and she's important because she's been a big QAnon booster of late.
She's going to be around for another 35,000 years.
I know, I know.
Well, maybe we'll be channeling her next.
Yes, we get to channel her.
Yeah, I mean, we're going to take a look at Lori Ladd, we're going to take a look at Elizabeth April, a guy named Paul Selig, and except for Paul Selig, the influencers that are really popular on the conspirituality circuit right now, they are not doing this performed induction and sort of direct performance of the the channeling, what they're actually doing is they're saying that the channeling is happening backstage.
And then they're coming out onto Instagram and they're saying, hey, this is what I just heard from the Galactic Federation.
So they're not actually doing the performance, they're reporting on it.
And I think, I don't know whether that's a sign of development in the channeling world where it just wouldn't be plausible for Jay-Z Knight to sell that kind of bullshit to an Instagram audience.
But But I don't know.
I don't know.
Have you seen anything like her schtick amongst any of the contemporary younger channelers?
No, I think that what happens is the way that it's presented keeps evolving over time, right?
In a way, you almost have to have a new gimmick or a new way of doing it if you're actually going to do the performative thing.
And I think you're right that with a lot of the people that we're looking at, it's less performative and more reporting on what came through.
Yeah, and reporting with this kind of like, well, of course you're going to believe me that I was just chatting with the Federation, or my guides just told me this.
It's kind of incredible.
Like, there's still a kind of threshold of buy-in that I can't... It's amazing to think of how many people step over it.
Alright, so here we have Lori Ladd, and we'll just play a one-minute clip from her most recent Instagram post.
Happy Wednesday.
I love you.
Sending you a very big virtual hug wherever you are on the earth plane in this now moment.
All right, so I want to remind us again of what's going on here.
Again, we can't hear this enough.
Here you go.
Regardless of what the external reality looks like, this is how an entire human collective shifts.
So it might not be what we expect, it might not be what we want, it might not be the way in which we would like it to unravel, it may be the exact way we want it to unravel.
But this is how we slowly click And move from one frequency to a little bit higher frequency to a little bit higher frequency.
All right, cool.
So we've been using this term content-free a lot in our streams and I think Lori Loud will outlast everyone in this industry because she seems to be the most content-free of all.
I actually can't, there doesn't seem to be anything to sync There was one point at which she released a video that said that Trump was a lightworker, and I'm wondering whether that's going to harm her brand in the long run.
I guess it depends on the absorption of the cognitive dissonance amongst her followers.
That clip is the perfect example of how the Barnum Statement gets reiterated in this new format, right?
You might be feeling this, that, or the other, or it might I want to point out that she's also starting youth groups, which is a little bit disturbing to me, but maybe she's recalling the fact that she realized, according to her own origin story, that at the age of 13, she says, I knew I had volunteered to come down here on this planet for this lifetime to wake up humanity and to help shift humanity into the next level of consciousness.
She describes having a very new agey mom and only being able to talk to her and her new agey friends for the next 20 years about this material and about the experiences that she was having which included a bout of drug use and alcohol use from the age of 12 to 17 and then of course she has a crisis moment as she says I remember sitting outside the park one night.
I was 17 and I looked up at the stars and I remember thinking to myself, I said out loud, looking up at the star systems, I said, I want to go home.
I said, I'm done.
I don't want to be here anymore.
I want to go home.
And I didn't know really what that meant.
I knew what it felt like.
And I knew I'd been feeling that way for a while.
And I was looking at the Pleiades and that's the seven sisters.
So anyway, this is where it begins for her.
Now, Elizabeth April has a similar crisis story in her teenage years.
She describes being 16, beginning to question everything in her physical reality.
Nothing made sense.
This is all from her About page.
And then at 18, she says, I was consciously abducted by aliens.
And then she writes, yep, that's right.
I said it, aliens.
Up until that point, I had never really considered the existence of aliens.
What's interesting is that she doesn't say anything specific about what they looked like or what the ship was or whether she had their food or whether they had a bathroom or how long she was gone.
There was no details at all.
So there's just kind of like this pop of, here's what happened to me.
And of course, you're going to believe it.
Now, she's important in conspirituality because she's regularly boosted by Northrop.
But she also got in on the Save the Children theme in a big way when it was at its peak in July.
And And we've got a clip of that.
I guess the first thing that I want to say is that this is going to be the single most important video that I ever do.
Ever.
In my entire career.
I didn't realize how important this topic was until I started channeling it.
And I didn't expect what came out to come out.
So I want to say that if you feel nauseous during this video, It means that you're shifting and that you're healing.
And when I was writing the information of this video down as it was channeling through me, I almost threw up probably about three or four times.
I shouldn't have to say this, but this video definitely isn't for children, so hopefully you know that and you're taking the appropriate steps.
I do want to say that this video is meant to be a DNA activating, healing, deeply cathartic gift to all of you from the universe.
Amazing.
I mean, and she gives that whole video, which ends up being an hour long or something like that, with this very tear-strained, mascara-stained face.
And, of course, her subject matter is, you know, something that she says she knew nothing about until she started channeling it, but of course, you know, the Save the Children QAnon material was also at its peak at that time.
That's what jumps out at me.
Do these channelers ever have topics that are not of the moment?
Right, right.
I just happen to be channeling the thing that's trending as a hashtag.
Yeah, you say, like so far we've listened to about half the clips.
I know we have a few more.
I've heard nothing of any substance, period, of any of anything.
Nothing that wasn't ambiguous and that actually pointed to pertinent information that could be useful to anyone.
Well, I think that she underlines the point of the experience of sitting with her as being the main driver by talking about the, you know, impending video as a purification or DNA re-altering exercise or something like that.
And if you have a purgation, if you throw up, then it's kind of like being at a plant medicine ceremony because, you know, you're giving up all kinds of toxins that you, and history, Is this like a channeler's form of Shaktiput?
Is that what they're trying to get at?
It really seems like it and I think it's worth noting too that like of all of the channelers she has Style she has visual pop like she has some supermodel stuff going on and like incredible high-definition Video work and her you know voice sounds like a million bucks.
She really does look like she's you know produced by you know a level la music producers or something like that like I So there's something about the texture of everything that's really important as well, in terms of Shaktipat, right?
And so far, we've not been talking about people who have small audiences, right?
These are all people who are reaching many, many thousands of people.
Hundreds of thousands.
Hundreds of thousands.
Are you about to talk about Paul Selig?
I am, yeah.
Okay, so I just wanted to say, as part of how we set this up, that there was a really, really nice, thoughtful guy who had a long conversation with me in one of the comments threads, and one of the people, he kept saying, you know, you're cherry-picking people who are, you know, sort of low-hanging fruit.
These are people who are really easy to debunk.
You should go and check out Paul Selig.
This guy will really convince you that.
And so we did.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay, so let's take a listen to Paul.
Everything can be re-known, underline everything, underline everything from the higher octave, from the higher octave, which is a reinterpretation, which is a reinterpretation of reality, of reality as it exists, as it exists, in different dimensional knowing, in a different, they're saying dimensional knowing, now we will explain this for Paul, Now, we will explain this for Paul.
Yes, a pencil is a pencil.
Yes, a pencil is a pencil on the lower energy, in the lower energy, or the upper room, or the upper room, with the realization of the pencil.
But the realization of the pencil, and the divine as pencil, and the divine as pencil is also present in the upper room, is also present in the upper room, because you haven't excluded the pencil, because you haven't excluded the pencil.
The pencil may be used The pencil may be used to write anything, to write anything but what is written with a pencil, but what is written with a pencil in the upper room, in the upper room will be very different, will be very different because the consciousness, because the consciousness that's informing this, that's informing this has been transformed, has been transformed, period.
Amazing stuff.
Now this guy is, seems to be extraordinarily earnest.
He presents himself very well on Marcus Aubrey's podcast.
He's a professor at Goddard College, which is kind of like the center of, you know, Bernie Sanders, you know, progressive political culture.
And apparently he's been kind of shy about being such a weirdo and having this, you know, this weird skill that he has.
And he also says in a PDF, an article that we'll post to the show notes, that the repetition is him repeating the initially heard voice.
So he's verbalizing the voice that comes through sort of intuitively, and then he repeats it, I guess, for himself or for clarity for the audience.
But it really reminds me of, there's a story by Mordecai Rickler, who's a famous Canadian author, now passed away.
It's a children's story, It's called Jacob Tutu and the Hooded Fang.
It's written in 1975.
And this kid, he's the youngest member of the family.
He has to repeat everything twice in order to be heard.
And that's all I hear with this is that there's this kind of wordplay that is involved in the kind of I don't trance of the experience here that really just sounds like a game, you know?
And again, totally content-free jargon.
You know, I suppose you could bake it down like QAnon crumbs or whatever, but like, I can't tell what it means.
It makes me think of the old MTV, they used to have this image that they would pop up on the screen in the early days of MTV, which was Rene Magritte, the famous image of the pipe against the kind of background, and it says, this is not a pipe in French, right?
It's like he's doing some philosophical treatise on the nature of how language attaches to the world, but in a very sort of banal and non-interesting way.
Right, so I wonder why is it channeled?
Like, why was it not cool being a professor?
I'm wondering what happened.
Okay, so not all channels, right?
I can hear people who are listening saying, of course, there are charlatans, but what about those who are not building an empire like JZ Knight?
What about those who are not just acting and fooling people?
Well, My sense is that in many cases what is called channeling is a kind of light trance state akin to Carl Jung's active imagination, in which stream-of-consciousness creative speech or writing happens, which may in some cases be more intuitive or insightful than the person's everyday self.
As with language like manifestation or being psychic, channeling has a kind of watered-down meaning for a lot of people that may be an inevitable side effect of it being monetized as a skill you too can learn in a workshop setting.
Okay, okay, they say, but what about others who really are absolutely sincere in reporting that they have hyper-real experiences in which they find they are literally being taken over or talked directly to by external intelligences?
Of course, it sounds mean-spirited or arrogant or even ableist.
To suggest that there may be a psychiatric or neurological explanation for the very real experiences these folks are interpreting as supernatural.
And usually people will respond to this by saying the channels they know are all very sane people.
Perhaps you're even a channel listening and you're thinking that, you know, I'm sane, don't say that I'm not.
Because perhaps, usually they're only thinking of mental illnesses that make everyday life unmanageable.
But I want to introduce something to the conversation now, and it's called temporal lobe epilepsy.
It's actually a really good fit here.
And so too might be a psychological profile of being very prone to fantasy, easily entering hypnotic trance, and in some cases being well-practiced in entering dissociative states, either from a traumatic history or from being taught how to do so in a spiritual setting, or both, because a traumatic history can predispose you to being drawn into learning how to do so even further because you're already good at it in a spiritual setting.
Now before we talk about temporal lobe epilepsy, I want to introduce Susan Blackmore here.
She's a neuroscience researcher and philosopher.
She's interesting because she spent the first 20 years of her career in paranormal research based on a fascinating out-of-body experience she had at university after smoking dope.
She has since, over those 20 years, comes to the conclusion that the reason she found no evidence for the paranormal is probably because it's just not there.
She's also a very dedicated Zen Buddhist meditator.
This is a clip of Susan Blackmore talking about visiting the lab of Dr. Michael Persinger, who created something he called the God Helmet that would use magnetic fields to induce paranormal experiences by stimulating the temporal lobes of the brain.
They put me on this lovely, lying back in this nice chair, put the motorcycle helmet on, say nice soothing words, shut the great huge fat door, it's totally soundproof, completely silent, in a silent room, you know, and I'm lying there, complete silence, and, you know, I have to talk and say what's happening to me for the TV.
Well, I have been in situations like that without the motorcycle helmet.
I've often been, you know, in sensory deprivation, in Gansfeld, where you have ping pong balls on the eyes and white noise.
So, this is a familiar situation to me.
And what happened was not familiar at all.
There I was, lying there.
And really nothing much happened, slight drifty, drifty feelings, like I would expect.
And then suddenly, I felt as though my whole body was getting stretched longer and longer and longer, and as though my left leg was being pulled right up the wall, as though it had sort of like stretched, you know?
And then it went back again, and that was so sudden and so weird, I was like, wow, that's, you know, really weird.
And then it was as though somebody had got hold of my shoulders, and was like pulling Pulling my shoulders as though it was pulling me up.
So I simultaneously knew that I was still lying down on this thing, and yet felt that I was sitting up.
So, fine, nothing happens for a bit.
I'm just lying there, just drifty sort of, you know, feelings.
A bit as though I might be on the verge of having an out-of-body experience, but it never really happened.
That sort of a feeling.
And then suddenly I was angry.
Really bizarre.
It was just... I was... ...pure asleep.
Do you know how sometimes you get angry?
You just... ...really, you know... ...so mad!
That sort of feeling, suddenly... ...there wasn't anything to be angry about, you know?
And then it was gone!
And... I don't know.
Okay.
And then suddenly I was really frightened in the same kind of way.
I don't know what I was frightened of.
It was just this awful fear.
That creepy, skin-crawling, horrible fear... ...came over me and went away again.
And these experiences were so powerful that the thought I was left with, really, was this.
I knew I had this motorcycle helmet on.
You know, I could say, oh, well, you know, this is because of the motorcycle helmet.
But what if you had those experiences without a motorcycle helmet?
Okay, so now, here's Michael Shermer.
You may know him as the prolific author and founder of Skeptic Magazine, talking about his experience of the God Helmet.
I sit in the dark in perfect silence for nearly an hour.
And yes, even a skeptic's mind can start to play tricks on him.
I feel a presence rush by me.
In fact, I'm not sure that it wasn't me running past myself.
I know it sounds crazy, but I really did sense that someone was in the room with me, courtesy of the magnetic influences being created on my temporal lobes.
What's happening to Michael now is he's being exposed to a complex magnetic field.
The pulse being generated is that which is associated with opiate-like experiences such as floating and pleasantness and spinning sometimes.
Halfway through my hour of isolation, the computer begins generating a markedly darker experience for my brain.
At this point, there is now another pattern being generated.
It's primarily being generated along the right hemisphere, which means it tends to be more associated with more terrifying experiences.
That's right, folks.
He said terrifying.
Under these conditions, volunteers have reported meeting the devil, being grabbed by aliens, even being transported to hell.
At the end of the hour, I could honestly report that temporal lobe stimulation had been responsible for not only a sensed presence, but an out-of-body experience as well.
In the first one, it felt like That's when that thing that sort of went by me I wasn't sure if it was me leaving or somebody there's something came by me or something it was very strange and then in the second round I did have it was the feeling like I was in sort of in waves and then like I wanted to come out of my body but I kept going back in yeah I can really see how
If somebody was maybe slightly more fantasy prone and tends to interpret environmental stimuli in a sort of paranormal way, this kind of experience would be a real wild trip.
That's some of what happens when the temporal lobes are overstimulated under laboratory conditions.
For people who have temporal lobe epilepsy, Short-lived seizures can manifest with no external symptoms.
The seizures are like electrical storms that overload the connections between sensory and emotional centers in the temporal lobes on either side of the brain.
No helmet or magnets required.
Experientially, this results in powerful surges of heightened and altered colors, sounds, and sensations, but also of an emotional saturation, a sense of profound emotional significance attached to the altered state that has suddenly arisen.
And then, of course, an ensuing wild stream of thoughts trying to make sense of what it all means.
This is something I've actually researched and written about quite extensively.
And we know from history that several famous and consequential historical figures have experiences that fit this profile, from the biblical Saul on the road to Damascus, remember who fell down off of his horse and changed from Saul to Paul, went from being a non-believer in Jesus to converting as a result of that intense experience, to Pope Pius IX, Joan of Arc, Emperor Constantine, Muhammad, and Ellen G. White, who founded the Seventh Day Adventists.
I'll go into more detail in my weekend recording for our Patreon supporters, but suffice it to say that this neurological explanation for very powerful, sudden,
and naturally occurring altered states that humans tend to interpret as supernatural, both fits the phenomena reported and can be present in people with no typical psychiatric symptoms, who indeed might be wise, compassionate, eloquent, conscientious, and sane in all other respects.
They just have this unique, undeniable, powerful experience that's part of their interior spiritual life.
And we have talked before about something called Geschwind's Syndrome, that is a variant of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, and it includes three telltale factors, hyper-religiosity, hypergraphia, which is the compulsion to write and write and write, which I would speculate could also be hyper-social media content creation in our times, and also atypical sexuality, usually, but not always, in the direction of suppressed
Sexuality, for some reason, the way this plays out in the brain.
That's really interesting given that the major religions of the world have at their center voluminous sacred texts written by people claiming to be in direct contact with the supernatural presence who are often quite conflicted about sexuality.
It's a fairly good fit.
What appears to be unexplainable, except via the supernatural, can often be a good entry point into learning more about what the science and psychology that contextualizes the topic has to say.
I know this can seem like it reduces the sense of mystery many associate with spirituality, but for me, learning more about the brain only increases awe and wonder at the multifaceted complexity of being human.
So I want to end this part of the episode with not some breaking news, I suppose, but a kind of a realization that I've had, which is that I believe Christiane Northrup is primarily inspired by the Romper Room Mirror.
Now, this comes out of Northrop not having dropped anything since the 19th, when she claimed that her Great Awakening installment wouldn't post.
She posted that to Facebook, but then in the previous post, she was doing her thing, of course, talking about the nervous energy of Uranus and so on.
But then in this video on Instagram, she pulled out a holiday card from a follower.
It had a gold leaf bird on it, a peacock maybe, and She praised it, and she thanked the viewer for it, and this is a repeated theme that she engages.
She names the followers, she connects with them, she praises them.
Some send her jewelry, some send her little poems, some refer her on to other channelers.
It's all very chatty and you know, social.
And in thinking about why this is so compelling to so many people, like what deep cultural ties she might be pulling on, I thought, again, she just rocks the mom so hard, but also kind of like church lady social coordinator.
But then I thought, also, children's TV host from the 1960s, and then I realized that she reminded me of Miss Nancy from Romper Room.
So here's an outro clip from 1984 where Miss Nancy looks out through her magic mirror at all the kids out there and does kind of what Christiane Northrup does, somehow impossibly makes them all feel seen and loved.
Miss Nancy is not adding in anti-vax paranoia.
So yeah, I mean, here we go.
Romper-bomper, stomper-boom.
And in Christiane Northrup's lingo, it's kind of like Great Awakening jargon.
I did.
I had a Superman day.
You had a Superman day?
Well, I'm glad to hear that.
Spider-Man day.
Good, I'm glad to hear that.
Well, you know what?
Wait!
You know what time it is?
It's time for me to see the friends at home in the magic mirror.
Romper-bomper, stomper-boo, tell me, tell me, tell me do.
Magic Mirror, tell me today, did all my friends have fun at play?
All my friends had fun today.
I see David's having a special day today.
And Olivia Joy had a special day on Sunday.
I see Robin had a special day yesterday.
And Dana's having a special day today.
And so is Reginald, and Edward, John, and Margaret.
And I see, I see Justin, and Megan, and Courtney, and Brick, and Mark, and Rachel, and Sheila, and Caroline are all having special days.
and Cicely and Ashley and Matthew and Jose.
And I see Bonnie and Anthony and Joe had special days yesterday.
And so did Tammy and Brandon and Gregory.
And of course, friends, you know I see you.
And I'll see you again. - So finally in this episode, we have an interview that I did with Susanna Crockford, which is fascinating.
Her research interests center on the use of ethnography to explore narratives of spirituality, millenarianism, and climate change.
Now, she did her PhD thesis, which was called After the American Dream, Political Economy and Spirituality in Northern Arizona, based on her fieldwork in Sedona, and her doctorate was awarded in July of 2017 by the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Now, one current project she's involved with utilizes ethnographic methodologies to collect and analyze personal narratives of interconnection and interdependence of humans, non-humans, and the climate.
Here we are, speaking.
Thank you for taking the time, Susanna.
Hi, no problem.
And great work on the Q Shaman piece in Religion Dispatches.
I always really appreciate when researchers can jump in and do public scholarship at critical times, so thank you for that.
But I wanted to say you might have seen that some new footage, I think published by the New Yorker Investigator, shows him very competently leading What looks like a legit evangelical prayer from the rostrum inside the Senate and he even takes off his horns very respectfully.
Now, I don't know his background enough to know whether or not that brand of Christianity is in it, but I'm just wondering whether it surprised you that he was able to fit right in and be accepted shoulder to shoulder with I don't know, relative normies to the extent that normies sack a capital.
I'm just wondering what this says to you about his already eclectic beliefs and the faith motivators at play in that event.
So I would say no, it wasn't actually that surprising to me.
For one thing, he's obviously comfortable with the concept of Jesus Christ, so he has some element of Christianity in his background.
And this is, you know, this is shown in the interviews he's given, where he talks about Christ.
And, I mean, if we're talking about J.K.
Angelou, the Q Shaman, as someone who is into New Age spirituality, Jesus Christ fits within, you know, the kind of pantheon of deities or beings that is accepted.
You know, a lot of people talk about Christ consciousness, you know, they talk about Jesus as an ascended master.
So while he doesn't have like the preeminent place that he has in evangelical Christianity, Jesus is there.
And you know, J. Gallagher is from Phoenix, Arizona.
And so it's entirely likely that somewhere through his upbringing, if he's like at all looking for kind of I think we've got a number of elements there.
then at some point he will go to an evangelical Christian church because that is extremely popular and common in this state.
So I think we've got a number of elements there.
I mean, possibly what's slightly more surprising is that others would accept him because, you know, he's just kind of like yelling horn wearing, you know, tattooed man who, you know, quite obviously has a range of different symbols that he uses.
But, you know, again, the crowd was kind of made up of many disparate elements, and they seemed to kind of be working on the principle of, you know, if you're with us, then you're fine.
You know, there was also someone dressed as Captain Moroni from LDS mythology there.
So there's a lot of different elements in play, I would say, and I don't think they were that concerning in terms of, like, Yeah, he was clearly on their side, so I think he was fine in that respect.
It seemed like the moment of tension was very easily smoothed over.
There was a point at which he's in the gallery and he's chanting, or he's doing a war cry, or however he would describe it, but a few minutes later he sort of grandly enters through the top of the chamber.
Down onto the floor as he's heading up to the rostrum, and there's a moment where one of the guys on the floor is shouting up at him to stop playing the fool.
And then that kind of drops when he's obviously able to not just, you know, be at home with and find common cause with these guys, but probably also do a better prayer than they're able to do.
Because his, like, you know, his articulation was excellent, his voice is booming, they were in the spirit.
It was pretty impressive.
Yeah.
Yeah, you know, he has this really loud voice.
Like when you watch him at the other protests in Arizona that there's footage of, like, that's clearly something that he utilizes a lot is this kind of big booming voice.
And he does kind of what he calls war chants.
He does, you know, he would often have a drum.
So he like, he chants, he sings.
And, you know, obviously he's well versed in prayer.
Yeah, I think as soon as he started up doing something that, you know, I think that maybe the discomfort would be that he was just yelling.
And then when he starts yelling about Jesus, that's okay.
You know, I think that was the shift that kind of kind of made him seem or made it that he, you know, everyone else was comfortable with what he was doing.
There was also a sense that, you know, once he got rolling that he was some sort of channel, and that's the main part of what I wanted to ask you about today.
So, he raises his hand, he closes his eyes.
There's a sense that the voice, that his voice is booming, is megaphoning something from the great beyond.
And so, is there a relationship between this kind of speaking in the spirit and You know, what is now popularly known as channeling.
Is there a standard definition for channeling as opposed to that kind of evangelical speech that you would use in religious studies?
What are some of the issues involved in trying to understand this kind of speech?
So there's a number of questions there.
I would say that in terms of like a definition of channeling, um, in religious studies, probably not enough people have written about it for that to be an accepted definition.
Um, I did look up the definition that I used.
Um, and I, okay.
And this, I think channeling in terms of, um, how different is from the kind of, uh, like, That more kind of charismatic, Pentecostal inspired speech, I think that would be very much what we would call an emic distinction.
I think they would see it quite differently.
So, okay, so my definition of channeling was that it's receiving messages from a non-human entity such as the dead, aliens, the higher self, something in the future, or the universe itself.
self and then relaying it most often verbally, but it can also be accomplished through automatic writing.
Now, inspired speech in terms of the kind of charismatic Pentecostal evangelical traditions, they would say that it's God speaking through them.
Right.
But equally, someone who's a channeler would say, you know, this is the alien speaking This is, you know, the spirit of this dead person speaking through me.
So on a functional level, it looks very similar.
But they would distinguish it, I think, from what they're doing.
And, you know, when people in religious studies study these things, they do talk about them comparatively.
You know, there's some really good work on, by Tanya Lerner, for example, on when people, when God speaks to people, especially evangelical Christians, and like, what is it like when God speaks to you?
What does it feel like?
What kind of, what does it look like?
And then on the other hand, we have work from people who, for example, Michael Brown, he wrote this book called The Channeling Zone in 1999, who have studied channelists.
He was in New Mexico.
And, you know, kind of what does that look like?
And often the comparison that's made is actually not between the two, but between channeling and things like spirit possession and mediumship cross-culturally.
Right.
Well, it brings me back to a point that we sort of touched on as we speak about the Q Shaman, which is his acceptability within that team that took the rostrum.
I wonder if a primary, I mean one thing that I think I would expect there to be friction around is that while they might be doing the same thing, his commitment is not only to Jesus.
And as you said, within New Age spirituality that Christ can be an ascended master or can be You know, what did you say, that we can appeal to Christ consciousness, but there's no exclusivity, like he's going to be compared to other entities or utilized in the same way as other entities.
And so, like I'm wondering whether there's something almost like,
imperialistic or, I don't know, colonizing about the New Age in the sense that it can collect whatever it wants and utilize it, whereas, you know, from the perspective of the Pentecostal, the person who's speaking the voice of God, they have to be very careful about who's actually flowing through them because it can't be the wrong person.
Yes, so I would say your characterization for New Age spirituality is exactly right.
So there's this idea of universalism in New Age spirituality, that anything can be used as your source.
But this in itself is, I would say, it's imperialistic.
So there's this imperialism of universalism that you are the one who is positioned to go around and pick and choose as you want.
And everything else is just open and available as a source to you, regardless of how people who are already connected to that source material may feel about it. - Yeah.
And on the other hand, yes, an evangelical christian, you have to be very careful because if what you're kind of, I don't want to say channeling, but if what you're bringing through is judged to be demonic, for example, then suddenly you may find yourself in an exorcism rather than speaking the word of God.
And there's, when you read works that are kind of dedicated to that kind of kind of performance, then there's a lot of steps that are taken when someone starts, say, speaking in tongues to say, you know, is this a devil?
Is this the devil?
Is this a demon?
You know?
Oh, wow.
So there's actually there's a protocol or is there is there's a Rosetta Stone or something like that for the others?
There is, but it kind of varies depending on the church.
So when I'm thinking really of vineyard churches and John Bielecki's work, he's written about this in detail.
It's not something I'd study myself.
And so not all, I don't want to kind of say that, yes, In every single church they do this, but at least from what I've read about certain types of charismatic churches, you know, there are steps they will take to try and ascertain what is the entity that's speaking through this person.
And so it can often be based on audience response.
Whereas in the New Age, it's much more accepting.
You know, if someone sits down in front of you and says that they're channeling an entity from Sirius, most people go, okay.
Yeah, there's no, I mean, I was going to bring this up later, but I might as well bring it up now, is that one of the things that I think I've noticed and we've noticed on the podcast about the channelers that are wrapped up in, you know, conspirituality or QAnon materials, and they use the Galactic Federation, for example, as a proxy for basically, it seems to be spreading QAnon propaganda, is that there's no
filter or sort of ritual guardrail for making sure that the information is valid.
You really just have to trust the person.
And it's amazing to watch them actually just ask for that trust, but not even have to ask because, you know, if they've shown up on Instagram, then they've got a message and that's just what it's going to be.
So there's a very big difference there.
There's no community holding them in check.
Well, I think there is a community, I just think it's in a different place.
And it kind of operates differently.
So in terms of the channelers, their community is online.
People will speak through their YouTube videos when they're channeling.
They will often use a range of various different platforms to connect people who are interested in the messages they're receiving.
So they have a community, it's online.
There's a vast, vast range in success of people who channel you can have you know your influence probably some of the people that you've come across uh who have like thousands of followers and can actually be supported from the remittances they receive through their channel messages and through the direct one-to-one sessions that they will give online much as we're speaking to each other now that you can do the same thing but with a channeler and you can pay for the messages that they're giving you um
So if you don't want to hear about QAnon content, that's not what you buy into.
In New Age spirituality, it's really a vote with your feet kind of authorization from the community.
But their community isn't in their physical surroundings.
So that is different.
And I have seen channelers in person Uh, authorized in a way what they're doing or to kind of show up, they're putting some kind of guardrails.
For example, I saw a channeler once, this was in the Sedona Public Library.
Oh, I have stories.
Um, so she, when she started channeling, she channels a group of entity called the Orion Council.
Galactic Council is used a lot.
There's not really any ownership over any of these entities, right?
Galactic Council is QAnon.
I could also channel Galactic Council and they could be purely peace and love, right?
This channeler, her name's Krista, she channeled the Orion Council, and when she did, she had someone sit with her who she said was there to hold space and to make sure no negative energies intervened, because she felt sometimes that could happen.
And, you know, it was her own discernment.
Maybe you've come across this word, like, discernment is really important in New Age spirituality.
Right.
It's a big word.
It's a big word.
So I'm interested in how the person sitting alongside her was going to, I don't know, tell her that she was going off the rails.
Like, what were they, what would they pick up?
Were they trained in some way?
No, and he didn't say anything the whole time.
He just sat there with sunglasses on.
Yeah.
So wait a minute, this was in the public library?
What was it, Story Hour?
No!
Okay, so it was a conference in, oh my gosh, 2013, and it was called the Starseed Ascension Conference or something like that.
It was Starseeds Something Conference.
I've written about this conference and the people who appeared in it.
There's a chapter in a new book, the book is called Handbook of UFO Religions, and my chapter is just called Starseeds.
So if people want to learn about it, it's out there.
But basically, yeah, so the library was hired by the people putting on this conference.
Okay, got it.
They were all Star Seeds or channelers and they all variously, some of them channeled, some of them just did music, some of them were just there to sell their wares.
But yeah, it was like a whole day.
Because they have these conferences, much like, you know, every industry has conferences.
I go to conferences.
Right, right.
But in their conferences, you get to listen to people channel aliens.
Do you know, I wanted to go back to one thing before I lose it, which is that as we describe, and I think I agree with your, and I resonate with your use of the word imperialistic to describe the sort of
You know, buffet quality pick-and-choose of New Age spirituality that allows everything to be consumed and kind of integrated into this very subjectivist, you know, this-is-my-truth kind of position.
But I do also have this other kind of feeling about the person who is caught up in that, especially if I hear more and more details about the life of somebody like Jake Angeli or Jacob Chansley, which is, you know, he's
Living in his basement, he has very little money, his mother was probably quoted on ABC about the organic food because his mother's probably taking care of him, and also I think his lawyer has brought up issues around, you know, past abouts with mental illness, and
So, while the industry of New Age spirituality seems appropriately dubbed imperialistic, I also see a lot of people, and Anjali is one example, one extreme example, but I see a lot of people who are kind of like scavengers, too.
Not necessarily buying stuff, going out and sort of collecting things for themselves, but just sort of picking up whatever they have because they had nothing to begin with, it seems.
And that's kind of a different version.
I'm wondering if it's imperialistic but also scavengy.
Yes.
I was just kind of thinking, well, I'm pretty sure the British Empire was pretty scavengy too.
They kind of just went everywhere and picked up stuff and then brought it back and put it in a museum, didn't they?
I guess I kind of would see that as a similar analogy to what people who are in New Age spirituality are doing.
And there's a vast difference in the way they do it as well.
They're not all doing it as, say, you know, obviously or kind of as unfortunately as Jake Angeli was.
You know, people take their inspiration from different sources.
Some do it very respectfully, Others do it less respectfully.
Right.
You know, it's just, you know, it's like anything else.
Some do way more research into what they're doing than others.
And the issue of mental illness always comes up.
Always comes up when I talk about, A, new-age spirituality, but B, channelers in particular, because, you know, there's this idea that, well, obviously, if you're going to say that you're channeling other beings from, you know, other dimensions, then, you know, you're clearly mad.
And this is, you know, this is this charge that's also leveled against shamans cross-culturally.
It was the charge leveled against mediums and spirit mediums historically.
And I would always say, you know, I'm not a psychiatrist.
I don't know about what mental illness category you could put any particular individual into.
But I've met many people who can both channel entities and seem perfectly lucid, coherent and able to look after themselves.
Right, well, I mean, pathologization is a huge issue not only in the topic currently, but also in the broader political context of like, well, how does somebody become indoctrinated into something like QAnon?
And I'm just wondering, It seems that there can be a zero-sum game at play with, well, you know, we don't have a verifiable mechanism by which we can, you know, we can know that channeling is what the channeler says it is.
And here are biological ideas of what emergent consciousness is.
And this is how it is highly unlikely that anybody's channeling anything.
So there's a way of speaking about this material that kind of funnels the discussion into whether or not it's possible rather than looking at why does it happen.
And I'm wondering about what you have seen as in your fieldwork when pathologizing language is used in relation to people for whom this is their thing.
How does it happen?
How does it impact them and how does it either help or distort our understanding of what they do?
I think there's kind of two different questions there.
The first is what happens when, you know, individuals who do channel are pathologized.
Mostly they don't like it, I would say.
You're right.
Mostly it's, you know, and I would also say it's in the large part inaccurate.
I want to stress that I'm moving away from talking about Jake Angelian specific here because I don't know there's a lot of other things about him in particular that suggests that he may have some kind of biochemical imbalance.
Again, I kind of think that that's A, not our business, and B, not something we can diagnose from the videos that we've seen.
C, I kind of want to move, I think that it's important not to pathologize the actions of the capital rioters in particular, because in a way it kind of lets them off the hook, right?
Well, it lets them off the hook on one hand, it can be ableist on the other, because it suggests that somehow, you know, mental illness is predictive of a violent siege.
Yeah, and that, you know, when it's, you know, when there's white people doing a violent scene, you know, well, they're probably, you know, they're probably mentally ill.
And I think that's something we need to move away from.
And the other question is really like, you know, do I, you know, is this caused by some kind of mental illness?
And I would say almost certainly no.
There's a lot of evidence that actually when people are channeling, what they're doing is something much more akin to hypnosis.
That, you know, when people study things like spirit mediumship, spirit possession cross-culturally, a lot of the people that are taking part in it are people who have no sign of any kind of biochemical imbalance in any other aspect of their life.
You might find it interesting to know that there is an Israeli sociologist, Adam Klinoran, who has written an article called How I Learned to Channel.
And this was published in American Ethnologist.
This was published in an academic peer-reviewed journal.
And he went to a 10-week course in Israel, he learned how to channel, and he channeled!
So it's a thing you can do.
So it's, you definitely- - Okay, so this is a real, okay, wait, hold on now. - So it's a thing you can do.
So it's like a skill you can train.
- Okay, all right.
However, however, like what I wouldn't, okay, I have to read the article evidently, but how would I, how would a person self-consciously approach this as a skill to use Like, why isn't the title of the article, How I Learned to Mimic in a Hypnotic Trance What Channelers Say They Do When They're Channeling?
Do you know what I mean?
Like, there's something ironic about that whole research process to me that I wonder if it would resonate with the people who are full-on channeling.
Yeah, I mean, I think that they would probably Say that it was fine.
I mean, he learned to channel at a series of workshops and a 10-week course literally called Learn How to Channel.
And the channelers I've spoken to have said, yes, you know, you can do this.
Not everyone has the same ability.
That's why I would liken it to hypnosis.
There's a lot of research done on hypnosis that not everyone is hypnotizable, right?
That some are more susceptible than others.
And it's probably something neurochemical going on that determines whether you can do this or not.
But there's excellent work on this by, again, Tanya Lerman and her collaborators.
She's a psychological anthropologist.
She talks about this concept of absorption, which is kind of a combination of hypnosis and imagination.
But it's an ability that can be trained like any athletic ability and just like, you know, say you could probably run faster than I could.
Maybe I could channel and you can't.
So there's like a A talent and a training involved in religious experience.
And the people who enjoy being absorbed in kind of imaginative internal worlds, like people who can read a novel and be completely absorbed in that novel.
If you have that ability, then you're more likely to be able to learn to channel.
Right.
Amazing.
Well, yeah, I mean, that resonates with me.
But it also couches the conversation in a kind of biological, materialistic vein.
And I wonder if your average channeler would say, well, yes, you can learn to do it, but you also have to figure out who the alien is that you really want to prop up, because that's the most important stuff, is the content.
Yes.
I mean, obviously the channelers themselves focus much, much more on the content than the mechanism.
They're not so concerned with how it works.
They just know that it does.
And so I've met channelers who have learned how to channel through a kind of repetitive activity.
And I've also known channelers who just say they started channeling spontaneously.
Right, right.
So, to kind of go back to Krista, who I mentioned earlier, she started to channel, she just fell down in the Whole Foods car park and she just started channeling.
Right.
But the other side of that is that her mom had already, was into the Seth material.
For example, Seth has a well-known channel being by JM Knight, who I think is actually into QAnon now.
You know, so her mom kind of created that container, I think.
Wow.
Go ahead.
Sorry, sorry.
So just when I heard her stories, I really felt like, you know, it was kind of couched in this language of it was a spontaneous event that happened to her, but there was still a person there helping her make sense of that.
So there's that.
I mean, I really think we shouldn't kind of swallow They have their own line about there not being community in New Age.
There is.
And often there's like other people involved in channeling already who, when someone shuts the sewer of propensity for it in some way, will say, okay, this is what you're doing.
Let's see what kind of being it is.
And they'll talk, you know, they'll talk the new channeler through who they're speaking to.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, totally.
Yeah, but I have to say that coming from, I'm married into a family of psychotherapists and that, you know, that scenario in which she falls down in the Whole Foods parking lot and then we find out that mom was into Jay-Z night,
That sort of immediately puts me in the mind of, oh, okay, well, what kind of internal family systems pressure is there to either join the program or to get a new different type of message from the cosmos than mom gets or to please mom or, so that's where I go.
It's very interesting to see the biases in my interpretive lenses.
Yeah, and I would say that her story isn't necessarily typical.
So another channeler I met, and his is probably the most fascinating story to me, because he learned to channel through his job as a court stenographer.
So you know stenographers are those people with the keyboards and they're just like typing constantly, so they're constantly hearing words and typing words, right?
And so his name is Amateo Ra, and he, that's the name he gave himself, And he told me that he was working this job as a court stenographer and he would just like come home from these like 10-12 hour shifts of just constantly typing like verbatim what people are saying and he would still have all these words going in his head and then they would just become he said he saw them as like lines of text and then suddenly other things started to come through.
These other voices.
And then when he left that job, you know, he was also interested in all this material, like he was looking at various different websites.
And then I think he went to Tulum in Mexico, which is a very well-known kind of New Age spiritual site.
And he was with quite a well-known channeler there, Solara Anra, and she Told him to channel.
She was just like, okay, you can do this channel.
And he started speaking in this way, this kind of flow that he'd already learned through his job.
So in that way, you can kind of see that rather it being like an internal family dynamic, it's a skill he was learning to do a job.
And then that skill kind of developed into something else that then became a religious experience.
Amazing.
That's an amazing story.
I really love that story.
Now, I'm wondering about the channeler that he ran into in Tulum.
Did she have, like, large influence?
Was she wealthy?
Was there something in it for her to get him on board with her particular program?
Yeah, so I think she was actually running a course that he was on.
So Lara Anar is quite well known.
She's a British channeler, psychic, lightworker, and she runs courses.
So she makes a living off this.
I'm just looking at her website now.
Yeah, so she does Star Councils of Light, and she's one of the people who's credited with things like 11.11 becoming important in UH spirituality.
So in terms of the online community of channelists, she's very well known.
Yeah.
11.11 makes me think that, oh, I didn't realize that within this community there are people who have top ten hits, right?
That certain people will come up with certain ideas, and will they be tagged to them?
Will they have a lineage develop from those psychic events?
Interestingly, no.
I feel like, actually, it's the scholars of religion who are way more interested in where stuff comes from.
I was like, where does 11.11 come from?
And people would just say, well, it's just something that appears and that's how you know that you're kind of, you know, becoming aware of these kind of higher spiritual energies.
Like, people would say that's when you know the extraterrestrials are contacting you because you keep seeing 11.11 on your, like, displays on your clock.
Yeah, I mean it's very interesting because, like, for me the question of provenance is the question of influence and, like, whose workshop communicated which ideas to whom and how much money got made by that communication, you know?
So, I can understand that that community wouldn't be that interested in sort of pinning that down because it actually works to the benefit of You know, the marketing of the skills is a very cynical view, I suppose, but there'd be an interest in sort of covering over where things came from because the goal would be to, you know, project a kind of universality to the messaging.
Yeah, and also I think it's just a tradition where, like, provenance just isn't that important.
Like, there are some traditions, you know, where it's incredibly important who said what and where it was written, and New Age spirituality just isn't.
Words and, like, practices can become free-floating, because it's not really important where you learned it or who you learned it from.
What matters is what it does for you, right?
This is also very consumerist, isn't it?
It is!
I mean, it's kind of like, because you don't know, you didn't know where your iPad came from or who made it, but you kind of float around and it's manifested and the same thing happened with your car.
It's still branded as an iPad, right?
And so that's why I would say it isn't consumers, because they're actually not that concerned with branding.
I see, okay.
They're not that concerned with branding.
Okay.
I mean, people who make money from it are, but as I say, I think it's really important not to take the spokespeople who are able to make a lot of money for the whole kind of discourse or the whole community.
Okay.
All right.
So maybe this is a good thing to ask you, which is that do I have a distorted view of channeling because over the last, I mean, I've known about channeling for decades probably, but over the last six months or so, I have focused primarily on messianic channeling influencers I have focused primarily on messianic channeling influencers who are, you know, commenting on COVID or QAnon and they have 100,000 followers.
But their relationship as celebrities to what you're describing as kind of like a broader and more diverse religious culture is, has to be taken into account.
Like they're not, they're not spokespeople necessarily.
They, they, they, They have figured out how to monetize something, but that doesn't mean that they own the religion.
Yeah and I would say it's always important not to kind of mistake the most prominent kind of representatives of any kind of religious form with like for the way everyone does it and I would say that probably the channelers that I've seen who are kind of famous channelers who are paid lots of money to appear at say conferences or run their own workshops And they can charge thousands of dollars for people to attend.
It's usually in a beautiful location.
They're probably more off-putting than the people I've watched channeling in the Sedona Public Library.
Do you see the difference?
Right.
Yeah, right.
And I would say, especially when you're talking about things like the Q&A messages, A lot of those now, it's incredibly problematic, the messages that they're putting out there.
And I think it's become more problematic.
So I did my fieldwork in Sedona in like 2012-2014, and the whole QAnon thing really wasn't big.
There were some people who were into spirituality who were very right-wing, so it's not an unknown crossover, at least in terms of my own experience.
For example, I met a psychic who was Convinced of the birtherism that, you know, Obama was a Muslim and born in Kenya.
Like, she was convinced.
Right.
Now, did she use her skill to ascertain that that was true in a way that was separate from the way in which Donald Trump was lying about how it was true?
Or did she verify it through the religious practice?
No, I don't think she did.
She was actually an artist, and actually she was quite a reluctant psychic, and when she was telling me her psychic experiences, I was just thinking, oh wow, that just sounds like something that happened to you that you didn't want, that it was kind of avolitional, and it was kind of these experiences of seeing a stop sign and screaming, and then at the same time, her daughter has a car accident, so she'd had all these experiences that made her think that she was psychic.
But then separate from that, she then said, well, you know that Obama is a Muslim, and I was like, what?
She was actually more convincing as a psychic than she was when she moved on to birtherism.
So the two weren't connected at that point, at least for that individual.
And this is definitely something that's happened over the last few years, that this kind of, this QAnon content has become very popular.
And a lot of, like we mentioned Daisy Knight, you know, there's a lot of the other channelers that, for example, that I saw back then, that when I check in with them now, they're also doing the kind of COVID is a hoax.
Kind of.
They don't say necessarily QAnon explicitly, all of them, but, you know, the themes are there.
You know, they'll be talking about, you know, save the children.
They'll be, you know, they'll be like, you know, yeah, they'll be receiving messages that tell them that they think that, you know, These children really are hidden in these underground bases they know because they're on a higher plane kind of thing.
So I think it's gotten more problematic.
So maybe you're cynical because that's something that's happened over the last few years.
It's actually gotten a lot worse, I would say.
Well, okay, so what you're describing is something that has gotten worse, but I'm wondering if it was predictable that it got worse, that the way that some aspects of the culture work is that
I've been developing this theme that I call disaster spirituality in which the religionist, the faithful person applies their ideology opportunistically to the thing that has most cultural currency at the moment.
Channelers back in 2012, birtherism might have been something that was, I don't know, juicy or transgressive to add to the personal profile, but QAnon has a lot more click potential, and I'm wondering whether that
degrades the, you know, whatever claims the culture would have to, well, we're doing something that feels authentic to us and that gives us, you know, life meaning and so on.
Um, I think there's possibly two things going on behind like why QAnon got so popular in this particular culture.
And like, one of it is kind of, there were already some quite strong authoritarian Trends within New Age spirituality, this kind of like demand for purity, for example, and you know, you've mentioned ableism, and there's also kind of the sense of, yeah, like using other cultures in a way that is appropriative and disrespectful.
I think these are all trends that were already going on that made QAnon seem more It was kind of feeding from, I like to call it swimming in the same sea.
There's a lot of the themes in QAnon, for example, underground bases.
I've been hearing about underground bases for years.
Underground alien base.
And it just basically seems to have got shifted so that the children are being held in the underground bases, right?
Right, so it's not like military installations are being formed, so it's flipped from something is being hidden from us that could be of potential benefit to something is being hidden from us which actually signifies the way in which we have devolved as a culture.
Well, it's both.
So, I mean, Jake Angeli talks a lot about what's being, all the hidden science that's being hidden in underground bases and by the military.
And this is a really, really common, huge theme in New Age spirituality that seems to go into QAnon as well, that the military, the government has all this secret technology that they're keeping from us that would benefit us, for example, you know, free infinite energy, but they're keeping it for themselves.
And the other side is the nefarious things that they're doing.
But again, these conspiracy theories about the New World Order were already there in New Age spirituality.
I heard all about the Dark Kabbalah when I was in Sedona.
And, you know, that there's this kind of New World Order, that, you know, obviously it's kind of an evolution of these kind of anti-Semitic conspiracies about, you know, banking cartels running the world.
That was all already present.
So that's why I would call it swimming in the same sea.
And the other side is maybe some of it is opportunistic.
It's hard to make a living as a channeler, right?
You're basically in the gig economy.
You're out there schlepping every month for your views and for your one-on-one clients.
It's hard to make a living.
So if something comes along that's very popular, Some people are going to jump on that bandwagon because it makes it easier.
And that's understandable.
You know, these are all individual practitioners.
They don't have a supportive structure that's going to fund them.
Right, right.
Well, speaking of that, I wanted to ask, I think I have two more questions, and one is related to how technology has impacted and changed channeling, because it's occurred to me that while, according to the definition that you gave off the top, that
The belief, the sensation that one is hearing an alien or divine or external voice or content and can then communicate it, I think prior to the internet or prior to social media influencer, Period.
We have the the iteration of the channeled content meeting human beings usually in a space and so I think Jay-Z Knight is a really interesting person in this regard because she gets her start in the 1970s or whatever and she's been she's been at it for almost 50 years and now her channeling can have an online audience but that online audience is also invisible, right?
To them.
And so, we have a source that's coming from beyond, and then the channel is sort of speaking it into the void.
And I'm wondering, because they can't see who's following them.
They can have, you know, like numbers and whatever, but it's not like they can see how it's really landing in any kind of traditional sense.
So I'm wondering if that's changing the nature of channeling.
So I think that For channelers, the internet in general, but specifically like social media and video sharing sites, are kind of portals.
I think that's how they would see them, and therefore it fits really well with what they do, because they get their messages from this other source, and then they just kind of put it through this box, essentially.
And then it spreads out to thousands of other people.
So that makes sense in terms of what they're doing, right?
And I would say that most of the channels I knew were probably more comfortable online than they were in person.
And maybe that was just the time, because I remember reading about like 19th century mediums and it was all very kind of physical, right?
When you look at something like animal magnetism or mesmerism, where there's like actually a mesmerist there, like doing hand motions to kind of induce these states.
You know, and in a hypnosis, that's similar as well, right?
It's like the stage performance is really a crucial part of it.
But I think for online channelers now, or just channelers in general, but the ones who work primarily online, I think that actually they're more kind of comfortable just kind of zoning out behind their computer.
And then they get an immediate reaction because they get an immediate reaction, not just through likes, but through comments, through people messaging them.
And so then it's like, yeah, it's like the people on the other side of the portal.
So they're kind of taking the message down.
They're a conduit and they're putting it out through a portal to other people.
And I think that for them, that makes absolute sense.
You know, it actually reminds me that in the cult that I was in, one of the cults that I was in, it was called Endeavor Academy, the leader, his name was Charles Anderson.
And in the last three or four years of his life, he got onto a kick of making videos that the production team would slave over to put out on VHS and then mail all over the world.
And, you know, they were bizarre and repetitive and terribly boring.
But he had this distinct impression that it's not just the lesson of The Course in Miracles that he was teaching or his improvised commentary on it, but that he would gaze into the camera as though the technology but that he would gaze into the camera as though the technology itself was a sign or it
representative of the content, that there was something self-similar between the content and the broadcast, that as you say, it was a portal.
And it's very interesting to remember that.
He would like, you know, gaze into the camera eye as though it was into some sort of universal devotee's eyes.
Yeah, well, gazing is a practice, right?
Right.
Yeah.
Yes, yes.
Right.
Yeah.
I think there's another one.
Jon Van...
John DeRoyter.
John DeRoyter, thank you.
I was going blank.
John DeRoyter is the gazer, the big gazer.
And I've done gazing.
It's so uncomfortable.
I hate it.
So in one of the Ascension conferences where there were people channeling, one of the kind of group practices that they got us to do was to turn to the person next to us and gaze fixedly at one eye for one minute.
And it's so uncomfortable and it's so intrusive.
And I absolutely hated it, but some people love it because it makes them feel really intimate.
And I think that that same thing is achieved through the gazing, through videos as well.
And I think it's one of these things where either you get it or you don't.
Like, you know, I've met people who think it's just amazing.
I just sit there and watch Braco through my computer.
And I personally find these videos incredibly boring and banal.
Like I find them almost unwatchable, but it's kind of one of those things that like, if you're into it, then yeah, I think it's a very powerful practice.
It's very, very, um, It makes that connection, I guess is what I'm trying to say, which can often be absent when you're kind of just this person on your own looking up things on the internet like so many in New Age spirituality are, to actually have this kind of direct line to another human being who's staring directly at you.
I think it kind of makes that profoundly human connection that is often lacking.
Yes, and that can also be profoundly manipulated.
And this is my last question, which is related to the fact that I am a cult survivor, and I think one of the biases that I come at this subject from, and I think that this is true for at least Julian as well, my colleague on the podcast, is that this entire field, this entire practice, seems to be rife for or very vulnerable to manipulation.
And if a person is cynical in their approach to channeling and adopts all of the mannerisms and understands how the language works and begins to monetize that as kind of like an affect, there's a question of potential financial abuse.
There's the question of, you know, whether or not the channeler is going to communicate messages that the follower should, you know, go to Washington, D.C.
on January 6th.
There's all kinds of manipulative possibilities.
And so I'm wondering, how do you, as an ethnographer of this stuff, look at the difference between Benign, hobby-level, you know, internal states of prayer, practice, and where that can cross the line into somebody using a kind of charlatanry to manipulate others.
Like, how do you find that line or think about it?
So my basic position on spiritual abuse is that it's a form of abuse, right?
And just like domestic abuse, there's a structure that can be taken advantage of by people who are manipulative, controlling, exploitative of others.
But that doesn't mean that it's necessarily the structure of the institution's fault.
Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.
But it's not something inherent to the structure.
That's what I'm trying to say.
Just because domestic abuse exists in the home doesn't mean no one should get married.
It's the analogy I like to use.
You know, and that's often the institution that is the most rife with abuse, right?
Is your intimate relationships and channeling spiritual practitioners.
It's another form of intimate relationship.
You're letting someone into your life.
So of course there's potential for abuse.
Where do you draw that line?
It really depends on what the relationship is between the person watching the channeler and the channeler and how that relationship is being enacted.
Are they constantly asking for money?
Are they telling them to go to the capital to lay siege to the government?
Obviously those things are incredibly negative and no matter what the relationship structure is, you shouldn't be doing those things.
But again, I, and this is where I kind of, my position is more of an ethnographer and I've also been across groups that, you know, you might call a cult.
I've not been in them myself in the same way that kind of, that you're speaking of, you know, but I've been around them and I've like visited them and I've definitely got in situations where I thought this is harmful and I'm going to stop doing it.
And, you know, my experience is very much like that's something that you have to judge for yourself.
That's not something I can tell people.
Like, I can't look at the way a channeler is interacting with someone and say, well, I don't think you should be doing that.
Well, okay, maybe I can and I would.
I think that it's up to each person to kind of draw their own boundaries and say, you know, this is as far as I go and no further.
Um, and I think that that's something that you personally would know about rather than kind of me going along and saying, well, these are the characteristics that you have to look out for in an abusive Chandler.
There's all different ways people can be abusive, right?
Right.
And I, I just, I hesitate very much from kind of making any kind of kind of checklist for people to look out for in terms of the way channelers are behaving.
Like if you want to hear QAnon material and you're into, you know, extraterrestrials, then you might want to listen to a channeler who's saying those kinds of messages.
It doesn't necessarily mean you're going to take up armed rebellion against the government either.
I would also make that distinction.
Just because a channeler is saying they're getting a message about a certain topic doesn't mean that that person is necessarily going to act on those messages in a way that is harmful and violent.
It probably can't help, though, right?
Sure.
But again, and this comes from working for a long time in kind of the study of new religious movements and new religions in the world.
It's very easy to look at people doing things that you disagree with or that you think are weird and then say, I think that's harmful, right?
This happens again and again and again in the history of new religions.
You also have to look at the behavior.
You also have to look at kind of what is happening because of the messages those people are giving out.
And, you know, it's the whole context.
It's not just what the channeler is saying, you know, kind of going back to what we're saying about Jake Angeli.
There's obviously a lot of other things going on in his life, right?
Right.
You know, not everyone who's been through the same things he will have is going to make the choices that he did, and he's still ultimately responsible for those choices.
Yeah, and I suppose we're responsible for the instinct to sort of zero in on one aspect of a person's life and try to attribute all kinds of behaviors to it when I think what I'm picking up from the study of religion is that, you know, it's both one part of a person's life, but it's also very diverse within that person's life in terms of what it actually motivates them to do.
Yes, probably one of the great pieces of wisdom I got studying anthropology was that nothing has a single cause.
Like, there's no one reason for why anything happens, and you've got to look at the total context.
You've got to look at, you know, it's not just this person's listening to these channeled messages, you know, it's also, you know, what's going on in their life financially?
Yeah, what's going on in their family?
What's going on with them emotionally and psychologically?
All these things combine to create that person's everyday social reality.
And when people do get involved in, say, violent acts or they get involved in abusive relationships, I always try to look at, like, what are the structures that we're either enabling or helping those people get out of those situations.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, I think it's also, that is kind of a guidebook for, you know, not, I mean, because the impulse to zero in is the impulse also to solve the problem as though the problem is going to go away in some kind of snap of a finger, and it probably won't, because, you know, lives are complex.
Yeah and you know I always say you know I feel like when you're one of the people who researches new religious movements you always at some point get asked how do we stop Groups that may become violent.
How do we stop people that may be in a situation that they're finding abusive?
And I always say things like, look, you don't look at their beliefs, you don't look at their practices, you know, you enact things like gun control.
You know, if you don't want, you know, there to be more violence in society, then you've got to take some real and effective action against domestic violence.
So many of the people who go on to commit large acts of terror and violence started as domestic abusers, and so if we had some serious support for survivors of those situations, you will often stop that before it escalates.
That's very interesting because to sort of dodge that and to focus on religious practices really lets some much more difficult and contentious things off the hook, and I hadn't really thought about it that way.
But you're right.
I mean, I think that if the U.S.
had some kind of system of universalized healthcare, that QAnon would be nowhere near as big as it actually got.
Yes!
I say this all the time!
Because I talk about anti-vax a lot, and people are like, oh, what could we do?
