Skeptiko 647 Darren King

yeah I mean I'm biased but he's very creative why be biased he just admitted he's biased biased unethical and unfair we are so biased and our bias just drowns our ability to apply any kind of reason or logic then we easily get offended and we have to pridefully defend stupid positions and stuff like that AI just million times better let me just say something on that because i' like to clear position so like Bernardo I'm suspicious of the notion skeptical of the notion that AI will become self-aware in the same way that we are but that doesn't mean it's not going to be incredibly powerful and change the nature of reality I think it will on top of that there's an additional question that people often don't bring in is which is could an outside intelligence leverage AI to actually impact our reality I think I mean I know people that are deeply in AI some of the CEOs of companies who are also into this field who've seen some evidence of that we're welcoming Darren kenning to skeptic so I am so genuinely excited about this and I came across you were just chatting one second ago about Bernardo who I have a ton of respect for I really like him and I I don't know what it's like to try and you know engage with the level of mainstream people that he does and kind of carry the torch for this other point of view so I I appreciate that at the same time you got to you got to do thing man so that's how I found you and then I was like I was telling my wife I was like oh my God this is this guy is like exactly the stuff I want to talk about in terms of point of convergence you've kind of looked at what I've said and you tell me where where we might start where we might go well the first thing I thought was interesting was how you mentioned and I've seen this before as well with Bernardo um on the one hand I like you have a lot of respect for him and I really appreciate him champion in mainstream philosophical circles the perspective he has of idealism and I think he's doing that job better than anybody else in the world and does it in a unique way um but at the same time I think he may be constricted by feeling like he has to move in those circles and to some degree play by the rules of those circles um so that maybe either makes him play it safe in terms of what he says so he just sticks to what he can sort of argue for in a philosophical argument but then he like you pointed out in the email you sent to me tends to be cautious about nde research for instance and I think nde research along with you know these converging Fields right that's what I find most fascinating I guess as a start off here for our conversation is that it's not just one field it's not just one thinker it's converging fields of evidence all pointing in the same direction and as Bernardo does a good job of pointing out in in my conversation with him he made this point idealism has been the dominant Paradigm for much of the world for much of our history and we're really in this anomaly right now uh with westernism and the way that we have adopted physicalism and it's a fairly recent um notion and he's pretty convinced that we're quickly moving away from it so in that sense I'm I think that's promising and again what's most compelling for me which is why I called my podcast point of convergence is because that's what's happening it's convergence of all these different fields of data pointing the same directions yeah I mean I think you know launching kind of one step further because even the point of convergence thing I get a multiple lines of evidence fantastic and you can beat physicalist over the head with that but I like kind of taking the leap and saying okay that's really kind of a deadend discussion and that's what I was really pointing out in my discussion with Bernardo and my discussion with Kristoff because that was really the impetus for the conversation with Bernardo is like here's Kristoff Coke Kristoff is great I interviewed him 10 years ago and he always has kind of played this kind of Middle Ground like a lot of these nde researchers do this thing too you know hey phenologically this is what we see but who knows just there's a certain insincerity about it or untruthfulness about it that I think Keeps Us stuck right where we're at and the point that I made with Bernardo about the interview with Kristoff is Kristoff kooch you know go listen to Lex fredman with his multi-million views and his interview with all these guys and it's just so drooling over oh my God Kristoff you've done so much and this that hey Christof is a great guy I don't have anything against him but like I pointed out you can't butcher the near-death experience data the way that he does and write a book about it you can't say I've investigated the near-death experience research I've included in my book and get it as wrong as he gets it I mean it's as wrong as Michael shurmer gets it and then Bernardo doubles down and says the same thing well I don't think pin Von laml really says that no the exact opposite pin Von laml says you guys are consistently getting it wrong and you're misrepresenting what I'm saying and that's not it the evidence is completely outside the realm of the physicalist Paradigm that you want to continue to prop up and so that's what I kind of see that you're kind of way past that but you're willing to at least kind of look at the whole playing field and say okay phenomenology that is experiences matter is something that we can Corral a little bit it doesn't have to be all anecdotal and it doesn't all have to be jammed back into a physicalist model we can somehow use that and I feel so strongly uh about that as well so let's talk about that for a minute yeah I mean I think when one looks in the on the face of it the prop of the nde research uh it's it's overwhelming and to try to fit that within a physicalist paradigm takes many more leaps in logic than just sort of looking at it in the face of it and recognizing these are representing real experiences and if it's the case that Consciousness is an epip phenomenon of brain processes and the brain is not showing any neurochemical function at the time and something's not adding up and when you again look at some of these other fields of research even look at some non-d duel traditions this is kind of what they point to so it is strange to me as well I mean I understand that science is conservative it moves slowly you know I've read my Thomas Kon I understand how scientific revolutions happen but this denial of the evidence doesn't seem at all objective to me so I'm completely on the same page with you there and I think one thing I'm able to do unlike maybe the fields that Bernardo is in and the pools that he swims in is I don't have to play it safe right I basically will just say what I feel like the evidence is pointing towards and I don't have to defend it within the academy uh so I don't have to worry about colleagues that might be suspicious I run into academics all the time not just with the nde research but even with the UFO phenomenon research who have to play it safe I see it over and over again so they can get some traction with their colleagues but in so doing they're kind of butchering the data a little bit so it's kind of a catch22 and I'm just happy to be in a field where I don't have to worry about those things yeah great and well and I guess that's kind of my point you know I te you up at the beginning I said this is inquiry to perpetuate doubt that's what I'm about and in particular I'm about that because of people like you who are now brave enough to step in that next realm and I'm going to say I want to kind of push back right away and say no Darren you do have to be held to that same standard you are accountable in that same way and by you holding yourself accountable which you do I think then that exposes how they are not holding themselves accountable and like one of my things lately has been AI is a bone in this and anyone who doesn't see that just hasn't used the technology enough and I'm very familiar with the technology but Bernardo makes that same mistake you know he goes hey AI you know you're really not going to get much with AI well AI just kind of wiped the floor with your argument right there you know all over done yeah no I agree and to respond to what you said at the beginning there I agree about being held to the same standard what I'm saying is I don't have to play it safe so they have to practice real politic to some degree within the circles that they're in which makes them I think not be as honest about what the data is actually pointing towards so in my case I do actually try to follow the data wherever it kind of thing and following in the lead of people like John Mack who tried to do the same thing even though he was heavily criticized for it um yeah I think that it's interesting with AI what you described there because I was listening to again that interview you did with Bernardo when you do the dialogue back and forth with the AI it's interesting to me how people think that it's doing this deep level reasoning because often it'll do even not even a super great job of regurgitating what you said they can pick up English words and regurgitate them back to you but it's perplexing to me and I think shows where there's some sort of Gap in it where you ask an initial question it gives you this sort of standard conventional answer and then only when you stop it and ask it to reason about what it just said then it recognizes something which I guess raises interesting questions about how it's generating responses but I'm also pretty familiar with the technology and I also have a background in programming like you and like Bernardo so I've seen how much to the point that you made in that interview how much the life of a programmer has completely changed in the space of two years I was working on some programming for a project I'm doing with the archiv The Impossible at Rice University and how I go about writing functions is completely different than it was a year and a half ago right so the dizzying pace of change is remarkable and I'll also make this point that to agree with you and take it one step further I think a reason why we do have to knock down some walls and be more directive about this is that we don't necessarily have the time as a civilization to wait 20 years for physicalism to sort of Die slow death kind of thing like I have real concerns about the trajectory we're on and I think reinvigorating people's sense of life and purpose I think is something we need as a civilization to get past this kind of turn we're up against in that sense I completely agree with you and it's perplex ing how slow it goes and it's perplexing to me that people like Bernardo will sort of play the game when he could actually take the front foot more so as an example even when he came up with that saluan hypothesis to explain the UFO phenomenon I was perlex by that because I'm thinking so Bernardo is an idealist he could come up with some really novel Notions of what these things could be especially because with the data I'm really familiar with the notion of like what frame of reality or what dimension of reality or you know what State of Consciousness this is actually happening within is one of the open-ended questions and a model like idealism presents many more Alternatives that are interesting we could explore so for him to sort of double down in a physicalist based kind of perspective was strange to me and the same thing with the nde research if I don't understand why he's hesitant there and on top of that when I spoke with him he expressed real hesitance around some of the abduction stories and some of the narratives of experiencers and dismissed them is quote unquote silly which to me again I love Bernardo I love the work he's doing but that didn't seem like he was making that statement after having done as much rigorous research there as he has done in other areas which was again perplexing uh yeah so there's so many points to dive into and I'm not going to apologize for kind of jumping into the middle of this we should back up probably and even though we gave people a little bit of an introduction um the John Mack uh Foundation which you are the director of communications for oh boy I mean we could talk for an hour about that history give people who kind of maybe have forgotten or are too too young to remember thumbnail sketch and then how do you enter that picture and what is your connection to that phenomenon which you have direct personal connection to it but you also kind of hold that apart I think from you know you're not one who leads with that my experience you know back in that's what it's all about kind of thing so I don't know a lot there yeah a lot there so let's start with John Ma so um John Mack was a really highly regarded highly respected uh psychiatrist at Harvard um and had uh won the Imp Sur prize uh for a book that he wrote um and was regarded you know highly by his colleagues and in his field and then one day Bud Hopkins uh who he knew in passing um while John I think was in New York One Day called him up and said hey would you like to meet some people who've had encounters with aliens and John said what had encounters with who and but Hopkins said no it's real like you want to come check this out and John again to his credit was driven by curiosity not by agendas right not by conventional thinking and so he went and he listened and of course what John brought to the table that was so important historically was that his entire role was about determining whether or not people were being truthful to the best of their ability whether or not they were delusional whether or not they were suffering from some sort of psychop pathology so he's employing all of those filters as he's listening to his people but with an open heart you know honestly wanting to hear their experience very much like a a warm human talking to another human and as he listened to more and more of these accounts he was struck by how similar they were especially back in the day where these were not widely published so it's awfully uncanny how similar the accounts are in terms of different elements of the experiences and he also found that they were by and large healthy individuals psychologically healthy not suffering from delusion and not trying to uh win fame or Fortune actually wanting to have sometimes even a psychiatrist say I think you are going crazy because they would rather believe that than that alien beings are abducting them onto spaceships so he became a chief figure back in the 90s in working with these experiencers and championing their cause and coming out into the mainstream which was highly skeptical because again as a modern society how would we not know this how are we not seeing them land on the White House lawn why don't we have better quality videos and photos and all these arguments that people make again with all sorts of hubris realizing or not realizing how much further ahead they are than us and how they can work with our Consciousness by the way in addition to being able to manipulate SpaceTime itself apparently but he became a Chief champion of saying something is going on here and he also again to his critics said this challenges my worldview I have no place for this in my present worldview right he was a conventional thinker right and and he was willing to have that worldview challenged by the data which is all we're asking for there's layers to this story which you might know better than I do and I'd love to hear but I find intriguing one is that he is like a social Elite in New York so when he goes to this party with this artist Bud Hopkins and I could just imagine the scene you know his cocktail party and Bud Hopkins starts throwing around how he does hypnotic regression with these people and they tell them the stories you can just see where this you know leading psychologist psychiatrist you know it's like wait a minute you're an artist you're doing hypnotic progression you don't know what you're doing pal and he goes no this is real I know enough come on over and do it and I think it connects to this interesting thing because butd Hopkins eventually teams up with David Jacobs and we'll talk about David Jacobs in a minute but one of the slams that people who are not not wanting to engage with the data is that oh it's hypnotic regression there it's all throw it all out the window but Hopkins wasn't that bad David Jacobs wasn't that bad and John Mack spotted that John Mack did hypnotic regression and he was very successful with it with his patience so this notion that we need to throw it out it's like his I what I imagine is that what he wanted to see is that is he really doing it in a in a way that's going to get us the most information accurate informational absolutely so a couple points there so first of all let me cover the hypnosis part because I'm with you that we actually do have to welcome it even though we do have to um hold a high standard for how it's done and you do have to be very aware of leading questions for instance and there are some researchers who I think have a conflict of interest because they have a high hypothesis and then they're the ones regressing people and even if they don't consciously end up doing it they sometimes might subtly uh subconsciously lead it in a certain direction so I think we have to set up sort of boundaries there to make sure we're being objective so again to John's credit he had a second psychiatrist unconnected from him unconnected from this material basically do an evaluation of each of these people to see what his objective third party uh you know sense was of them and he said they seem like normal people they're healthy people and so that was again John not trying to trust just his own perspective um now on the part about you know the way that John impacted culture and whatnot and the spirituality piece absolutely and towards the end of his life John was really interested in survival after death by the way and was focused on that kind of material and he was actually encouraged when he actually read the material and he talked to different people and he ran into people with indigenous backgrounds right or Dem monic understanding and they said to him you need to go talk to indigenous cultures you need to go talk to shamans because this is not um divided up this cartisian split doesn't exist in those cultures right so he went and talked to these people and they kind of laughed and said yeah you white people you think this is so weird and you don't know how to you know metabolize this but for us it's always been part of it and then John would ask a question like a good physicalist like okay but are these happening in reality or is it happening kind of in a dream world and they'll say to us there is no difference that's more of a spectrum of conscious experience and you know he actually went to Africa and interviewed different tribes that had a different word even for the GRS going back well into their history kind of thing so he recognized that something was going on here now I will say that he still wrestled and he actually ended up having a conversation with Thomas they were childhood friends actually they grew up together and he had a conversation like how do I how do I represent this in the mainstream because if I say it's fully physically real it's going to challenge a lot of people and they'll just want to you know just say there's no way there's not enough evidence at the same time it wasn't really playing according to the rules of being in kind of Third Realm kind of thing which is kind of what the humanity is like to talk about so I think even for John he kind of slid a bit towards um let's say it's sasi physical right and I and my colleagues and friends have talked about it would be very interesting to hear what John Mack would say today hearing Notions from people like David grush that we have bodies and we have craft and Hangers from Crash retrievals that fully puts it in physical reality even if it is more complicated than that so then I guess let's segue into how did you become associated with the John Mack Association and then obviously it connects to some experiences that you've had so the experiences I've had first of all this is really fascinating and again depending how familiar people are with this lore and this topic they'll find this harder to believe than others just depends on how much familiarity you have because one of The Uncanny things that happens is over time you your fascination with the topic my fascination with the topic sometimes gets to the point where it prompts certain questions around am I being is something being inserted into my Consciousness that was the seed of my interest going back a long long time so for instance even when I was in high school I remember reading all of Whitley stuber's books I was totally fascinated there was a time we went up to a mountain cabin and the wind blew the door open and everybody started screaming it was pandemonium um people's worst case scenario kind of came to the four and we afterwards kind of laughing said what each of us thought it was you know one person thinks Axe Murder sobody thinks a bear so many thinks a cougar I think gr aliens right that was my answer so I had a really specific interest in this topic alone like Abduction research little did I know that decades in the future I would end up working with the John Mack Institute and then for a while it kind of like diminished and went into the background and then I had an experience in 2005 with my young family we were traveling across the country and we woke in the early morning hours so just give you the quick version here and there was a female entity at the end of our bed and at the time my wife was multiple months pregnant with our son and our daughter was in the bed beside us and I got out of bed to start walking towards this um being and the being looked surprised that I could see her that's what I sort of registered that facial expression to mean either I'm surprised you can see me or I'm surprised you're a wake you're not supposed to be awake and if something one of those two are both and it proceeded to back up still facing me and then went right through the wall and then I did something at the time that made no sense to me and I really wrestled with until later on I learned in the lore it's not so unusual I turned around and went right back to bed as if that's what you do after you see a being passed through a wall now my wife actually saw them come back through the so when I turned to come back towards the bed facing away from the being the being proceeded to walk down the hallway and through the front door not opening the door but through the front door of the hotel room and um I probably would have fallen asleep and the next day wondered if it was a weird dream or something again this weird know frames of reality gets complicated here but she sort of shook me out of my stuper and said what are you doing how can you go to sleep after what we just saw and so that was a was a huge blessing that I saw it with somebody I witnessed it with someone cuz totally grounds you in reality in a very different way so we got out of there quickly um and I remember bringing up with friends and family and they just like quickly move on to what's the weather like you know or how's your favorite sports team doing because they don't know what to do right um so then later on in the 2010s I became more and more interested in the lore and as it began to gain Traction in the mainstream through articles like Ralph and Leslie Kane's article in New York Times um and it was clear that this was beginning to be integrated into our zist in a way that was not just xfiles territory um I really poured into it and then it kind of was a conglomeration of all the things I'm fascinated by not just the notion of aliens but frames of reality Beyond this one uh survival Beyond Death right how much the for instance with the Kenneth ring research that was done how much a contact experience with an apparent non-human being overlaps with nde research in terms of how it changes the people when they come back right so this is again what I would say to some of the Skeptics of nde research is so regardless of what you are trying to say it is some sort of laugh laugh for ra of a Dying brain or whatever how does that explain the ongoing persistent changes in the people that have encountered these things they are acting like people who have entered a realm that feels more real than real more substantive to this one to the point where they return here by contrast this feels like a matrix or some sort of construct some simulation it's going to be a lot that we're going to want to unpack there because one of the real issues I want to drive towards is You Know M thing does uh ETF and nde which is just trying to be quick and witty about it but you know we both know Ray Hernandez right you know him have you spoken with Ray so what it was funny when you're tell your story do you know Ray's uh story about contact it's I do it's a mirr it's a mirror of of your story right his his wife is downstairs having this incredible encounter with this non-human Intelligence being after they had seen craft in the sky with his daughter and the neighbors and then Ray walks three steps down the stairs and says oh this is nothing go back and go to sleep you know and like like you the next day this is completely in congruent with what I would normally you I be down there trying to yeah do what I can protect my wife protect the house and then there's this healing event where the dog that they're going to put down the next day is healed and is running around the room so this is the phenomenology part of it you just touched on it but I hate always you have to do it but hate always referencing the Skeptics well if Skeptics could only hear this or that no that's not the point people want to ignore this data you know disassociate themselves from either the events they've had themselves or the events that other people have had what I'm interested in is how to begin to incorporate it in a way that challenges it in the way that we would want it to be challenged it was scientific so maybe that leads us to the point that you were just making about Kenneth ring and the parallels between near-death experience and encounter experiences yeah absolutely and and just to quickly pick up where I was before Mo to what you just said there how it connects to the John Mac Institute so basically because of what you found compelling about my work I hope um about the way I'm trying to take a broad perspective a deep perspective see these overlaps and I have championed how experiencers are having real experiences that we should take seriously even though they do challenge our paradigms the executive director of the John Mac Institute was actually in a U-Haul moving all the boxes of all John's archives from Harvard down to R University in archives impossible and had a multiple day trip and end up listening because the driver at the U-Haul was a fan of my podcast put on my podcast and they listen to my podcast for like two days basically straight and she was impressed by the way I talked about the depth and the breadth and the way I connected things and the way I championed experience for Testimony because she was one of the people John worked with in the 90s that figures prominently in his books so she contacted me we totally jelled and that's the long short story of how I became the communications director I didn't know that I didn't pick that up but yeah back to your point of like coincidence is there such a thing planned connections you know we've all met these people in our lives when we go no that's too weird you know exactly it's what I call synchronistic orchestration that's what it feels like right my friend Mike Master is a good friend of mine who has been a champion of the extr Tempest hypothesis the notion that they are us from the future in some way um he also has had this experience of going from being a physicalist and an atheist to within a few years completely revolutionizing that perspective turning it upside down now he understands Consciousness as prary not just because of his research because of his own experiences so again this overlap between we have an interest in this field and how we've kind of been called into it becomes a really interesting question um but absolutely with the nde research one thing I want to say too is that to your point absolutely the evidence is compelling Dean Raiden's research is compelling in so many ways he knows he has to uh adhere to a higher degree of rigor than almost anybody else because he's going to be held to a false standard that nobody else is being held to and yet it still has not really moved the needle very much within the mainstream now within the nde research one thing that's really fascinating when you sort of cross over the inter reincarnation studies not sure if you've seen this but there have been studies done by universities in the US where they will compare accounts of children right who have remarkably clear succinct um and not publicly available memories of previous lives that they're able to verify they able to track down these people that they were related to in a previous life they about to confirm elements that are not part of the public record uh really minute detail right but what's fascinating about that too is that there's a subtle difference or even not so subtle actually there are some distinct differences in how reincarnation seems to manifest for people in Asia for instance versus people in Europe and North America so this again undermines what we think of reality we think of reality as being this thing that's out there that's separate from us that's subjective and yet we see even in reincarnation research that our expectations of reality play a role in what manifests even in the next lifetime so this is not a subtle shift that physicalists are going to make this completely turns everything upside down see I'm willing to go there but I'm not convinced like at every turn again the inquiry to perpetuate doubt what I like is that you're engaging with the scientific method in a very real way in these areas that everyone has just kind of thrown up their hands and go oh well we can't think about that or even just right now we can't talk about it so here's how I would talk about that is that the number of cases we have in the US is so limited that it isn't really a fair comparison at this point and the ability to take the cultural uh overlay however we understand that to be part of it also isn't fully understood so when we look at the University of Virginia and their reincarnation research I don't think we can I don't think I'm ready to draw the conclusion that the cultural overlay is so strong that it's influencing how The Reincarnation experience manifests Maybe but maybe not and like so that be one question there and I'd apply that same thing however you want to get there to the near-death experience versus the what do you call it because I don't want to misrepresent it contact experience which I think again this is one of those things we shouldn't have to say this but if you can't Embrace that data to some extent then you're just not part of this conversation and you need to just go back and listen to Lex ghoul over Sam Harrison you know all these kind of guys who are just committed to this they just have a belief system they're just religious fundamentalists in a different way and my cheeky way of asking that question is does ET have an nde yeah yeah give me some leeway here because I would like to address that at some length so I think number one I'm going to again stretch the parameters right and say that um I would say it seems to be a violation of a parent sovereignty and agency right but again there is evidence in the data which I am very familiar with you know I'm pouring through the John ma archives and the streber archives at this point and what people often remember you probably have come across this in your research that sometimes there's this understanding they come across that prior to this Incarnation they actually agreed to this that it's part of some overs Soul structure that transcends the body mind that we inhabit in one lifetime now I understand some people might say that just sounds like Stockholm syndrome that sounds like making up stories to justify what looks like a clear violation of Human Rights but again each of these different bodies of data bleed into each other so ndes bleed into contact experience bleed into reincarnation experience and to your question about does an ET have an nde I would complicate that a little bit further and say many of the people a certain percentage of abductees when they're in the presence of these other beings they actually remember them there's often a block but once the block is removed they remember these beings and sometimes recognize that they were a gray in a previous lifetime or even that they might have a certain part of their mentality now that has a Persona so Susie Hansen wrote this book The Dual Soul connection that basically represents that that she basically has these two different modalities when she's on board the craft a different Persona comes to the four and then she goes back to a different Persona in this construct so again the physicalist notion about how we will set the parameters that this is all there is I'm just an accident of you know physiology coming together having this thing I think is consciousness but it's just a fluke and therefore the only way I will evaluate whether I have agency and sovereignty is whether or not I remember in this lifetime giving permission writing it up form or something but I think again the data itself complicates that picture and we have to follow the data wherever it takes us please go on there because you have a very nuanced and deep understanding of what people generally talk about High hybrids and you extend that into this time Dimension I would say that there are some elements of the overlap the intersection between the nde research and the contact research that would suggest it's happening in similar Realms of existence or states of Consciousness and that in itself is interesting and both of them seem to supersede and transcend and feel more real and substantive than this reality does so for those who haven't had that kind of experience it's very hard for them to imagine what it would be like because they don't have the contrast but once people have had either of those experiences they tend to view that as more real than this and it helps them also recognize that this is an experience they're having as a soul going through multiple incarnations in order to grow in Soul wisdom basically part of the complication here there's many complications but one is that people tend to think about spiritual history religious history and they think about Spiritual Beings they don't think about technology what's complicated about the graves and the abduction research and the hybridization research is that it seems to transcend these categories it subsumes these categories that we assume exist or these ways of organizing reality that have existed in our cultures between religions and science for instance so with the graves they seem to use technology and science and DNA but all in the service of what I would call Soul science actually this incarnational experience over multiple lifetimes and that's definitely part of the lore that they have actually reported this to abductees that this is what they do that we as Sovereign beings choose to come into this cation we sign up for everything that happens to us but they work on a sort of species-wide level to the point you brought up with Brent uh with um who is it that did the research about yeah Bruce sat yeah Bruce right that there seems to be indications in our history that we've been tweaked we've been augmented whatnot maybe we were even a seated species so people think of those as two distinct Realms of research I would say that they actually intersect that you in the picture end up with something where we as Sovereign Souls choose to come into this Incarnation and then we become part of the process that gravs are involved in and more than just the Grays but on a species-wide kind of level that includes both soul and science it's a kind of Soul science so when we start asking questions about human rights and things like that and I do hear people sometimes saying things like they abduct you that's that's kidnapping right they touch you without asking first that's assault right and the challenge is again all the assumptions that are brought to the table that we never think to question and those assumptions don't play well with the data itself I'd love to give an example here just to underline this point and I think it helps to connect the nde the reincarnational and the contact experience right so this one friend of mine she told me her case where when she was a baby basically toddler um she ended up on Christmas Day eating a bunch of wrapping paper while her parents were in the kitchen and she ended up choking and she had a near-death experience and she found herself suddenly on board a UFO with alien beings who she immediately some sort of filter went down and she recognized them and she said I'm finally home right which is what you hear in nde research too right this Source this home and she's like I'm so thankful that I'm back with you and that was a crazy place down there and then say to her well don't forget though you have a mission here right and then she remembered yes she signed up for this and in fact she uh was the daughter of two drug addicts and she knew that she had agreed to go in to help bring light and spread Consciousness amongst the people that she was uh you know living with and growing up with but in that moment she had a full adult perspective and said oh no I have to go back into that toddler body it can't even like stand up it just rolls over uh but because she was reintroduced it as conviction that this is what she had signed up for she did come back into her body and went on to you know now she's in her 20s or 30s and living life and that's been um you know uh an orienting uh experience in her entire life so in that one event you have overlaps between nde contact and reincarnation and a sense of mission and purpose so when people try to again make this argument about ethics I think what we need is a multi-dimensional ethics this is one of the things we're talking about at the John mck Institute how do we widen the frame how do we let the data dictate how we should ask more open-ended questions yeah see this is exactly the conversation that I am super excited that you're having because I see it quite differently in some significant ways like I just throw in you know like you're were talking about Jeff kple fantastic had him on the show multiple times down there at Rice University he's offered a bunch of books one of the books did you read his book with Elizabeth Cron the woman who I did struck by lightning right struck by the uh chained By the Light No CH flash I think changed in the flash or something something like that but yeah I read the book yeah so I thought she had a very brilliant insight and this is like the challenge that I'm going kind of to the next level on this I hope people are following this discussion we're going to have right now is the kind of discussion we need to formalize and figure out how to do it in a way that has substance in meaning from a scientific standpoint and at the same time it's impossible to do because we're talking about anecdotes but as we know anecdotes become case studies and case studies become the rock Foundation of everything we know about medicine certainly so one of the things that Elizabeth says I think it's really really an Insight that I hadn't heard before is she goes all this thing about growth no your soul is completely perfect which you're not in your head because from a non-u perspective we can immediately shift around and go yeah I guess I do know that so it's more of and this is what I've heard you say too this jives with another thing you've said it's more of an experiential thing it's more of a continuing to experience but she really pushes against the idea of learning and the school and you have to kind of know your mistakes and this and that and I thought that was an interesting Insight so whether it's true or not it's an important distinction between what she's saying and I'm advocating and what you're saying and your advocating yeah absolutely I do want to talk about that because in my essence of being classes which by the way so I started this essence of being initiative where I teach these classes not just about non-duality and sort of roll in UFO phenomenon kind of information but primarily it's about this Consciousness piece we're talking about that when you actually recognize and begin to practice life as if there's an interconnected field which you are a part of and you can tune into there's vast trows of information available to you that you're just tuning out because you're buying into the consensus narrative so it's kind of like a muscle you have to begin to use a subtle Anatomy that you can begin to develop so that's a big part of what I do and in those classes I make the distinction between the relative and the absolute so I sometimes hear people say it's either this or it's this and what I want to say is well it depends which perspective you're speaking from again from a non-d du perspective in the relative we do experience trauma we do feel like we're baked into to this reality and it feels real and it feels experientially impacting on us and it feels like we have skin in the game on the other hand in the absolute perspective everything's perfect everything's seamless everything is prior to and Beyond manifestation and so it's completely this undifferentiated Sea Of Consciousness in its perfect form now I would say that when you again according to the non- Traditions when you take on a perspective when you enter an Incarnation You Are by definition limiting yourself so to have one perspective so that you then have a vantage point from which you can have conscious experience learn from that experience from a unique perspective that's never existed anywhere else in the cosmos before and then when you move through different lifetimes you eventually contribute that understanding that wealth of wisdom that has come from firsthand experience and you contribute that to the whole and sort of this ultimate reunification with source so for me it's both end there is this underlining Perfection but in the relative experience there is a transmutation of energy via catalysts that come our way in experience that's my view so this is where it kind of gets interesting but I think there's a distinction there so I agree with you you know the kind of relative absolute we all get that you know do nothing it's all perfect get that but Elizabeth is saying something specifically different about our process about how we are experiencing uh life in the same way and so there's a distinction to be made there in terms of this school school that we're in Soul school that we're in and what she's saying so I just think we need to be able to drill down and really hone in on those distinctions another distinction we made previous in this conversation was about reincarnation oh it seems to manifest differently In some cultures in the west than it does in the reported cases the East Maybe not maybe that's just again so these are the kind of distinctions so the next distinction I'd make or or try and make is about the is there a distinction to be made between the near-death experience and some of these other experiences in the extended Consciousness realm so I can acknowledge and fully Embrace because I think it's super important the data you're bringing forward about the points of convergence the points of overlap but we still that does not answer the question is are they in some way fundamentally different and I think the push back that I would give and I think other people would is it's not so easy to gloss over the kind of coercion deception not only screen memories but trauma that is induced you don't see any of that near-death experience you don't and and people who want to do this ah the thing that gets me it's the soul trap thing and I didn't even want to mention it but it's just another misdirect it's another cherry-picking of the data reinterpreting of the data go to Jeff Long Dr Jeff Long radiation oncologist care L collected 4,000 5,000 8,000 I don't know how many at this point ask Jeff I've had them on the show multiple times what's the number one thing that comes through statistically from a medical survey is love love at a percentage of like 96% you don't get that in the contact experience I'm not saying I know what that means but I'm saying as this next level applying the scientific method it's not there the deception people want to you know again the soul trap people want to go oh it's deception then it's really not there in the literature that's not what people report that they're being deceived so I I think there's some important potentially some important distinctions to be made there right and and so I would say I'm I'm very happy to hold a complicated perspective and I don't feel the need to uh reduce cognitive dissonance by landing on a clean position that leads no residue hanging outside the suitcase um so I recognize that there is complexity with the abduction scenario for instance because my friend Stuart Davis uh would make the point and has made the point that if nothing else um the graves need to do more anthropological research on us so that they understand how to communicate in a way that's Kinder that their bedside manner could be improved I know people who speaking of for instance with the abduction and hybridization part that you brought up earlier may give you another anecdote um which by the way is a quick aside on anecdote so I recently had the chance to speak with some government people and people from the military who dealing with this topic from their Insider perspective and I asked how often they were considering experience for literature and data when they have their briefings and the answer was never and that's problematic to me and I said to them if you had people who were captured by Al-Qaeda and spent two weeks in Iraq and then got released you would brief them for days trying to learn everything you could about Al-Qaeda right and the experience somehow we don't treat it to the same standard when it comes to abductees which is strange to me and then we go and hear them say things publicly like we have no idea who these beings are what they want and that's not true based on the evidence now that's your point the evidence is not it's not simple it's not clean it does beg the question sometimes you hear examples where only once the person's screaming do they then do some sort of mental thing where makes the pain go away why not do that before they're screaming right I understand now here we even have to be wary of you know anthropocentrism we have to be careful that we assume they should know these things they should know better we assume that if they're higher beings right then they would know all of that we know and more but I think that's a dangerous assumption to make and I think they can also learn from us and might have some gaps in their perspective and if they are either a different species altogether or some further version of us that's followed a different you know evolutionary trajectory then their experience of reality and even personhood might be different enough that it makes it difficult for them to relate to the way that we are so tied and connected to our body like they will actually say in the abduction literature that they see themselves basically as this energetic um Persona moving through bodies across incarnations and they are sometimes perplexed by the degree to which we are identified with our bodies which again is not to explain way some of the data I understand it's complicated I'm just saying let's open it up even more well open it up but I think we have to nail it down at the same time because what I'm suggesting is that we have to consider the hypothesis that the near-death experience realm let's just call it a realm qualitatively significantly different from these other Realms there is a higher spiritual realm that we don't have to try and pin down or attach to any religion for God's sake or anything like that but we just say it is operating in a different way and that there is the chance that these other Realms are mimicking that in a way for whatever nefarious reasons they have so that returns to the story of Mary Rodwell and David Jacob so I'm interviewing them both and it's really interesting David Jacobs it's all dark it's all manipulation and Mary Rodwell is no it's Soul growth and spiritual and all the rest so finally I get to there I go David insists that it's a program operation she thinks and she goes oh yeah it's a program it's a program as in government program it's not a government program but in the sense that we think about it in the sense that you talk about it I think you know you bring evidence forth in terms of hybridization and you go yeah that does seem to be like you just attached it to technology a great technology all that stuff so that is a distinction that I don't find in the near-death experience literature no one come I don't want to say no one but again Jeff look at the statistics 96 94% remember all this in the high 90s people are coming back and not saying it's a program and they would if you I'm inferring from what their full accounts are if you suggested that it was a program they'd be like no it's not a program no it's not a soul trap no it's not any of those things it's something different and we can start saying all these bunch of stuff and hanging a bunch of stuff on how different it is but it is not that I totally agree with you like I'm definitely not trying to flatten everything here and say they're basically the same thing I I actually do believe that um an nde is real that it's tapping into something uh that subsumes our physical reality what we perceive as our physical reality and it's not the same as contact experiences what I would say though is that I would again um argue for a spectrum rather than an either or so rather than thinking about this Mortal construct and then some um Transcendent realm where people experience an nde I would say that perhaps some of these other beings have a a deeper understanding of the nature of reality itself and there's more of a spectrum and they are able to uh inhabit some of these ranges within a bandwidth maybe that approximate or get closer to that sort of subsuming Realm and that's why there's some overlap because another piece i' just like to introduce as as part of the data which you probably have heard about which I think people should know about is one of the the intersections again between these pools of people is that if you've had one of these types of experiences you're more likely than someone from the average population to have one of the others and on top of that both in Elizabeth cronin's case as well as contact experiencers they come back often with s capacities online that did not exist prior to that so there is some overlap and intersection even though I would flatten and say it's the same thing oh I think that's very well said that's the kind of Next Level stuff that I think we have to though find a way to be more uh systematic methodical logical about really analyzing that and laying out those Frameworks and again I won't jump on the AI thing but AI just does a fantastic job of that I didn't realize you have that programming background you're not convinced as I am as much at this point but the reason I think AI can do it so well is not because it's so brilliant at this point and making inferences and and doing all that it's just that we're so terrible at it we are so biased and our bias just drowns our ability to apply any kind of reason or logic then we easily get offended and we have to pridefully defend stupid positions and stuff like that AI just million times better like I just said the thing with Bruce Fenton 10 minutes you boom you get to the answer you could spend an hour doing that let me just say something on that because I'd like to clarify my position so like Bernardo I'm suspicious of the notion skeptical of the notion that AI will become self-aware in the same way that we are but that doesn't mean it's not going to be incredibly powerful and change the nature of reality I think it will on top of that there's an additional question that people often don't bring in which is could an outside intelligence leverage AI to actually impact our reality I think I mean I know people that are deeply in AI some of the CEOs of companies who are also into this field who' seen some evidence of that and I will also say that one of the things that's frustrating I would was invited to be part of this AI Symposium where we're giving different perspectives on the future this one person had this perspective well the good news is that the good people in the Bay Area make sure that ideology doesn't end up in the responses of AI right so they scrub it and my point was I'm glad they do that but in so doing they also scrub all the UFO data because that's considered outside the norm right so you're biasing Ai and what it can do in terms of its responses and sometimes I think even what you came AC across there where it gave you an initial response and then you ask a deeper reasoning question and then it was able to some of those initial first layer superficial responses are often biased by our own Prejudice and we again this is where I think we go astray when we think that we need to make sure that AI is not being biased by you know Nazi ideology but again modern conventional physicalist ideology also ends up in there but I completely agree with you and I have made this argument in terms of this AI project I'm involved in with archives the impossible we're taking John Mac archives and the streber archives and using AI on it one of the things I'm looking forward to is what it can pull out in terms of patterns that we never think to look for so I absolutely agree with you in that and I'm looking forward to what what'll come with that well great we'll have to talk more about it right now because I started a podcast a while ago just a few months ago called AI truth ethics podcast and I've interviewed some I think pretty great people so far in this AI ethics thing and it's a complete problem reaction solution dialectic in my opinion it is a cover a misdirect to control speech and to do what they've done all along so I got to bring it up to you I mean people haven't seen the Mark Zuckerberg letter that he just published just a couple months ago where he said hey lay off you know yes I censored the crap out of people but the White House was pushing me to do it on the covid issue and of course on the hunter Biden laptop thing but particularly he was talking about Co he he goes yeah I had to he goes look at my position I want to go to Europe I have all these things that I want to get done in Europe politically I need government support for that this is fascism right they lean on me and say you don't do this you censor these people or you know you're not going to get this so AI is just an advanced tool for implementing that kind of control and now you add to it you know the engagement that we have with it the anthropomorphizing that we have with it that's where energy is going not to you know how we can prevent Nazi hate speech what a false phony cover story what they really want is to be able to control free speech and to be able to control uh the narrative in the way that they've done and I just published three more shows on that where we did evidence you know right on the show where they're doing that you could see the difference between the models and how some models are doing it and some models aren't so I think there's conclusive evidence that that is what's going on there then I think that factors into this evil thing which I think is super super important you know when I asked Bernardo about yal Harari and he doesn't know who Yuval Harari is and he doesn't know World economic forum and he doesn't know transhumanism the best I can offer you is uh drugs and video games and if you don't understand that agenda that that is a real agenda whether you subscribe to it or whether you think it's going to dominate or not it is a real agenda agenda then I think you you're not really capable of having a real discussion about AI certainly but I think you also are crippled in having a real discussion about these extended Consciousness Realms because these guys have known about these extended Consciousness Realms like we talked about remote viewing I mean hell put up and Russell tar weren't exactly ringing their hands saying oh my God this defies physicalist science maybe we should stop right here no yeah so a lot of true on there so um absolutely absolutely on the um censorship that happens um and that again the problem is concentration of power so you've got a few of these companies who like you say if they want to be Global they have to adjust their algorithms and whatnot um to follow laws in Europe that are different than here but hold hold on Darren full stop it's not the companies it's the Deep state right Zuckerberg is saying it's not me you guys I don't want because from people don't get this they don't have the business background he's saying it between line censorship is bad for business my customers don't like censorship they don't like examples of censorship this is fascism this is deep State this is unelected officials in the CIA and the FBI telling me to do stuff it's not companies it's not Elon Musk it's not Zuckerberg totally agree and you hear Notions about Google Maps and Google Earth before they could release that publicly they had to agree to all sorts of censorship that the CIA was directing absolutely I think they understand that to play the game and to be public they have to to First adhere to these rules that is being set by if you want to call the Deep state fair enough um I think that's true one of the things I like to point out with AI you know you often hear this argument that's made that every new technology people will argue this is going to destroy us or this is going to liberate us right so it happened with radio it happened with television happened with the internet and now we have ai now what I think is perplexing and frustrating for me is that I also like you hold amazing promise for what AI can become and the global problems it could help us solve because you can give it a million hyperparameters if you need to and it can handle that able to do what communism was never able to do right when you've got a few bureaucrats at the Kremlin trying to make decisions for every region in the Soviet Union that's an incredibly inaccurate process which ends up being a lot worse in effect than a free market system that tends to balance because of the way the nature of the market works because of where AI is going we're going to have to come up with some sort of model that super needs transcends capitalism because AI is going to undo the lamur market eventually and you and I were talking about you know for instance as programmers within the space of two years has completely changed the nature of how someone does programming now and you know when you hear people like Sam Altman saying by 2030 you're going to have a piece of glass that will do everything for you right um I don't think that's an exaggeration and and the change is happening at this exponential level we seem to be approaching some sort of Singularity but like you to address some of your earlier comments I have major concerns about uh when we Marge towards that Singularity with a physicalist notion of ourselves where we think the only way we can achieve immortality is to somehow integrate ourselves U merge ourselves with technology and machines I think that that undermines who we ultimately are and misses the entire point of the Enterprise I think transcending capitalism completely misses the point in the way exactly that you're talking about human flourishing human consciousness human Free Will has to be protected and if anything we've learned in the last 100 years is that the enemies of that are the enemies of Truth and those are really the people that we should be against so when it comes down to Notions of kind of like I said embracing hey communism is great if they just could manage it better no that's that's uol Harari that's transhumanism that's making people feel this nihilistic you're meaningless because the universe is meaningless so how could you be any meaning meaning in your life and that AI will change everything so you know drugs and uh video games are the best you can offer you I think Sam Alman is much closer to the truth Sam Alman with his yes we're going to change the social contract with AI clearly and I think he's not the first one to say that but that's true but what happens when the the price of labor goes down dramatically like 95% is not uh necessarily a bad thing and it can completely be compatible with a free market kind of system and it's completely compatible with human flourishing on this other level so that's a really interesting political discussion to have because I don't think it's a political discussion I think it's a discussion about what's behind the transhumanist agenda and but to get there you have to understand that transhumanism is real and it's real on the spiritual level it's Alistar Crowley you know it's create better than the Creator Gods I don't want to be confined by a moral imperative one of the things I think is clear from the near-death experience science but is less clear with the contact experience is the idea of a moral imperative no one comes back and says there isn't right or wrong they come back and say no there's this deep-seated sense of right and wrong I wrote a book a couple years ago called why evil matters couple of people I interviewed for this book one was a FBI undercover agent who was working with the naml you know the guys they made fun of in South Park the pedophiles right so they' get together for their pedophile little outings and one of them was in Times Square at the old toar R Us thing and he said hearing these men talk about not just the sexual acts that they want to engage with these children but the pain that they want to inflict and he said you know it was everything I could do to keep from just throwing them over that rail you know and then the other person I interviewed was a woman named Anica Lucas who was I don't know if you ever heard of the drro kind of child sex trafficking thing in Belgium but it become a big thing because in the papers these kids were in cages and they died in their cages because they arrested Dutro and he was tied up and he couldn't feed his uh his victims these young children who were in these cages she was sold into sex slav in Belgium at 6 years old and horrific kind of thing and the reason I bring that up and the reason because evil I was talking about being like well I don't know about evil I see it as you know kind of learned or unlearned or you know growing or not growing but when you bring that they go yes that's evil I don't know howse to process it but it's somehow evil in some way that I can't fully understand in the same way that I read the near-death experience accounts and I go that's good that's light in some way that I can't maybe understand but my point is I think we need to try and understand that because if we're in this world thinking that there isn't evil and that there aren't people with malevolent intent and they may be using yal Harari to advance these kind of agendas to tell us that we're meaningless to advance this AI thing that uh don't worry give everything up to AI I just don't think we can get to that next level of really having these discussions if we don't acknowledge that bring that to the table Yeah so I think we have a lot of overlap maybe some settled distinctions too so let me first of all just go back to the AI part then we'll come back to the the evil aspect so with the AI thing I'm not arguing for communism what I'm saying though is that we actually now have an intelligence that we can ask for it if it's programmed in the right way we can ask it to uh come up with solutions that do serve the greatest good which again I'm acknowledging difference between good and evil and one of the definitions for me is that um you have an ever increasing Circle of Care and concern so you want to be making decisions that impact the greatest number of people and beings the biosphere the animals the and whatnot um positively and we can do that and in some ways AI um if it's done again correctly which I'm not at all convinced it's going to be um we could ask it to act in ways that uh over overcome some of the selfishness that is part of um the way that our economies work while AI could be this miraculous opportunity for us to change the nature of our civilization and free up people and allow Consciousness to flourish instead what I see us doing is racing headlong against the Chinese to get to AGI um as soon as we can and in so doing we're not taking the steps and considering like a tribe would do what is in the best interest of the whole and how we make sure we don't make missteps while we're rushing towards AGI so I have concerns about how that's happening I have concerns about how different ethicists have resigned from the board at open AI because they feel like their concerns are not being considered I think when you put AI only in the hands of a capitalist system it can quickly put us in a position where we didn't take the time to do the homework we needed to do if it's used correctly again I think it could be the biggest revolution in the history of the planet now one of the things you sent me was a comment from Dean and he had an oce so it was interesting to me that you kind of looked at that as transhumanism this hive mind thing so this is something else that comes up in the contact literature that again often people in our context who are used to especially in America we have this rugged individualism kind of sort of Ideal but so when people hear about some sort of hive mind even amongst the grvs they think of the Borg on Star Trek and it's all these negative connotations but I tend to actually agree with Dean Raiden here that if we are to let this fundamental interconnectivity re we ideally get to a point where we have individuality but like Hons right so a hon is something that is an individual but it's also part of something larger and you have this kind of nested fractal structure right where molecules form cells which form organs which fill bodies which form species which form ecosystems planetary civilizations on that those I think that the more we can actually have a a porish sense of identity where I do identify as Darren King right but I am also recognizing that I'm more than that and I can actually um express my agency uh without being defined by that limited kind of sense of parameters I think that's where we need to go and I think that's the nature of reality getting back to the non-dual thing again the nature of reality is everything's perfect and interconnected and all the intelligence we need all the solutions are already in the environment it's in the illusion of separation and our misapprehension of who we are and how connected that all these problems arise so I can get to a problem of evil in a second and while I do think that's a fair caricature of what goes on much of the problems that arise personally interpersonally and collectively I see as being an implication of the illusion of Separation yeah so the we're we're getting to kind of a great point because we're uh kind of stripping away I think what amounts to what a lot of people call political differences and I'm apolitical not voting for Trump I vote for Trump before I won't vote for him but I certainly won't vote for the people on the other side they're a lot worse a lot worse so I don't know who who to vote for it and not May political I think it's the Crips versus the Bloods but look at what Dean Raiden is really saying there I gotta say Darren this is like a a meaningful point where our opinions might diverge or maybe we can bring back together but anyways listen what Dean Raiden says he says I want to give you the jab right the MRNA jab which by the way in that interview and which was taken down from uh YouTube not for it was on there for a while and then uh somebody must have kind of caught on to it you know what this was at the time when after the jab if you remember the jab was extremely dangerous most dangerous in history and not effective and the United States Army had the database that they've always had and available to the public that was showing 600% increase in heart conditions among troops who had taken the jab you know so this is public it's in Congress the guy's you know saying it so what did they do well they took down the database first time in history made it not available don't let that date out so I asked Dean about that I said you know you want to plow forward with this mRNA they already ran the experiment once and it was horrible and what was his response hey you know if we need to break a few eggs to get the omelet made you know so do it but more to the point is do you remember what his excuse was for how horrible things were and how we had to jab people into give them the hive mind Ukraine Ukraine he goes look at the people in Ukraine that war that are killing each other over that what is your understanding of of Ukraine well so first of all I just want to hear what you're saying and clarify what Dean Raiden's saying is are you saying that uh he's not just talking about evolving to some sense of having some sort of collective intelligence you're saying that he's suggesting we use technology and medication to force it upon the population I'm just want to clarify what you're saying 100% that that is his startup right he has a biotech startup right using the MRNA technology which was used in the covid jab as a way of changing your DNA right so that's the new tool that's the new technology at his disposal and the reason he's in this mix and when I talk to you know another guy and kind of apologizing for Dean he goes well this is just Dean trying to get you money you know which I get you know he's at he doesn't make a ton of money he's in Silicon Valley he sees a lot of other people going around making tens hundreds of millions of dollars maybe that's it but I think whether that's his motivation or not I think it's it's extremely extremely concerning to think that someone would think that they could use this biotechnology the MRNA technology which again you know I did this in the original interview with Raiden but you can look up his biotech company and you can look up all that stuff it's not like a hidden kind of thing but again this is what happens with this this is what happens with with uh you know Ukraine Ukraine now we come to know that we really were completely complicit in egging that on right so we it took over Ukraine we rigged their election then we invited them into NATO they drew the line they said you just can't do this this would be like us coming into Canada and saying well it's Canada you know it's an independent country we'd go no that's our neighbor you can't do that you're right on our doorstep so the situation in Ukraine at the very least including their neo-nazis kind of that we put in when we overthrew that just because they were the power structure kind of like in Afghanistan when they did that with the different War yeah the Taliban warlord kind of stuff but certainly more complex much more complex than Dean Raiden in his Silicon Valley kind of liberal kind of everything should work out just great very very different from that and that's the guy I want to to be giving me the jab and say don't worry this hive mind will be will be great for you it's where you want to go right so that that's helpful Contex so I I do agree that the Russ Ukraine thing is more complicated than we are uh told um and definitely is a a degree of propaganda there for sure almost every global conflict I would say is much more complicated than single narrative would allow for um now I certainly am not arguing for that kind of transhumanism I'm certainly not arguing for that kind of hive mind whatsoever and I think where you and I would find a point of convergence I even though we might have some differences politically but I think where we do find a point of convergence is I I have found one of the interesting um ways that the data diverges even amongst like euphology so ology tends to skew right actually because it's people who are questioning of the government and consensus narratives that also sense there's something that's been covered up in the UFO phenomenon so it's more of a conservative group of people tend to be going in that direction than Progressive or liberals and part of what I see as a bit of a blind spot for progressives and liberals is they assume that conventional government and the powers to be generally are well-meaning and I think that's a bit naive and I I think that um in the midst of saying that the abduction scenario is I think more overarchingly positive than people give it credit for likewise I would say that I do see some evidence and Janice and I have discussed this on Event Horizon you know really wrestling with data that sure looks like the powers that be have undermined human Freedom have undermined human health seemingly deliberately over time and of course they have also some of the intelligence committee and whatnot have sown so much Discord and multiple narratives and released them all like viruses into our field so that people even when they're try to claw for what's really true they end up being exhausted or they don't have the time or resources to do it so I think that looks quite nefarious to me and I'm very open to the notion again but again being cautious and being skeptical right not jumping holding some doubt but I'm certainly open to the notion that there is some sort of global cabal behind the scenes that is not that we what we see on the surface that are political structures that is you know turning the lever so to speak speak and when you look at some of theop human health it seems to be going down over time could it be exopolitical because that's part of the lore and I I think it has major traction because if you just deconstruct everything else that you're saying none of this stuff goes on without some sinking up with whatever though that EXO agency non-human intelligence agency is and to me always the starkest example of that is disclosure you know oh disclosure disclosure disclosure could happen tomorrow right so there is some and it's also in the lore that we have some elements of our government or world government and also the whole thing of world government looks a lot different from an exopolitical standpoint it might be eventually where we have to get you know that from an interplanetary thing it's like of course you idiots out there you can't have 146 different kind of countries that doesn't work but there's no transparency there that completely deceptive if that is an agenda but I'm rambling on why can't we connect what what you're saying doesn't it fit perfectly with some kind of exopolitical agenda yes and I have equally entertained that because I am so convinced that we live in this really diverse Universe multi-dimensional Cosmos with all sorts of other kinds of intelligences that can like I said earlier not only manipulate SpaceTime but can manipulate individual consciousnesses so examples like you know Jo Val has talked about a case where where this French family were driving down a busy road they see what looks like a UAP coming down they each see something but what they each see is different than the other and what actually does get captured on film which was something looked like what none of them saw and simultaneously nobody else on the highway seemed to see anything whatsoever so that shows you how they can custom deliver uh perceptual experiences right and here again I lean on someone like Donald's Hoffman's work saying that you know our perception of reality is not a pipeline to ultimate truth right in terms of Base reality so it there's many ways they could step in and manipulate that process so that being the case I absolutely think that I argue for a spectrum of Consciousness development where not all of these non-human intelligences are you know all sunshin and roses and enlightened beings I think that we're going to find a spectrum there I think the data itself suggests we find a spectrum I think part of what we do a disservice to the data is that we collapse and conflate it all and try to make sense of it rather than recognizing there's multiple kinds of beings with different stages of Consciousness development some are still very don't say stages of Consciousness development we don't know that this is advancing towards the good and that's where I see there's maybe there's a different Continuum like I love when you laying out before that they have advanced extended Consciousness capabilities that bleed into these other Realms like near-death experience but maybe there's a complete and separate difference in terms of alignment with good and uh in the in the soup with the rest of us who are all of mixture so I'm not exactly clear on what distinction you're making from what I'm saying I'm saying that I'm not saying that it's guaranteed that every being will ultimately achieve enlightenment necessarily in a particular construct what I am saying though is that I think we should expect and it would be fool hearty of us to assume either and you do hear this in the lore right in in the UFO Community you get people who argue for them all being demonic basically or all and shal right and I'm like that just doesn't play well with the data so you know we have to be very wary of our bias there um what I'm saying is that I do think there may them be a quasi physical or a completely non-physical kind of intelligence that can manipulate human consciousness and does so a kind of parasitic kind of entity if you will that and again this is part of the lar that feeds off of fear that feeds off of suffering the same way that a parasitic you know entity that enters your body might consume part of your innards or whatever I mean I think that's quite likely and again this is one of the reasons why in my Essence to being initiative I actually help people to reconnect with this deep subtle awareness so they can track better their own agency and what's potentially influencing them and part of the challenge with Modern Life is with us being so distracted and buying so much into physicalism we are basically sitting ducks for some of this parasitic stuff that might be working on a more subconscious level so I'm fully open to the idea a that um and even David grush has kind of hinted at this right if we have Accords with the military-industrial complex and some form of nhi you have to ask yourself how enlightened would a group of nhi be that is making Accords with the military-- industrial complex so I think again I think it's complex until I'm convinced otherwise by the data I assume a spectrum both within humanity and with non-h Humanity so great I I love that and I think the point you made about Rush is is perfect well said right right whatever alliances they're making we should immediately call into question the motives of both those individuals so again if ET is having an nde IT suggests that it is on a different if you want to call it Consciousness evolutionary track completely that that would be an hypothesis that I would throw out is that it's a completely different Consciousness evolutionary track than all these other shenanigans that we're talking about so all the really evil stuff that we're talking about and all the very human sounding I got to get ahead I got to take over the planet I got to do this and that and by the way o Open AI you know again you know the the the kind of capitalist versus uh socialist kind of view open AI alignment problem complete hijacking of the narrative right they didn't like that he was too open is what they didn't like so they made him go hire a guy from NSA to run the thing right so you know you say oh I'm a little concerned about their safety and others you know high level people left CU concerned about safety they were concerned because he wasn't closely enough following the agenda in terms of we got to lock this stuff down and evidence of that is who they brought in for alignment is NSA NSA is the guy that you bring in and say oh this will keep us free and safe now but yeah is there a separate track in these Consciousness Realms I don't have any really firm conclusion on that but that's where the evidence for near-death experience leads me well I think again for me I tend to keep um going further back into the assumptions or the axioms that give rise to the hypotheses we have in the first place and many of those axioms have become unquestioned right and so as Donald hoopen likes to say give me one miracle and then I'll spin up some version of reality right but he's yeah but he's kind of a physicalist isn't he at the end of the day he kind of has some physicalist leanings and again we don't know like we served in this interview an hour and a half ago that we don't know if it's just because he has to get along with his colleagues and doesn't want to be disinvited from the conferences or stuff like that but when he's really pushed he isn't embracing the near-death experience data he isn't embracing the contacte data he's still in a backd door kind of way he's still saying there's a substreet you know Donald Hoffman yes with his screen screen screen and the icons and yes he has said that he sits in front of his colleagues right and makes some argument for his model and then they said they're just nodding his heads and he's like I don't think you guys understand I'm saying neurons don't exist your brain has no causal power over your experience and so I think he's actually making a pretty radical argument for Consciousness giving rise and everything we perceive as physicality is just that it's a perception it's an epip phenomenon of The evolutionary process so he's saying that give me one miracle and I'll spin up physicalism he's saying okay let me assume for a second that Consciousness is primary and then from that let me see if I can spin up what appears like quantum gravity and SpaceTime right and if I can do that then I'm getting somewhere where were we before that we were talking about I think there's a backdoor physicalism there where they always have to come back to then explaining physicalist phenomenon rather than really Breaking Free and saying what you say which is unsatisfying to most people and even unsatisfying to me and it's the Bernardo thing it's like hey it all is just Consciousness at some level so even his little icons there's no such thing really as emergence emergence is just another level of abstraction from you know that but I think that becomes problematic if you really try and embrace some of this other data that we're talking about like particularly near-death experience and you know contact experience unless you're saying well that just emerges as well and everything emerges and it's like okay what are we talking about Darren's right I'm wrong Donald Hoffman's not up physicalist hope to have him on again soon well so like so again my friend Mike bers he and I have had um conversations because while he's come around to the Consciousness piece again he trained as a biological Anthropologist so he's following Darwinism and those kind of assumptions and I think this is where I kind of align a little bit with hoppen in the sense that I can say it's a subset of some larger reality so it's a self-consistent subset but that doesn't mean that it's ultimate or that's ground of all beinging right and so when Hoffman says that and that Bernardo kind of said this too I think this where they kind of align a little bit he'll say that physics May ultimately be the science of the study of our perception rather than a base reality I think that's actually getting somewhere because it then opens the question what might the base reality be or again what might be a spectrum of realities so one person I want to bring in here again speaking of this converging data sets is Neema arani hemed who's a physicist who says that the numbers themselves the data themselves tell us that SpaceTime cannot be foundational right so Hoffman will often reference him and when he says SpaceTime is doomed and what he means is it the numbers just don't work right so again this is where you and I would agree that it's in the data just look right and he's saying that it's very clear that SpaceTime is derivative of some deeper structure so everything we're talking about today everything that Bernardo at least gives some you know hint towards and that Donald Hoffman perhaps is pointing towards is deeper levels of reality which again might be what people are tapping into in something like a near-death experience right because it would feel more foundational and real because it actually is prior to and Beyond and transcends this particular subset so what I'm saying is that I'm I'm open to the idea that we could come up with a model of Consciousness where you have a subset that ends up looking like physicalism so again it's about a parent physicalism or a parent physicality versus it being that way so one of the arguments I make and I know Berard made this point to is that if I have a lucid dream which I do pretty easily um I'm going around having what feel like physical experiences I mean if I bang my knee in the dream it hurts right when I do different things it feels real the reason why I suddenly wake up when I feel like I'm falling is because I feel like I'm going to actually hit the ground and it's going to hurt but I wouldn't if someone were to say to me um and I were to say to somebody that's physical they would say well no it's not it's just the way your brain is configuring Consciousness right it's taking on a certain manifestation quity that has the appearance and the qualitative um you know phenomenology of physicality but that's just a modulation of Consciousness so that's where I I tend to be with Bernardo and when he talks about you know a Whirlpool is ultimately just the river right but can still take on the appearance temporarily of something that seems semi-independent yeah that's great and the essence of being a program that you put together I haven't done it but I listened to a pretty extensive interview on it sounds fantastic sounds like anyone would gain a lot from that you know both in terms of the material you bring and then the experiential aspect to it and you're well trained in kind of meditation and non-d dual stuff and you're bringing that in and then you have a group you know you're creating this like-minded people that bring this energy to it so I definitely hope people check that out and I'll provide a link to that as we move towards wrapping things up and I appreciate all your time today guess to poke at you a little bit more on one of the things CU there is this overlay that you have of evolution of Consciousness and I already kind of pushed back with the idea that I think I'm open to Elizabeth's idea that we may be perceiving that in wrong way and we may be applying our cultural overlay darwinian about that and that's one thing I find fascinating about Bruce Fenton so he's going back 780,000 years and he's pulling these independent scientific aspects of it the tech ties the gene sequence the Out of Africa stuff all the rest of that and then he's saying now let's connect it with Channel material that says these interplanetary wars 780,000 years ago and here's the evidence of that and then you go to John brandenberg and you you've seen his stuff on the nuclear weapon signature from Mars you know 250,000 550,000 years ago hell man the idea that we are evolving is just I I I think it is it does feel kind of ethnocentric in a kind of this expanded kind of way like we are evolving now is the special time which said there forever it seems to me that somehow this aggression is this Conquest thing is playing out forever in the timeline as well in a way that I don't want to give some trait explanation for it of like you know these are uh agreements that we made pre Soul I'm down with that I on one level I totally get that but another level it breaks down it doesn't make sense you know in the same way that Raiden is going to jab you because of the Ukraine thing and he's never looked into it to say that gee that might be a little bit more complicated or China is spending three times as much as we are on AI in the battlefield oh but they're probably our friends but maybe they're not our friends maybe they don't have the best intentions so the evolution of Consciousness and that we are in the dawning of the new age I'm open to it I just I I think there's counter evidence so let say a couple things so one part of my history that was pretty informative for me was integral Theory and studying under Ken Wilbur and one of the things that Ken has championed although he wasn't the originator of this is spiral Dynamics and so this is again compelling data in my point of view over time you do see this again assuming that major catastrophes don't happen or people feel like their basic needs are not being met then they can actually devolve right but when those needs are being met when technology is increasing and people have their basic needs they have shelter they have food whatnot we see people identifying over time with larger spheres of care and concern so we have the movement towards something like rather than just being tribal we identify as nation states then we identify as a particular religion maybe across nation states then we start recognizing human rights saying that regardless of what your particular religious view is or whether you have none whatsoever or if you're like you say a fundamentalist atheist like Sam Harris or whatever we still recognize that your basic rights should be protected we now have animal rights right we had the civil rights movement that happened we have now recently some acknowledgement that plants seem to have some degree of Consciousness so maybe we need to rethink that so when you and I talk about this underlying field of interconnected Consciousness where everything ultimately is this Cosmic field then we recognize that everything might be imbued with some degree of Consciousness and we have to consider our our ethics from that point of view but I would also argue that as part of that you have involution and evolution so in this and again this sort of plays into some of the non-d duel Traditions not all of them but some of them in the sense that you kind of have this cycle right where um Source spills out into manifestation and then all these breadcrumbs are left because of our ultimate nature being this interconnected source and slowly we we remember which as my friend Janice likes to say is to put together greater parts of ourselves we recognize we are Source we somehow are Source dust not just Stardust and then we sort of move towards this reunification with Source where we recognize actually you and I are not so different we maybe are fundamentally the same maybe this illusion of Separation while meaningful is not ultimate right so in that sense for me I think in the data themselves you do see that across time again assuming cataclysms don't happen political disruption doesn't happen where people can regress you do see this evolution of Consciousness and I would also argue that this is a cosmic Norm because even for these Graves and these other beings they also are ultimately Source right so my perspective hinges on non-duality here that if we're all ultimately part of this connected field then we all follow this journey in one way or another now I would argue that some of what we're seeing today in terms of Greater Distortion and dissension in our ranks in ever in some ways absolutely and I agree with you and no about years part of my background is in religious studies so I agree with you people have been saying it's the end time Jesus is coming back every year of my lifetime going back into centuries of Millennia right so yes everybody always believes this is the moment everything's going down but I think I would argue that actually at this moment we're moving towards something like a singularity although how I might Define that might be different than some other people um I think that we are facing um with our rise in technology without a requisite advancement of our consciousness misunder understanding we are potentially encountering numerous existential threats to our entire Collective civilization um and so I think where everything's coming down right now is will there be enough Awakening to overcome that because I will say this right and I know you're open to different kinds of data not just within the UFO phenomenon right one of the most fascinating aspects for me of the people that end up in my essence of being classes is that the UFO phenomenon becomes the delivery mechanism for them arriving at this Consciousness understanding and non Duality right and but there are numerous other circles channeling circles like you talked about that I'm aware of that are not connected to euphology who also are seeing this burgeoning Awakening where people are remembering this context that subsumes this one so to me I do feel like as much as I understand historically it seems a bit presumptuous to say it's all going down in a lifetime but I think there's some evidence to support that in the data themselves even though I agree that's open to interpretation I just don't think it's I think you'd have a hard time supporting that you know and I think it's like when you look at natural disasters you know and you look at the tsunami in Indonesia you know what 20 years ago that was that was the apocalypse for them if you lived in Asheville North Carolina a few months ago that you're in North Carolina I mean that was their apocalypse for families there their life will never be the same their life will fall apart be destroyed and they'll talk about you know how their dad committed suicide because he couldn't do this and this and that and their whole life will change so it's wherever we want to put the lens and you saw the video of the guy from Australia he's going up to New Guinea and he's going to try and you know make contact with the tribe and the head hunters whatever you know the native people threw Spears at them killed them and stuff like that we tend to think in a very ethnocentric way and the counter evidence that the counter data that I keep presenting that again I you're fantastic I really appreciate you engaging in this dialogue but I don't think you F engage with it is that there is some push towards a one world government and we don't know if it's an exopolitical but it's clearly a pleasure so I would decouple the notion of us having to move towards some sort of collective working together from the globalist agenda you're talking about so I'm open to the possibility as I said I'm very open to seeing data I don't dismiss it out of hand at all and I have even entertained the notion that because I have seen in the data themselves suggestions that human thriving has been going down over time which shouldn't be the case which seems to perhaps suggest some sort of deep cabal who is actually slowly trying to rob humans of their agency help them forget who they are by distracting them so that they don't act of their own inherent power which is connected to this undercurrent of connected energy so I'm open to saying that's the case while also saying that I do think that just because of the nature of the fact that everything is intercon connected that's the fundamental nature of reality that we will have to find ways to work together and not be in opposition to each other that there are real implications to the illusion of Separation that I think we can and should overcome and we'll have a better world for it without saying therefore that I want these particular guys and their particular agenda to be the manifestation of that how does that not lead to Star Wars lead to Star Wars is that you said yeah essentially I mean that's what ruce Fenton is talking about that's what John brandenberger is saying that this is our history our history is advancement but it still is two sides that don't agree and it's Star Wars so I because I'm a I'm into non-duality I just this two sides thing this the this binary view just doesn't play well for me you just described a binary you just described hey you know are people becoming addicted to the phones and the dopamine and all the rest of that I mean that's in this reality and you're making real points about that fair enough but I think they're misguided I think they're misguided I think I don't think it's necessarily that they are pure evil I think that they are misguided about who we ultimately are what we ultimately are and what our potential is if you really BL buy into the physicalist agenda and many academics just inherit it as part of our culture without questioning it as a lot of business people do then you're going to say well the best we can do is give people more technology maybe help them overcome diseases by integr with machines but that's not necessarily because there's this agenda of ultimate Evil I think that while the illusion of Separation plays out people will try to dominate they will try to suppress people they will try to or resources like all of these arise from the illusion of Separation which is not to say that there are not parasitic entities there are not some dark fields of energy that seem to prey on and thrive on other being suffering I think there are but again I would just argue for a spectrum rather than this binary View and again I would argue that we do need to be careful of all things you're saying and I think part of what is missing in our conversation is it tends to be are you here and I'm saying there's truth in both elements it's more complicated it's multi-dimensional let's look at the data let's all be open to this and recognize on the one hand that we do need to overcome this perhaps this group that might be nonhuman as well as human some sort of aord that is basically trying to control people Rob them of their agency um not given to that and the ruses that they're calling this you know happy Collective but at the same time recognize that we do need to move to some sort of sense of um Collective cooperation to overcome some of the challenges we face and to fully step into our Birthright as beings that are part of this interconnected field so for me I want to have a richer deeper dialogue and be open to some of what you're saying but also not reduce that to this kind of binary view which I'm not saying you're doing but some people do so Darren uh excellent excellent I so appre apprciate it tell folks about when a convergence podcast and essence of being training sounds fantastic and then you have another podcast as well you actually have three podcasts so um the first podcast that I began as point of convergence which we've already discussed is basically discussing the overlap the intersection of all of these um anomalous fields of research that seem to be pointing to something fundamental about reality that you and I tend to agree on Lim of frames is a second podcast which I did with my friend Nathan we both have a religious studies background so we sort of connect not just the modern U phenomenon and ndes but also bring in religious history and how that might be part of the same dance between these Cosmic U beings and intelligences and then event Horizons the third podcast I have where with my co-host Janice we entertain the passage we were all going through right now as a collective and how that involves both challenges and opportunities like what we talked about with AI where it could be you know it could be work out really well for us or it could be used uh to our detriment depending on who's controlling it and the essence of being came out of my experiences basically um so it's both both based on my experiences and also my understanding of non-duality and my uh my conviction that this interconnected field um is not ultimately a better description of who we are but that there's immense uh wealth of information and intelligence there for us to tap into if we can transcend this sense of being separate beings and separate objects so it's a very fragmatic way of through things like guided meditation helping people tap in to sematic knowledge and noetic understanding that transcend sort of the cerebral process and then some actual just curriculum to help us um work through how we could move towards some of that collaboration I was talking about earlier well that's really awesome and you're obviously bringing light into the world and all about that and your energy is fantastic and I love the deep thinking that goes into your show is super impressive so I hope people do check them out and I'm very grateful for you joining me today I appreciate it well I have fully enjoyed it too Alex I'm glad for the push back and uh we need to have these conversations and be willing to entertain you know all of the data not just the ones we prefer so I look forward to doing it again sometime you bet we will [Music]