Season Two, Episode Ten: Causeways

And in fact, you must know yourself from going through all of the things that you did. You know, causing effect, it comes almost, it's a blind really. We're programmed with it because in Newtonian physics, everything we grow up with, you do this, you get that. Even the magic, you do this ritual, you get that happen. I'm not, I really, I'm not so sure anymore. I think it's a lot more fluid. I am almost like a fluid electrical field, everything. I'm going to do some recording of period range students, I'm Nathan Isaac, and this is Pinrola. What is this phenomena that we've been experiencing? Is there some intelligence coordinating all of this? Is whatever we've been interacting with located here on the Pinrola? Is it drawing all of these people and events to this place? The language we use to talk about all of this, fails us. It feels impossible to find the right words to communicate to another person about any of them. These things which seem to defy reason and causality, I believe, reveal the machinery and mechanisms of something wondrous, albeit terrifying in its strangeness. To say the inner workings of the unseen world would infer that it's hidden, but it's not trying to hide. We simply can't see it. This phenomena or whatever it is that we've been interacting with, we are not the only ones having these experiences. There are so many others experiencing the phenomena themselves in their own way and from their own place. And all of the guests on this show last season and this season have been having their own experiences, discovering their own mysteries and magic. At the end of most interviews that I conducted over the last year to have, I asked guests to the show what they thought the phenomena was and what role magic played in their lives, especially in terms of enchantment and reenchantment. This episode is a collection of those perspectives on magic and what the phenomena is and how we can rediscover enchantment in a world where it's easily lost. Kiki Dombrowski and I discussed why these messages and communications might be coming from somewhere else and where that somewhere else might be and also how the phenomena relates to initiation. I mean, obviously it must be something we're interacting with. We're all walking on these pathways. We're interacting with spirit of place. We're being influenced by symbols and messages. I think it's just taken on a different costume in 2021. Maybe it is technological, maybe it is on the highways, but I also think it's really, really valuable to reconnect with earth and natural spaces. While we talk about visiting foamhenge or another roadside attraction, like Chucky Cheese, I think it's also important to also say I need to go visit the mountains. I need to go visit serpent mountains. I need to go to old stone fort. I need to see how these people connected with math and where they were looking for patterns. Something feels a little bit more pure about that as well and maybe that's just my perspective. I was being somebody who's not technologically inclined. But I also think too that the phenomenon, we started by saying that if we look at it, it looks back, I think there's an element to that too. My perspective automatically when I thought of Amy's story or Pamela's story, I automatically went one direction that somebody else might say that that doesn't make sense to me. But to me, it's like real truth. It's like, oh my god, this is the key. I guess in a way, something that's really spectacular about this phenomenon is that it's inspiring people. It's inspiring people to still remain at the crossroads, have one foot in this technological world of highways and traffic, but also have a foot in the other world where we're still fascinated by high-strangeness and mystical experiences and having moments where we feel we've been given a sign. So I think that the phenomenon is a really special opportunity to still allow spirit and sensitivity and magic and wonder and imagination be alive in what feels like a place that is trying to strangle that. So I'm really thankful for what you do because it gets me to think, it gets people to think. Like I said, just in preparation for this conversation, I had so many aha moments that are going to inspire me and persuade some of the things I study and write and believe. That's going to be the same way for anybody else that tunes in and listens to this. They're going to play a role in this too. But the interesting thing is, though, is about initiation. Everybody has to experience initiation, but you still do it alone. So it's really interesting. You have to make the choice. Nobody is going to do it for you. You have to do it alone. So it's almost like it's a very, it is. It's a very liminal space where, you know, you're very technical. We're in a modern world. We're, you know, having hard groceries and products dropped off at our front door. But then also we really want to somehow have this supernatural experience to remind us that there are still things that cannot be easily written away in an academic book somewhere. And the other thing I think too, one of the things I've always noticed, because I'm obviously I'm not from the South. I'm a Yankee. But one of the things I've always said too is maybe one of the things that would be beneficial is to see neighborhoods where libraries and community centers and schools are the main feature on the main road as opposed to the big churches. You know, it's like I remember I had that feeling especially when I was driving through Jackson, Tennessee. I thought, man, I've counted like 12 churches, but I haven't seen an elementary school yet. Maybe of course I took the wrong road so I could kind of have that judgy, you know, perception, but it's not the first time I've felt that way. I don't know how we shift people into trusting that you can have an imagination. The issue is if you open yourself to re-enchantment, if you open yourself to the mystical, if you open yourself to the imaginative, it means that you have to be vulnerable and sensitive. It means that you show that you're like you have like some sort of like child's eye. You have this like unusual view of the world and be okay with that. In my interview with Josh Kuchin regarding his research and works about the cross-cultural similarities between UFOs, fairies, bigfoot and other aspects of the paranormal, he detailed how he's come to the conclusion that while these things are not all the same, they are, at their core, all related parts of the same phenomena. I wonder, you know, is it literally, you know, talking about like whether or not aliens are fairies or whatnot? You know, well, things being misplaced, we blend on the fairies, but is that actually, you know, time-slip territory? Is that actually, you know, dimension shifting, you know, to use a pop culture term like Mandela of fact territory? Are you like, you blip that out of one dimension into the next, you know? I mean, if you look at sort of the way that people talk about the way that we process visual information, like you only see like a very small portion of what you're seeing and everything out sort of like an artifact that's lagging behind in time. So like maybe the stuff that we're not looking at just kind of ceases to exist unless it has to, you know, you know, far else don't I thought? Yeah, I think that we don't have a good name for what this is. And I think people listen to me talk and they think, that I'm saying that aliens are fairies or fairies or aliens or you know all these things are the gin or any member of things and that's not really what everyone I'm saying but what I do think is that these are the same family of phenomenon, the same suite of beings if you want to talk about it that way. Because I mean just the similarities are just too strong in my opinion. You've got you know on a very basic level you've got stuff like you know appearances tight, you know, the fact that they like to abduct people, anomalous lights, wands, but then you have stuff that gets more and more specific like for example like you know alien implants. It doesn't sound like there would be a comparison for that in like fairy lore but it was a thing where if you like got if you angered a fairy in you know certain parts of the world they would hit you with a blast of air, a blustery blast of air though cause a blister on your skin. This was called the fairy blast and it would be like a little like pebble or you know sometimes it was like a tooth of something or a piece of bone or skin, twigs, any number of things just to try this that would be underneath your skin. And that's such a to me it's such a clear reworking of that with the alien implant thing. You know you've got analogies that can be drawn between changelings of old and you know the human alien hybrids that we talk about UFO bases are underground or in mountains and these were places where the fairies used to live. You know fairy rings versus crop circles missing time you know you go into fairy land and you would have this you think that it was you know an hour had passed and you came out in a year had passed which is pretty clearly reflected in the UFO phenomena. It just the rabbit hole keeps on going deeper and deeper to the extent like you get really granular and it still holds true in some ways. What I'm thinking of specifically is the fact that you know John Keel famously dubbed what he called the Wednesday phenomena before his death. Now I don't know if this actually holds true when looking at the uphological data because it's so hard to get like a big amount of you know good reputable cases but he claimed that he had noticed a pattern that UFO sightings tend to occur on Wednesdays and that's one of the that's one of the fairy days you know it's a it's a it's a middle day of the week it's the liminal day right it's the it's it's it's the it's the day of the fairies which is also you know incidentally sort of the day of psychopaths the the beings that lead you to the other side you know Wednesday Odin's day or you know in Spanish Wednesday in the arcolez you know Mercurie's day but you know you keep on looking at this and it's just I can I can find almost anything in Alienmore that has at least a symbolic reflection in fairy folklore and vice versa I'm pretty confident to say that. Now again I'm not saying that's all the same thing it might just be sort of similarities that are of you know similar like I said like similar families of whatever these things are but like you know or maybe they just use similar techniques or they have to abide by the same rules but the idea that we're dealing with something that is entirely distinct you know extraterrestrials versus fairies is just something that I can't buy into anymore and you know there is a trickster aspect of it fairies would you know hide your keys some people still blame it missing keys on on various today they would lead you straight down roads that you had no business being down you're compelled down there where you find yourself traveling a way that you should know home and you find yourself on a road that you never been on before but you know again parallel to UFO lore as you just mentioned about traveling down these roads that you're compelled to drive down this race of flying saucer being that's another sort of tricksterish element and then you know there was more sinister too like you would have you would might get blinded on a win because the fairies were upset with you know of course blindness being at least temporary a side effect of some UFO sightings from possibly ionizing radiation you have all these things it's almost like a capriciousness like a like a there's sort of flighty I guess faithful which is something you see very much with you know spirit contact in general it's like you've got to be very careful about your words and careful about the way that you approach these things it's the ham sandwich fallacy right you make a pack with the demon and it says what do you want you say make me a ham sandwich and proof you turn into a sandwich like you've got to be really specific about what you say and the way the truth things and you know there was an almost contractual mindedness that the faithful to have for sure that sort of speaks to that that trickster element and then you know the trickster though is not just about being mischievous or prankish it's about a lot of other things that fit into that mold from an archetypal level if you look at tricksters around the world like hermys or Loki or Coyote or rabbit or you know these other trickster figures in the world till the island speaker they're not only like you know playing literal tricks but they have like you know they sort of they're transgressive in general right so they're not ashamed to do things that society would deen disgusting or inappropriate there's generally sexually fluid they're almost always guards of guardians of the doorways right so they're guardians of thresholds that that is not a liminal space which is why you know trolls appear under bridges and liminal spaces fairies are at the farest edge appearing around twilight like you've got all this liminal symbol isn't you can find they take babies that are born into the human world but not yet born to the church in other words and other not baptized yet you find all these similarities time and time again these connections still a minority for sure. you know I kind of wonder if enchantment is something that happens I wonder if we're not really enchanted even our disenchantment what I mean by that is like you take something like have you ever noticed how you know whenever you I don't know go to check on something you know you're sitting at it let's say you're sitting at a train tracks and like trains going on forever you're like you know what I'm going to get out and check and see how much more this trains left you get out as soon as you get out that's when the train ends right like I wonder if little gestures like that aren't actually some sort of of of magical practice in and of themselves you know because these tendencies and always seem to happen that way like last time that happened to me and I was like you know what this damn train so long we're just going to get out and see how much longer's left as soon as I did it sure enough the end of the train was right there kind of wonder if you know we think of those as you know just cruel ironies but I wonder if the act of looking and checking on something doesn't in that sort of you know observer effect kind of way force the universe's hands sometimes. Mark of a scanty who has assisted us in our research since season one explain how magic is the development and creation of rituals with the purpose of ordering reality and that the story has always been the same. These rituals accumulate and coalesce into the story that we tell ourselves to navigate reality. And what's interesting to me is that I mean from a magician's standpoint of what is my person point that is also the nature of the rest real consciousness God's goddess's spirit it's always it's always the same story that repeats itself for higher or lower than the other. And because there's one story in the end and does this one story is the story of reality very much so it's very interesting that you know you mentioned that because it's it's exactly I mean that's exactly how I see also the interplay between magic and mysticism as in like you know it is a fractalization of each other right like you have you use magic and you try to. To create rituals and try to order this story which seems chaotic but it's you know like you create little orders and disorders eventually becomes you know fractals of of the bigger picture and as you go higher and higher and you see the big more and more bigger picture you realize it's always the same story that comes again and again. Robert and Wilson carry Thorneley John Kill Terrence McKinna and many many more have tried to communicate to others the nature of their interaction with the phenomena and they've given it various names and descriptions over the years but in many ways it's ineffable especially in that it's often such a personal experience the synchronicities and connections that possess so much meaning for one of the most important things that is happening in the world. And so we're really looking forward to the next one. in my new parts, you know, but the actual lived experience of it is like incredibly deep and strange. It affects your dreams, it affects your memories and everything. We also talked about the human potential movement and the ways it's connected to reenchantment. I think it's kind of like an awakening, you know, I guess that's sort of a cliched term, but in terms of, you know, I'm originally from Chicago, moved down here to rural Georgia, and one of the things that I've been really amazed by is how all of the folk traditions of, you know, folk magic and that have been augmented by the hyper-mediation and hyper-communication network that we have. And an example of that would be the number of people that I've met who are good Christian folk, local, their families have been in this area for like 100 plus years, right? They start talking about the book of Enoch and it's because it's on History Channel, right? You have you have Ancient Penalions, which is this long-running show that's super popular and covers all of these different topics and they watch that show and it fits enough in with the stories that they've heard about, you know, from their family and that and their sort of like local culture that it sort of seamlessly comes in, but it sort of awakens in them these possibilities that may not have been awakened before quite as easily. And, you know, what I mean by that is like there's a fellow up north of here from Raven County and Raven County is where deliverance was filmed, right? So folks who are familiar with that movie, like that picture of rural Georgia, which it's not actually, it's not quite like that, but you know, it's rural, right? Ed Edwards is from Raven and he grew up right by Dr. Heranomis, who was the famous Heranomis radionics machine, you know, the symbolic Heranomis machine. Galen Heranomis had a summer house up there and so Ed grew up around him, but Ed's mother was, uh, was like a faith healer and so his familial tradition and the local tradition of faith healing blended with Galen Heranomis's, you know, sort of human potential, psionic, radionic stuff for Ed to develop his psychokinesis and in the course of Ed's life, he's met with a number of researchers and over the years his psychokinesis has been cultivated through these relationships, but it's only been really recently since Facebook and everything has connected him to this global network of people who are interested in, you know, developing psychic powers and that kind of thing, where he's been fully authorized, right? Like in the sense of being given the okay to embrace fully what he's able to do and you know, Ed's lab test, right? Like he's gone to a university of Virginia. They actually, up at the University of Virginia, the folks, um, built a chamber to test his his abilities, um, at the Monroe Institute, uh, which is like this copper lined hallway where they can they can actually measure his his electromagnetic output. And so he's, I mean, he's lab tested as being capable of altering his, uh, his body's electromagnetic output in a way that's fairly extreme. And, you know, this was his mother with a faith healing. He was authorized to a certain extent through his relationships as he grew up, but locally, you know, people still sort of looked at him like the witch, right? Like the weird guy who could move stuff with his mind and he said he could call down lightning and stuff. And now, because he has this, you know, access to the internet and he can communicate, he's been given the okay and to develop it and to, uh, you know, sort of run with it, right? And so I think that, uh, you know, this reenchantment thing, it has so much to do with relationships and developments and really the concept of authorization. Because all of these communications and conversations and, you know, different groups that people can align with and that and the media that's that's put out the ease of creating something like a podcast, you know, that can that can focus on this stuff and these topics and normalize it in a way that was never possible before. [Music] Also last mod in Manna, Alan were here in Somerset last summer experiencing all the fucking weirdness and more gracious enough to let us interview them, per se season two. They described how magic and enchantment became such a significant part of their lives. Yeah, I like was, I was formulating my answer in your head as you were talking and I was going to use the metaphor of like the lens, like to me witchcraft or magic is the lens through which I view the world. But lens sort of implies that you can like take a glass off at some point, you know, and you can be like, cool, I got my witch lenses on, I'm seeing all these synchronicities and I'm seeing this weird shit happen. But like maybe I can go home at the end of the day and take my witch glasses off and then I just become like, you know, for a while I was a college English teacher, I've worked in retail, I was like a marketing manager and like a fashion company and that was like a part, a point in my life where I was still practicing magic, I've been practicing magic since I was like 14 years old, but witch goggles on, witch goggles off. But at a certain point the witch goggles have become sort of like fused to my face and now I think even if I wanted to take them off, I don't know that I could and I had this crazy experience, you know, not that long ago, like a month and a half ago. I was one of those people who thought like, I don't really need to do a bunch of protective work, I just don't think it's that important. And I had this experience that really taught me that that was not the case and that if you start putting the call out connecting to that current, making yourself that light, things will find you. And you can talk to as many people as you like who can give you some love and light bullshit about like spirits all good and everything's fine and like, you know, you just create that shit for yourself by believing it and you people will tell you like if you do protective magic, you will experience negative things because you are putting out into the world that you believe that things can hurt you. Well, I am a living testimony that that's not true because I did nothing of that ill. I was like, I don't need to, it's fine if I don't engage with it, it won't find me, it fucking found me. And that was a moment, you know, a month ago, I've been practicing my whole life pretty much where I was like, I want to take the witch goggles off. This was a frightening experience. It sucked. I felt deeply unwell. It destabilized me. I don't want to do this. I was like, very close to taking all my occult books and throwing them in those miscessive hands saying like, walk away back to marketing manager territory for like two days until I restabilized and was like, no, actually, this is this is really just who I am now. It's become like part of the DNA. I don't think that it could go away if I wanted it to. You're going to find particularly in traditional witchcraft, which is what I have come to understand the the current of what I practice. I think that's how you could best categorize it. There's this idea of the witch blood. The witch blood is like a very divisive term because there is sort of a like almost eugenics implication of anything when you talk about something being passed down in blood. Even though we know that things like epigenetics exist and that trauma can be passed down genetically, there's still this like strange idea when you bring blood into it, I think. But witch blood at its core, the concept is not, you know, it's not a racist concept at its core, but unfortunately, a lot of these ideologies get like twisted and manipulated by people who want to use them for shitty shity ends, right? But the idea of the witch blood is that you do have something innate that's different about you and there's different origin stories for where this comes from. There's like certain subsets of the community that believe that witch blood comes from angels mating with humans at some point in creating nephilim. There is fairy law reasons for way which blood exists and they will say that like true witches, you know, if you really truly are a true witch by blood, that you have fairy blood, all these things are things that truly like 12 months ago I would have heard any of this shouldn't be like, that all sounds crazy and I don't believe it. But the more I walk down this path the more I'm like, I don't know. I'm trying to think about the best way to start that because, you know, way it is now and the way I used to connect with magic is really different. Like I personally think that there are people who dabble in magic and that's totally fine. But there are some people that it really does become ingrained in everything you do and there's much more intention behind everything and at the same time as well like divination isn't inherently witchcraft. If we're gonna go that route with magic because I'm not a ceremonial magician but I do It's hard, especially if you're working this field. You reflect your friends, and the same goes with you reflecting kind of spirit allies, or different associations that you have with different types of practices, and so it affects you. And personally now I'm at a point where there isn't really anything that I do in my life or that will appear that doesn't have some type of connection or association. Even if I do something that's supposed to help ground myself, such as like have a job that's like not inherently podcasting esoteric podcasts, or doing readings professionally, or anything like that, or spiritual art, let's say I go work at a restaurant or something, it still kind of weaves its way back to it. Because then suddenly I'm putting specific oils on before I go to work to protect myself, or I'm putting an oil on the bottom of my feet to get more tips. All things like that where it's like I can't really separate it, and even now it's like I can't travel the same way I used to. Like I used to just throw barely anything in a bag, and then go off somewhere. And now I'm checking for four days, I have to check a suitcase because I have too many candles and oils and all these things to like establish a presence wherever I am, because you become increasingly more sensitive as well. And this is one thing that people don't talk about a lot, especially when you get more over into the witchcraft hornor, whatever tradition it is, if you're going to take on the mantle of a witch, you are putting a call out through to experience and people and whatever, and you just have a different type of attention on you. So some people will be like, well, I don't need this type of protection, I don't need this type of working or I don't experience that, and they probably don't. But if you're dipping your hand, and you can only dip your hand in ink so many times, you can only walk through the liminal space, ride the hedge, whatever it is, tune into things before your hands will start to stain when you stick them in the ink. And so now it's like traveling, it's just a lot more revolving around, how do I protect my car, how do I protect myself, how do I do all these different things, knowing that you have a different light on when you walk around that signals different things to people. And that, I think this question too, even if whether you're talking to people who are just interested in a cult phenomena or not necessarily practitioners or ceremonial magicians or people who practice voodoo or oboeia or different types of folk magic, Italian folk magic, and then maybe traditional witchcraft, you're just going to, I think, get a different answer because it really does, I think, like fundamentally change your view of the world as well. And I personally am at a point where I can't separate, I can't turn it off or on because the times that I try to pretend that I don't need something at this point because of what I've put out into the net, put out with these strings and chords that I've created, the feedback I receive is just different than it used to be and I have to be aware of that. [Music] Much of what Matthew Bird and I talked about during his interview involved personal folklore and histories, especially when he grew up in the country in the Bible belt, which we both have in common. Interest in strange stories or magic meant you were dabbling with the devil, but that same magic that was seen as coming from the devil often had roots closer to home. And Matthew related the story of what happened when his mother discovered that he was practicing magic and how that magic was really an extension of his own family history and different aspects of magic that were already a part of the community. Look how it's viewed. My mom, when she found out that I was no longer following the Baptist's faith, she says, "I'm really concerned about you and I didn't know you were into that witchcraft and I was like, 'Mom, what am I doing?'" and she's like, "Well, I don't know. Are you worshipping the devil?'" and I'm like, "No, I'm not worshipping the devil. This is what I'm doing. I'm doing this, I'm doing this, I'm doing this. Your father was a free Mason, which was basis of a lot of the things that I'm reading about right now. My grandparents did this, my grandparents did that. I said, "Your mother bought my warts and when I explained it to her that way, she, you know, a kind of clicked with her." Intuition is also a significant part of the way magic, enchantment and synchronicity seem to function. The same of Corwin realized this during his close relationship in collaboration with publisher of the weird Adam Parfrey who embraced all things strange, shocking and French. I mean, do you feel, does it feel weird to you that I know that you're meeting with Parfrey was weird, right? The fact that you live next door. Does it feel weird but also strangely like auspicious that you're involved in all of this? Yeah, yeah, I guess it does. And it's really hard to tell where I factor in. You know, I've always wondered that. And especially that Adam brought me on to help with the project of writing his memoir. I guess I'll just relate this dream I had because I think it's relevant in at least the kind of archetypal, more young and like way of looking at this, you know, that there's a greater narrative at play and there's meanings and coincidences that we might never be able to parse out. But I had this dream and it was like days before Adam died. And we were both on top of a pyramid and it was missing capstone. We were both sitting up there just stacking bricks or stacking pieces that we knew would finish the pyramid. And we weren't saying a word to each other. It's like he would hand me a piece and I would know exactly where it went and I would hand him a piece and then he would know exactly where it went and we were just silently completing this pyramid. It was just the most beautiful dream because it kind of encapsulated how I feel about working on this book. It's I don't know where it leads me but I just follow my intuition and intuition always leads you to the right places and it leads you in weird places that cause these kind of connections that seem too good to be true, I guess. And Adam did that his whole life. His life story is made up of those kinds of interactions and it's like a lesson in just going with your gut and acting on it I think is the big thing. Because a lot of people won't, they'll stop, they'll have that gut feeling but they won't take that first step. Because this path is super weird and there's a lot of things that will get you tangled up and confused and spinning but I think in the end intuition always leads to clarity and understanding, at least I hope. Interacting with and navigating the phenomena without a doubt changes you and changes the way you interact with the world. As Dara Mason explained in his interview, once you interact with the magic and enchantment of the phenomena, you can't go back to seeing the world the same way you saw it before. It changes you and it changes your reality. It's really challenging to try and understand what the motivation is for whatever is engaging with people and pushing them down these avenues. And it's like each time you come across an odd synchronicity or you lift up another stone and there's just like a whole freaking other rabbit hole down there, right? So it's very hard to quantify that for other people because you can't really share or translate the emotional holy shit moment you get when you. uncover those things. It's not directly transferable. Sometimes you can package it up in a reasonable way, but it's hard to really get the resonance of like, no, something I don't understand is happening around me, you know, and I'm trying to navigate it, but through the navigation, my view of the entire world and what reality is is the boundaries of that are falling away, you know, and that's an extraordinary thing. You control society through its narratives, you know, one of the things that we have constantly is we have the archetype of the hero of the Superman or the superwoman, right, that solves the problems. They solve the problems. We have this the individual who is God-like. You look at the marvel films, you know, that that's not telling you anything about community, it's telling you essentially your power and you need kind of a son of God to solve your problems. That's basically what it's saying, right? So, you know, that and that goes back to, you know, like a warrior archetype, a warrior tradition, right? It's a very different view of, you know, an agrogarian society of one that is in a mutually beneficial relationship with landscape and place, right? You know, it sets up conflict, archfilling, archhero, and we're all the little shit-mongers trying not to get killed. You know, that's what it's playing out is, it's taking away individual power through those narratives. I think it's very difficult, you know, because of where we are in the West, in terms of we're in a cultural decline cycle, you know. There's an Irish philosopher called John Marriotti, who I'm a big fan of, and he essentially said, "We need to return to dream time," and dream time, he meant it very much in the Aboriginal sense, you know, he meant, "I'm not going to try and paraphrase him because I just fuck it up, it's like somebody retelling a comedian's joke," you know, kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, that's a good joke, man, yeah, fuck it out. How I see it is that we have the two kind of main ways of framing or understanding your world. You've got logos, you've got mythos, and logos has had supremacy for a very, very long time, and within logos, you don't have room for enchantment. It's pushed away past the borders of logos. Within mythology, in the mythos, you do dream and enchantment are as valid and as important as every day, you're waking experience or the banalishes of your life, dream and enchantment are equally as important if not more so. So I think that's where we are at is that we have the decline of logos, and then we have a society that doesn't have a dream, that doesn't understand enchantment, right? You know, and it's about making sure that we are, you know, we collectively have that. Those was who are on say the kind of the front line of this, or like they were the kind of the vanguard of it, you know, that we do that bit of stewardship, and we do that bit of guidance and community. Like I said, it's like when you have that kind of yet, the fascists take root and so to open that university. Don't fire bombers. Open the anarchist bookshop across the road with fucking great coffee that they do an amazing student discount, but that's how you defeat it. Give the dream, give the seed of, like create that great protein that healthy, beautiful soil that hummus that the seed can take root in, you know, and has the best chance of growing, you know, and I think that's our collective responsibility, and I think that's how we combat fucking terrible ideologies, you know, that destroy worlds, that destroy everything. Stephanie Quick is a writer and esoteric researcher of a wide range of 40 and magical topics. She's also studied and tracked synchronicities for almost two decades, trying to understand the nature of that phenomena at her own experiences. During her interview, she and I discussed engaging the outside world and the necessity of looking at the phenomena and enchantment from not only your own perspective and experience, but also from other perspectives through collaboration and by being part of a collaborative and inclusive community. It really reminds me a lot of Colin Wilson, the writer, because he would talk a lot about how it's easy, like if you're a magician or even just becoming a famous person, if you rely on the outside world to come to you, or to provide you with stimulation so that you're not bored or to interest you, you know, you can become very jaded. He had a friend who became a very famous writer in like the 70s or something, and this friend was telling him how he had a lot of groupies, and at one point he was involved in a sexual encounter with seven women, and he was bored, right? Now obviously this is a problem with this person's attention and ability to engage with the outside, right? So Colin Wilson was saying, you know, he has the philosophy that you need to always cultivate your own ability to pay attention to direct your attention to whatever is outside of you and to really engage with your surroundings and with your interior life and feed that energy and that attention and will it, and then, you know, you will kind of kick over into everything becoming like supercharged with meaning and brightness and, you know, giving back to you this attention that you've put into it as opposed to just kind of like passively waiting for the world to entertain you, or maybe seven groupies. I can't imagine, but I thought it was a funny example. If it is like you're saying, and that's what I love so much about Penny World the first season and how you wrap it up, which is if we give our attention wholeheartedly to the outside world and make a good faith effort to, you know, really explore these things, then, you know, you can just more and more just opens up. It's pretty phenomenal. And there are these patterns, but they're kind of just like a little bit out of sync enough, and a little bit off to the side enough that you can never quite get it all at once. And there always seems to be having this feeling of like the shadow versus, or I'm a more like the image at the end and the young, because they're creating each other by their interaction. And as an observer, like you were saying, you can only be observing your side of it to an extent and catch a glimpse of the other side. So it's almost like I think that this is where working with other people and in groups is supremely helpful. Everyone can kind of look at part of it and kind of hold the space for one another. So you can get more of a feeling for the whole, the more people that you have, because you may not be able to see all of it, but you can see your part, and then, if you have more people, they can see more different parts of it and kind of start to form a whole. It's like the whole idea of multidisciplinary approaching science, where, if someone's you want to learn about birds, you have people that will observe the behavior, people that record the songs, people that will look at the physiology of the birds on the physical level, people will stay there migrations and the mechanisms that they use for orientating themselves in time to speak, right? And even, you know, I'm a bird watcher, and if you have a bird festival or a bird conference, there's, you know, very much a interaction with art, you know, for illustrations for field guides, or very often art pieces, because that way you can convey more accurately than in a photograph, what are the field markings that can be used for identification? And then you'll have scientific information about birds that informs, you know, for example, art pieces that are talking about birds on or things like that. So there's a lot more, I find even in some of these multidisciplinary or scientific approaches or academic approaches, you have a lot more free-flowing kind of inspiration and ideas between the scientific and the various scientific disciplines and our sciences and soft sciences and art and education than in a lot of the pair of weird stuff. Or I think some people tend to be more, you know, I just want to be nuts and bolts. Or we need to only look at this from like the paranormal angle. There's no physical, they don't want to get into the physical stuff. But then everyone gets worried about magicians or artists and, you know, having for baby you start to mash it all together. But I think you could learn a lot about, you know, just approaching things from a lot of different perspectives. Joshua Madera is an occult technologist and technocultist who uses art and technology to explore the great work. He and I discussed the connection between cybernetics and magic and how reflexivity and circularity are essential parts of the interaction with the phenomena. It all feels like magic because it's how magic works and how enchantment works. What seems like the other isn't always the other. Sometimes it's just you and the system you create. He also explained how it isn't necessary for there to be some golden, eternal chain of being in order for us to explain what's happening in our own lives. Intentionality and direction and steering, you know, what do we want and how do we get it and what is the best course of action to take both practically and morally. Cybernetics is very much about those kinds of questions and I love cybernetics. But I also love a more post human philosophy than cybernetics admits to. And while cybernetics can appreciate the cybernetics of non-human systems, including other animals, but obviously also machines, I think that cybernetics tends to be a little more anthropocentric than I'd like. And I think, you know, both things can be true, right? Like, we can ask ourselves, what do we want, what is good for us, what do we desire, how do we get it, how do we get it without, you know, being an asshole to other people. We can have this level of conversation and planning, but we can also at least try to. It's difficult. I don't know, you know, as humans, as human beings and experiencing life as human beings and having everything that we experience at least physically filtered through the lens of the human. You know, I don't know how much we can get outside of our humaneness, but we can at least acknowledge that there is something other there. And I say, "Reach for it." I say, "Reach for the inhuman." Reach for the post human. Reach for the other. Reach for the strange, including becoming a stranger to oneself, perhaps. Felix Gutary, you know, he's talking about Nicholas Lumin's sociological theory of autopoiasis, which of course is informed by Ambertal Matrana and Francisco Varela's theory of autopoiasis in living things and Lumin extended that to the social domain. And I mean, apropos of strange paranormal phenomena, there's a lot of things I think we could explore there. But I think in one of Gutary's books, he said, and he said this in the third person, "I'm going to paraphrase it in the first person," because I think it's more, I think it has more impact, more affect that way. He said, "Like any autopilotic machine, I can die for want of sustenance, or drift towards destinies which make me a stranger to myself." And I just always thought that that was just a very, very beautiful sentence and idea. And of course, Matrana and Varela's ideas had a lot to do with drift and, you know, and that's related to my interests in Chaos Magic, you know, a lot of Western magic has developed out of a kind of cosmology and mythology where the world was created by some kind of divine being, having a divine plan. And everything is evolving toward something. There's some kind of telos that is happening. And I embrace the ideas of Darwin and Matrana and folks who have, and maybe Lovecraft, no folks who have more of a cosmology about a world that is a drift that is constantly emerging from these complex interactions. There's no divine plan to it. There's just all of these different feedback loops all over the place that are informing how things emerge and arise. I don't know, that just that kind of world just seems to make more sense to me than one that, you know, than one of a eternal golden chain of being. You know, of course, the relationship of the magicians to the world, the relationship between, you know, the microcosm and the macrocosm, the idea of the universe as being a living thing and how we interact with that. And, you know, not just a living thing, but a whole ecosystem of living things that probably extends far beyond what we currently think of as being an ecosystem of living things with various kinds of intelligence or consciousness or emotion. Of course, what I'm describing right now is very animistic, but, you know, I think magic is not always animistic, but it often tends to be in practice, if not in theory. But also, you know, the idea of intention and of attention, right, attention and what we put our intention on and what we give energy to and how that affects things that we interact with and how those things in turn affect us. And there's another loop just like when you're driving your car and, you know, most of us have experienced driving for some time, thinking about something else and then suddenly realizing, like, oh, wow, I just went through, you know, this whole span of highway and have no memory of it because I was thinking about something else and I was automatically piloting the car. There's two magical things related to that. One is the idea of trance and how we can get into a trance, including the trance of driving and that facilitates thinking about other things other than what is immediately present, complimentary to that and sort of contrary to that, the idea that our attention does tend to determine to some degree, sometimes a lot of degree, where we go, right? You know, as you find with the mysteries of Somerset Kentucky and, you know, as you start to look at these things, things, features of what it is that you're looking at come to light, they become apparent to you. I mean, that's kind of magic. One of one, right, is like pay attention to what you want. If you want to manifest something in your life, if you want to make some kind of change, then pay attention to it and maybe visualize it in a different way or see a different possibility than the status quo. and then give that energy and give that your attention. And of course, magic is full of these various tricks and mechanics for "charging" these things with our energy or our intention or our will or whatever. Again, I think the language of this stuff is really quite bad. I think that the common parlance of magic is wanting, but such as it is, it's a feces that we can have conversations about these ideas. And we can agree that we're talking about something similar and we can have an exchange of ideas with one another. But yeah, I think, I mean, a lot of what you were talking about, I think, is present and magic. Essentially, all I'm doing is inviting synchronicity. I'm just trying to create a space of possibility where synchronicity can happen. You know, that can happen as well with a digital terro deck as a physical terro deck, but also, you know, all other kinds of ways of sorting things and assorting things and arranging things and reading things. So that in itself is generative and it allows me and other people and folks like yourselves to create all kinds of different ways of doing divination. And I think that, you know, going back to the mathematics of this and talking about, you know, Shannon's work and entropy and information theory and stuff, I think that that is a space that hasn't been explored enough. And I'm really glad that you guys are working in that. [Music] Penny Royal started out as an investigation into stories I had heard about unsolved murders connected to a strange cult here in Somerset, Kentucky. But it became a story about the magic and mystery of place, specifically this place and how the relationship between people and place produces folklore and reveals the spirit of that place. And the further along this road we've traveled, the more personal it's become. It's impossible to not become part of the story, a part of the thing that you're observing. Before we started the Penny Royal investigation, I'm not sure I believed in magic. Everything that has happened since has changed that view. Now I believe, now I know magic exists. And whatever this phenomena is, the culmination of all of these synchronicities and events and transmissions, whatever it is, it seems to want us to believe in it. The interaction with the phenomena gives it definition. The observation of the phenomena gives it defenable edges and a shape begins to form. Is this phenomena an entity? Is it a group of entities? Is it a discarinate intelligence or communications from something in another dimension? A sentient cybernetic information structure. If it was fairies or aliens, it would be easier to explain, easier to understand. But it appears to be stranger and weirder than that. There are elements of magic and enchantment to the phenomena. And I think that means that it's more about encountering reality in a novel way, encountering some entity or intelligence. Trying to define the phenomena as an it is part of the problem. It isn't an it at all. The phenomena isn't a thing. What's happening and unfolding and presenting itself has more to do with the relationship between reality and the observer than anything else, at least in what we've experienced. There's something to the relationship between reality and the observer and circularity that's baked into the core of the phenomena. It's highly interactive when engaged, but the response appears to evolve based on how that engagement occurs. And these responses don't seem to be limited to our conventional understanding of time and space and cause and effect. We still don't have any idea what any of this means. Murders, cults, anomalies, meteors, monsters, alien intelligences, secret societies, occult groups, clandestine agents, corrupt politicians, portals and hundreds of synchronicities haven't gotten us closer to any greater truth. And trying to create a narrative structure that presents this story as it is, how it began, what it led us to, and how we've been terrified and changed and inspired by all of it, hasn't been an easy task. And I'm not sure we've been successful, but it's earnest and it's from a place of curiosity and wonder. Years ago, I wrote a story about a group of characters in a European city standing at an intersection when two cars suddenly collided. At the moment of the collision, these characters, each from a different nationality and culture and language, all witness a miracle at the same time. The exact nature of the miracle is never revealed except that it involved the car collision. And the story follows the characters over the next 24 hours as they try to continue on with their lives after seeing what happened. These characters repeatedly cross each other's path, sitting beside each other on a bus or the tram, or standing in line at a restaurant, or even sleeping beside one another in bed. They witness the same miracle, but they can't share it because they don't speak the same language. They tell each other the same story, describe the same event in their own tongue, not realizing they shared the same experience. The audience, the reader, is the observer who pieces it all together, who understands all the tongues, all the languages. That's how interacting with this phenomena, with this mystery, feels, and how it feels to try to communicate the experience of synchronicity to someone else. We're all speaking different languages, different tongues, but telling the same story. The Global Consciousness Project and the Princeton eggs are really what started us thinking about the connection between synchronicities and randomness. When a synchronicity occurs when something significant happens, does that event cause a decrease in randomness in the immediate area? Do things temporarily become more predictable? Do the odds of that event happening again increase? And do magic and enchantment cause a similar decrease in randomness as evidence of the influence of the will on reality? And following that same line of reasoning, could there be a relationship between randomness and divination? If so, could we build a device that could track the relationship between randomness and the effect of the supernatural on reality? Well, Darian did create such a device, which for the last year we've been testing in experiments in our Limital Watch Research Group. We've been testing it during say-ons' channeling sessions and paranormal investigations and even placing it at the center of magical rituals to see if we can detect an effect on reality, evidence by a decrease in randomness in the local area or even globally. Whatever has been happening, whatever this phenomenon is, the spooky synchronicities and seemingly mystical connections between people, events and actions, it all appears to be an essential feature of this thing, which implies that there's some structure to all of it. In his book, Decoding Real. Vlodko Padraw puts forth the theory that matter and energy aren't the building blocks of reality. He and other scientists believe that the basic building block of reality reduces down one more level to information. His book argues that quote, "Information and not matter or energy or love is the building block on which everything is constructed." Information is far more fundamental than matter or energy because it can be successfully applied to both macroscopic interactions such as economic and social phenomena and information can also be used to explain the origin and behavior of macroscopic interactions such as energy and matter. Vlodko also argues that information in contrast to matter and energy is the only concept that we currently have that can explain its own origin. In order to understand more about the phenomena and what the Penirole mystery might ultimately mean, we were being pushed toward new ways of understanding information, observers and randomness, all of which were essential ingredients in the recipe for enchantment and magic. "I'm Brad Cagabra!" "I'm Brad Cagabra!" "I keep digging." [Music]