TPG 01.11 Psychic Terror with Duncan Barford

[INAUDIBLE] Hello and welcome to the psychic guys. In today's show, we're going down the rabbit hole of psychic terror. Have you ever had the feeling you're being watched, but nobody is there? Have you felt a dark presence lurking in the shadows? Have you experienced frightening thoughts or feelings that don't seem like your own? Well, stay tuned as we bridge the gap from psychology to magic and anomalous experiences. Joining us today is Duncan Barford. Duncan is a psychodynamic psychotherapeutic counselor, specializing in working with clients seeking to integrate anomalous experiences or spiritual issues. He writes and podcasts in the fields of magic, spirituality, the paranormal and psychotherapy. Welcome, Duncan. Hi, hi guys. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm much appreciated. So to kick us off, could you tell us a little bit about how you got into all this stuff and the intersection of magic and counseling? Well, it probably goes back to when I was about eight years old and decided to do a project at school on ghosts. So that interest in the paranormal has been with me since forever. And it probably came to a head when I was a teenager, when I was about 13 and cracked out a Ouija board for the first time. And as in common with a lot of people, I imagine, perhaps some of the present company, had some experiences that I couldn't explain and stayed with me for years and years and wouldn't go away. And I went to university, got a proper job, was in a proper relationship and was getting home in my life. But there was always this sort of nagging question at the back, which is I know that reality is more than this. I know that there's a whole side of things to this that nobody ever talks about or seems to think about or take seriously. And from there, I started to get interested in magic in the occult. You know, as it means to try and perhaps explore intentionally, some of the things that had happened during those Ouija board experiences spontaneously. And you know, over the years, to my surprise, discovered that that's something that you can do. You know, you can actually create those experiences intentionally. And also from there, realizing that there's an intersection here with spirituality, which I'd never expected, suspected at all. So when I decided to train as a counsellor as a therapist, I'd had an interest in psychoanalysis and psychology for many years. And always had the impression that, you know, these things were incompatible. Generally, you will find that people in the field of therapy, you know, don't have a lot of time for the paranormal or, you know, even spirituality in a lot of ways. And so I took down my blogs, I took off my magic ring, you know, to do my training, thinking that this was something that wouldn't be acceptable, that I needed to keep hidden. But then COVID hit and I just really, really missed writing about, thinking about, talking about these sorts of things. And I started a podcast called Look Up Experiments in the Home. And what I've tried to do since then is to integrate the whole lot of it, you know. And I think there are some interesting intersections there, which hopefully we'll get into in the course of our our conversation this evening. And now, you know, I've been really lucky to find that I tend to do a lot of work with people who may have had some sort of anomalous experience, you know, that they're struggling to understand or integrate in some way, might have been traumatic in some way. People who have had spiritual or religious issues come up, you know, that they're seeking to resolve. And much to my surprise, I've discovered that it's a thing, you know, there does actually seem to be a niche for this. A lot of people are work with the people who basically, you know, have a magical practice or spiritual beliefs. And they just want to talk to a counselor who's not going to put all their job in that, you know. Yeah. You know, it's funny. Thanks for joining us again on this discussion, Duncan. I'm quite long intro of Polish. No, no, it's great. It's fantastic. I think it's great to set the stage. And there's a lot of, I resonate a lot with what you said as far as kind of like, oh, you need to keep it kind of separate. Or if you're doing something more professionally. And I were talking about before the show started just real briefly. And I did executive coaching for a while. And before that, I did remote viewing. And I was very interested in remote viewing. And those obviously the intersection there, actually, I found there's a lot of more people that were entrepreneurs and really motivated business individuals who were super open actually to intuition and accessing information that would otherwise not have been logically possible to know, but you know. And then also even that they were open to the idea that the world in reality is a little bit more strange perhaps. So then we might believe in strangers initially, you mean bad thing. But is that it's not what we really anticipate or expect. And so what I found is actually I had people showing up at my doorstep. Just through clients and inquiries that were already interested in this kind of stuff that I wasn't expecting. So my question for you is I wonder if you had any kind of similar experiences where almost like the right people found you as opposed to maybe, you know, they other people weren't has open. But I don't know. It's like I felt to me like it was like that your clients find you when you're offering this kind of a thing because maybe it's like an intuition thing or something else. Just curious. Yeah. Yeah. Your reaction to how people find you. Things like that. Yeah. I mean, think it's through the podcast. Sure. But I've done. But the strange thing was that wasn't my intention at all, you know, when I started podcasting. It was a complete surprise. The reason for podcasting was just that it just felt important for me to talk about this stuff because it's been such a lifelong passion. Sure. But yeah, never dream. But you know, it will be some sort of marketing tool. It just shows to show that there's a big unmet need out there of people who do want to talk about this stuff and the taboo and pathologisation is such that I think lots of people are sitting on this, including many therapists actually because my understanding is that most therapists will eventually experience something really weird and inexplicable. But I quite inclined due to the nature of the mainstream sort of psychological profession to not ever want to speak about it and put it in a box, you know, for fear of that, than being tainted or ridiculed or something for saying this anomalous thing took place. It essentially went a climb that I can't explain. Yeah. You know, one example I read. Which I think was illustrating to people were doing a study on how often this happened to try and kind of destigmatise the spiritual stuff happening within your field. Which was where somebody had been that a client who was like a young autistic person who drew a lot and they drew kind of mandars and patterns and doodles and sketches and stuff, but they were always drawing in the sessions. And the therapist was also a doodler and she was there and she was just drawing like a mandala or something that was just a sketch that she always did as a thing to just kind of stay focused and relax or whatever. But it was just a particular pattern that she always drew. And one day she looks down and this kid has drawn exactly what's on her notebook that the kid can't see and they've just reproduced it totally subconsciously. And you know, that was a real, oh my god, what is happening? People think I'm crazy if I talk about this kind of moment, but I think it's sad because you know, clients are experiencing it and want help and don't want to be pathologised and stigmatised. And then people who work professionally in the field are also experiencing it and can't talk about it because they don't want to be pathologised and stigmatised or have their livelihood threatened. So I wonder the extent to which really it's an illusion that we can't talk about this. And if more people, you know, like yourself, it came out and said, no, there really is an important thing here we need to talk about. There will be lots of people we wanted to have this conversation. Yeah, there's this strange hinterland. So every so often the therapist will write a book saying this stuff happens and we ought to take it seriously. And then nothing happens and then decades later another therapist will write the same book. It just sort of happens again and again, but the strange thing is that these sorts of experiences are kind of there in the theory that you're taught when you train as a therapist. So I mean, I trained in the psychodynamic tradition, which is basically a kind of outgrowth of psychoanalysis. And you have concepts in psychoanalysis like projective identification, which is basically when and the therapist might find themselves experiencing something that is conceived as being put into them by the client. Well, you know, so it's basically telepathy. But we give it a name, projective identification, you know, and we talk about it as some, you know, psychological mechanism, you know, and you're taught to kind of look out for this and that this is a thing. But it's somehow envisaged as this sort of, you know, rational kind of psychological process that happens. But you know, basically what you're talking about there is something coming into you from someone else's mind, something coming into your mind from someone else's mind. And that's telepathy, you know, in my book. Yeah. Would you say that that is likely to take place because of the kind of intimate and ongoing nature of the relationship there? And but, you know, there's a lot of very deep self reflection going on in the kind of, I mean, not exactly in altered states, is it? But it's not a normal kind of conversation that you'd be having on the bus or whatever. And when you've got two people who sort of very committed and in that intimate, special circumstance for a lot of time, do you think that increases the ease with which these telepathic or anomalous things can take place? Or do you think that that's something that's kind of happening all the time, but we're maybe less inclined to notice it's just, you know, people with, you know, family or friends or people, you know, you could maybe write it off more easily. It's possible, isn't it? But as you say, there's a certain intensity in the therapeutic relationship where, you know, you're really, really exploring the meaning of, of stumbled is life. You know, two minds kind of pouring over that together in a very intimate way. And of course, the therapeutic relationship is a relationship that isn't really like anything else in our lives, you know, where you, where one person talks, you know, openly, as openly as they can, all about their intimate thought processes to somebody else who generally reveals very little about themselves, you know, there is, there is an intensity there that you really don't get anywhere else. And I think I'll tend to agree, David, that there is something unique about this situation. I mean, maybe it has some analogies to ritual or magic. I know I had that thought just as, maybe it was to laugh at you, but just before you said that, I have the same thought there, that it is almost a very special ritual space or a sacred space or it's a different delineated space isn't it when you go into that? Consecret space. The rules are different. Yeah. Completely. Could you, for those who, for those people who may not have kind of gone through or experienced something like this, whether working with a counselor or just doing anything like this, could you kind of describe what that process looks like? I know, I mean, I've worked with people and what you described absolutely happens quite a bit when I was working with them where I would actually see the image in my mind before they even said it. And that would happen in my interactions when I was working kind of as a coach within individuals. But I'm curious what your experience is like and kind of what that looks like for people who maybe haven't worked with someone like you or even just like someone to talk about these kind of things. Like what does that actually look like? Yeah, just before I go onto that, Brett, you've, I think you've described another, another thing that we get taught about, you know, in therapy trainings that has a technical word for it. You know, that you described when you get an image flash into some into your mind before somebody has actually said something, you know, that's, that's described as reverie. And you know, and as therapists, we talk to very closely monitor what's going on in our imaginations, you know, while a client is talking. And often you will get strange images flash into your mind, you know, which make no sense at all. But then in the course of whatever it is the client might go on to talk about, suddenly it makes sense. And you can see that you pick something up, something nonverbal. I mean, to go back to, you know, what cancelling and therapy is what it looks like. I mean, what I generally say to, to new clients is my job is basically to encourage you to talk. Yeah. And that's pretty much what we do, you know, try to talk, talk as much and as clearly and as openly and as deeply as we can about what matters, about what's what's actually going on in a person's life. And the thing about cancer and or therapy is there's another mind there, you know, that a client can kind of a advantage of use. You know, that's, that's what, what it's very basically essentially about, just thinking about helping someone think about their life and what's going on and what the difficulties might be and then, you know, over time together, thinking about what might need to change if you want to change it and what you might do to to bring that about. Where does the intersection between talking about a subject through just a counselling session and magic kind of interlink where those magic or whether it's the, is it the ritual of talking like where do you see those kind of things intersecting? I think what I'd say to answer that is maybe bring something in from my own experience and then which is always very interested in meditation and I started to learn Buddhist meditation and I remember the first time ever I sat down to meditate and I was like, and I had an experience that my mind was somebody and it's very weird for me to look back on on that now because it's difficult to imagine what I thought my mind was before I'd done that. I think I used to think that my mind was some sort of mechanism or something for working things out for thinking, you know, for analysing and when I sat down for the first time, I had this weird sense of presence and the sense that my mind was a presence and I think what started to dawn on me over time is that our experience of reality is malleable, it can change. So once upon a time I used to think of my mind as a sort of machine for analysing things but then that shifted and suddenly it felt like my mind was a person or a presence or something and there's been various other shifts in my life since then. So reality can alter, it can shift and I think that's perhaps where we get a crossover between therapy and magic, you know, what therapy can sometimes do is give you a different perspective on things, you know, you can't change what has happened but you can change your relationship to it and in that sense, you know, your reality can alter, can shift and in magic, pretty much, you're doing pretty much the same thing, I think, you know, using different sorts of techniques perhaps but trying to achieve that same end, you know, of sort of making reality shifted in subtle, interesting ways, you know, and it's never, you know, it's not like Harry Potter, you know, where you can fire flame across the room. It's about to ask that, as that duck and I'm like, so you're saying there's a chance, go to Hogwarts. It's like, right, it's like the popular culture rendition of what magic is is not even remotely close. I mean, other than its reality is more than we realize, perhaps those are maybe like the closest intersections between popular culture and maybe what traditional magic might be, could you could you frame that actually like what would you call magic? Like if you're to sum it up for someone who has no idea what it is, what would you say it is? They were, there were various classic definitions aren't they? I come in the classic one is Alistair Crowley's magic is the art of causing change in conformity with will, which is the one that will often get trotted out. But I'm a big fan of my, my all time colleague Alan Chapman who came up with a different definition in a book that he wrote about around 2010 and he described magic as the art of experiencing truth. And this is one that, you know, I really, I really like magic is the art of being able to make something true, to make something real. I like that. And yeah, I mean, but magic is never what it seems, you know, my impression is that the psychic world, psychic powers in general, they're never really quite what they might seem to be. They're very elusive, something very subtle. I'm so like I was saying earlier, you're not. going to be able to use, they won't you push down? No, you're not going to be able, if you want to make fire come out of your fingertips, you're probably going to struggle to do that every day, but say if you decide to have a lucid dream and you can have that experience, say if you take psychedelics, you might have that experience, you know, there is still a means of being able to make that true, but it may involve something a little bit more, more subtle or convoluted than, you know, Harry Potter world. I feel like we are circling around the idea of the subjective nature of our experience of reality or life or whatever this is, where this podcast is and where our bodies are and stuff. What is on the inside of us has a profound effect on how we experience what we assume to be outside of us, right? And there's this idea and magic that in order to change stuff in our life, in the world, what we're really changing is us ourselves, you know, but you kind of go deep enough down and you lose the distinction. And I suppose the Buddhist slate, you know, say, well, that's because the self is an illusion and you're not really there. And actually the inside and the outside are the same thing and fine, baby. But in terms of subjectivity, sorry, I derailed myself there. You mentioned earlier, Duncan, the in the therapeutic context, but a client has your job as to help a client talk as much as possible. But your mind and you as an individual is there in that context, which really made me think of this idea of subjectivity and how what we're seeing out there is actually in some sense a reflection of ourselves. So then in the therapeutic context, you're talking to your therapist or your counselor, you're using them as a mirror to reflect your own stuff, clack and kind of get that different perspective, you know, it's an imperfect mirror. No offense, man, you know, but it's biased. It has individuality. It's got its own tastes and preferences and imagination and sense of self and all the rest of it, you know. So what I'm trying to do here is segue us into discussion of the shadow and how the shadow can appear around us in that subjective way that we experience our lives. So I think no, get to the scary stuff and this episode is meant to be about scary things that I've got to go to the scary stuff. We've got to talk about those ghosts. That's what we do for people. But I totally agree. It is the is useful topic people want to hear about it too. Like what is that? What is the experience of it? Yeah. If we're going to bring up the shadow, we probably also have to define it for our viewers who may not be familiar with union psychology or the ways other as a terror, more as a terror practices refer to that shadow. Yeah. Duncan are you down with young definition of the shadow or do he, would you, he was a broad old dove in? Yeah. Please chip in. Please chip in if there's anything you want to add. I mean, basically the shadow in union psychology is all those aspects, all those qualities of ourselves that we, that we keep hidden, basically, that we don't want to acknowledge as ours. Go on, Brad. Yeah. Well, it's a, how do you find that plays a part in magic and kind of the work that you do? Is that something that you start with? Or do you find that that kind of, when it, it appears, it kind of makes its appearance at its own time. Okay. This is someone who we're working with that part in a session. It was the practical interaction with that that you, you do on a daily basis when you're working with clients or even yourself. Hmm. What comes to mind is, you know, that's, that's not the only archetype in young, of course. I mean, for me as well, spirituality is, is an important part of the mix. And I think a lot of what we're talking about can maybe be framed as sort of staging posts in what might be described as spiritual growth. So the shadow is an important archetype in young and psychology. But young also talks about how there's a kind of progression. So first of all, we might, as we really start to explore ourselves, come across these aspects, things that we, we kind of keep in the darkness, that we don't want to acknowledge our parts of us. And often these are quite anti, anti social impulses, you know, commonly that's what's thought of when we think of the shadow, but not necessarily, but often it's that sort of material. But then there's a progression. Young also has this, this other archetype that he calls the animal, or the animus, which assumes the figure of the opposite sex for myself. So for a man, it's a woman, for a woman, it's a man. And this is a figure that represents the entry into the collective unconscious. So the shadow is basically a kind of window into the personal unconscious, all the stuff, you know, that we shoveled under the carpet. But the anima or animus is a figure that's a gateway, a window into what's beyond ourselves, you know, not just what we don't want, but what's beyond our personality, you know, why? Yeah. There's a, there's something that I mean, I've just personally come across to see my own experience, and I've heard others as well, where some of the things that are anomalous in my own experience, and others that perhaps others may have experienced is that there's always typically this attribution that whatever this anomalous experience is, it's outside of themselves, where it's like, there's some other thing out there that is infringing upon my space. It's the demon or it's the ghost or it's the alien, right? And I found, and I don't whole hardly say that's not possible in some certain circumstances, but I have also found that a lot of instances, it's not some external thing that is playing its role out in this drama that is going on in the person's life. It's actually the part of themselves that is arising and presenting itself as this exterior thing, but the origin of it is actually still the person. So I wonder if your thoughts on that is, and if you've kind of experienced that are seen that where it's actually the individual that seems to be creating these experiences for themselves as opposed to some, you know, a UFO craft overhead creating an experience. You know what I mean? Because there's a big difference as far as origin is concerned between those things. Yeah, well, bazillion dollar question, isn't it? And I think that's what I was trying to point to in my answer just then, where is this other, where does it come from? Does it come from inside the cell? Or does it, can see, will become from something outside? Is it from the personal unconscious, the collective unconscious in Jung-in terms? I have a heart. I have a heart. I think you are. Yeah. Yeah, I think it can sometimes be either. Mm-hmm. Me too, you know. Yeah. There's this. I imagine you're familiar with the concept of sort of negative entities or astral parasites, or whatever you call them from the magical tradition Duncan. And do you encounter those things or something that you would equate to that phenomena? From a therapeutic point of view, or is that not really a relevant model in what you do? What I've found most useful when working with people is to keep as many paradigms open as possible, you know, don't shut anything, anything down at all. Yeah. Sometimes it's difficult to say, I think, and sometimes, you know, it can take time. For somebody to find a way of thinking about what they're experiencing, you know, that feels right to them, that fits for them. I think, I mean, I think one of the problems with the kind of psychological discourse that we have at the moment is there aren't any registers to put the sorts of experiences and phenomena that we've been talking about into, you know, there's only one which is psychosis, madness, e-insanity. Yeah. But I think it's far more complicated than subtle. I had a sort of change of heart on this matter, because I'm quite sort of just despite the stuff I'm into and the stuff I do, I'm very skeptical in that, you know, until a flying source of land in my back garden and the little guy gets out and walks up and down making the blue bluepuels as I'm going to remain very skeptical. Yeah. Maybe even overly skeptical. So when I came into contact with this phenomenon of sort of negative entities or things which appear to be in some sense sentient of my frightening appearance, I'm going to But but do arise in association with repressed or forgotten trauma and shadow stuff that you know when you go digging around In the corner of the dark corners of your mind Sometimes you meet these things and they can be treated purely as a psychological Phenomenon you don't need any Wu-Wu beliefs to engage with that in a way that will resolve it and so that being you know In accordance with Ockham's razor that requires the fewest number of assumptions Why shouldn't it all be in my head right and then somewhere down the line? I experienced exactly the same Entity affecting two people at the same time in the same way And I hope to one of them deal with it and when I did the other person got better spontaneously and that really challenged my View on the nature of that phenomenon all the the things that it can be I mean, you know, what it what it is it almost doesn't matter what it is does it because it's sort of this subjective thing but it There's this really confusing space where it's like is it my own junk my own trauma is it out in the collective Shadow and why is it appearing as a scary monster when I go look in my unconscious mind? There's literally monsters in there why and are they mine are they somebody else's is it both is it a collaborative effort or something? And so I've kind of gone from the Totally psychological we don't need Wu-Wu to explain this camp into the oh it's completely Wu-Wu But we can approach it psychologically and we don't need to care that it's completely Wu-Wu because You know if you look at like Catholic Exorcism where it's prayers to get rid of things and the holy water and the crucifixers and the begun I don't know what they do. I apologize to any exorcists listening But you know those this kind of aggressive approach to odd Anomalous phenomena which are frightening which is kind of I command you to go away I essentially I repress you I kick you out. I won't acknowledge you right and then there's the therapeutic approach to it which is Camon tell me your story and unravel your pain and your whatever motivating you to be a scary monster in my mind, right and there To just wildly different ways of approaching whatever this is you know or yeah, there's aspect of it But that's that's quite a striking story there David. I mean, you know, and it sounds like what you did there was keep the paradigms open You know engage with what's going on and see see what the results are and what you experience was quite compelling Yeah, so you changed my mind you help one yeah, yeah I mean, you know, it would seem foolish to To interpret that in any other way from the way that you did that there was something perhaps with some degree of an you know ontologically objective we That was it work. I Know I think that's what we have to do I mean in magic sometimes, you know if you're communicating with With entities you will come up against you know silly time wastey Entities that just seem to kind of feed off your attention, you know, I mean you're both nodding. Yeah, yeah Yeah, I'm nodding as well Yeah But sometimes there'll be something more than that and it will show that it's more than that through some sort of different experience Yeah, yeah, there's a technique that I'll use I'm a very I think what once you Experience this quite a bit you begin to recognize certain patterns that you come across and whether that's something internal or external To me at the end of the day what I care about is the outcome and is the outcome a positive one Do I have a healing result is my trauma no longer if it's a trauma or if I'm not working with the trauma they're having It's whether or not it's exactly how we perceive it. There is this thing Ultimately at the end of the day to me doesn't matter as much What matters is that the outcomes positive they're able to continue Build a life they want to and they're no longer being negatively impacted by whatever that was and so I feel it's like to say for certain it is this thing or isn't that thing almost It's beside the point and you can make your own mind up on it But the real important part is well, what is the outcome and so for me when dealing with things like an entity in this space or What I perceive to be an entity in this space or if I was working I'm working with somebody else and They're perceiving something and maybe even I sense it just through my own intuition and and is Whether or not there's some objective reality to some ghosty thing flying around to me actually isn't a roadblock or even the question I care about what I care about is this is an experience that someone's having is an experience either that I may be having I want to get through this in a way that then is freeing me of it and healthy and productive and Personally what I found is not done to the whole going pulling out a sword and Trying to go to battle with things is actually the best way to get whatever that is glued to you very very strongly And the way to that we've been incredibly successful with in my own life and with people I've worked with is actually the opposite It sounds very biblical actually I love it's like it is through love and through an interest a keen interest in whatever that is that energy is To understand it to acknowledge it to see it to what what where are where is it and what it what has it been successful at What hasn't it been successful at get its whole picture to understand from its perspective and when you have build that kind of a Starting place with these types of energies typically you if not always but it instances you can actually either if it's just some sort of an energy thing They can dissolve very easily after that point or if it is some sort of a beingness I got I can't objectively prove this. It's just experiential But you could have a communication with it. Hey, let's let's part ways or You know, there's a number of different techniques, but it's that it's a different approach then pulling out the sword as opposed to Pulling out the olive branch and I found the olive branch actually is vastly more powerful in my experience And so I'm curious what your interaction is with Things you know you you told you mentioned that you haven't experienced as a kid that kind of kicked off this with a Ouija board And I'm curious what your experience and maybe if that's changed at all did it seem early on like you had to go to battle Or did you have a different perspective maybe on how to approach this? I'm curious what that that arc in your in your life was like Yeah, well, maybe maybe we can come to that But I've got to respond to yeah to what you've just said Brett because I think I think you've expressed something wonderfully well there which is you know what what was resonating with me when you were speaking was You're doing therapy there. You're doing therapy because What what your aim your intention is there is what's best for your client? Yeah, you know like you were saying doesn't matter about the nature of the entity doesn't doesn't matter what its Onto logical status is you want the best outcome You want to form you know the best relationship with it in order to get the best outcome from that situation and and of course You know I would agree with that, you know, I would endeavor to do the same You want the best outcome for your client. That's why your clients there. Yeah, that's what you've got to work towards Maybe what what you've done there is really brought out the contrast Between that and magic so magic perhaps as always suggesting earlier is being about the experience of truth You know when we practice in magic Maybe what we want to know is you want to know the truth of this date. Yeah, you know and But the the best outcome perhaps is sort of put to one side This is this is why you know I'm always of the opinion that magic is not therapy Magic is not therapy, and I would never never encourage anybody to to practice magic because it can It can be challenging. It can be difficult. It can lead to arm. I think we probably have all been asked this You know what should I practice magic should I learn? I'm reviewing should I do whatever while practice it is? For me the answer is always I can't in good conscience recommend you do any of those things because they're dangerous And I don't want to be responsible for you ending up hospitalized or wrecking your life or something if that's not the right path for you now You know, you shouldn't do these things because somebody sent you should Yeah, it's the path it's right kind of chooses you doesn't it but whatever time in your life that is it's you can't recommend these things Even meditation, you know like to say to somebody well meditation could help that's dangerous too This territory is inherently dangerous Yeah, yeah And you know, I think there's always an ethical question isn't that and there's When we're doing therapy when we're doing coaching, you know, there's an ethical framework that we're working with them When we're doing magic when is to experience the truth of a situation, you know, rather than perhaps what's best from that situation. You know, we're putting those concerns aside. And there is, there is a danger of harm. Yeah, the, the type of coaching that I did, a lot of it, I mean, I didn't, but I never said, like, explicitly what I was doing was therapy for people. It was just coaching. It was talking, very similar. It's like, but it was, it was, it was couched in the framework of typically some sort of achievement of a goal. And so in their life, in their business, whatever it was, and the coaching and the talking that would go on and some things would come up that would build willter the people I worked with, when they started reflecting internally about what was the cause of why certain things or certain blocks were there is usually was it elicited it. And so I found that it was just something that appealed to me originally. And then I helped, I worked with a lot of other people too for a period of time, where it's like they had a goal, but then they needed to be able to elicit the typically things to traumatic experience, or some part of their shadow to the surface to handle because that was the reason why they weren't getting to where they wanted to go. And so it was like, and there was another way to measure for them was this did they feel one do they feel like relieved after the interaction like do they feel better is it more productive, but then did they actually achieve their goal to and can we actually measure that. And so that was the, you know, corporate America approach obviously. It's the people love measuring things, but it was it was almost a they wanted it, but it's like the way they could get it. They had to handle what their their stuff, the baggage, the stuff that they were refusing to really acknowledge her look at. And sometimes that stuff can be a little scary. They can be images that are strange. They can be experiences that they wrote off. It could be a number of things. And sometimes it is just a normal, it's standard everyday stuff, but you know, you mentioned meditation. And I for years, I was around Silicon Valley and those working in tech and things like that. And the approach to meditation as just a purely mindfulness type thing. And that's all it is as opposed to all the consequences of meditation, which it opens these floodgates once you do it enough to all the stuff that is not only around you, but within you. And if you're not working with someone who understands that, it's like you could I always, there's someone who I talked to says, you know, you give enough time to the mindful mindfulness movement. And these people in business are going to have psychological breakdowns because they're doing this nonstop in 10 years. And suddenly they're seeing orbs in their space that they don't even know what's going on because they open that doorway with zero instruction and zero coaching. And so do you think there's a risk in that particular case? Do you think that that's something? How would you bridge the risks there? What would you tell people about how to be safe in that environment while still wanting to pursue these things? Well, meditation, I mean, the Buddha taught meditation as a means of attaining enlightenment of awakening, you know, that's what his fore, he didn't say it was for stress relief. Yeah, he didn't say that he would create a positive entity. Yeah, still a cabal is right up. Yeah, it's for awakening. It is for confronting you with the true nature of reality. Yeah, I think on that journey, you've got to confront the true nature of your self as well, which is a lot of the scary stuff comes from, isn't it? Yeah, the self-being part of reality. Yeah, we don't even have any framework for understanding what enlightenment or awakening is in our culture, in Western culture. You know, ask people what awakening or enlightenment is. And they'll probably say, you know, it's some sort of chilled, blissed out state where everything's okay. Yeah, but that's just being chilled and blissed out. Yeah. What do you think of enlightenment is? I know you don't have a really a cultural reference, but I'm sure you've thought to some extent, I mean, it's a big obviously question, but have you thought about that? Like, what is that? It's the ability to be able to experience directly in real time non-duality. I've gotten the same, the same type of information from remote viewing, where when you actually look down that road, you actually start describing things beyond the self. And it gets really kind of strange as far as how we're trying to use our everyday language to describe not just being Brett or not just being Duncan or David and being larger than that. And so, and that's I think that probably scares a lot of people actually because it's a big unknown. Yeah, and I was really interested to discover that in the classic Buddhist maps of meditation, because we, they have handed down maps to us of the path that we take towards awakening and all the stages and things that we will notice on that path. Psychic powers are on there. They're on the maps. In these ancient manuals of meditation like the Vinuti Marga and the Vishuddhi Marga, they tell you how to get psychic powers. They have methods there and you know, and describe what will happen. Which brings up an interesting side idea maybe, which is of psychic powers, you know, as some of those staging posts, you know, stations, like I mentioned, on the way to spiritual development. I'm going to have another go at pivoting us around to talking about frightening phenomena. Good luck. Right, here we go. So one commonly reported experience that people have when they sort of open up the doors to transpersonal perception through meditation or sometimes it happens through trauma or near death experiences or whatever, but somehow the doors get blown open on somebody who isn't part of a tradition that's expecting this and going to support them through it. And they have no idea what's going on and this has happened to me and I've spoken to several other people who've experienced the same thing and been able to go and don't worry, this is probably what's going on. Try this if it helps, which is that you start experiencing other people's thoughts and emotions, particularly, you know, we were talking earlier about the therapeutic context where that accidental telepathy can happen. This starts happening more broadly. And I know I had that experience where there was somebody who was very negatively oriented towards me and I think had plenty of issues themselves. And I started having these unpleasant intrusive thoughts, but they were very like not me. You know, it was with hindsight, they were quite clearly identifiable as not mine, but this wasn't something I believed to be possible at the time, you know, so these aren't my thoughts and these are my feelings. It wasn't an explanation that I was considering. And it's one, I was sort of forced to come to by having had this experience and overcome it was, oh, that's possible, you know, it was, I had to broaden out my worldview. And in that instance, you know, I think there was just kind of focused attention and it was an accident, but I remember, you know, that was unpleasant, it was really unpleasant. Because I think it was a person who had a lot of really unpleasant content in their mind. And at one point, you know, I had just begun practicing magic and meditation and stuff and I didn't really know what I was doing and was still at the stage where you're going off largely what you read in a book and not your own personal experience. And I went through that thing, which is sort of, it's really common that we kind of joke about it where people become convinced they're under magical attack or they've been cursed, you know, right? So I think this gets to the crux of a lot of the really negative experiences that are potentially transpersonal that people can have, which is that there's a real unpleasant experience that you're having. And then we make this error of attribution in how we kind of model this as part of the world. And we assume somebody, you know, in my case, it was I incorrectly assumed somebody or something must be doing this to me on purpose, right? So therefore, there is a hidden enemy and adversary doing something to me or that has your will towards me when actually what it was was just I'd kind of tuned the radio into our cell FM and hadn't realized that, you know, that was me doing that, right? And so, especially when you're in a, you know, confused unpleasant state where this nasty stuff is happening, you know, it's a natural, quite a low level impulse that we have to identify the threat. Right? It's quite an animalistic thing, isn't it? To go, I am being hurt. I must find out what is hurting me so I can fight it or run away from it or whatever, you know, it's and I think we we erred towards wrongly identifying the threat when the alternative is being unable to identify the threat. So I think misattribution is really common. You know, we hopefully the experiences we have don't mess our lives up and we get over them at some point, but I'm going to wonder if you could speak to that phenomena. They're not necessarily the telepathy, but something bad happened, and then there's this misattribution thing, and then potentially that can snowball. Is that something that you've dealt with or experienced? Well, suppose you hadn't made that attribution that this was being sent by somebody, what would you have been left with? Well, I'm a bad person, I've suddenly become evil, because first I misattributed it to myself, which is very confusing. Right. I'm unpleasant. Then I had this external attribution with Will, and then eventually I realised what was going on. Now what I tell people to do is go on Google and type in "Setting Psychic Boundaries", and then just start the top and work through them until you find something that doesn't require black candles and goats, bladders and stuff that you feel personally comfortable with, and that you can just do every morning or every night. That's all you need to do really. It's like 101 isn't it? It's really straightforward to just set boundaries, but you have to know that you have to do that. You have to have an appreciation that there is a thing which needs a boundary around it, setting now that the doors have opened. That's what it is. Sorry, go on. You also need, which is completely counterintuitive to most people, I think, the idea that there can be thoughts just hovering around out there. I mean, there they were, you experienced them. First of all, you took them to be from you because where they are, where they come in from. Then when that didn't fit, you attribute them to someone else. What were you supposed to do? But there is underneath all this, isn't there? There's a sense that there can just be stuff out there that doesn't belong to anyone. It's just phenomena, karma, just hanging around. Then, like you said, taking a very practical approach, all that you need to do is to be aware that this stuff is there and you keep you to the distance. To share a personal experience of my own, sort of in a similar vein, but probably a bit different. I remember I went to this really intense Kundalini Yoga class one night. I'm a big fan of Kundalini Yoga, really powerful stuff. We were doing these intense exercises for a couple of hours, just non-stop. Can you guys hear me because you've frozen at this end? What's happened? Oh, I think we lost them. That's what I love. I'm going to wait to come back. Kundalini exercise experience affecting the technology. I got him. I'm sure. I guess while we wait for him to come back, do we want to add context to the idea of Kundalini or talk about our own experiences with this sort of phenomenon? Not necessarily Kundalini, I mean, just psychic entities in general. You have one you want to share? I did, but I was hoping I'd be able to share it with Duncan here. I've had that same experience here talking about David where all of a sudden I was overcome with these thought not intrusive thoughts, but like intrusive feelings where just feeling intense sadness or frustration or something and like identifying that it wasn't actually coming from me. This was in my pre remote viewing days. This was like in high school and I would almost like reach out and be like, well, if it's not me, then who is it? I'd have just this intuition of it's this friend and I reach out to the friend and be like, hey, are you feeling like this right now? And I don't know if they were just humoring here or not, but it would almost invariably be like, I am actually kind of sad or frustrated or whatever right now. Yeah, picking up on whether a thought is yours or not is something that I began to kind of when was that? Like 2017, it was after I did remote viewing for quite some time, but I think it was because of I did so much remote viewing. I began to know what my inner voice sounded like and it was more than a sound, but I do I do hear my voice in my head, especially in remote viewing session when I'm getting information. I'm actually hearing a little my little voice telling me in my head, oh, it's soft. It's hard. It's round and then it gets higher level. This is an object. This is a tool. This is whatever it is. And I got really familiar hearing that voice. And it wasn't until after I was doing that for quite some time. And that's when I started moving into some of these other practices. I began noticing the difference between my own internal voice and a different thought. And it confused me at first because I was like, you David, I was like, wait, what is this? This isn't me. I don't see where this would even. First, it doesn't logically make sense. There's nothing that I can find within my space or even my experience that adds up to of why that would be here. But then it started being a little bit more clear to me. This doesn't even feel like mine. And so therefore if it's not mine, then what is it? And what do I do about it? And it doesn't mean it's still not there. And it's like the, have you ever in like really dangerous areas? I don't know if either of you guys have had this experience. A place may where there's a lot of car accidents or really dangerous place on the road and or bridge. And you just get this random thought to just drive into the other lane or drive off the bridge or and I've I don't think I've only had that one time and I was like, what is that? But I've actually talked with other people who they have that they say, oh, no, this happens all the time. Yeah. And they're not, they're totally level headed people. They never would do that. This is not some kind of strange things going on. But even they would say, I don't even know where that thought came from. But just popped in their head and they said, well, that's weird. No. I did have that when I used to have a job that I really hated driving to every morning where I thought, I just have like a crash that doesn't too bad. I won't be badly hurt, but I won't have to go to work. But is that your thought? Do you? Is it a normal external? I really hated that job. I think it was mine. Yeah. The friendship had a word for that. And of course, I don't recall what it is, but it was something like translated into calls from the abyss or whatever. Yeah. Just that armless feeling to walk into the danger. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a it's a hard one to tackle, I think, for the everyday person because they don't have the experience of having a very visceral understanding and experience of the non-physical world. And so it's hard for a lot of people to go there, I think. But yeah. I think once you you just build enough experiences on top of each other and you begin to start seeing patterns. And when you actually are hibble to handle them, you start recognizing, oh, okay, it's just experience. Just like anything else, you know, you experience more, you do more reviewing, you do more, I guess what, you know, I don't I've never called it my own life magic, but intention setting intentions, working with symbols, using writing. I mean, that's kind of stuff I've always used. Yeah. I wonder if if we're able to get him back because I'd love to go into just the actual application of magic. I know we've talked a lot about up to this point, you know, the shadow itself, the dark scary things that can be out there. And you know, whether those are from us or from outside of us. But it's how how does someone if they do feel a calling to begin? Like where do they how do they do that practically? I think practical things are things that people would be interested in hearing. I know that's what I would be interested in hearing. It's like, well, what are the things that you do that actually help that you've seen evidence for and you can apply? I'm not talking about going to Hogwarts. And I don't know, I'm talking about like what do you end like you said, David, doing the the boundaries with intention is a great one. And something that I do every single night. And it's helped with any type of intrusive dreams that, you know, thoughts or dreams that seem out abnormal or I don't, you know, wouldn't want. I always set a very, very strong intention before I fall asleep that it's just like a little mantra to be honest, except I don't really repeat it more than once or twice. Where it's like I'm only open and receptive to those energies or frequencies that are in alignment with my highest good. So be it. And then it's just period. And that solves, when I started doing that regularly years ago, that that solved any type of night terror when I'm dreaming completely and just really set that strong intention. So I don't remember to do that every night. But if I get into the habit of forgetting to do something, remind me to do it. You remind me. It's the same. It's the exact same. Like it's all I've had enough of those reminders that I'm like, okay, every single night. Crazy nightmare. The other night. And like I don't have it's night, I never have my whole life. I'm not not given to it at all. I have this nightmare in the morning where I'm still outside. I don't know how I live there or something. But it's like a really ghetto version of Venice. You know, there's a waterway going right past the front step and there's this dead woman floating like the like the girl from the ring with the dark hair and the like face that's white from Big and the Wartous House. long and everything, but she's face down. And what do you do with a dead body? You poke it with a stick just to check. Right. So I'm there. I actually have my hoe from the garden for some reason. My own personal garden hoe was in my dream. And I'm there trying to turn this body over me, like, I don't really want to touch it, but I should check my stick. You know, I turn it over. And then suddenly she starts moving. And I'm like, yeah, my hoe is disappeared at this point. I had nothing to defend myself. I don't want to talk like, she's roused. What was that? That is not my style at all. And then like, I bet this was early this week. I think this was like Monday or something. Didn't set the intentionals, did you? I probably know. I don't know. I've been sick and I've just had like a bad cult, you know, I just been laid up in bed feeling really under the weather. And I'm laying up bed thinking, I should go see what about dream was about, because that's, I think there's something there. There was one of these scary demon things that we've been talking about with Duncan. May he please return to us. And it was quite a freaky one, you know, and did the process. And I went into the details that maybe I'll tell you about it off the eyebrow, because it was a funny one. But it was dispatched and went away. And instantly, or over a period of a couple of minutes, I was much less sick. Like I still have a bit of a cold, but that feeling of like, oh, I just have to go to bed. I'm so ill, you know, really that evaporates. And this was like 2am. And then I had to get up. I was like, well, I'm not tired. Now I don't want to be a bed. I'm feeling great, you know. Which was kind of weird, but it was, you know, obviously I do have a cold, right? I am physically sick. But then this thing was really weighing down on it as well. It felt crazy. I think there's something to be said. Now I'm not saying it's a direct one to one thing, but we're talking about intention. And I mean, this kind of falls over into actual manifestation. And so I mean, that's another application of magic. And through intention, manifest. And what I've kind of taken from my own personal journey and studies and other things is like, well, I like to call manifestation more, creating your own luck is what you're kind of doing. And you just happen to be the right place at the right time. And it kind of ties into this whole phenomenon of synchronicity, of you're creating synchronicities for yourself. And how is that? Well, a lot of that I think is actually handling the stuff. The shadow self is actually how you're able to then unlock that ability. That's one of the things that holds you back. But tying it back into your cold. And I heard a long time ago. And it still resonates to be true for me. This is that personal illness and sickness, often time, it needs to start at the energetic level first. That's before cells, that's before viruses, it's before bacteria, it's before any of that type of stuff. And there needs to be some sort of an alignment with some part of yourself to that sickness. And I don't know if that's necessarily mean, well, you just would never get sick if objectively you went in. And you know, was around someone who was coughing on you all day, you wouldn't get sick. I'm not saying to the degree that it would actually-- oh, it's a miracle that's going to stop that. It might, perhaps for some people. I think that may actually be possible. But the degree is severity of how quickly or how much you resonate with that cold. We resonate with that sickness. I think does begin before it even shows up. It begins with what you're in alignment to. And if there's a part of you that you haven't handled, that is something in your space. Or that it's like, oh, well, you're still letting it be there. Or maybe it's even just something within your own mind. If you haven't handled that, it's like a little cracked door for something else to magnify. So that's perhaps would not have been intense. And so when you handled the energy, suddenly the magnification of it was released and was gone. And then that was your experience after the fact. It is like, oh, I seem actually a lot less sick now because you don't have to magnify it anymore. So it's just a hypothesis. But it's just an experience. Something I thought about. It's a model. It seems to fit. That's good enough, isn't it? We don't have to say it is like this. It's like, is it useful to use this model when we think about it? Probably, yeah. But I just thought it was interesting because I never experienced healing from a physical illness instantly or having the feeling of being less ill. Unnew. Really was over like a minute or something. It was so quick. And you expect to feel great when you handle this stuff, right? It's normal to feel brilliant. But I'd never like what I've been healed miraculously by dealing with my bad dream, you know? Or well, dealing with what the bad dream led to. For what do you think about spontaneous healing? Do you think that's something that's possible within physical reality? And if so-- I mean, at this point, I've seen enough weird stuff. I mean, how I know. I wouldn't write it off. It would be great if it was true. And there's lots of stories of anomalous healing. Like I was listening to-- I think it was the Jeff Mara podcast. It was somebody that had a near death experience. She had had an organ transplant and was on anti-rejection drugs, which I think there are immunosuppressants, horrible drugs to be on. She was kind of recovering from whatever illness. I kind of was wrong with that. But she'd nearly died. She'd had some kind of NDE out of body thing. And they kind of was on her healing journey on the other side of that. And she went to South America to see a shaman of Duan Ioasca ceremony. And they said to her, you should have a really clear goal before you go into this with what you want to achieve. And she said, well, I just want to get off these damage, your rejection drugs, because they're horrible. And she went and had that experience there. Now her body is not rejecting the transplant organ, and she doesn't take the drugs. Medical science cannot explain shit like that. The urimmune system should attack the donor organ. That's what you have for immunosuppressants, right? But now-- How is it something in the mind? And the consciousness is able to change what's going on in the body. And I think that's probably-- this is something that modern medicine just totally throws out the window. Is that there is no connection to something that met measurable connection, your consciousness and your illness, unless it's a mental illness. They're like, oh, no, it's just you put a cast on it, and that's just the body doing this thing. And what you think about it has no reflection about what actually occurs. And I think it's-- there's an interesting similarly here in my mind when you bring that up to remote viewing, actually. And what Ingo referred to in the original exploration of remote viewing, where they started with, you know, we know objectively that orders of perception can be reduced. You can do that. You can have less and less available to you. You can take out your senses. You can be in a flow tank. There's ways to reduce your orders of perception. And then, this always stuck with me. They've said that the thought was, well, what if you could expand it too? If you can make it smaller, why can't you make it bigger? And same thing in this instance, when it comes to the body, is that, well, if you can-- I wonder if there have been studies or any type of actually objective research on the fact that your attitude or your emotional state affects how quickly you your body heals. And I would be surprised-- Yes. There was. I pay for published recently, which-- Really? It was. Let me see if I have the reference here, because he's got the receipts. Well-- I know it's possible. There has been research for-- this is a wild one. But they took people-- this may even been-- I mentioned this in a previous podcast-- but those who visualized themselves lifting weights for a period of time-- Those versions of those people-- --who actually went and lifted weights. The strength gain was-- Compatible group did nothing. Who did nothing? The control group didn't get anything. People who visualized it got the strength gain and the people who lifted the actual weight got the strength gain. And so if that's not evidence-- I think lifting one on here is-- I think lifting one on here is-- Atta, but there was a-- It was still dramatic in the visualizing strength. I think that actually applies to skills like playing the piano or tune hoops or whatever. It's not just physical strength, but actually aptitude. That-- Sure. I mean, which makes more sense in a way. I just found the paper that is-- What's it called? Physical healing as a function of perceived time. And what they did was-- From memory, because I'm not going to read through the abstract now, but they wounded people in some sort of controlled way. A men dis-manipulated their perception of time. Made it seem like time was dragging or going really fast. Unfounded that. Effected wound healing. Let's have a quick. That's really interesting. So their perception actually affected the recovery process. I guess they felt-- A time distance. Lots of time had passed, which would be time for the wound to heal, you know? Right, right, logically. And so therefore, is this like placebo is what they're actually-- They're inducing like a placebo effect almost-- the unknown effect. Duncan has just emailed and said he's having odd internet issues, and he's trying to resolve them. So let's continue this interlude. hopefully he will. Well, Joliness again soon. - Sounds good. - Maybe we need to perform an exercise on modernist internet demons. - Yeah, let's do it. - I feel like we'll be back. - Oh, mildly related to this in terms of the mind. And I suppose in this case, it's the opposite of healing. I just finished up a book called "Combatting Colt Mind Control" by a man named Steve Hasen. And he is a probably America's pop cult expert. But anyway, to get to the point, he made a couple of claims in his book that I thought were rather interesting. He noted that there were many cases of individuals that he was helping to not keep program, but to help them address those beliefs and make decision on whether or not they wanted to stay in a cult where they seem to suddenly develop some sort of psychosomatic illness, which ended up creating a situation that would allow them to get away from their respective cults, control something would happen where they'd come down with a serious illness and they'd have to go stay with their family. And that's when the family would stage the intervention or in his own case, he was a member of a cult referred to as the moonies or the unification church. There's a couple of other words in that name. But where he had been, he just had such a lack of sleep from what they were asking him to do, go out and do all these fundraisers that he got into a car accident and it broke his leg and that was his way out where he was gonna stay with his family for a while and that's when they staged an intervention and got him out. Which that in particular wasn't the psychosomatic aspect of it, but he noted that later on after getting out, he overheard his mother talk on the phone about his experience right before they were able to get him out and she mentioned that she had actually been, their family's Jewish, that she was praying to God that Steve would break his leg or something so that they could hold the women's talk to him about getting out of the cults. - Nice. - Yeah. I mean, this is why when we do magic, we have the like, harming, nothing because I bet you the universe could have contrived something less dramatic for him. Like she's decided, ah, must be a broken bone that gets him home. Maybe, oh no, we're getting a, we're back, how do warning message there that's gone now? But if you said like, could you engineer it so that he comes home without hurting him? That's probably possible too, you know, so just, if anybody's still-- - That's why he's high as good. I feel like he was a better person. High as good or all concerned is such a good catch-all because you don't know what you don't know and like you don't know whether or not there could be a better way for something like that to occur. So why rely on your conscious mind that has limited information instead of rely on the part of yourselves that has access to a matrix of information much greater than yours and whether it's at the unconscious or beyond that to find the solution. - In this particular case, he actually, he felt that was in his highest good. Like he's actually happy that things went the way they did and he was talking about in the process 'cause he broke his leg, he couldn't run away or like his, when his parents confronted him with cult deprogrammers, he had been so finally conditioned to believe that they were agents of Satan that he actually said there was a point where they got him in a car, he was sitting in the back seat, there was three deprogrammers and his father was driving. And he had worked himself up into such a religious fervor that he had made a conscious decision that it would be in his best interest instead of being tricked into the lies of Satan that these deprogrammers were gonna tell him that what he should do is attack his father and get them to crash the car so that he could die. - He couldn't go to heaven. - So in that way, he said that because his leg was broken, he didn't have the means, he ended up not going down that path. - That's not interesting. Sometimes the highest score, there's still a matter of break in the leg. - Yeah, it's all perspective, I suppose. I think there's, it's an idea of, that comes to my mind when you mention that, is there's a lot of things that when I started this whole journey with remote viewing and just, my spiritual practice is what I was never trained if I've never done officially the cult or magic or anything like that, but it seems some of things that came across have maybe come from that in my practices. They rhyme, they're from a different source, but early on in my remote viewing practice, I would say that the spiritual stuff, the non-physical stuff was a lot more harrowing because of the stuff I was doing with remote viewing and what I was looking at because I was super fascinated with all the esoteric stuff. And you can imagine as someone who, I believe that certain times in your remote viewing, you put a little light bulb on your back and you can attract all sorts of fun things to your space, which is why if you're just trying to experiment with remote viewing, maybe stay away from remote viewing in demons and aliens and all the other weird esoteric stuff. But I had a lot of pretty harrowing experiences early on and it gave me some perspective coming out the other side of that and I had a lot of stuff to handle because of that. That now I can actually work with other people to say, "Hey, you don't have to do this." And here's why and here's the alternative. I didn't have anyone who I learned from that gave me that option. And so sometimes you need to go through those slightly harder things to be able to help point, but at least to very least to point someone down the road, there's actually a bridge over there. You don't have to cross this raging river with all the rocks and the sharp edges. You don't have to, too, trust me. There is another way if you want, but I mean, you want to swim too. It's ultimately up to you, but it's like just being a little bit of a warning and a suggestion, just a suggestion. Like I don't, there is a strong idea, I think, in our part of our society that to achieve something it has to be hard. It has to be ruling. And if it's not grueling and you haven't suffered, well then the achievement isn't really as valuable or it's not even worth going for to some extent. I think a lot of really high achievers believe that is that they have to actually grind themselves to paste or else what are they doing? You know, nothing worth doing is easy. And I don't believe that's true at all. I think there's a lot of things we're doing that if you want them to be easy, can be, but you have to choose them. But there's a lot in our culture that says, well, that's not real. So therefore you have to choose it to be hard. If you actually want it. And I think that's a very big, it's a big lie that's perpetuated. That I believed for a long time too. But ultimately it's up to everyone's, everyone has the free will. They want to do it hard or they want to do it easy. It's up to them to make that choice. And who might say you can't swim across that river with all the sharp rocks? [LAUGHS] I mean, Paul. Back you can see as a toxic lie, which is very convenient for people who want their employees to work unreasonably hard for us to believe this. But on the other hand, I suppose it's easy to assume that all the low-hanging fruit has gone. And that if it was easy, somebody would have done it already. So there's kind of a non-synastir explanation for that assumption too. But I think that's different from it being like a core belief that is really deeply in that. It's impossible for anything worthwhile to be easy. It has to hurt. It's kind of different from it's probably going to be hard to find opportunities to make loads of money where I don't have to do any work or make any sacrifice or suffer or grow or learn or work. You know, I'll just win the lottery. And let me know if you crack that one. Yeah. Well, one day maybe. Well, I was going to crack it. But yeah, doing pretty well on the Bitcoin stuff and forecast the market, it's definitely possible to do with intuition and remote viewing, not 100% obviously. But yeah, it's unfortunate that we had a bit of a technical drop out with Duncan. OK, I have an update. We have an update. So Duncan has emailed and he's trying to get back in. And I won't let him in. So what we'll do is stop this recording. I'll start a new one. OK, welcome back to our impromptu part two of this episode. Looks like the CIA, the shadow entities, the alien, somebody came for Duncan and messed up his internet. But he's now back and we're back rolling. So before we lost you, Duncan, you were talking about a Kundalini yoga class. I'm doing a very intense exercise and then everything exploded. So why don't we pick up from there? Well, and then everything exploded. Because at the end of the Kundalini exercises, suddenly I could see all my different bodies in front of me in a way I never had before. I could see the physical body, the aesthetic body, the astral body, all of them lined up. It was obviously in some quite altered state after the class. So anyway, I went home, went to bed, and woke up in the night and found myself in a very strange realm. And. And coming back to the sort of experience you were talking about, David, there were entities in the room and I could feel them invading me. It was like they were kind of trying to get into my body. And I had a sense of these personalities, these characters, what it seemed at the time was they were dead people. And there was a woman who was really vicious and nasty saying horrible, nasty things. And I remember her saying horrible things about Margaret Fatcher, you know, how she wanted Margaret Fatcher to suffer. And what I was doing was, you know, what we normally do under these situations, doing some sort of protection ritual and I was casting pentagrams, mental pentagrams while I was in this state. And that seemed to work, that seemed to keep them up bay for a bit. But then they kept sort of crowding, crowding back. And there were quite a few personalities that I could feel. All of them sort of vicious women. And like I said, one of them talking about Margaret Fatcher. And anyway, after some time and doing the protection rituals, things settled down. In the morning, had the very rather strange experience where we turned on the radio and the first story was Margaret Fatcher having a stroke, you know, being taken ill, which was quite strange. And I was puzzling over the experience with my girlfriend. I said, you know, one thing that was really odd was all those personalities that I sensed they were all women. And she pointed out to me, she said, oh, it's March the 8th today. It's the National Women's Day. So again, you know, a slightly odd experience where it feels like there's something objective, you know, that was somehow invading me. But also these odd seem to echo things in the future, you know, the reference to Margaret Fatcher and the fact that they were all women. And it was international women's day completely unconsciously to me at that time. So how do you interpret that experience or do you? Well, I wonder, you know, seeing it along similar lines to yours, maybe her part, you know, the Kundalini Yoga put me in a state where I was more receptive than I usually am, and I was able to pick things up, you know, and what are those things? Yeah. Thought without a thinker, maybe traces of dead people left over some sort of comic imprints, you know, who knows or alive people. Yeah. From tomorrow, you know, because as as remote viewers, we get terribly passé about the non-existence of time or the, the non-linearity or sort of, you know, because we, we were awareness around in time, Brad spent the last week posting incredibly accurate crypto market forecasts on the public discord and going like, check me out, I'm so good. They've all been like really good. The posting it before, if the people want to act on them, the throw up. Yeah, yeah. There's some people who made some good money off your, your predictions. It doesn't even cross anybody's mind. You can't do that. You can't see the future. It's like, sure, you can. We just need to practice. You know, it's, and we, while we did a whole episode about this predicting the future, because it's not, it's not as simple as that, but time isn't as simple as we conventionally think about it being this kind of linear thing where we're at one point and we can't look forward. And, you know, it's much more wibbly wobbly and tiny whiny than that. So the, the death of that, somewhat not a death, but really illness. My growth, that's a big take in it. It's a big psychic event, isn't it? It's very impactful and lots of people are going to have strong emotional reactions. It produces a big lot of noise locally. Like when the Russia Ukraine conflict kicked off, there was a lot of noise, psychic noise about, and there was a lot of fear, obviously, and like a real awakening of the Cold War pervasive nuclear terror. Lots of sort of emotional stuff was, you know, and I'm sitting here trying to do my, I'm reviewing my day to day stuff and kind of paying attention to the war, but it's not what I want to be looking at psychically. I'm trying to do boring stuff. And there's, you know, you shut your eyes and you just feel all this stuff there. I think that's another example of when there's big, loud events that resonate with a lot of people, then when your perception's open, you just hear it, you know, whether it's tomorrow or next week or whatever. So the Kundalini Yoga perhaps had opened me up to experiencing things on that level of experience, you know, whatever that might be. I mean, maybe, you know, there were other things, open people up, you know, a natural gift perhaps or, you know, there does seem to be some sort of correlation between drama, you know, psychic abilities or transpersonal experiences. I imagine we all, we were all on the same page with that as well. There are lots of factors which seem to lead people to some kind of opening up or awakening or onto the spiritual path because of anomalous experiences and lots of factors which are common across people who that happens to, but unnecessarily causal. There's a really good book on this subject called The Hiss of the Asp by David Richie, which you can find on Amazon and he did an interview with Jeffrey Michelle Averk a couple years ago too, which was how I found out about the book. And the the asp in the title stands for a nominously sensitive person. So it's any kind of experience or of anomalous things, whatever they may be. And then looking at a cross section of as many of these people as he could get hold of, and seeing what they have in common. And trauma was a big one, personality type epilepsy, migraine, autoimmune disease allergies. And while you were off the air battling with the internet team in the stunk and we were talking about miraculous healing and how the how the content of the mind can directly affect the body. And it's interesting in that context, the idea that allergies and autoimmune disease, and I mentioned earlier about that woman who didn't need to take the anti rejection drugs for the organ transplant because of a change in the stuff of her consciousness or mind as a result of an iOS experience. Right. So we've got all this hidden mental mind stuff, consciousness content inside us. And it actually interacts with the body. Doesn't it? It can maybe, maybe if we hate ourselves, we'll get an autoimmune disease or if we don't accept ourselves in some way, then our body will attack itself. Spitballing, you know, but just talking about my experience of having a bad dream, going and resolving the traumatic entity thing, whatever it was, which had come to the surface and triggered that dream. And I got over my cold, mostly I felt physically way better. And it's like, what is going on there? So our conversation had gone into the mind body overlap. Well, while you were off fighting your own battles there. Yeah. Well, with the Kundamini experience, there was there was that sense of seeing all the different bodies, you know, that we talked about. You said that they were in front of you. What, what was doing the seeing from the point of exactly? Yeah. I mean, what I was going to say about that was, you know, what you were just saying there, maybe brings home the fact that the thing that we're least in touch with is our physical body. You know, we don't have any experience of the physical body because the experience that we do have of it is mental. I mean, by that logic, which I didn't, as it's only disagree with at all, absolutely everything is subjective. There's no objectivity because really the only experience we have is like, there's in a world we construct that's actually, it's like, presumably at some level of abstraction reality or creation or something is happening. And then this is reflected off the dirty, distorted hall of mirrors, warped surface of our inner self and our shadow and all of our mental content into our awareness, right, where and to put it to give an example of that that might make sense because it sounds like total bone X, doesn't it? But if you are, if you have a particular trauma in your history where I don't know, you got bitten by a dog as a child, you know, and now subconsciously, very deeply, you're terrified of orange dogs, right? You're going to actually all sorts of evil and malice to the orange dogs, right? Even if you don't remember being bitten because you were a baby or something, you know, but this is now programmed in. So if you see, you know, an orange dog being walked along the road and it's pulling on the lead, it's like, it's trying to get away because it's going to attack someone. But if you see a black dog behind it, it's pulling on the lead. You're like, "Oh, it just wants to go for a walk." You know, and there's no conscious awareness of the origin of these different attributions to essentially exactly the same thing. You know, but because of your own unacknowledged subconscious stuff, that's kind of filtering or distorting any kind of objectivity which there even might be. So perhaps when we attain enlightenment and we've brought everything within us into complete awareness and cast a light upon it, maybe that's when all that distortion is gone. And you know, this is if we're going back to Buddhism, though, aren't we? Where we see things as they really are because we're a true God out of our own way. Yeah, yeah. Expensive truths. And that takes us back to the question earlier that you asked, you know, if we see all those bodies lined up in front of us, where are we seeing them from? Yeah. That the wake of mind, the enlightened mind. That's the sort of question that your guru asks you and then sits there and goes, "Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh." Like that while everybody gets there. Well, I have another thing that came into my mind when you were talking about that experience and curious about your perspective on this part of it. You mentioned that you'll put up certain mental pentagrams that you mentioned, like, in different around the space because they were really infringing upon you. And I'm wondering if you've thought about what is the ethical way to go about actually interacting with this kind of stuff, especially when it's interacting with you? Is there a way to do it that? I mean, a lot of people like to talk about karma. A lot of people have very different interpretations of even what that means. But you can have you thought about how to boil it down from an ethical point of view. And I'll give you one tangent, and then I'm curious what your thoughts are, but really quick, it's interesting to me, because I've remote viewed some of these more esoteric things in the past. And sometimes I actually describe what happened to that thing, why it's no longer around. One of those was actually the bellwitch. It's a very famous case in the States where politicians, all sorts of poltergeist type of activity was happening. It would appear, they'd hear the voice, a bunch of people would hear the voice, and then just disappeared, it never came back. And what I described in the remote viewing session was basically this group came along and just totally lobotomized this thing. And so obviously I can't objectively prove any of this. It's a very esoteric remote viewing session. But they basically came in and they just dismantled the mind of whatever this non-physical being was. And in remote viewing, we get, we have a column specifically for our own emotions. Like how are we reacting to the data we're perceiving and describing? And I just got this overwhelming sadness, which it was really strange for me, because but I knew it was my sadness for the being, because I felt like wow, that such a horrible thing that have happened to some sort of a being, I would never want that to happen to myself. I would certainly never want to cause that on some other being. And so putting up pentagrams interacting with this kind of stuff, I'm curious if you thought about ethics. What is the right way to go about doing this? Is there a way where you might overstep a bounds? And have you thought about that at all? Yeah, absolutely. I think what I was doing in that instance, casting the pentagrams was just pushing something away. Totally. You know, that was all that occurred to me in that state to just try and fend it off. Other experiences I've had suggest, and I think you were alluding to this earlier, Brett. Compassion. Compassion comes into play to have had other experiences where perhaps I've have been able to summon some more resources. And just embrace what's there, you know, assimilate it, let it dissolve, let it dissolve, fall apart, within me by embracing it. There's a famous ancient Tibetan teacher called Mashi Glabdron, who was a female lama, and she taught this technique. You know, I don't know if you come across it, but it's called Cho, which is basically a method of dealing with demons by offering yourself up to them, letting feed upon you. You know, and when the mind is open and when there is true compassion there, the demon just takes what it wants and dissolves, you know, because there isn't anything there in you for it to get hold of. There isn't anything in you that it can baton onto. You know, we're in that state, that sort of vent light mind to where, where we're, you know, we're looking on on those bodies, you know, like we were talking about earlier, that sort of Buddha mind. You know, there's nothing there for that chantu, because we're not identifying with our experience. There's no conflict there, isn't there? It's almost like this idea of how phenomena constructed from attention between dualities. And Brad, you were saying about, you know, wielding a big sword as the best way to attract things to you. But all of these things are constructed by a sort of tension of some kind, a dissonance or a. Something that kind of, like a not tied in a string or something, there's something clinging together and coalescing about it. And if there isn't a force holding it together, it does just kind of go, "Pah!" And you go, "Oh, there's nothing there." It's like this idea of if you take an opinion, then really strongly consider the completely opposite opinion and, you know, then the whole debate kind of makes itself obvious to you and you see, like, "Oh, right, that's not real either." You know, but when you're kind of polarized one side or the other, then I'm on the blue team and you're on the red team, and there's this whole worldview and this whole thing, and then when you're kind of like, "Oh, both of them are fine." The whole thing just completely evaporates. Yeah. Which is kind of. I've never heard of doing that with demons before, but that's pretty cool. You've got to have a lot of compassion for that. Have any of that? It's like advanced level. Yeah. It reminded me of a joe exercise in what the extra name. It was a course on shamanic journey, and the exercise in particular, it was called a shamanic dismemberment, where basically when you went into the journey, the goal was to basically visualize, "Mmm, meeting with your spirit animal, in that particular case, it was a bear, and then to just let the bear consume you, until there's nothing left." And the idea there was some sort of dissolving the ego or what have you. But like you're saying, it does seem to compassion versus conflict. It's dualistic worldview versus non-dualism. Like we've already been saying, I was originally raised as a fundamentalist, charismatic Christian, and that is an extremely dualistic worldview, where I was raised to believe that we're in a constant state of superior to warfare, and our enemy isn't, I'm going to butcher this verse, but basically it's not that anyone in the physical world but powers and principalities in the unseen. And that actually really formed a lot of my experiences. I had at the time, I would visualize as a teenager getting visited by these shadow people, these entities that would come or ask me. In my view, they were demons, so what I would do almost every night, and maybe it's like a matter of religious group velocity, but I would just aggressively chance Bible verses that, until the shadows went away. And that really informed a lot of my later on, even after deconstructing and experiencing other paradigms, I generally will go in, see these entities, and go guns blazing out of habit, this that deeply and aggrange. Would you, so that idea Duncan of like, do you call it "show"? Was it called? Was that the present? Yeah, the travel practice. Yeah. Yeah, is, do you, I'm just putting myself in the position of a listener who may not have done a lot of this, and then they hear that. They hear, wait, you want me to just give myself up to be eaten by a demon, and they're going, oh no, oh no, that's terrifying, this terrifying idea. And when I hear it though, I hear something a little bit different, which I imagine, so I'm curious if you could expand upon it slightly for that type of person who may have that reaction. But my interpretation of it is you are offering, it's like you're almost an antidote to that darkness, because you're offering love and compassion. It's like, come, let me embrace you. If you think you're going to stab me, and you're going to do all these horrible things to me, and that it's going to be the end of the world, I know in my own knowingness, that's not true, but let me embrace you and show you that that's not true for you either. And so it's more of the analogy I use for myself is, if I'm trying to be in the light, how can I be in the light if I'm holding someone else outside of it, or another being outside of it, even if that being is showing up in my space, as I'm a big demon, and I'm super evil, you should be terrified of me. I go, if I go, yes, you are, you're such a demon, You're so terrifying if I engage with it on the level that it's presenting itself with me as anything more than just a silly facade and instead reaching out to what I know it is in truth, which is another part of source, which is a spiritual being, which maybe misguided, is has its own experience, but I speak to that part of it and I embrace that, the truth of what it is. And I say, "Please come, enjoy." And that it's almost like the facade. It's like they're wearing this big jacket that they think is who they are, this demon or whatever it is, but the moment you embrace them in that form, and maybe that's what I don't know. The Buddha is talking about, it's like, "Oh yeah, consume, if you wish to consume this energy," what that does is it shows that the coat falls off because these are just misguided, sometimes beings that need assistance, they need help. And that's, yeah, I'm curious. So to the person who might hear, "Oh, being consumed by a demon, what would your response be to that?" I'm curious about that. Yeah, I thought you nailed it there when you said another part of source. The demons of part of source were a part of source. It's being able to interact with it at that level. It reminded me as well of David's orange dogs. Look at the orange dog one way and it's evil. You look at the orange dog another way and it's wanting to have a walk. Is the orange dog then good or evil? It's an orange dog doing what orange dogs do. It's being able to get to that level of awareness. I mean, how this was, how Cho was practiced originally, monks would go out to Gary places, burial grounds, and they would go out there in the depth of the night and deal with their fear, just surrender, open. Sounds like an amazing practice. I might do that. Sounds great. Well, I realized that I did actually do it well. I did this thing once for charity where as a fundraiser, I agreed to spend the night locked in a haunted prison cell in the dark on how the way will burn us now. I was absolutely terrified at that time. I couldn't even sleep with the light off. I was scared of the dog and that night did actually cure me of that. Yes, sort of alone, all by myself in the pitch dark in this haunted place all night, just dealing with the fear. What I realized and what I think this practice is probably intended to do is to show you that all fear can do is make you afraid. That's it. I mean, once you're afraid, that's all fear can do. That's it. It's done. It's perpetuates itself. Yeah, it's only going to add more of itself. This hooks back into the idea of subjectivity in magic and when we change what's inside ourselves, the experience of what's outside changes as well, like orange dogs being evil and black ones being cute or something. But that becomes a cycle, doesn't it, where you become afraid and you don't necessarily know why you're afraid, but you just feel fear and intellectually a model and understanding will appear. I feel this way about orange dogs. I feel that must be because orange dogs are inherently more aggressive or more scary or something because you have to rationalize your own feelings, right, they have to kind of be brought into. So then because the dog is now inherently violent and scary, if you have to approach the dog, you're going to be afraid that it will bite you and your body language is going to be all wrong and you're going to be sweating fear, pheromones, you're going to really upset the dog and increase the likelihood that it actually will bite you because you're going to freak it out because it's going to go, this person smells like a crazy who could lash out and now I'm scared, right, and this thing escalates, you get bitten by the dog and then you go see orange dogs, I told you they were evil. And this is the mechanism by which things kind of repeat themselves. You could say it's take on karma, but so when that happens with metaphysical or transpersonal experiences, you know, things can get really weird, really quick when things prevent themselves and go, oh, I'm a demon, I am an alien, I'm whatever I am supposed to be, I'm scared, you're looking around for an explanation for this terrifying thing you have and it gives you one and says, well, you know, I'm the ascended masters and whatever it says it is and you go, well, it must be. How could it lie? It's metaphysical phenomenon, right? And I think this is the key to magic, David, you know, to always approach everything with a very light touch. You know, like you're saying, as soon as you take something seriously, you know, as a thing, you know, and engage with it on its own terms. And then you're setting down the pattern for a relationship that's then going on forward. You know, I think it's so important in magic to approach everything with a light touch. And maybe here we can start to maybe sort of think about, you know, psychosis. Because probably what we see in psychosis is situations where maybe somebody's unable to do that, you know, the thing about psychosis, the difficult thing is the absolute certainty, sometimes, with which people have latched on to whatever it is that they're experiencing, you know, they are the Messiah. You know, it's true. They need to save the world and something dreadful is going to happen if they don't. Moe, please correct me if I'm wrong here, because I'm sure you have the best understanding of psychosis of all of us. But as somebody who hasn't experienced it in trying to apply some of the models that we've talked about today to it, it seems to arise by that cycle where you're scared of the orange dog and therefore it bites you and therefore you're scared of the orange dog and the thing escalates. It seems to arise where a process kind of like that happens in your worldview where it can start with a little loop like that or a little conflict, a men that sort of have you heard of that? What is it called? The Black Goo conspiracy theory or something where there's like some sort of terrifying substance that physicists were going to make in a lab that would cause all the matter to kind of collapse into the set of goo, basically. And it was going to spread like a disease of atoms of molecules and everything would become goo, the whole universe or something. It came out of some speculative science writing and then was like run with by people who wanted to write scary stories and scare people on the internet and they succeeded for a while until they came up with a new one. But it kind of happens like that within the worldview, I guess including the sense of self as well, so how you experience yourself and what's around you, it starts with a little discontinuity or prior diseases might be another analogy, you know where you have a malformed protein and when it comes into contact with the same protein with the correct form, it flips it round into the malformed version. So it's like a structural virus that just blossoms and turns things into dysfunctional and mush. Is that, can we apply this idea about misattribution and subjectivity kind of spiraling to the formation of psychosis or am I barking up the wrong tree? Sorry, the dog metaphor, I wasn't stopped now. Maybe it's about different styles of proliferation. You know, I mean, if we go back to Freud who was of course, you know, usually the first person to write and think about, you know, the sorts of things that we've been talking about. I mean, the distinction he drew was when a person's under some sort of stress or they're in some sort of conflict, you know, maybe there are two sort of broad avenues that are responses to that. And the first one are the sorts of distress coping mechanisms that we often see, you know, that we can call neurosis. So if we were in a situation where we're under pressure, pressure, what would we do? What we might do is sort of change ourselves in response to that. And often, you know, these are the sorts of things that you see, cropping up under the heading of, you know, mental illness, people end up with some sort of symptom, you know, I mean, you know, like a breakdown, for instance, you know, I can't go on because I'm ill, you know, that's one way of dealing with intolerable stress, you know, we just cease to function. So what's happening there is we're changing ourselves. But what may be the distinction might be in psychosis is another type of response, which is instead of changing ourselves, what we do is we change reality. So I can't cope with things because most of them are moving me. Other intelligence agencies are, if I go to the level. You unfortunately see this even in communities like remote viewing. This is something that David has brought up in the past. Apparently, I haven't been as in touch as you, David, but where there's those in the community that have, they profess, people are remote viewing me, stop remote viewing me, and they come into the discord in the communities. I mean, these are not remote viewing around us. These are people who've come to this region and they've come looking for remote viewers in order to ask them how to stop the remote viewing that they imagine is happening. Yeah. It's not massage, it's remote viewers are the enemy coming to get me in the middle of time. But where you can see you might have a feeling of being watched, but nobody's there, maybe some strange synchronicities takes place, and then you put those things together and rationalize, well, what can do that? The only thing that transcends time and space with its awareness is remote viewers and psychics. And they're obviously harassing me because they're leaving me these stuff all clues in my day experience just to let them, to let me know that they're watching. You know, actually it's, yeah, those things are probably happening. You probably do feel like you're being watched and you are having weird synchronicities and that's fine. I mean, it might, it might be that you're not really being watched. It might be that you are, but I'm almost certain it's not by remote viewers, you know, who would be a very boring job for a remote viewer to do that. And nobody would pay for this kind of work. Do you find that with, I said, go ahead Duncan. No, sorry, what you're going to say, but I was just curious if, do you find that through the talk, the counseling that you do that these kind of things pop up, is it usually like these types of things or do you find it's like a wider variety? I'm curious like what your experience is because you do open yourself up and you're to listen to understand, to acknowledge these types of experiences for people to help them work through them. Is it really just a huge grab bag or do you find that it's a certain type of scenario tends to crop up more often with the people that you work with? I think it is maybe more in terms of structures, you know, on structures, perhaps. Like that distinction that we've drawn between neurosis and psychosis, neurosis, meaning that we change ourselves in order to deal with stress, psychosis, meaning we change reality. There's a structure there. If we're changing, if reality is being changed in some way, if it being altered, then there must have been a sense of the reality that it's being altered from in order to make the alteration. And often there is a grain of reality in everything that people experience. So, I mean, one that sprints to mind is the kind of David Ike idea of the lizard people, you know, the lizard elite. You know, maybe there is a grain of truth in that, which is why you would, people behave so cruelly and dispassionately and violently as they do if they were really human. No, no. No, no. In a sense. This was actually part of my own meandering path towards taking up magic and meditation and spiritual practices is because I started kind of looking into all of the conspiracy theories and, you know, the true ones and kind of trying to examine how does the world really work? Because I'd realized like that I really haven't got a clue. I thought I did, but I don't, you know, I don't have models that can make good predictions. I haven't got the faintest idea what's happening. The more I looked at all of the terrible ways that people behaved in positions of power and otherwise, the more I got this idea that this cannot be explained just by greed and malice and simple base animal stuff, there is some missing part of the picture here. And what, and that this was a few years ago and it was a very weird time in my life, so I can't remember the book. You hear a dog, you know, that I came to, but it was basically an answering that question was the thing that I've missed here is the reality of spiritual metaphysical, transphysical personal effects and phenomena and post materialism basically because you need that to explain the nuance with which people are awful people. So it was funny, the kind of in a way, this like conspiracy theories and examining the evil in the world actually kind of drew me on my path to be, to realizing that the world was much bigger than or reality was much bigger than I that I'd assumed. But I get that might be a bit idiosyncratic to me because I look thinking about that now I can't necessarily work out how the coherent logic would have progressed from one to the other, but I just remember I went down the rabbit hole, fell out the bottom when I realized that, ah, spirituality, that's actually the missing piece that makes this equation balance and makes makes sense. So yeah, lizard people for sure. [laughter] I mean, they're a trope, and it's a shorthand now that the lizard people because of this idea of the bad people, right? But what about the room view? You know, why, why are they watching us all the time? I think it could be very fascinating. What's I mean, what the particular thing I'm knowing is that typically you would not notice if a remote viewer was doing a session about you very rarely would you notice occasionally, people do actually experience a very intense feeling of being watched, but it's like it's not enough anecdote to say that that's even a common, it's not normal, usually you wouldn't know, right? So especially. Well, it wouldn't surprise me if you were able to sit down with one of these individuals and really create a space for that person to acknowledge what their experience is, and I imagine you do have to do it, like you have to do this without judgment. You can't say, oh well, maybe that's not true or, ah, like where are they from? And it's through that space they may actually be able to find what is the thing, and maybe there is something in their space that they're picking up, or maybe it is just, ah, you know, something that they're creating for themselves based off of something that happened in their life, and they're just fine trying to find an answer for it. So it's that constant trying to navigate, trying to navigate this field. And, ah, yeah, I think it's, if you, it's funny because I take it from the vantage point of if they are a spirit, there are other beings affecting other people in negative ways. The best way is probably for me, either I don't know if you're the most proactive to go to war with that stuff or to try and, there's a campaign to fight it. But at the same time, I still want everyone to, I want what's best for everyone to, this is the best of my ability. So how do you merge those two things together? And I think that's something that, you know, what Josh was talking about before, it's like a lot of people brought up, well, the demon is always trying to get you. And so if there's always this antagonistic force, what are you supposed to do? Just not do anything in lose. And I don't know, I think that that's, these are the kind of topics that just aren't thought about by a lot of people. It's usually just black and white. It's like evil is evil. Good is good and I'm good in their evil. And it's good. Well, evil exists because you have to believe that you're good, right? Isn't it? When you, it's another duality that you can collapse. Yeah. And then the demons stop being evil. And you can just have a normal conversation with them. Yeah. Project taking with. Maybe one thing to think about is what, what is the problem that's being solved in these scenarios? And if there's a feeling somewhere that we're bad, then, you know, the idea that that might be someone else instead is maybe a solution to that problem. I mean, maybe the idea that the remote view as a watching us all of the time is a solution to perhaps a sense that nobody's watching us on. Everybody cares. Do you avoid it? Or perhaps the fact that, you know, that we are being watched, but it's not by anything, anything human. Yes, you're watching machine, your phone, your power, your robot vacuum. Exactly. That's such a useful thing, actually, to do. How you, what you did there, Duncan, you turned it upside down on its head. It's like, what is it solved? What, what is it doing? What, why, what do I get to, it's, it's like, I've heard this before. And remind me of it, where would you get out of the bad thing that's happening? And in this instance, it's, well, you get to not be alone or never be observed. So therefore, you're always observed by something. And for example, like another version of that is, would you get out of always knowing that the worst case scenario is going to happen? Well, you get to be right, actually, because you constantly get to say, I told you so to those around you. You didn't work out, I get to keep saying that over and over again. And so I could see that being a useful thing. You also, you avoid being surprised by unpleasant events, don't you? Because you're already expecting the worst. You can't shock you. You're kind of safe. from sudden, if we're going to be bloated up tomorrow, then I can worry less or I can't worry anymore. As we were saying earlier with magic and with spiritual practice too as well, it's usually advantageous to hold things very lightly. But often what we see in these sorts of scenarios with delusions and hallucinations is something being held on to perhaps a bit too tight, because it offers a sort of refuge. It's interesting. Sometimes I see people who are running into similar territory. They might be having hallucinations or having ideas about the way the universe works as a consequence of their spiritual practice, things they've run into through meditation or prayer or religious experiences. Often people in that sort of situation tend to be characterised by just wanting to get back to normal. Why am I seeing angels? Why am I having all these energy currents running up in my body? I just want to get back to normal. This is awful. But often where it more kind of somebody is crossing into what we call psychosis, that offers something to them. There's a refuge there. They won't want to come out of it because maybe on some level they feel safe for their knowing that they are the Messiah or knowing how they're dealing with the remote viewers or the intelligence of it. Is this what I was talking about earlier where we have to intellectually understand or label the threats or the experiences that we have. We have to be able to say that is a angel or that is a alien. Then the way we're manifesting that experience for ourselves because we have to experience something or we have to understand what we look, we can't just be like, well, I don't know what that is. It doesn't look like anything and it feels like something unfamiliar and I don't know where it comes from or if it will hurt me. We can't naturally do that. We have to go, "Oh, it's like this. It's probably that." That becomes that self-fulfilling prophecy almost. We actually ask the mechanism by which we conjure up these scenarios and then that becomes our whole bit like trapped in the bubble of everything we see is then coloured with that interpretation and you can't de-outside of it to correct course, correct in a way. Does everything have to come into agreement where everything has to fit in? If you end up with beliefs like "I'm the Messiah," that's probably not the first thing that happens. The first thing that happens is probably the plants are talking to me or it always stops raining every time I step outside. Something little things and the incorrect worldview or the labeling grows and just like orange dogs are horrible and then you get bitten by them. More and more things start to come into agreement and the thing actually grows until so much amazing stuff is happening to you. But being the Messiah is the only logical explanation for that. So then that gets sucked into the construct as well and then it is then not differentiated from all of the other parts in it because they all are internally consistent and the worldview is kind of like an expanding bubble where more and more and more weird ideas are in it. Is that even remotely on the right track? Yeah, it's what grows and expands. One of the things that always surprises me is when I work with people who have some psychiatric diagnosis may have seen psychiatrists and may be taking medication. Always surprises me how infrequently they've ever actually been listened to or had anyone to talk to about those experiences and what they might mean because in a psychiatric context you know it's just treated as an honest that needs to be gotten rid of. And I'm not saying by any means that people need help sometimes. People can be a danger to themselves and to others when they're entering this territory and I'm not saying that that's not the case but it always surprises me how they've never seen to have the opportunity to talk through what it might mean, what it might actually be about. I mean the very idea of mental illness is maybe problematic because our mind is where we live it's our experience. Is it really applicable to talk about that as being a disease? In some way. I mean you know of course if you break your arm or if you get a virus you know of course that needs to be something that needs to be fixed or got out of it. What about if you break your mind? Yeah. So from that should you know say that's a mental injury? Yeah should you get rid of thoughts? Should you get rid of feelings? You know because there's so much a part of us. Is it even right to look at it as a disease? There's a really good TED talk called psychosis or spiritual awakening that you can probably still find on YouTube. Looking at the I think it's this one that looks at the like the shamanic initiation where shaman's are kind of chosen and often get mortally ill as a child and have a period of isolation in the world and are sub but sort of it is a path which commonly chooses you you don't choose it but these things happen and then the person gets kind of scrambled and bust it up and reassembled and like they're the shaman whether they like it or not and they've got all these spirits that are those the ones that you stuck with those the ones you're working with you know and it's not a matter of choice but you know we would look at that in the West and go well that's psychosis you're ill but then there's other context where people go oh the kids are shaman yeah just like give them some culture even for six weeks so we find yeah and maybe they will and psyche psychiatry is as run into difficulties with this because you know of course as people have become more culturally sensitive in some cultures what we're talking about not you're saying it's regarded as as normal you know there are structures for coping with it so then psychiatrists are encountered sort of confronted with the problem but what we consider you know strange behavior bizarre in other cultures isn't you know and have been forced to admit that if somebody's presenting these symptoms you know and they come from a different culture then in that case no they're not psychotic this doesn't do proper. There isn't very an exception and they're de-air so that's like something along the lords of with spiritual component or something is like the last bullet point and that is like no them are not ill but if they're crazy but not spiritual then we need to give them tablets pills and injections and stuff but if there's a spiritual component no they're fine we don't we know this is this is the same phenomenon. It was a guy that came with Ross who who did a podcast about this I'm not I'm not going to name him because he's since taken the podcast down so I'm assuming he's he sort of walked away from it all but basically what he did was he he meditated and he had an awakening experience and it blew his mind and he thought to himself well you know I should tell people about this this is interesting so he went to his doctor and he said you know I'm enlightened you know you might want to study my brain you know and see what's different about it and you know with predictable consequences you know he was sort of detained in a mental institution and basically told that he was too happy and that he was obviously a man. There is more in you know he was just trying to be helpful he thought that you know scientists would be interested in what he'd experience and eventually what what he did was he I think he he must have read that that page in the in the DSM and he said to them actually this is a religious problem and then they they were forced to the amount. Wow. I'm sorry. I'm sorry back. Yeah there's it's interesting this is reminding me of I'm not sure if you've read his book Dr. Kirby Surprise wrote a book called Synchronicity and he's a clinical I think psychiatrist I'd have to double check but he was he writes a lot about synchronicity and how a lot of these individuals like you mentioned they're live people just don't listen to them they won't even give their naive they're just they just assume everything that they're saying is totally nonsense and it doesn't even go in one ear it's just ignored which is kind of sad and he was someone one who was fasting with this idea of synchronicity and he had clients who were institutionalized, but there would be so many instances with some individuals. There are the synchronicities would line up every single time that he had a session with them that it would blow his mind. He would say, "You're not going to believe me. I'm not going to tell you." He says, "Well, God talks to me through the radio." And he says, "No." Well, the patient constantly just said, "Well, you're never going to listen to me because that's what he'd been treated for years." And this was the first person who had said, "No. Tell me. Let me listen at least. I'll listen to you." And sure enough, in several instances, he said, "This is what's going to come out next on the radio. They're going to talk to me through. They're going to say my name in a commercial and God talking me to go do this." And the very next commercial on the radio could be very easily interpreted as that's exactly what it said. And so it's through that process of, "Well, how much is reading in and projecting, which there's a degree, but then how much is also this potential ability that humans have to look at?" Like we're all the way back to the beginning of our discussion, affecting reality in this non-linear way. It's an asymmetrical affecting reality, which is, I think, to be honest what I would say, a form of manifestation is, which comes out of magic. And I mean, when I did work with executives on achieving, let's make more money, a lot of it was really taking their focus and their mind, really a crystal, pure, clear picture of what they wanted to create. And then any resistance that they had within themselves, whether the trauma or a belief or whatever it is, we then handle that through just talk counseling. And then right back to the, "Okay, what do we see for ourselves? What do we want to create? Crystalizing that image of where they see themselves in the future." And I wonder if what goes on in some of these instances with people is that they actually have this uncanny ability to affect reality in these peculiar ways or their experience that other people even can experience. But then that, then, like you mentioned, tying it back into it, you said, "David, that's the beginning of this loop that it's not necessarily the truth of all of it, but it's the truth they're experiencing of it." And so it's like the super complex soup of variables that are going on that can lead people down to incorrect conclusions, but it's not all a fabrication. And if we listen to them, and we see a lot of-- >> And it's a variation of numbers and curiosities. You know, when people see every time they look at the clock, 11/11 or whatever, and they see the same number everywhere, and it's happened to me, you know, you shouldn't read too much into it. Right? Slippery slope. The numbers are talking to me. They mean something like, "I just need to decode them and I'll have the answer." You know, you've got to be careful with that stuff, right? But it is a phenomenon that happens and it's really common. I'd always kind of ignored it just, you know, it's sort of nice and you think, "Oh, that's nice." And I'm trying to start trying to decode messages from God in the time on the clock radio or something, you know, like it's this. But, undeniably, people have the experience of seeing repeating and significant numbers really regularly and see, you know, like they'll see it on vehicles and adverts and the time and the same thing will crop up a lot. And sometimes it'll be meaningful, the sort of Jungian thing. Sometimes it'll just be the same thing, it appears everywhere and I don't know why. And I had a really good idea for what is going on there, which is that it is, like you say, Brad, a kind of manifestation where maybe you're aware and I saw yourself as kind of started to grow through time a bit, you know, you're kind of a bit opened up and things are just sort of falling into sync, you know, from the universe, starting to listen to your bit or your thoughts are starting to affect outwards a little bit. And obviously we've already established we don't get to shoot fireball with our hand, like Harry Potter, but maybe these minor things that don't matter and don't say anything on fire, we can do because nobody else is going to see it. It doesn't affect the bigger picture. Well, there are natural techniques for doing that intentionally, you know, things like a matriote, yeah, yeah, Kabela, I mean, that's the point of that experience to make everything full of meaning. That's a really good point. Yeah. And, you know, if you're a magician, if you're a spiritual practitioner, you know, you're probably going to run into that territory where everything fills up with incomprehensible meaning. But again, you know, like we've been saying, what you need to do there is to hold it lightly. I mean, there's a therapeutic aspect to it. Synchronicity can be wonderfully freeing, wonderfully therapeutic because in a synchronicity it's like the universe is sort of turning around to you and winking and saying, hi, you know, you're seen by reality in these experiments. Yeah. And having that consolation, you know, that you matter that the universe is a meaningful place and you belong here and what you think and do matters, you know, can be incredibly healing. And yet, it can also tip over into this is where as practitioners, when we get into the good matriere and the numbers, synchronicities and the sacred geometry and all those other paths which are sort of doing this same thing, we actually have to flirt with psychosis. I think that's order to overcome that. We seem to make it out okay. Somehow, but perhaps, perhaps sometimes you don't. Some of us. Yeah. Because I mean, I've been there. There's a few pages in my magic journal where you look at them and it's like, this is just great, oh, it's so posting. This is absolutely, if I saw somebody posting this on Reddit, I'd be like, oh, there's a red flag. We don't mean it. It's fine. It lives in, it was in its own little compartment. It didn't mess my head up. It was just like, oh, wow, it's really weird things. What does it all mean? And then, you know, a few days later, I'm fine. So it's weird. But yeah, I mean, I've been a member of the. Yeah, I mean, I've been a member of a magical organisation for about 50 years and you do sometimes see people who come in, start to do that sort of thing and they crash and burn. Yeah. It happens in remote viewing as well. It happens absolutely in remote viewing. And I'll enter that big universe without being prepared for it because remote viewing is a ridiculous thing to do from a spiritual point of view because we're teaching people, the cities, we're giving them powers with no spiritual development whatsoever. And there are people out there pretending that this is just science, right? Which is disingenuous and it leaves people completely vulnerable and unprepared to deal with things that they can subsequently run into. And I've seen people getting to really serious trouble. Well, I'm a lizard people in fact, no less. Literally, that was part of the experience. It's not pretty. But I've also seen that happening, which is people might come into the organisation and be in that realm, you know, that danger zone. But then when they get to engage with magical techniques and see that things might magic and bend reality, you know, and it demonstrates to the man, "Malibur reality is." And there's a sort of relief. It's like, "Oh, no wonder in experiencing things the way I have." You know, and actually seeing it kind of pull people out of that dangerous element. But why do you think it's one way or the other? Why do you think that is for some people, but for others, they actually go, they embrace almost as psychosis when they, I've had first experience of this where someone I was working with really deep into remote viewing, really deep into using it on a professional setting for clients. And then because of the extreme use of it, they began hearing voices in their head that were saying for them to do things that were really terrible. And then they fled from her of viewing as fast as they could. Whereas other people, it's totally the reverse. Why do you think that is? Or do you have any thoughts about it? Yeah. No, no, just everybody's different. Everybody's so different. I think some people have, like with everything in life, some people are naturally gifted. And it doesn't take very much to blow the doors off. Oh, yeah. And then if there aren't structures in place, you know, if there aren't proper guides and teachers, then, you know, they're vulnerable. Yeah. I think that's true. Yeah, definitely. You've seen similar things in meditation. Some people have an incredible gift for being able to concentrate. You know, I would die for a hunger, but it can get too hot sometimes. You know, especially if people aren't prepared for where that can take them. It's a weird balancing act. I've just found personally where, as I've said this, you've probably said this before, David, where it's like, I'm trying to keep my feet on the ground, but my head in the clouds. And how do you do that? How do you navigate that thin path between trying to, this is an, I'm having a human life, I'm having a human experience, but I'm also having psychical experiences. And I'm also accessing information that is no one unless they're experiencing this would believe and they think I'm crazy. It's navigating this thin path between the two. Still, and I feel maybe this is something that I found helpful. So it's a constantly questioned myself. Am I being honest and truthful with myself? Am I genuinely trying to keep my feet on the ground or am I just taking everything? at face value when well face value is not necessarily always the truth. And so it's that self-reflection and questioning I felt was very is very important to me to make sure I'm doing that. - That's your skepticism, isn't it? - Yeah, health skepticism. - Yeah, yeah, rather than skewed oscapticism, but is there a is there a simpler explanation? Is it definitely what it appears given that I know everything is highly subjective? Is this maybe telling me more about myself than it is about some objective, external reality? And then very quickly, the lizard people just don't matter anymore. - I love the light touch. I love the light touch. It's like it's perfect. That's like the laughing Buddha, right? Where it's like don't take it all too seriously either and that helps you not fall down those those rabbit holes. - Well, and don't take yourself too seriously either because I know that's part of the same illusion as everything else is leading. - I mean, there's that thing called the phenomenon these days, you know, it gets referred to the phenomenon. And I mean, my hot take on the phenomenon is it's radically incomprehensible. We will know what it is. The relationship we have to it is one of non-understanding. It is in its nature to be incomprehensible, isn't it? That is what it is. is an unknowable thing. So if I'm really really happy to hear you say that because I've said that before and everyone goes, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's aliens and flying saucers. And I'm like, no, no, no. Unless it is. - It's the funny part. - But you can't prove it because it's nature is, of course. - It won't be known, right? - Yeah. - But that is what you like. - Yeah, but that is what it is. You know, that is what it is at the same time. You know, that's our relationship to it. We can't know it. So given that, you know, what is the wisest thing to do? It's got to be that kind of light touch approach. Where we try and keep everything open. - We possibly can. - Would we look if it was? And it's like a constant question. And so it's like a beckoning you further. It's like unknowable. And then there's this human part of me that goes, well, I can know things. Why can't I know this? And then the reach out and try and grab it. And then you reach out into the air. And maybe you get a little bit more understanding of this, but still the thing itself is still this perpetual mystery. I wonder if that is by design to get us to reach towards source. - Wake up. - And yeah, and that it's the motivator. If we didn't have a motivator, we maybe it'd be less likely to do it. - And the reason that the unknowable thing is the motivator. - The reason it's unknowable is because you can't stop learning because you'll never get the answer. So it forces you to learn until you go, oh, wait, this is unknowable. I get it. - You know, it forces that growth. Like, okay, Chris Pledso, I think who wrote book, what it's called recently, but he went from nuts and bolts flying sources and aliens to now he's writing about apparitions of the Virgin Mary in his background and has just done like a complete story arc from material to totally metaphysical throughout. And you know, he's somebody who experiences a huge amount of this and has the government guys coming around to look at the orbs that he's got. There's all sorts of, he's one of those people that just attracts weird stuff, but has still gone through that material linear time kind of perspective, getting slowly smashed violently apart over time until I think, oh yeah, the latest book is called UFO of God, I think. So it's just gone like fully spiritual. And I think that's that's a really good example of how this thing works. And maybe I'm projecting agency onto it where there is none, maybe it doesn't have a will to do this, but that is what it appears to do nonetheless. Because like, Brad, your origin stories, you were doing video game design or play a consign so you were doing a normal thing and animation, you saw a flying craft UFO thing that came and like super tattooed and now look at you. My old story. I mean, I certainly was a mess after I saw flying saucer over my head and then take off it like a warp speed on Star Trek, but yeah, it's a that was only needed. Interesting. You didn't need the first introduction experience. Well, it was, it was like a little wake up call. It was just like a little alarm bell. I actually had removed years look at that event and then look at the purpose of the event. And they actually did a great job. They described the triangle in the sky and someone seeing it and someone going what in the world they described it really well. And then I tasked him with what was the purpose of that? And they just described it conceptually as just an alarm clock. Just like time to wake up, time to go do some stuff. You've apparently decided to do. It's really simple actually. It wasn't anything more than that. So it's pretty wild. Well, Duncan, is there anything you're doing right now that you'd like to share with our audience? Or thank you so much for I know it's getting a little bit late. That you're working on now, that people might be interested in hearing about or looking up further or that you're doing. Well, my podcast that I've been I've done that are over a still out there. There's some occult experiments in the home, which is where it's just a massive brain dump of every single experience and thought I've had in my years of studying and following me occult, presented in a way that I hope will be helpful to anybody who wants to explore that domain. And then the other podcast I did was called Hyrofony, which was a kind of exploration of the tarot. Let's put it that way. It's sort of esoteric exploration of the tarot. And I've also done a podcast with my colleague Alan Chapman called WarPfM. And these are all for finished products. So I'm in a kind of liminal state at the moment. I've recently written a novella, which hopefully will be will be ready in the next few months. And hopefully there'll be a new podcast coming along. Are you sure you're not going to do any more WarPfM because I was really enjoying that. Was that one of the best podcasts I've listened to? We noticed something really strange, which was if you look at the numbering of the episodes, the content corresponds to the tree of life. Oh no, really? Oh, see, you had to stop. So we got to number 10. Oh, you're real? That was that was a mouth. No, no, no, no. You've got the four-camelistic world. So you can actually do another 30. That's really wild. That's really cool. Well, is there a website that you'd like to promote that they can immediately see other stuff or social media or anything like that? All my stuff is at my website, oeth.co.uk, oeth.co.uk. A cult experiment in the home. If you promote that as a word, does it rhyme with Keith? Yes. Excellent. That canon now. That's lovely. Awesome. Anybody want to add anything else before we wrap up then? Has that been a brilliant chat? I think we could probably bang on until the small hours of the morning, but it's actually getting to 11pm here, so we should let you get your beauty sleep, Duncan. Yeah, thanks so much for inviting me guys. Well, thank you so much for coming. It's been a brilliant time. Thanks, Duncan. Yeah, look forward to your future episodes. Thank you. Yeah. Well, hopefully we can come back and I can actually get around to asking about some of these dark and scary things with not managed to do. We've talked about some interesting things to do. Oh, I wanted to do Jerry Marzinski talking to the schizophrenic voices and the prison planet, so many places to go. We'll have to say it for the other weeks. I'm scared. I'm going to lose my internet again if you'd want. Yeah, I'll do it. Yeah, very good. Well, good night then. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Duncan. Bye-bye.