Consciousness

Come walk down the winding path don't mind the spooks and monsters. They stay hidden within the trees. There are mysteries in this world that you need to know and paranormal truths that need to be told. Come step up into the caravan while we share tales of old as well as new accounts about things you thought only existed in your nightmares.

Welcome back inside the caravan. Tonight, we will take you on a strange journey into the web of consciousness with our very special guest, MJ Banias. MJ Is a theorist who critically and philosophically examines the weird. You can check him out on his own website, Terra Obscura, as well as his many contributions to the mysterious universe and web planet.

I really appreciate you being here. Thank you very much for that. No, it's an honor. I'm excited to be on here.

Oh, cool. I'm happy to be one of the, sort of the first guests on the show that's like, solo with you. This is great. Awesome.

Well, thank you. So just to kind of jump right in, I will pose a question to you. It's a little long winded. Here we go.

All right, so if separation is an illusion and we're all one, and if we're able to create our own realities, how does this span out into the universe? Is that part of what we've created? And could our collective consciousness create a veil between this world and the next? Okay, so we might need sort of unpack a few things here because I think, you know, when we think about the idea of, let's say, everyone being one or not, right.

I think we need to first avoid, you know, sort of the traditional problem we get into, right? Which is sort of the materialist interpretation that, you know, I am not the table in front of me, right? Because ultimately, you know, from a strictly biological sense or from a physical sense, I'm not the table in front of me, right? If I burn this table, I don't feel what the table feels, or I'm not affected by burning up the table or breaking up or resting my drink on it.

So I think we. When we examine or when we look at the idea of, let's say, separation or oneness, right. I think we need to maybe appreciate that there's sort of different. There's maybe different facets of this.

So while physically the table and I are not the same, I think potentially there may be some subatomic connection between myself and the table, right? The subatomic connection between myself, the air around me, and then the air that interacts with the table. Potentially there's going to Be, you know, infinite amount of particles flying between us at all times or even sort of the building blocks of those particles. Whether you sort of believe a string theory or some other sort of physical theory that link everything.

But again, like on a real, just down to earth, realistic sort of standpoint, you know, I'm not the table and something like you and I, Right. You know, I'm not you and you are not me from any, I guess, sort of nasible, you know, salt of the earth explanation. Right? That makes sense.

But I think, you know, again, if we, if we then think about sort of what consciousness is, I think this is kind of where our argument, maybe our conversation maybe needs to dwell a little bit, is we don't really know what consciousness is. There's a long sort of, since the beginning of a sort of philosophical thought, it's called mind body problem. Right. And Deborah, philosophers are sort of weighed in and scientists and everyone, psychologists, psychiatrists.

And the issue is that we don't know where like the mind is inside the body, right? So there's no, there's no, there's no, like, evidence that suggests that the mind. There's no evidence that points to where one's sort of consciousness is inside the brain or the body, whatever. So when we think about consciousness, we often think about the rest inside the brain, and it's just sort of there.

The problem is that no one has ever been able to figure out the sea of that consciousness. Right? No one's ever able to figure out, well, if I do this or do that, if I poke this part of the brain, poke that part of the brain, I'm getting rid of that person's consciousness or altering that person's consciousness. There's no evidence to suggest that that's occurring.

Right. I can, I can cut the cords, right? So I can, for example, give someone a little body, but I'm not necessarily just running a consciousness. We can cut the cables, let's say, interfere with connections, but we don't really know corrections from consciousness itself.

So if you have someone, for example, who suffer permanent brain damage and they seem different to you, right, because of an accident, let's say a collision or, you know, getting shot in head, whatever, you don't really know if that person's self is gone. All you know is that they can't communicate that self to you like they used to be able to because all the wires have been sort of rearranged or damaged. So I think the big sort of philosopher that we're talking about in this sort of realm is Carl Jung, who's a psychoanalyst and a student of Freud, and he kind of argued, you know, consciousness itself is potentially unified, or at least the unconscious mind is unified. So on a daily basis, you wanna look around, we buy coffee from Starbucks and we, you know, we go to work, whatever.

Our conscious mind might not be unified, right? We have separate conscious thoughts. I don't know what you're thinking. You don't know what I'm thinking.

But Jung would say that potentially on an unconscious level. Sorry, an unconscious level, the background stuff that makes us all up is all one giant web of interconnected. It's a one giant interconnected construct, let's say. When I visualize it, I think like a giant spider web that goes in sort of all directions.

Not just sort of a two dimensional plane, but like a three dimensional plane. And we sort of all are sort of points or facets. Our conscious minds are points of facets along this web. But what our conscious mind rests upon is this unconsciousness that, that links everything.

All, everything that's conscious is linked together via this sort of unconscious web or unconscious network, let's say. And he was kind of the one who really sort of hit a hold of it. He has a lot of examples and answers a lot of arguments as to why answer is common. One is the idea of the myth of the archetype, right?

He sort of argues that if you look at cultures across the planet, especially ancient cultures that have never spoken to each other, have never communicated with each other, they all have sort of similar ideas of what, of what it means to be human. They all similar ideas of stories or story arcs that sort of, that exist. All of their stories have similar sort of characteristics or characters, even with certain characters. So there's always going to be sort of the hero and the villain.

There's always going to be sort of this representation of darkness as being bad and representation of light as being good. You're gonna have characters that are some tricksters. You'll have characters that are sort of shadow characters. You have, you have the typical, you know, sort of the wise old mother or the wise old father figure.

You know, like there's these archetypes that exist and it exists universally. So Jung would probably argue, but you'll probably argue, you know, here's an example of human sort of interconnectedness, right? You have cultures that have evolved in totally different ways, yet they share similarities in sort of religious stories or creation stories or just stories that are on campfires. So that's sort of where we can maybe start Our conversation, this idea that maybe something is connected that links all of us.

What we choose to call it, I don't know. But there's an interconnectedness to all things, let's say. It's interesting because when you put it that way, it's like you can't prove, as far as I know, that we have a spirit inside of us, moving us around. So what if the consciousness is specifically part of spirit?

So that's why you can't find it. Yeah. So, yeah, and I think. I think you're sort of.

You're sort of dabbling, right? I mean, you know, for the longest time, you know, most religions will often argue, you know, you have a soul, let's say, or a spirit. Right, is the term. Right.

Especially sort of the Judeo Christian sort of tradition of sort of theology. Right. You know, people have souls or spirit. I think we're sort of the same thing here.

I think, you know, again, one spirit or soul from. If we sort of look at it from a totally sort of secular standpoint, let's not talk with a specific religious ideology or Dhamma, but we just talk about a purely secular level. You know, your mind or your soul are probably the same thing. Right.

It's that which is you. Right. Inside your body or outside of your body potentially. Right.

Depending on your religious tradition, your soul can exist outside of your body, depending on sort of what you believe, I guess. But yeah, I think that's kind of the same thing. You know, like when you talk about the soul or the spirit or the mind or consciousness or your identity, the units within you. For sure, that would sort of be a good way of looking at it.

Okay. Yeah. So I mean, so your first question, sort of ask about seeing beyond some sort of veil. So what do you mean by that?

Like the veil when it comes to, you know, all this paranormal stuff that I'm just trying to see that spider web and how everything is connected, you know, if. If things vibrate just on different planes or if our collected consciousness kind of created a veil between us and others. Yeah, yeah. I don't actually think that, you know, we need to sort of think about that.

There's a veil, let's say. I think going back to Yule, he wrote an essay. It's a very long essay, but it's an essay on sort of flying saucers. And he goes into UFOs and he talks about the idea of people seeing UFOs.

And his theory is that the UFO is that unconscious mind, that unconscious hive mind. Right. Like the Web sort of projecting the anxieties and the fears and the desires of all of us into sort of into our visions or things we see? So people see UFOs in the sky not because they're sort of an objective UFO necessarily, but they see UFOs in the sky because their.

The unconscious mind is projecting that into their consciousness. Sort of scene where Jung starts to kind of stumble a little bit, and he sort of admits to this is he says, you know, what we don't understand is what happens when you have more than one person see a ufo. So does that mean then the unconscious mind is projecting that UFO to multiple consciousnesses that are, you know, in the same place at the same time? So if you have, you know, like the Phenix Lights example, you had, like thousands of people see UFOs, you know, does that mean that the unconscious mind is projecting the same image or essentially a series of images across a thousand people which are present in the same area?

You know, that for you, at that point, he's like, I don't know. Right. This is. We can we prove all the time that people see things that aren't there, and it's a projection that I'm conscious mind to say, like a psychoanalyst standpoint, like, that's normal, Right.

People have psychosis, but once you start getting some mass psychoses, there are events where this has occurred. But, you know, again, it's kind of now you're kind of getting into murky water. How do we prove that? And then, you know, even goes further to see what happens if that ultimately trace the landmark shows on our radar.

This is completely wild and crazy, he would say, because ultimately, you know, can the mind then project something into, like, an objective state? So if I think it can become true. Right. So I think it's sort of a common version of something like a tulpa.

If, you know, that is from sort of certain. Yeah. So if someone can think about something hard enough, let's say, if someone can concentrate, focus, can they make their thoughts become physically real? That is sort of the big question.

And that's predominantly what tulpa is, Right? It's something that does not exist physically manifesting physically, that it can walk around and open doors and things. And again, you'll be like, I don't know at that point. But, you know, again, if we sort of think about.

If we really want to go speculate, if we want to really start speculating outwards, right. We could probably say, you know, a lot of paranormal activity isn't necessarily objectively. Real, it's not actually existing. Like there is no, let's say Bigfoot walking around in the woods or there is no ghost that haunts that house.

Objectively in the sense that if suddenly all humanity disappeared, would that ghost still be there? Would Bigfoot still be there? Right. Or rather, are we ourselves creating Bigfoot?

Are we ourselves creating the ghost? Are we ourselves creating those monsters that will pop in the night? But because we think about them, because there's enough of us thinking about them, are we making them real to the point where they can knock on trees or knock on doors, or they can haunt and move things around in your home objectively? Right, right.

Yeah. Are you giving sort of form to something that doesn't have form? But because you believe in it, because you are able to tulpa it, you know, maybe you're making that ghost manifest, let's say for a long time. I've always believed that, you know, so everything's made of energy, even our thoughts.

And so the more energy that you put into something, more likely then that it's created, you know, and it goes to the, to the spiritual side of things, of, of being these great manifesters of our own reality. Yeah. I mean, people have problems with this. I think this is one like, you know, sort of the like materialist science is going to definitely say, well, this is nonsense.

Right. Because you can't prove that to be true. Right. There's no laboratory that's available to prove this to be the case.

Which is fine. I mean, you know, and then on the other side, I think you're going to have people within maybe the paranormal community who have problems with this. So, you know, for example, I think, I think especially in ghost hunting circles. Right.

And I spoke to a lot of ghost hunters and I often ask a question, it's like, how do you know it's the spirits of the dead? But how do you know it's dead people? Right. Like, and what I mean by that is how do you know that it's.

That it's someone died, their spirit left their body or whatever, their mind left their mind, their consciousness left their body, and now it's back hunting like a traditional sort of ghost? Right, right. All the evidence points to that twitch. I was like, okay, well what happens?

Do you really fundamentally have just because they say they're dead, not necessarily sure if that's evidence. I mean, how, you know, you're not projecting that and it's your interpretation that is making that manifestation say that. Right. You know, because ultimately, you know, you don't have the chicken or the egg.

In this case, the ghost is doing what it wants. Or. Or you're making the ghost do what it wants. And if you're gonna just say, I'm dead, you know, still here, you know, so.

I don't know. It's interesting. So you're gonna have the Bigfoot hunter, woods hunting Bigfoot, saying, there's no Bigfoot. Like, yeah, there's no Bigfoot.

Bigfoot. Bigfoot shows up like, how did I just magically make this thing? You know, that's six foot tall and hurt, you know? No, I know.

And see, that's. That's the biggest thing that I enjoy, though, about doing the podcast and talking to people in the community is I. I am really. I don't want to get stuck in either camp.

What I like to do is play with what if. Like, just, you know, think about things and. And. And go with it for fun, you know, on both sides.

Yeah. No, and, like, it's not. It's not necessarily. I believe in sort of wholeheartedly, but I think it's an interesting thing to think about because I think it.

It forces us to maybe reconsider a few of our assumptions. I think the paranormals of community, animal love for everyone, like, that's, you know, whatever esoteric paranormal stuff you believe in, like, whether it's Bigfoot or ghost or, you know, Loch Ness monster or I don't know what else you believe in. Mothman, whatever. You know, if you really lump the big paranormal subculture community together, you know, we really.

What people think they know, they don't know. Right. They just think they know. Or this is what I was told, or this is how it's taught, or this is what other people think.

Unfortunately, no evidence really support much of it or any of it. There's no evidence to support, you know, UFOs are caused by aliens. There's no evidence to support that ghosts are dead people. There's as much evidence to support that, you know, Jung's theory of unified consciousness will causes ghosts as there is to save dead people.

Right. There's no real evidence that would none otherwise be other. Right. I think people just sort of have for the longest time said, ghosts are dead people.

Therefore, you know, we believe ghosts are dead people. And, yeah, they just sort of roam around for some reason. It's really interesting thinking of it this way, because there was an experience that I had with my daughter. My grandfather, he passed away in 2011, and when I was a kid, he would come home from the grocery store and there was those little, you know, 5 cent toy machines that it would pop out, this little egg.

Yeah. Dinosaurs inside of it. So he would go to the store and he'd come back home and he would hide these dinosaurs in his pocket. And then, you know, he'd.

He'd just pull them out at these random times. Well, it's not something that I really talk about. There's no reason to really bring it up. And then my daughter, gosh, she was probably about 5 years old or so, and she says to me, she comes up to me and she says, papa Don has dinosaurs in his pocket.

And of course, you know, at that moment, because we had lost him and everything, I just, you know, broke into pieces and everything. But it's interesting because then going back to what you said about the unified unconsciousness, like, I'm curious how she. Is it that that pool that she was able to just tap into and like get a memory from it or. Yeah, I mean, okay, so, yeah, first of all, you know, we don't know how it works, right?

If it exists at all, let's say. We don't really know how it works. So let's say someone. And I think, right, maybe it is like a pool in that some people are just better able at tapping into that sort of consciousness and they can.

They can perceive things and they don't necessarily know why they perceive them. Almost like precognition, right. In this case, it would be more of just a postcognition or a present cognition. I don't know.

You know, but ultimately you'd be dealing with sort of this idea that the person simply just pulls a piece of information out and then just has it. Much like, you know, precognition work, right? It's like, you know, precognition is. You can practice, I suppose, but ultimately you're just sort of there.

You're just sitting there and all of a sudden an idea comes into your head, right? And you're like, oh, oh, yeah, okay. And then, you know, you have a run with it. So maybe she somehow accessed, let's say, the pool.

You know, we can also potentially suggest it's just because someone's consciousness is no longer sort of physically present. So they have a body, but they've died, let's say. Does that mean that their consciousness leaves the web, right. Of sort of the unconscious mind, Right.

So are they then maybe existing within that unconsciousness? Do they then enter that web as whatever, you know, and again, from like a Judeo Christian perspective, right. You know, this is Heaven or the afterlife. You know, what's to say then that.

What's to say that heaven is sort of a physical place and not necessarily sort of state of mind. And literally, by state of mind, I mean, you know, the mind itself exists with its own sort of state. And it's sort of connected to the rest of consciousness itself. Which would maybe answer potentially a few sort of both stories or a few sort of ideas between those.

You know, if that mind is still sort of milling about, can it not manifest itself? Right. Via, you know, appearing to you, let's say, again, not objectively necessarily, but you see it again, where things get weird is where, you know, it starts to manipulate with reality. And that's a whole other conversation.

That's a whole other sort of conversation that we'd address. But, you know, I don't know, you know, whatever is happening. Right. Let's say the unconscious mind is real.

This one I always wonder about if, say, this unconscious mind exists, Right. Is it limited, let's say, to our sort of universal state? Or if, you know, as quantum physics is trying to sort of really dig into this idea of the multiverse, infinite universes. Are we also connected with ourselves in other universes?

Right. So am I. Is my unconscious mind connected to myself in every other parallel universe that exists? All infinite of them?

So then in your daughter's case, maybe she was interacting with. This is your father, your grandfather, My grandfather. Maybe she was perhaps somehow interacting with your grandfather sort of in another state, another parallel universe, let's say. And then it.

Simply because it's all connected. Right. She was able to tap into that idea because your grandfather would carry dinosaurs in his pocket in an infinite amount of universes. That sounds cool.

Right? So, again, right. Like, this is all speculation. This is all just a bunch of, you know, philosophical rambling.

But it's interesting to consider, you know, our options here. What's kind of what we're doing. Or I'm totally wrong. I could be totally wrong.

And there is sort of an afterlife that's very literal. And like, you know, his spirit came down and informed her to, you know, there's dinosaurs in my pocket. I need those now, please. Because the broadest source is really important to me.

Like, I don't know. Right, right. Yeah. It's such a reconcile.

Because ultimately, like, I'm. I'm. Like, I'm. I'm sort of born raised and I'm practicing Catholic.

So for me, you know, I have to really reconcile my. My sort of my faith, let's say, as a person and then sort of my philosophical compartmentalization of, like, stuff that could potentially also be happening. So I don't know. I think the things are interesting.

I think that there's, you know, if people who hunt ghosts are listening to the show and they're going to be like, what about EMF mirrors? And what about, you know, when the ghost pushes me? You know, this is. This is sort of what things get really interesting.

There's a great. He's a professor of theology, I think. His name is Jeffrey Kripal. He's written a whole book.

He's terrific. And he's very interesting the way he sort of interprets what we sort of call the imaginal realm or the imaginal. So he sort of argues, I guess, to really sort of simplify it is in one of his essays, he talks about monsters, the idea of the monster. And he says, you know, we seem to.

We sort of seem to separate the idea that something is sort of objectively real and then sort of imaginary, right? So when we're kids, you know, we're sort of told when we're little kids that the boogeyman is real. To us as a little kid, there's a boogeyman under hiding right there, or monster hiding right there. And to me as a kid, it's objectively there.

I'm afraid to get out of my bed and go look, because I know it's there. And as we get older, we realize that, you know, there is no monster in the bed. It's purely our imagination. It can't hurt us, right?

It does not exist in a certain real sense. At least we understand. Krekle says, you know, why do we sort of. Why do we think this is the case?

Like, why do we think that there has to be a distinction between something that's objectively real at a table and something that's imagined and inside your mind, like a monster. And he argues that in sort of monster stories where people have experienced monsters, whether they've seen Bigfoot, whether they've experienced aliens, whether they've seen ghosts, or whether they've, you know, had attractions of the Mothman or whatever, he says it's pretty short sighted to say that the two are separate things like objective and subjective. He says rather, maybe they exist in a sort of. It's more a spectrum in that if enough people or there's enough thought about the monster, the monster becomes objectively real.

But when no one's paying attention to the monster, when the monster is sort of forgotten about, the monster no longer exists. Or at least it's in the imagination. You know, we can sort of say, I'm sitting in this room right now and there's no Mothman in here. So he exists in some imaginal realm, for he's part of my imagination.

But if I'm somewhere and there's sort of enough, I don't want to say thinking about Mothman, but there's enough, I guess, drive to make the Mothman manifest. The Mothman becomes objectively real in the sense that he can land on my car and leave Ganmarc spotted. And the idea of him being real or not real is not two separate things, but it's one connected idea that's a spectrum rather than. There's no break between the two.

So there can be shades of realness or objectivity and shades of subjectiveness and sort of subjectivity. So, you know, you see here these stories all the time of the Mothman standing front of me and, you know, his eyes are staring into me. I'm scared and I can even smell him. Right.

He has an odor. And then he turns and he leaps off the building. And I run to the edge. I don't see anymore.

Right. Because the Mothman has left objective reality for you and for everyone. He's not hiding, he's just gone. Right.

And he happens in UFO case all the time where people see UFOs and it's right there in the sky and it's like they're. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. And they turn their eyes for a second and look back and it's gone.

Right. Or the opus is there and it just disappears from view. Right? So the idea that it's both sort of objective and subjective simultaneously.

And you can have multiple people seeing it because it's objective for that brief moment it shows up on radar, or it can leave landing marks on the ground or burn marks on a tree. That moment it was real and then it's gone. And we shouldn't distinct. We shouldn't have a distinction between the two because there's no.

There's no evidence to suggest there should be a distinction. Right. Yeah. See, it reminds me of Linda Godfrey's book, Monsters Among Us.

There's a case in there where there was the Dogman type, Prince in the snow, and then it just disappeared. The Dogman did or the Prince did. The Prince did. Yeah.

And that Snails. Yeah. So, yeah, it's interesting to think about because then it. I think it answers a lot of loopholes, right.

I think fills a lot of loopholes. I mean, it really Addresses. Then why no one can ever get a decent shot at Bigfoot. Right.

And why, you know, anyone who's ever said they did shoot Bigfoot and killed them can never produce evidence to say that. Well, here's the body. See, this. This line of thinking for me makes everything almost more scary.

You know, there was a. There was a movie that I watched with my kids, and it was kind of like a goosebumps or are you afraid of the dark kind of movie. Classic. Yeah, Right.

And it was. The title of. It was don't think about it. There was this book and it was talking about this monster, but it said specifically, if you don't think about it and you don't worry about it, you'll be safe.

And of course, what happens, the little kid, he thinks about it and it. Like, you watch this thing, it. It grows and grows until it's finally there, you know? Yeah.

And that would be really terrifying because then it doesn't matter whether it's a, I don't know, known cryptid, you know, like Bigfoot or whatever, that means that anything could just happen. Any monster that you could possibly think up, you could just, boom. Create it into being. Yeah.

You know, and it's interesting, right? Maybe, you know, again, this is. Yeah, we're speculating here, but it's also interesting when you really think about, you know, like, our. Our society, you know, in North America.

You know, we're so occupied by things, Right. Like, we govern our lives with things. Our cell phones, our laptops, our cars. You know, we go to Starbucks, we work our day jobs, we watch netfl.

Like, you know, we're so plugged into the material world. Not only that, but, like, you know, our objects that we possess, our possessions, you generally don't see strange or frightening things. We don't make monsters because we don't need to. Right.

We've sort of. We've sort of governed our time in such a way that we don't allow the monsters to exist, at least for us. You know, the monsters come when you're not occupied. Right.

The monsters come when you're. When your schedule is all off. The monsters come when you exist in a state of chaos or marginalization, or you're under heavy stress, or you've lost your job or a family member, or you're alone in the woods at night. You know, that's really what.

The monsters come. Right. When you really look at the vast majority of, you know, let's say, UFO stories, you know, a person simply alone. Right, Right.

A person oftentimes In UFO events, you know, something is going on in their life that has thrown their life kind of on black a little bit. They're experiencing some sort of stress or. Or they're. They're in between something.

Right. They don't have a job or. Or they're. They're, you know, they think their marriage is on the rocks or they're somewhere different.

Right. They're not at home or. Or they're in a new home they just moved into. And the same thing with ghost stories, right.

You know, a lot of ghost stories have something where. Where people often say we're doing hormone donations and people say, Rhea, things like hormonal innovations and upset the spirit because people give a shit about your tiles. But. But it's not necessarily that, Right.

It's the fact that your home is a mess. Right. You're living in a state now where your place of comfort, where you get away from the monsters is in a state of disarray. So that allows the monsters to come in.

Right. It's interesting, I think, if you really look at a lot of people's monster stories, and it's high ufos and goes into the general term for monster, I think a little bit of monster stories, I think people are often who experience these monsters are a certain sort of place where they're uncomfortable, whether they're anxious or afraid or depressed or whatever, that's when the monster sort of is able to. Not the monster, but that's when the mind begins to create the monster, whatever it is. And that's why they're also cultural.

Right. Like, it's not like, it's not like, you know, like, I'm in Winnipeg, so, you know, north, I'm in Canada, you know, I'm not going to see a Chicago running around. Right. Because not part of my sort of.

It's not part of my ideological background. Like, chupacabras are not something that are part of my sort of mythology within my landscape or the mythology within my sort of geography. Right. We don't have these sort of desert monsters, you know.

Exactly. Yeah. You know, I would see something else potentially that may be a little more local to sort of the mythology around my area. Right.

You know, and it's interesting because as you're saying, all this thinking back to my personal experiences that I've had since I was a kid each time, and it takes a little bit to really think about because it seriously seems like there's been so much. Each time something happened, there definitely was something going on, whether I was fighting with my Parents just experiencing a general depression. You know, one of my biggest experiences I had was I foolishly, I had made a Ouija board and I was messing around with that. And then, you know, I could have definitely created the experience after that.

But I remember laying in bed and there was just this really dark figure that stood next to my bed. And I remember feeling like I was held down, like there was an actual hand on my leg. But. And it's interesting too because since I was a kid, I've seen a lot of.

I was laughing. I call them Nazgul looking shadow figures. The most interesting thing about that is the fact that I experienced that since I was young. And then I found out that my sister had experienced it too, but I hadn't told her about it.

And then fast forward to having my kids and of course it's not something that I really tell them. They hadn't known about it. And then one morning one of them was like, mommy, there was, you know, there was this standing in the corner of your bedroom. And she described it exactly like what I had seen.

And then my sister, her stepson also experienced something like that in his room. Right. And so it'll be, it'd be interesting. I'd have to.

I'll have to see what was going on in her life too when she experienced it, if there was trouble, you know, for sure. I mean, I'm not sure there's also one answer to all this. I mean, ultimately some of your experiences, or some of your daughter's experiences and your friend's son, your sister's son experience. Yeah, sister, stepson.

Right. You know, you don't know necessarily how much of that is necessarily directly, let's say, caused by some sort of monster phenomena or how much of it is imagination because, you know, maybe they've overheard you talking about it or they saw move. You know, like there could be cultural reference points as well. Right.

You know, just because somebody, you know, somebody may see something or have sort of a frightening experience or have a dream or whatever, you know, again, you know, we also exist with sort of a very, you know, obviously sort of media rich culture. And your parents talk about stuff and you'll hear it and it just sort of just slips into your mind and all of a sudden it sits there and then five days later it, you know, manifests in some weird way. Right. So I think the combination of all these things, I think, I think, you know, there's.

There's no, there's no sort of grand solution to all of it. I think you Know, everyone's going to have that experience of seeing something strange, and it couldn't be the imagination, Right. Like, there's not every single person has an experience with something strange is actually having experience something strange. Right.

And some people who have experienced something strange all the time, like, legitimately, may also, you know, also have imaginary ones, too. I mean, we all do, right? So, yeah, I think. I think it's pretty complex.

But, you know, in the case of, you know, your particular sightings or experiences, you know, obviously, some of them definitely, you know, I wasn't there, so I don't know, and I can't tell you, you know, what the reality is. But, you know, recognizing that, you know, often, you know, life is in a state of disarray, and then there's sort of a reaction to that. Right. And it manifests in some way.

It's interesting. It would be really interesting to think, though. And this is where things get weird, is when it comes to, say, the monster. Right?

So let's use examples like the Mothman, for example. He's a pretty hot topic in Chicago. Yeah. So let's assume that, you know, our speculations are true, that.

That Kripal's right, and that there is no disconnect between something being objectively real, like a table, and something being subjectively sort of imaginal, like, you know, you thinking about unicorns. If the Mothman exists somewhere along the spectrum, does that mean the Mothman, though, has a mind of his own? Right. And this is.

This is the weird thing. So. So when. When somebody experiences Mothman and, you know, they think about it and it becomes real, and then Mothman disappears and he comes back later somewhere else, is it the same Mothman?

Right. Like, and does the mind. Does the Mothman have mind in the sense that he remembers all those experiences and he understands himself to be both real and not real, or does he not know that he thinks he's real and he just sort of pops in out of existence, Right. And just doesn't know, you know what I mean?

Like, are we basically creating a whole bunch of Mothman, right, that they sort of. They're born and they die immediately? Right. With that experience, I see the Mothman.

There he is, he jumps off the building and flies away and he disappears. You know, Mothman's dead and then another one that's made. Right. Or is it the same Mothman?

Right, In a sense that it's the same. He has a mind of his own, let's say. And we can talk about Bigfoot for this. We can talk about, you know, the sort of any sort of monster.

Wow. Do they, like, you know, like, do they have their own minds within this creation system? That's really interesting to think about. Yeah.

Wow. Because if they do, you can't shoot them. So I know before, and I'm kind of going off topic here, but kind of not before, when we were gonna have you on. We were gonna talk about injured cold.

And so I'm just curious where. Because I haven't been able to do a lot of research on him or anything yet. Where does he fall on this spectrum? Is he also something that you think that could be just created with the mind and then away and then come back?

Because the guy who sort of, I guess, first bumped into the injured cold phenomenon was. What's his name? Something Wood Burger or something like that. He was a sewing machine.

He had sort of multiple experiences. He's had a legend multiple experiences. And again, you know, you ask for who you talk to. Some people say, you know, maybe the initial experience was real and everything thereafter was sort of made up because he got pressed attention for it.

And Keel talked to him. It was a big deal. So he decided to write a book about Indrid Cold. And allegedly this guy gets taken by Cold to his home planet.

And then Cold is a legendless alien from another world. And he gets to visit with these people. And they're all wonderful and peaceful people and they live, you know, these righteous, beautiful lives. And then his daughter wrote a book about how the family had experiences with these other people from the same sort of planet.

I think it's called New Year or something like that. I don't remember it. It's been so long since. But.

So the daughter then writes a book as well, sort of years later, right? And she talks about these experiences too, and how her family and she's gone to this planet and visited these people and whatever. So. So the original, sort of.

The original Indra Cold story from the first guy who actually saw it. It's sort of ridiculous when you actually, like, read the book and you sort of go through it. You're. You're.

You kind of depending on, I guess, your interpretations. Look at it. One, the guy's just totally making all this happen. It's total nonsense.

Or he is having some sort of series of, like, you know, psychotic episodes where he thinks this is happening and he's writing it all down. Or. Or it's, like, real, right? And.

And there's a planet where. Where there's these people who have strange grins and they wear Funny clothing, like, like the people in Wuzh. And like, because it's so fantastical, right? Like it's so.

And it seems so contrived, right. Like by today standards. You read that book and you're like, this is silly, right? Right.

Because again, this guy was writing this book and he was talking about sort of slightly futuristic technology, but he's talking about from a standpoint in the 1960s, right. So he's making predictions of where technology is going and what these people are like. And he's like, way off, right. You know, like no one uses like steam powered, you know, spaceships, you know.

Right. So it seems ridiculous. I think if you look at though, the Intercooled phenomenon, strictly sort of from Keel's interpretation. And this is where things are interesting because a lot of us sort of don't want to go down the original, the guy's interpretation because it seems so silly.

But if you stick with Keel and you kind of go through his stuff and his interpretation of Intercool, you know, he does talk a little bit about sort of the alien. Ness of him, as if he's some sort of alien being, but he talks about it a lot more that there's a direct connection between him and the Mothman, as if they're part of the same phenomena. Right? The Mothman isn't Cold, according to Keel, and Cold isn't the Mothman.

But they're almost part of the same, like. Right, like almost like part of the same mythology, the same mythological sort of coin, right. You know, if Mothman is sort of the frightening beast, Cold is sort of the. The polite Dr.

Jekyll, right. To Mr. Hyde as a Mothman. Because they kind of show up at similar times.

You know, there's been stories as well. I think this was actually in the daughter's book. She makes the claim that Cold was going, not he was chasing the Mothman. Nothing was bad.

But I don't know, like they were just like going after him for some reason, packing him down or whatever. So the Mothman was running from them. And that's why you show up in our world again. There's so many ridiculous stories, right, where this Cold idea comes from.

Right? And again, right. You almost like don't. You almost don't want to believe.

Like you almost want to go down the path of the family that had experiences with this guy because it just seems so silly. But I think Indrid Cold is also kind of frightening in a sense, right. You know, he carries this sort of this strange grin and he speaks in a Strange way. And even his name is quite eerie and has, like.

Even when you say his name right, it. Yeah, like it compels something. Right. It's such an odd collection of sounds and just the phrases are so symbolic and they mean so many different things.

You're like, holy crap. Yeah. And I think that for me, Indrid Cold, at least, when I wrote the blog post, that sort of was the start of the conversation. So many months ago or years ago, I guess a year ago, y' all had to.

I'll find it in all Padonia. Yeah. For me, it was an odd moment of, I guess, synchronicity and sort of tricksterism in that it sort of came up. And I was just in a certain place in my.

In my life where strange things. Not a strange thing happening, but I was just sort of having, like, these odd moments of people communicating with me or talking to me and messaging me or calling me and. And then, you know, this guy's name popping up a whole bunch of times and then like, Seth Breedlove giving me a copy of his. Of his filmed review about the Mothman.

And then it popped up right there. And I was sitting there being like, holy crap, what the hell's going on? Like, how is this happening to me right now? So I decided to write an article just about how my interpretation of the UFO phenomenon was shifting drastically from something sort of concrete and physical to something maybe a little more subjective and something a little more odd and trickster.

Y. Let. Yeah, so just an off question for you, just because I'm curious. I also asked Ryan when he was.

He was live. And it's just. It's so interesting if you ended up. If somebody came to you, let's say the government or somebody of stature that was in the know came up to you and was like, hey, aliens and UFOs are 100 real.

And you had. I mean, the proof. It's right there. They take you, but you can never speak about it, ever.

What would you do from that point on with all the stuff that you. That you do and that you're interested in? I mean, what. Where would you go from there?

Right. So, okay, so we're assuming I believe everything I'm seeing. Yes. Like, this is not some.

Some big hoax that I'm being. Right. Like, you can physically. You can touch it.

They've showed you the proof. I mean, everything is 100. Yeah. Okay.

So it's like I have to see it and I cannot talk about it. Or do I? You have. Sure.

Yes. You have the option they say, would you like to see this? But in exchange, you can't talk about it. Right.

Or you just. You don't see it and that's it. Yep. Yeah, man, that's tough.

Yeah. I would also say that it would really depend on what they're showing you. Right. Because my argument would be that there is no.

Like, when I think about ufo, I don't necessarily think that we're dealing with, like, extraterrestrials. We're not actually dealing with, like, six aliens. I don't actually think that's the cause of the UFO phenomenon. So again, if we showed, like, an alien body in it, you know, and it was 100% real west, specifically, like, okay, this is 100% proof, that concludes that this is what is causing UFOs or UFO, something else.

And this is just one thing. Right? This is one aspect of the phenomenon. A dead alien.

But ufos are actually like other things. You know what I mean? Right. He said, let's see if I can remember.

Right. I think he said that because he didn't have the option, though. He didn't have the option to see it. Okay.

So they don't have an option anymore. Like, I am again dragged into Area 51 or something. I think that he would. I think what he.

If I remember correctly and he can correct me if I'm wrong, I think he said that he would. He would see it and take in the information, but I think he said he wouldn't be able to hold back that information. Right, but you have to as part of this deal. Right.

I think that he would have just agreed to it and then. But he would still continue to do what he does now. Right. But.

Okay, okay. So I'm allowed to do that. I can basically just lie to them and say, yeah, yeah, I don't think anything's gonna say anything. Well, that was his decision.

You have to make your own choice. You don't. If I can do that, then I'll do that. Like, I don't know.

If it was like to put an implant in my head, electric shock, then that's different. I don't. Answer me. Because it seems so out there that would never happen.

I don't know. You know? Yeah, I like to. Like to play with the what ifs for sure.

And. And, yeah, I don't know. I can't answer your question. I don't know how to do.

I think. I think if I knew the answer. Let's say if somebody said, here's the answer to, like, the UFO riddle, here it Is. Yeah.

And it was perfect. Like, it was like, this beautiful, perfect solution. Right. That was so elegant to send.

I think I'd probably be like, okay, cool. And then I would go to my cabin, and I would live out there for the rest of my life, and I would never come back. There's the answer, right? Me.

And take the next FOSS episode. Episode that just came out. The aliens in the book. Are you watching the new season?

I want to. I haven't been able to yet, but it's not going to spoil anything for me. No, no, it won't, because there's just one goofy. It's a goofy, like, fake.

It's not real. Like, it don't matter. But anyway, it's quite a silly moment, and he hands him this book and says, this is the answer to everything. Like.

Like, if you're looking for the truth that's out there, it's in this book. And they hand in this book, and obviously, you know, mul. It's all here. This is useless.

You know, he falls down crying because, you know we have the answer, right? That's the way it would be, Right? Like, suddenly, the hunt is over, so what's the point? Right?

Ooh. You know, that is one of the things, is a couple years ago, I can't remember what. Oh, I can't remember what they're called, but. You know those rocks that would move across the desert and they never knew why until recently?