Mark Gober and Doug Scott on the Spiritual Implications of UFOs Transcript

Mark Gober and Doug Scott on the Spiritual Implications of UFOs

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Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people and about spiritual topics. We’ve done nearly 700 of them now. If this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and look under the past interviews menu, where you’ll see them organized in several different ways. This show is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there’s a PayPal button on every page of the website, and there’s a page that explains some alternatives to PayPal. Our topic today is going to be the spiritual implications of UFOs, and I have two guests. One is Mark Gober, who has recently written a book on that topic, and another is Doug Scott, who has a long-term interest in that topic. Both of them have been on BatGap before and are friends of mine. This topic has interested me for a long time, since maybe 1980 it first dawned on me that there’s something to it. I’ve read a lot of books and watched a lot of documentaries and so on. What we’re not going to do today is spend a whole lot of time just trying to convince people that UFOs are real or that aliens have visited Earth and stuff like that. We’ll cover it, but there are so many documentaries. I just watched a six-part, one-hour-per-episode series on the National Geographic channel on this subject, and it’s very well done. There are probably hundreds of books, and there have been dozens of documentaries, and there’s all this footage coming out from the Navy, and all kinds of people, airline pilots and military people have reported experiencing these things. So, you can spend the next month watching all those things and reading all those books, and if you do, you’d probably get convinced that there’s really something going on. I’ll have Mark summarize that briefly as we start, but I want to focus on the spiritual implications of it. This is obviously going to be a very speculative conversation because who are we to say what their intentions are, whether it’s spiritual or so on. So, we’ll do a lot of conjecture and talking about our conjectures, but I think it’s interesting to consider because, first of all, if they’re even visiting Earth, and we’re going to assume that they are, that’s probably the biggest news story of all time, and it’s not really being covered adequately. But you can’t blame the media because the evidence is still a little indirect. And if the Earth is indeed, if humanity is indeed undergoing some sort of spiritual upgrade or awakening, then that’s extremely important because our very continuation as a species may depend upon it. And if non-Earthly intelligences are involved in that in some way, that’s very interesting. I mean, are they monitoring us? How do they know what we’re doing? And how can they help us? All kinds of questions that we want to get into. So, for starters, I think I’ll just have my two guests introduce themselves in their own words. All this will be written up on the BatGap website, but for those who might be listening while they’re driving on the podcast or something, we’re going to find out who these two guys are who are going to be talking with me today. So, Mark, why don’t you go first?

Mark: Well, my background is from the business world, from I would say a very mainstream background. So I wasn’t in my business career thinking about aliens all that much. I mean, I guess it maybe came up in the back of my mind, but it wasn’t my top focus in my life. I graduated from Princeton and then, like many of my classmates, went into investment banking. I was there in 2008 during the financial crisis at one of the big banks. And then I joined a firm in Silicon Valley where I spent 10 years called Sherpa Technology Group. Again, very mainstream advising companies on their technology, innovation, intellectual property, that sort of thing. And I had, as we spoke about in our last interview, an awakening of sorts. It was not through a near-death experience or psychedelics or anything like that or meditation. It was more of an intellectual path. I was exposed to, at first, podcasts that talked about other realms of experience, of consciousness. And as I learned more and studied some of the science behind it, I realized there was a whole new paradigm that I needed to consider. Because previously I was much more of a materialist, an atheist, agnostic. I used to think life was random and meaningless. I firmly believed that. And then here I was being confronted with evidence contradicting my worldview. So it was a very dramatic shift for me. I’m still in the process of adjusting to that because it’s relatively recent.

Rick: And I first met you at the Science and Nonduality Conference in, I think, 2018. And there were so many events at that conference. And I was looking through the program to see what I wanted to attend. And I saw your talk on the end to upside-down thinking about how consciousness is fundamental and not just a product of the brain. I thought, “Oh, that’s my favorite subject. I’m going to this one.” And so we met there, and then we eventually did an interview on that book.

Mark: Yes. So that book summarized the research that I was doing. At first I was doing that research just out of curiosity. I wasn’t planning to write a book. The book was the last step at the end where I said, “Why don’t I share all the stuff I’ve been researching for the last year?” And at the time I was still working full-time and very focused on my job. But then I had this other passion on the side, wrote the first book, “An End to Upside-Down Thinking,” which came out in 2018. And then I produced a podcast series in 2019 called “Where is My Mind?” which is on the same topic, the idea that consciousness is not produced by the brain. And it features my interviews with many scientists. And then at the end of 2019, I was still at my firm, had become a partner. And again, I had these other interests on the side, and I made the decision to leave the firm because I wanted to be able to just explore these other avenues fully and not split my energy. It was becoming really taxing to split my energy the way I was doing it. So I left my job not knowing what would be next. And long story short, I’ve written four more books on various topics, including the topic of contact. The book I wrote on that is called “An End to Upside-Down Contact.” And it explores not only the evidence that we’re not alone, but also some of the implications.

Rick: Yeah. What is the subtitle of that book, “The End to Upside-Down Contact”?

Mark: “UFOs, Aliens, and Spirits, and Why Their Ongoing Interaction with Human Civilization Matters.”

Rick: Yeah, and all the words in that subtitle are significant. We’ll get into each of them. And that was a gutsy thing, leaving that firm at which you had become a partner at such a young age. It was kind of like Jack and the Beanstalk selling the family cow for a handful of beans or something. I mean, you didn’t know what was going to happen.

Mark: No.

Rick: Impressive.

Mark: Well, I appreciate it. Not everyone would say that, so thank you.

Rick: Obviously, you weren’t married at the time, or your wife wouldn’t have let you do it.

Mark: Exactly. I had a lot of freedom to be able to make those kinds of decisions. But I think it was just inertia from my old life that had carried me in that direction. So, I found myself in this position that was no longer aligned with my life’s direction. So, that tension became difficult to handle.

Rick: And now, among other things, your first book was named… let’s see, where was it? Well, okay, it won an Independent Book Publishers Award for the Best Science Book of the Year, 2018. And you’re on the board of the Institute of Noetic Sciences and something called the School of Wholeness and Enlightenment. And how did you first get interested in UFOs or aliens, and get interested enough to write a whole book about it?

Mark: The topic came up as early as 2016, when I was first listening to podcasts. People talked about communicating with spirits, and very often they would talk about entities that were not from Earth. I also remember very early on learning about past life regression, taking people through hypnosis to an alleged past life. And people were talking about having past lives on other planets where they were non-humans. For example, Dr. Linda Bachman, I came across her work and I also interviewed her for my podcast. She was a mainstream psychologist, and then she had a paranormal experience with her deceased colleague, which led her to look at past lives and things like that. So she was doing past life regression, and she noticed that suddenly more than half of her clients were describing past lives not from Earth. So it wasn’t something she was asking, like she wasn’t looking for that, but it was spontaneously happening. And the messages were very consistent across her clients, so I found that interesting. That’s always been in the back of my mind, that this phenomenon seems to be occurring. But I think where I return to the topic, because that was 2016, I’ve written about a lot of other topics since then. This was, so the “An End to Upside-Down Contact” was published in 2022. I had written a book previously in end of, let’s say fall of ’21, so there was not that big of a gap between those two books. And I think it was early 2022, I returned to John Mack’s work. He is the former head of psychiatry at Harvard, Pulitzer Prize winner, who late in his career studied allegations of alien abductions. Wrote a book called “Abduction” published in 1994, and another called “Passport to the Cosmos.” And I had heard about his work, and I had read a little bit about it, but for some reason I wanted to dive into it further. I mean, his work was really rigorous. He writes it like a doctor. He talks about case studies from a, I find, a meticulous perspective. So as I looked into that more and more, it raised lots of questions for me. And I also, going back to your question, Rick, why cover this topic, I feel this responsibility when I write books that I want to educate people as much as possible. And I felt like there was this big gap of, “Wow, Mark, you’ve kind of covered these topics, but you need to expose more, let people draw their own conclusions, but there’s a lot you’ve left out.”

Rick: Yeah, good. I know what you mean about responsibility. I feel that with this show a lot. So Doug, how about you? Tell us a little bit about yourself and why you’re interested in this topic.

Doug: Well, I’d like to start off by saying nanu nanu. Rick, I’ve been waiting for a while to be able to say that. Thank you.

Rick: Don’t quit your day job to become a stand-up comedian.

Doug: Yeah, there’s not going to be a problem with that. I currently work as a therapist, mental health therapist, and I’ve been doing that for 22 years. I have a private practice in Dallas area. I was a stay-at-home dad for 10 years also, and we have three kids. So pretty domestic, I would say. I’ve kept a blog since 2015 that combines two very important things for me. They’ve been important since I think kindergarten, so it’s a long time. And that is my Christian mystical Christianity, that particular faith background on one hand. And on the other hand, the cosmic existence, including aliens and UFOs and things that we’re going to be talking about today. And my blog tries to synthesize those two things. I have a master’s in clinical social work that allows me to do my counseling, and I also have a master’s in pastoral ministry. And so the nexus between spirituality and psychology has always been super fascinating for me. And then when I was, I guess I’ll just say really quickly here that when I was in first grade, prior to this happening, I had a real interest in UFOs in first grade. While other kids were watching cartoons and I don’t know, reading some kid books, I just couldn’t help scratch the itch of reading as much as I could on UFOs and watching UFO movies and whatnot as first grade. So, this is 1981, 1980 and ’81. And then I went in the country with my relatives. They lived out in the country in Oklahoma, my mom’s side of the family, and we were all inside the house. I felt a nudge, heard felt, it’s hard to explain if it’s a felt or a heard or whatever, but it was something about come outside. And it was the same delight, warmth, tenderness, beckoning that I had felt when I was invited into studying the UFOs. So, it wasn’t just a curiosity, these things, it was more of something connected to my soul, something connected to spirituality. So, I went outside, I was the only one, everybody else was inside, I was in first grade, and I looked up and I saw an orb in the sky that was the size of a full moon. And I think there was a full moon if I recall, but I remember the moon being really bright and it was on one side of the sky. And then where I was at directly above was this orb, and it was like a star light with blue and gold and silver tendrils kind of all going in there. As a first grader, I just knew, A, that it was a UFO, B, I wasn’t surprised because I had been sort of psychologically and spiritually prepped for that. C, I could never tell anybody about it except many years later on Bat Cap. And lastly, somehow I intuited that they were connected to who I was, that there was some sort of connection, not only to who I was, but to some level, some mission that I had on earth. So, that actually sets me up, I’ve been very mission-oriented all my life. I don’t know how not to see myself as doing a vocation, not just an occupation, but something that I’m integrated in some level of service here. And I delved deeply into mystical Christianity, loved the smells and bells of the Catholic faith and the traditions. And then in 2013, that same kind of nudge that I had experienced before, I heard on a Sunday night after seeing many clients, I heard that noise saying, “Invitation, listen to a Buddhist chant.” So, I typed that in YouTube and “Om Mani Padme Hum” came up as the thing to select, so I selected that. In my heart eyes, I just started seeing a golden dew descend and interpenetrate me. And that ushered me into this next season of my life, which has been going on for now 10 years. And that led me to the Law of One, that led me to write my book, and it’s been very important for me to synthesize the cosmic with the conventional.

Rick:That’s pretty cool. Yeah, and Mark talks about this, this kind of thing in some of his books, how there, I mean, we’ll get into this, how there is the possibility that there are beings from elsewhere in the galaxy visiting us. But then there’s also an interdimensional thing going on where there could be subtler beings who could have been right here on Earth all along, actually, but we just hadn’t been able to see them. And I’ve had some experiences with those, actually, and as have some friends. So, we have to kind of blend and balance those two possibilities. And then there could be, like, if you remember the movie “Arrival”, I think it was, there were beings from elsewhere who were also capable of traveling interdimensionally. But before we get into all that, Mark, could you just give us a quick summary, for the sake of those who haven’t been fascinated with this topic for a long time, of the most convincing evidence that we are actually being, or seem to be, being visited by something that we can’t quite explain or understand?

Mark: Well, when I think about this phenomenon of contact, that word often has a connotation associated with a craft, which I think is just part of the story. To me, contact is any interaction with a non-human intelligence. So, other beings who are very highly intelligent that we could be interacting with in some way, that’s what I consider to be contact. And if you look at it from that broad lens, which I do in my book, I think there’s just so much evidence in diverse categories that it’s hard to shoot down every example. So, I break down the contact experiences into non-UFO contact and UFO-related contact. And in the realm of non-UFO contact, I’m trying to think what the most convincing is, maybe near-death experiences, because that has been, they’ve been studied so well, and you’ve covered that extensively on this podcast, Rick. But examples where a person has, let’s say, little or no brain functioning, cardiac arrest, and yet the person has a consciousness that is clearer than usual. So, they’ve got no brain and an enriched consciousness. Often people report encountering other intelligences, whether it’s a being of light, it could be Jesus, the Buddha, some kind of mystical figure, and those beings are interacting with them. But this also occurs with psychedelics. People talk about this all over the place with DMT and other psychedelics where they encounter beings. The phenomenon of channeling has been studied as well, where a being actually speaks through the vocal cords of a human. Helene Wabe from the Institute of Noetic Sciences has written a book called “The Science of Channeling,” which demonstrates, I think, very well that these experiences are not just symptoms of pathology or the person is mentally ill, that in some cases at least, something very real is happening where the human is tapping into a non-human intelligence. So, there’s tons of evidence there in that non-UFO field, but within the UFO field, there are just so many examples throughout history. So, what I’m getting at here, I’m going to give a few examples, is that to me the strongest evidence is that there’s so much of it in diverse areas. I wouldn’t just pick one thing because that wouldn’t be enough to build a case and I’d feel like a crazy person writing a book about UFOs. I feel much more confident writing a book about this topic when there’s so many diverse areas. But in the field of UFO-related contact, I’m very swayed by the work of John Mack because he’s such a credible person who didn’t have to just ruin his career by talking about aliens. I mean, Harvard went after him for this. They gave him a really hard time. And he concluded when he talked to people alleging that they were abducted or visited that they were not making it up. They had a very real experience. So, I think his work is very compelling. And then also the history of visitations or people actually seeing crafts. Richard Dolan has written some great books on this called UFOs and the National Security State. These are history books effectively on UFO phenomenon. And there are just so many examples. I mean, I wouldn’t stake my case on any one of them. But people have been seeing these things all over the world. Even before we had flying technology, there were many cases. There have been many more sightings since the 1940s, let’s say. And maybe not all of them are aliens. But if we look throughout history, some of these are very bizarre occurrences.

Rick: Yeah, and of course, going back thousands of years, there’s the book of Ezekiel and the Bible, which talks about something like this. In the Vedic literature, there are, what are they called? Vamanas? Vimanas?

Mark: Yes, the Vamanas. Jacques Vallée and Chris Aalbeek wrote a book which documents these ancient accounts going back from BC to the modern era. And there are just so many examples, whether it’s biblical, whether it’s in the Vedic literature, but many others too.

Rick: Yeah, and there’s all kinds of interesting specular… there’s accounts which makes it sound like alien life forms interbred with whoever or whatever was living on the earth at that time. And we could all be the descendants of these marriages, or whatever you want to call them. I mean, there’s so many interesting things to get into. We want to do it in a coherent way. But basically, if you really look into it, you see a lot of evidence going back hundreds and even thousands of years that people have been having the kinds of experiences that we’re talking about today with non-human intelligences, some of which appear to fly in various craft and others of which are more, you know, perhaps angelic or, you know, celestial beings that just appear to somebody who’s capable of seeing them, as was the case with, you know, the birth of Jesus and, you know, the shepherd seeing an angel and so on. So, we’re not alone, whoever they may be, and, you know, again, what we want to get into today is a discussion of the various aspects of what role they may have been playing and are playing today in human evolution, and especially in a spiritual sense.

Mark: Well, there’s a question embedded in that quickly. You mentioned “they,” and it’s like “they” with a capital “T.” Who are “they”? Is it monolithic, or is it a diverse set of “they”? Is it different? Are there some beings that operate crafts and others that are more etheric? Are they one and the same? I tend to think that it’s a very diverse landscape, both multi-dimensionally and within this physical realm, but it’s an important preface.

Rick: Yeah, no, I do too. Actually, there’s passages in various Vedic literature where it goes on for big, long paragraphs naming all the different kinds of beings that are non-human that these Vedic rishis were able to interact with or identify. And some of them are good guys, and some of them are not such good guys, which stands to reason because we live in a relative creation where there’s always a spectrum, you know, from good to bad. Do you have any comments on all that, Doug?

Doug: I really appreciate Mark’s legwork here. I have recommended his book to other people as a really awesome primer on the subject. My hat goes off to you for that hard job of researching it. And because I’ve studied the material for a long time and I have been interested in UFOs for a long time, I’ve read a lot of people who have talked about UFOs, including the Harvard psychiatrist. And at some point, I narrowed it down to a couple of sources that I have come to trust that give me an inner resonance that resonates with how I understand spirituality, let’s say. Things that are parallel and mystical and even paranormal that have taken place inside me and with me from a spiritual perspective, when I see that mirrored in some of this material, then I can learn to trust. And I had my own discernment senses going on. And I would say one of the main sources that I have come to discern as being pretty undistorted, now everything is going to be distorted a bit. Because as you said, Rick, at the outset, A) who knows and B) whatever we do read, can we trust it? But the material called the Law of One material, which is a channeled source, and it actually began the same month that I saw my UFO in first grade. It was that exact same month that it began to happen and be channeled. And somehow I think I’m somehow connected to that material, although that could be a delusion. And I’m happy to admit that too. But it lays out a cosmology that makes a lot of sense to me. And it doesn’t just cover the UFO phenomena. It covers it and it has an incredibly large net and expands beyond the UFO. But inside that, the UFOlogy and things that we’re talking about today have a place. And so, it makes sense to me and I start with that because it has a spiritual and psychological resonance with me that I’ve discerned a lot over time. And then when I read research, I can often compare the two and feel like it fleshes out what the Law of One material isn’t saying but has a big enough net to cover it. So, for example, some of the things that Mark wrote can fit right inside that larger paradigm.

Rick: I kind of, when you were talking about how you got zapped when you were in the first grade or so, it kind of reminded me of the movie Close Encounters, which I was just watching on TV again the other night, which Richard Dreyfuss’ character gets zapped and a whole lot of other people get zapped and they’re imprinted with this thing, which gives them a yearning or a searching, and they’re trying to find out what it is, you know? And as the movie progresses, probably most people have seen it, a lot of them end up at Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. That was the information that was imprinted and then the ships come and land there. But the whole movie is a really cool metaphor for spiritual seeking because you get bitten by the spiritual bug, so to speak, and you know there’s something more to life than meets the eye, but for the most part, society tells you you’re nuts and that that’s not important. What is important is this obvious stuff that you have to deal with now, but you can’t forget about it. You have to keep searching and you have to sort of like chart your own course and not listen to all the people who try to sidetrack you or oppose you in your search. But as Jesus said, “For many are called, but few are chosen.” Only a small portion end up passing all the tests and kind of getting to the point where they realize what they’ve been looking for. That was kind of the way that movie rolled out. But anyway, I think a lot of people have had these kinds of experiences where they just, like Richard Dreyfuss with his mashed potatoes piling them into a mound, this means something. They have this feeling like there’s something going on here and I’ve got to get to the bottom of it. I just wanted to throw that in because I love that movie and I love the metaphor for what this represents. It almost seems, I have a friend who got called up into a ship one time, kind of out of body, and was shown what they’re doing. This guy’s very credible, not crazy. He explained that they showed him that they have ways of monitoring the consciousness of the earth, either whole nations or even individuals. He didn’t elaborate too much more, but if that is the case, then someone like you, Doug, who had that experience, wasn’t just an inner yearning, but it was reciprocal. That orb knew you were there in that house and appeared in the sky above you, and you went out and there was some kind of connection. So, there’s some deep thing in you that has propelled you in this direction, and it’s not just in you. It’s some kind of broader agreement going on.

Doug: I would watch that movie, Close Encounters of a Third Kind, and cry because it was speaking to me on so many different levels. And it was right before that I washed that movie, and then right after that is when I had the UFO experience too. It was almost prepping me. But you’re right, and I think that the UFO experience is not really that out of there. It’s not that paranormal. I mean, I know we’re just now learning about it, and Mark has done a lot of research to show that. But the cosmology that I can see, and I’ll be very quick about this, but I think it bears just mentioning, is as above, so below. As below, so above. This is often a cosmic law that is bantered around, and if it’s true on the small scale, it’s going to be seen somehow on the large scale and vice versa. And just like we are made up of trillions of cells, and yet we are one body, then I also hold this true that the cosmos is somehow one self of which these different groups are the different cells inside a cosmic body. And so, when we talk about ETs and aliens, that’s our particular earthly way to describe this phenomena. But really, I see them as other cells inside this larger body, and it’s beings within beings within beings that make up these Russian nesting dolls, you see. So, for me, it’s not really that difficult to understand that these would fit right into the cosmic body, the cosmic Christ, as I sometimes write about.

Rick: Nice. Mark, you want to say something?

Mark: I think that’s well said. I view each being, each life form as part of the whole, ultimately. And so, it would make sense to me that there would be a great diversity. We see that on this planet. Why might that not exist elsewhere in terms of just biological diversity? And then, in terms of the spirit world, that’s probably so diverse that we can’t even conceive of it.

Rick: Yeah. So, Mark, do you want to lay out a kind of an outline for us? Sorry to put you on the spot, but I think you can do this. Of various theories, we could call them theories, of what the agenda of these beings may be. Positive, negative, spiritual, hopefully. And what evidence is there for these different theories that we can discuss?

Mark: Sure. Well, I do think it’s a spectrum, and I do think there are probably just different agendas, just like human beings have different things that they would like to see for the world. We likely have that with regard to these advanced intelligences. With regard to, let’s say, the evidence that agendas even exist, I think a lot of my thinking goes back to the early examples of contact that people reference in religious texts. That, whether it’s like the Book of Ezekiel, or let’s say Native Americans who talk about the star people and the sky gods coming down, there seems to be an agenda in those early stories. That the beings were trying to impart something upon the humans. So, I’ve always held that in the back of my mind, that they’re not just interacting with us for no purpose. And even if you look at the near-death experience, the entities people are interacting with, they seem to want to do something. They want the human beings to enact something. So, let’s say on the benevolent side to start, one of the common messages is that the humanity is going through an evolutionary phase, and we’re at a relatively low level of consciousness. And as we elevate to a higher level of consciousness, we’re going to live in a better world, and there are beings who want to help with that. So, that comes across in many different contact experiences. I mean, there’s so many individual accounts. One thing that’s related to this, but there’s a debate as to whether or not it’s a fully benevolent experience, is the abduction accounts. Where people are taken aboard seeming spacecrafts. Again, this is studied by John Mack from Harvard, among others. And sometimes they’re traumatized through the experience. So, they often describe sperm and eggs being taken against their will. Hybridization programs where these alien beings allegedly are trying to create part human, part aliens. And the people come back sometimes, however, spiritually changed. And actually, Kenneth Ring, who’s a near-death experience researcher, has compared what happens to people after a near-death experience versus after a contact experience. And often, there are many similarities in terms of their spiritual transformation. So, people come back, and they’re more elevated in many ways. So, it seems benevolent from that standpoint. Even some of these experiences that are traumatic can elevate people and can help us evolve along that positive agenda. On the more negative end of the spectrum, going back to the abduction accounts, Dr. David Jacobs is someone who’s also studied these experiences. And he uses hypnosis just like John Mack did. And some of the messages he’s gotten are less benevolent with regard to the abductions. So, he is finding that, yes, people are being abducted, and yes, there’s a hybridization program. But it’s not to help humanity. It’s to enslave humanity. And it’s to do it in a covert manner. So, he uses the term “hubrid,” human-alien hybrid, which is basically the goal of at least some of these beings is to create a species that is virtually identical to humans. But it has certain alien genetics and an ability to, I don’t know, might have heightened psychic abilities. Whatever alien abilities exist within a human form, and that can be used to then infiltrate humanity and take over from within. So, that might be one agenda that people talk about.

Rick: What you just described is something that abductees told John Mack. Is that where that came from, that idea?

Mark: This is from Dr. David Jacobs, primarily.

Rick: Okay.

Mark:From Temple University.

Rick: Based upon abductees’ reports?

Mark: Yes. So, this is also through hypnosis. What’s interesting about his work is that John Mack passed away in 2004. And Jacobs’ work has evolved over time, and his book “Walking Among Us” was written, I believe, 2015-ish, in that range. So, he said over time, the messages changed from the abductees, where they were talking more about this hybridization program, from a negative lens. From a more nefarious lens. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s one of the messages that comes back. John Mack took a more benevolent lens. He talked about abductions as being part of an evolutionary insurance program as well, where if humanity destroyed itself, then at least we’d preserve genetics and we could go on to other planets. I’m giving a broad range here. I do not know what’s true, but these are the various things that are talked about.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, we’re not going to be asserting anything with certainty today about this stuff. As you were saying that, I thought of our dog, who we take to the vet about once a month to have his nails clipped and his anal glands squeezed. And he hates it. He screams. And if our dog could talk, he would say, “I’m abducted once a month, and these horrible beings do these horrible things to me, and then they let me go again.” But actually, it’s in his interest that we have that done. So it could be that people are just really scared by some of these encounters, and they attribute a negative intent to it. But who knows? There might be some positive value to it that they don’t see because they’re so scared.

Mark: Yeah, I agree. And it could be that there is a little bit of both. There could be entities abducting with a benevolent intent and others who don’t have a benevolent intent. It’s really hard to tell. And one of the big challenges here, before we go back to these agendas, is that we’re relying on people’s memories. And the more I look into this, the more I’m just, I don’t even know if we can trust our own memories. So there’s a phenomenon known as screen memories, which is, in short, the idea that we can have memories that we think are true but are actually implanted by these more advanced beings. In other words, they now alter our consciousness. The work of Mike Cleland goes into this a bunch with regard to allegations of animals at alien contact experiences, usually owls but other ones too, like deer. Where people come back and they say, “Well, I saw this owl on the side of the road, and then it was a few hours later and I drove home.” And there’s this missing time, which happens a lot. So that raises questions about memory because where did that time go? Where’s the memory just gone? And then what’ll happen is people might undergo hypnosis, for example, to try to uncover that memory. And the hypnotherapist might say, “Well, I want you to go back to the memory of seeing that owl, describe the owl to me.” And they’ll be like, “Wait a second, this isn’t an owl, it’s a gray alien.” That sort of thing happens a lot where the implication is that the alien beings were able to manipulate the person’s consciousness for whatever reason. Some people say it’s benevolent because they didn’t want to scare the person or leave a scary memory. But maybe it’s not as benevolent sometimes where they’re actually masking who they are. So if any ounce of that is true, if that ability to manipulate consciousness exists, how can we trust any memory of our own, let alone someone else’s accounts? And I know that muddies the waters, but it’s also an important preface here for all of our discussions.

Rick: Yeah. There’s a guy named Marshall Vian Summers, you may have heard of him. And his son, Reed Summers, is doing most of the talking these days. But his premise is that most of these guys, they just have a commercial interest. They’re kind of like the colonizers from Europe that went all over the world and took over various countries and extracted all their resources. And so that’s their motivation in coming to Earth. But like you said with the spectrum thing, I think that that could be part of it. But there are other things that have, I think, a very positive intent. I mean, one example, for instance, I heard you say on an interview recently that there’s some guy who wrote a book, I think it’s like a 600-page book, just about the intervention of apparent alien beings at nuclear launch sites, you know, deactivating missiles or activating them and scaring the crap out of the people running the thing and then turning them off again, just to show that they have some control over this.

Mark: Yes, Robert Hastings. The book is called “UFOs and Nukes”. He interviewed roughly 150 people who were at these facilities, and they described very anomalous events, which I can imagine would have been terrifying, where the nukes are all of a sudden they go on or all of a sudden they go off and it’s not in their control. And often there’s an associated UFO sighting. So again, that raises questions to your point, Rick. What’s the agenda? Are they there to just wake us up and say, “Don’t mess with these nukes anymore,” or are they actually trying to detonate nukes because they want to enslave humanity, they want to destroy humanity? It’s a big spectrum.

Rick: Well, that brings up a couple of interesting questions. I mean, if they wanted to detonate them, they probably could, and they probably have the capability of getting here from God knows how far away, they probably could have a lot more powerful weapons than nukes if they wanted to use them against us. But, you know, I mean, the Earth is a precious place. I mean, how rare is a planet like this that’s inhabited by beings that have evolved to this extent? You could say God has a lot invested in us, and it would be a shame if we blew ourselves up, you know, without realizing the greater potential that we might have.

Mark: Yes, well, many people have speculated that these encounters at the UFO, at the nuclear sites, is to wake us up to say, “Don’t do this anymore.” And in the book, I reference a story told by Lieutenant Colonel Corso’s son. So Corso wrote a book called “The Day After Roswell,” and he alleges that he was involved in collecting the stuff at the Roswell crash, and it was alien material, and that the U.S. government used the material to then develop technologies like Kevlar, and lots of things that we now use was because of the Roswell crash. And there’s big debates about whether or not that’s true, but he wrote this very famous book. He’s now deceased, but his son is speaking about all this stuff, and he said that his father spoke with Edward Teller about this nuclear issue. And Teller’s the father of the H-bomb, and what Teller told Corso’s father, allegedly, is that the alien beings are very interested in our nuclear capabilities, but it’s not because they care about us, it’s because they care about themselves, and the detonation of nuclear weapons affects other dimensions, including these other beings.

Rick: Yeah. In other words, it sort of creates a ripple in the force, to quote Obi-Wan Kenobi. It sort of creates a tear in the astral realm or some such thing. Doug, do you have a comment on any of what we’ve been saying?

Doug: Yeah, this would be one of those areas that, for me at least, the Law of One can provide some basic outlining of what might be going on. But as you said earlier, this is speculation, so I hold it lightly. I’m not, it’s something to learn, it’s a spiritual and psychological skill to learn that one can hold things lightly and be engaged with them at the same time. You know, that’s kind of a mature spirituality. So, I try to do that with this topic. But one of the things that the Law of One material talks about is the Earth is not just unique and given the planet, but it’s unique in some ways given the souls that are here making up humanity and where they come from. It’s kind of a motley crew and just as we have seven chakras, let’s say, the Logos, or that being that which transcends us and includes us would have these seven chakras as well. Those are called densities of consciousness, densities of conscious awareness. And we are in the third density, Earth is the third chakra, if you will, of this Logos. And the point and purpose of third density is for the Creator or God as us come to some level of self-awareness and then exercise free will in the pursuit of love. And to do that, something very important has to happen and that is to make a choice of polarity. So, again, the polarity in that spectrum, the choice of polarity to choose the negative path or the positive path. And the negative path would be that which is not or the path of separation and the positive path would be the true path of that which is and it’s within unity and union. Both paths within this density have merit. They’re both equally ways to progress forward and upward. And so, this is considered like a rough hewn sculpture that happens in the consciousness of sentient beings that have come to the level of self-awareness. And then fourth density, fifth density, and sixth density increasingly take the rough hewn sculpture and polish it depending upon the advancement of the particular chakras or bandwidths of consciousness that someone is in. And what happens according to the law of one is that in sixth density, just like the sixth chakra, it is the density of unity of love, which is the fourth chakra and fourth density and wisdom, which is the fifth chakra and fifth density. And so, the sixth density is this putting it together, balancing love and wisdom together in unity and that is when the negative polarity in order for those beings and they’re not, it’s only about maybe 10% of beings choose the negative path. It’s a very difficult path to go on. These beings, however, in order to progress further into their, on their journey, they actually have to leap over to the positive because ultimately there is no such thing as disunity inside the great field of union and unity that pervades, that is reality. And so, the way then, I’ll just say it this way too and I’ll be done, the way that one can understand, at least how I understand third density humanity is we have not yet chosen a polarity even enough to go and withstand the rigor and lessons of fourth density light and love. That’s called the harvest, let’s say, or ascension or, you know, different terms and our job here is to do a lot of work on the lower chakras to alleviate unprocessed bellicosity or warlike attitudes and then choose to get into the heart, especially if you’re on the positive path. If you’re on the negative path, you want to bypass the heart, you want to be more warlike. And so, we are still in the process of making a choice as a humanity and the fourth, because of that, let me say, because of that, we are a wound in the cosmic body, the great cosmic body. We are acting as if there is an energetic wound, the wound is being confusion, because we have the veil of forgetting and we don’t remember that we are a part of each other and we are a part of this one infinite creator. And so, we send out this signal just like it would be if you were stabbed or you fell and you had this wound in your flesh, in your skin, that would send out an opportunity for opportunistic bacteria to come in, into your wound. But it also would signal things like antibodies and white blood cells to come in to fend off the bacteria in this cosmic body. And so, the fourth density and the fifth density and sixth density would be either the bacteria that’s trying to polarize and manipulate and control and then you have the positive groups that are working to help humanity awaken to the mystery of awe and wonder and get into the fourth chakra, the heart. So, they can begin to live in a more unified way and get ready for fourth density work.

Rick: That’s interesting. Go ahead, do you want to say more?

Doug: That’s just how I understand it, yeah.

Rick: So, you’re saying that humanity is like in this teenage condition where we’re kind of wounded and that is attracting different polarities of beings who are kind of duking it out over us. Whereas, if we were all just dinosaurs, we wouldn’t interest them that much, there wouldn’t be that much for them to do here at this point. Is that what you’re saying?

Doug: You bring up an important point and I just want to say this. It’s not that the negative and positive, from my perspective, it’s not that the negative and positive fourth density groups, and those are the ones that mostly that are seen if they’re UFOs, besides our own craft, human crafts. But anyways, you’ve got the fourth density negative and positive, they are battling it out. There is a war in heaven, let’s say, okay. But they’re not trying to battle it out so that the winner takes Earth, you know, as the spoils. That is a third density mindset because we think about the angels and devils or demons battling it out and the winner takes the Earth’s souls. It’s actually in the service, they’re battling out in the service of helping humanity balance our own inability, our own bellicosity, and our own inability to process our own individual and collective shadow. When we don’t process that, we act as if we’re a tire that’s going down the highway that’s not screwed on very well so it has to go 65 miles an hour, let’s say, but it’s doing it wobbly and what does that create? A lot of heat and friction. Well, metaphysically, our inability to process the lower chakras, particularly what I believe is reactivity and bellicose attitudes, we are entering into effectively a highway area that is green ray. It’s this fourth density and if we were more in tune with that, we would move into this harvest, this ascension. Because we’re not, we’re wobbling and that heat goes somewhere and so fourth density groups are called to actually sponge up the heat so it doesn’t create such a metaphysical greenhouse that we can’t try to then work out our own inner lives and our blockages in our lower chakras. We can try to work it out on our own without the excess heat that we also have created. So they sponge things up.

Rick: Interesting. Does that evoke any thoughts in you, Mark?

Mark: I hadn’t thought about it that way before. It’s really interesting and also, these are abstract topics. I think the nature of reality is inherently abstract and it’s hard to linearize the non-linear. I think you did a good job, Doug, explaining it, but I’m having a hard time grasping what are the arrows of causality? How much are we affecting those upper realms versus they’re affecting us? I feel like it’s mutual, but you made it sound like maybe what’s happening above, so to speak, is affecting us. They’re able to then change our world, but we’re able to change their world too, I would guess, because of the interconnectedness.

Doug: In fact, what happens in fourth density, according to Law of One’s speculation, of course, but how I understand it is that fourth density societies which Earth is moving into, okay? So, maybe in a few hundred years, we’re going to be a fourth density planet, is speech won’t be necessary because we’re going to be able to have more transparent energy exchanges. That telepathy will be more of the norm. There won’t be a way to hide. Everything will be open, in a sense. And everything, just as is often said, anything that arises must converge. So, you have the manyness and the manyness come together to create a new oneness, a new unity. And that’s going to happen in fourth density, that the manyness of human beings will converge through the heart and create kind of an interconnected organism. In other words, the cells will be humans, let’s say, but connect and create a gestalt, something that’s greater than the sum of the parts. And as an organism, like a multi-celled organism that would be a fourth density united society, they decide to go and serve. Like, they’re going to be a social worker, you know, and go and serve a population. And who are the population in the great cosmic body that are calling for help are third density planets, usually. Because third density is the density of forgetting. It’s the density of where you’ve got self-awareness and free will, plus an inability to remember where we’re coming from, who we are, and how we’re connected. So, the actual work of fourth density groups is to learn fourth density lessons of love and understanding through their service of us. In other words, the gardener learns how to garden, not by reading books, but actually by gardening themselves. Gardening, you know, and we would be part of that garden. So, there is an interchange, but above all of the octave, the cosmic octave, from first density to seventh density, there is the other octave. And what Law of One talks about is from that perspective, there are guardians that give off karmic, they have like a karmic algorithm that perfectly balances all of the catalysts and the opportunities that are needed for third density humanoids or beings to learn the lessons that they need to learn to choose the polarity. So, in other words, it’s a perfect balance and no more negativity can be allowed in, there’s a quarantine, that’s what I’m trying to say – there’s a bit of a like a quarantine net, around, energetic net around, and no more negativity can be allowed than positivity being given a chance to also be manifest. And no more positivity can be allowed than negativity being a chance to manifest. And so, these are light and love, negative and positive coming together that are higher densities, absorbing our confusion, mopping it up so that we are free to continue to work enough to gain polarity and harvest into fourth density. I know that’s a lot of metaphysics, but that’s how I understand it.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, a few thoughts quickly. One, it sounds like you’re saying that there are sort of fourth density beings and higher that have an overview of what’s going on in the galaxy and they kind of can spot when a third density planet needs help and they swoop in and go to work. Another thought, I’m reminded of someone once asked Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, “Why in the Vedic literature are the gods and demons always portrayed as battling one another?” you know? And he said, “It’s a representation of something that happens at a very fundamental level of creation without which there would be no creation.” It’s that sort of primordial tension or something keeps the creation going. And then, it might have raised a few eyebrows a few minutes ago when you said that both the negative and the positive are viable paths, but I’m reminded again of Vedic stories where some being is given a choice. Okay, you can have like three or four lifetimes as a positive being and you’ll eventually get enlightened, or we need somebody to incarnate as a demon who’s going to end up battling with Krishna or something and is going to get killed by Krishna. And getting killed by Krishna will guarantee his instant enlightenment and the being says, “Okay, I’ll sign up for that.” So, even the negative, I mean, obviously it has a role in creation, or it wouldn’t exist, but it has an evolutionary function, I think you’re saying. And usually we think, “Oh, it would be good to just get rid of it all and have a totally positive universe or a positive world,” but that has never happened, and so why? Well, there must be a reason for it.

Doug: Let me just say one thing and then I’m going to ask Mark’s opinion. I have come to see that the archetype of Satan, which we know means the accuser, as the archetypal personification that humans have given for the phenomena of the veil of forgetting. So, what I mean by that is when a second density being gets to a certain level of their evolution where the next incarnation is going to be as a third density being to begin the lessons of learning about love.

Rick: The second density, does that mean like animals and stuff?

Doug: That’s right. Mostly pets and trees that you love. Yeah, I mean, these things are the tip of the iceberg on second density, going from the single-celled, eukaryotic, I’m sorry, prokaryotic cell all the way to, let’s say, your cat. And they are invested by love, by third density. God as third density beings invest their love and love author’s life. Love individuates, culls them from the group soul into third density, which is the next level of evolution for them. When that happens though, when a human comes into this, especially a newly minted one, you look around and it’s like, “Who am I? What am I doing here? What is this? Is there any path?” It’s almost like a blank canvas. Over successive incarnations, they begin to learn that there isn’t the phenomena of evolution. There’s something that builds upon something else. And at some point, they make a choice of the polarity, the negative or the positive path. But all of this is forgetting, it’s predicated. I mean, the veil of forgetting is actually a divinely beautiful thing because it allows the one infinite creator through us to experience very intense lessons of what it means to be the infinite creator, given that parts of the infinite creator, us, don’t remember that we are the infinite creator. So, we have all of these frictions and the friction creates light, you know, two positive and negative, put that in, you get a light bulb and it works. And so, Satan is the accuser of saying, “You are not a part of this matrix. There is no unity. You are separate. You’re separate. There is no illusion. Reality is separate.” That’s what Satan accuses us of, or that’s how we feel when we’re on this side of the veil. And then awakening is to awaken that it is an illusion of separation, but it’s a very, very important and actually sacred illusion.

Rick: Good. A couple of questions came in, but I want to give Mark a chance to respond to any of this that he cares to before I ask them.

Mark: Yeah, I think we’re generally talking here about the tension of dark light and how we reconcile the obvious existence of darkness to some degree, because we all know that is part of human history. And we also know there’s benevolence too, and I think the theme here, if I were to summarize it, is that there is an evolutionary value to having both. And without the contrast, we wouldn’t have the same kind of experience. So, I tend to see it that way too as just an inference for what’s going on. And that doesn’t mean that there aren’t very dark things. It’s just put into a different context. And we could look at, I mean, I think terminology can be confusing because we could talk about evil and people would say, “Well, there is no evil,” because at some level we’re all one and it’s all unconditional love. And we could say, “Well, that’s true at some level that there isn’t evil, but at another level, at the level of duality and separation, we could say certain things are objectively evil, even though at some level it’s not evil,” if you know what I mean. So, these paradoxes are constant. And this also goes with the notion of, like I talk about in the book, a bit of a spiritual war. That’s one way of describing that very tension, which also doesn’t exist. So, it’s like it exists and doesn’t exist.

Rick: Yeah, somebody sent me a t-shirt recently that has the word “paradox” on it, my favorite word, and I’m always dealing with this multi-level thing where things are paradoxically true, even though they’re opposed to one another. Things exist, things don’t exist. There’s good and evil, there’s no good and evil, all that stuff. It’s just a matter of what level you want to deal on, what level you’re looking at.

Mark: Right. And I also think…

Rick: No, go ahead. You go ahead.

Mark: Yeah, I think this is an important point because the acknowledgement of the paradox, I think, can lead to overpassivity if it’s not interpreted properly, where it’s like, “Oh, well, yeah, there’s really evil stuff happening, but it doesn’t matter because it’s all just oneness and benevolence.” And I think that can be a trick to misdirect people.

Rick: Yeah, I totally agree. Everything, you know, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” everything has to be given its proper emphasis, and you can’t use the level of consciousness of one level to brush away the reality of another level. You know, the gun of the dream state won’t shoot the tiger of the waking state. Anyway, a couple questions. This is from Ivan Dimitrov in Bulgaria, and he’s just speaking as an alien scout reporting on the level of intelligence on planet Earth. “It kills for money. It kills for fun. It kills for God. It is the most intelligent being on the planet.” But that’s a little cynical because obviously there’s some people who do good things, and I prefer that kind of intelligence. And then here’s a more serious question from Tarun Philar in Naperville, Illinois. “Can you elaborate more on the diversity of the interdimensional beings and their origins?” I suppose you could both take a crack at this.

Doug: Mark, please.

Mark: Sure. There are so many reports about this sort of thing, and even the term “interdimensional” is hard to pin down. Because if someone encounters a physical being, let’s say on a craft, and there are many examples of that, is that an interdimensional being that can go in and out of dimension? Sometimes they can, but maybe it’s just a purely physical being. So I’ll speak with regard to all contact, because I’m not sure what’s interdimensional and what’s not. With regard to abductions, for example, people talk often about grey aliens. That just comes up everywhere. John Mack talked about that a lot as well. And people also encounter insectoid beings and reptilian beings, meaning intelligent and often large insects, like a praying mantis, a huge praying mantis, as crazy as that sounds. People are talking about this nonstop. I don’t know what to make of it, but that’s what they say. But then there are all kinds of humanoid beings, and Richard Dolan has written a book recently about this where he goes through, I believe it’s his book called “Alien Agendas” where he gives all kinds of speculation on what the agendas are. But he even includes pictures of what people have seen, allegedly, and they’re just like an infinite number of species, is the best way I can describe it.

Rick: Like Star Trek.

Mark: Yeah.

Rick: And some of them are depicted as being very, almost like saintly humans. Did you ever encounter that book “Contact from the Pleiades” by Billy Meyer, the one-armed Swiss farmer? That was one of my first books that I ever ran into, but he claimed to have been interacting with these Pleiadean beings, which are just like, you know, just very beautiful and highly evolved looking human types.

Mark: Yes, and you reminded me, I haven’t mentioned the Free Study, F-R-E-E, which is an important one in this general domain. And it was an analysis done of several thousand contactees, and it was run by Ray Hernandez, Rudy Shield, Bob Davis, and maybe one other, where they looked at the similarities across contact accounts. And so they have stats just from those few thousand people, but these are independent accounts and they talk about different species. So, reptilian, insectoid, beings of light, spiritual entities. So, it comes from many angles where people are seeing patterns.

Rick: Yeah, and it’s good to reemphasize that these are not necessarily coming from elsewhere. I mean, I have friends who routinely see subtle beings, like guardian angels and devas and elves and whatever. There’s a whole menagerie of beings who reside in the astral and celestial realms right here on Earth that we just don’t see because most of our perspectives are limited to the upper crust of creation, not the subtle realms.

Doug: I would just add one more speculation, because it’s hard to know these things for sure, but the Law of One does make mention of the inner planes, and they talk about, they being the source of the Law of One, talk about the inner planes as what’s called time-space, where it is an analog of space-time. So, what you and I experience as our everyday life is space-time, and then the other side of that, the so-called afterlife or dream world, or oftentimes called the astral world, would be time-space. And those would be dimensions, and you can almost see it as horizontal ways to understand things, different compartments within a spectrum of bandwidth of consciousness, and then densities would be the vertical. So, you have one through seven, let’s say, different floors, and the higher you go, the more expansive it is, like concentric circles going out. But in each one of those, the densities as well as, yeah, each one of the densities has a space-time and a time-space configuration. But on Earth here, you can actually access the astral realm or the time-space thru different kids of meditation. Some people are gifted by seeing auras and whatnot, and you can train yourself to do that actually. And you can perceive sixth density astral, or fifth density astral, or you can perceive the hell realms. And this would be the lower third density astral, where you have a lot of the thought forms and egregores that we create here that begin to coagulate, because everything that arises must converge. So, you have these thought forms and elementals that coagulate and become sentient beings, you know, and can be kind of energy vampires, if you will. So, yeah, those things, dimensions and densities is how I understand it.

Rick: Yeah, and I guess one way of illustrating this is that when somebody has a near-death experience, and presumably a death experience, they perceive all kinds of stuff. They don’t go zooming off to some other planet to see it, they see it right here as soon as they’re released from their earthly confines.

Doug: There is no distance when we can move into these kinds of realms, because it is only one body. And so, we can move simply when people learn how to do this, and I think in the higher densities, it’s just a matter of fact, everybody can. But you can move anywhere in the cosmic body where you will, because you are essentially an awakened cell within that, and have learned how to traverse from location to location simply by willing it. Because you are God, having an experience of that being who is progressively learning how to express omnipotence.

Rick: So do you think that an alien species who actually comes here in an apparent craft has figured out how to get not only themselves, their own bodies, but a craft in which they can dwell to kind of get into this, I forget how you phrased it, this subtle realm in which they can traverse great distances instantaneously?

Doug: Yeah, in fact, the Law of One actually mentions that exact thing. They talk about in fourth density, fourth density above, there are two different kinds of ways that UFOs or aliens traverse the cosmos, and both of them are instantaneous. Third density, apparently, there are some aliens who learned how to use hydrogen in different ways than we know, or certain ways, and they put themselves in long cryo, you know, and kind of do that. But with the fourth density and fifth density, they have learned to approach the speed of light and then somehow move into a part of a tesseract. Now, I’m not familiar with those kinds of things, but it’s moving into a tesseract, and then you jump into time-space for the astral, and then you can program where you want to emerge from that in space-time, and then you appear. So that’s one way, and these would be beings inside a craft. But the more advanced way that the Law of One talks about is that there are beings, mostly are the positive ones in fourth density, and in the fifth density and sixth density, it’s all the positive ones, that don’t need craft anymore, but they will create craft for us so that they can appear, the positive groups. I’m not talking about the negative groups. They can appear in our skies as craft that are actually thought forms that they create as a collective, and even abductions, they might be very real, but they’re actually elementals or thought forms that are created elsewhere and then projected here. And the purpose is to awaken awe and wonder, awaken to the great mystery of union and unity that we can’t understand in our normal way of understanding reality.

Rick: Do you have any comments on all that, Mark?

Mark: I just want to add the notion of shape shifting with regards to species, because it is a theme that comes up in the research and even John Mack said that the alien beings appeared to be consummate shape shifters, meaning they can appear one way but they’re not actually that. They can change their form. I guess they’re advanced enough to be able to know how to manipulate their physical realm in some ways. And that’s important because with this whole field just like I was talking about with memory before, that we can’t always be sure if the memory’s real. We can’t always be sure what we’re seeing sometimes because some of these beings are so advanced. And that’s, I think, always an important consideration here. And this also goes back to many ancient traditions. Muslim tradition talks about the jinn, and many stories which sound mythical, where they talk about shape-shifting creatures. Maybe some of those are not mythical, maybe they’re referring to alien encounters.

Rick: Interesting. You know, one concept that I’ve had in mind a lot over the last nearly 50 years, and which of course many spiritually-oriented people have been thinking about and hoping for, is that, you know, the world is, or humanity is on the verge of some shift or transformation. And I know your most recent book, Mark, is “An End to the Upside-Down Reset.” I’m not sure if, we don’t want to get into that in too much detail, but I also feel that a reset is coming, and I think a reset needs to come. I’m just not sure exactly what form it’s going to take, but it does seem to my mind, and I had an interesting conversation with Dwayne Elgin a while back, and he laid out like three scenarios that he saw as possible. One, and all three of them involved everything pretty much collapsing, and the first one, everything stays collapsed and we stay in a long period of chaos. The second one, everything collapses and then some kind of Chinese-style artificial intelligence, you know, government-controlled society takes over. But the third one is everything collapses and then out of the ashes, so to speak, a very spiritual civilization emerges, which is, you know, characterized by great freedom and higher consciousness. So I suppose that any three of those is possible, but it does seem, maybe it’s just New Age thinking on my part, or the part of many other people, but it does seem that something like that is on the horizon. But in my conversation with Dwayne, none of those scenarios had anything to do with extraterrestrial intelligence, but we could easily bring them into the conversation, because as, again, we were saying earlier, they don’t want to see us just crumble and go into a total chaotic society. And I don’t think an AI-dominated, you know, authoritarian world would be in the interest of higher consciousness or shifting into fourth density. So, you know, maybe they’ll help us achieve scenario number three.

Doug: Yeah, I have the thought that I have on that one is like, what do we do? Where do we go from there, from here to fourth density? And how can we think about a different kind of future? And the one thing that I consider as a counselor is that I think our outer world is a mirror of what’s going on in the inner world. So, when I get a couple that has a hard time learning how to communicate, I’m thinking, of course, metaphysically, you know, they may not know that, but I’m thinking metaphysically, and it’s going to be some inability to speak in Blu-ray, which is the throat chakra, speak with honesty and clarity, having processed all of the other centers below. And where you find the problem would be in the realm of reactivity or bellicosity, and on both sides. So, what they may be talking about and having the same argument over and over again, and it’s really a power play, the real problem is actually way down lower where they have had emotional baggage from the past, and they don’t know how to handle that, or things trigger them now, and they don’t know how to process that in a way that people learn how to see the other as themselves, and set boundaries if needed, but coming from a place of compassion. So, that’s hard to do, hold compassion and set boundaries at the same time. We haven’t learned how to do that on an individual level, and because of that, we can’t do it on a macro level. Therefore, we are still adolescent, I think we could say adolescent, might be early 20s, humanities, maybe in the early 20s, you know. And I think, actually, if you look at the mirroring between individual psychological development and the global development, right around 21, 22 years old, between 22 and 24, there’s the final brain push. The neurons start fleshing out, and that’s the last final development of the brain, and that’s when humans in the individual levels are able to start thinking in philosophy and theology and holding paradoxes together. So, maybe fourth density is humans coming to some level of holding problems together and then approaching it with love and understanding with other people.

Rick: Mark?

Mark: I think that was well said.

Rick: Okay, so you wrote the book on upside-down contact, Mark. What are some important aspects that you covered that we haven’t thought about here yet?

Mark: I mentioned psychedelics earlier, and what I’m about to mention is one of the findings that really surprised me when I was researching, is that especially under DMT, so this is dimethyltryptamine, a hardcore psychedelic when it’s allowed to stay in the body. Typically, the body just breaks it down so people aren’t tripping all the time when the body naturally produces it. But it can be taken intravenously, or through ayahuasca. The ayahuasca combination allows the DMT to stay in the body for a long time. But Dr. Rick Strassman from the University of New Mexico was giving people DMT intravenously in his studies, and he wasn’t trying to induce contact with beings. He was looking at bodies’ physiology to see what happens on the psychedelic, and he was able to get approval for the study. But he was shocked to find that people were encountering beings, and they were describing abduction-like scenarios. And these were people who often didn’t know about alien abductions, and Strassman himself was not an abduction researcher. It was like some fringe thing he wasn’t even familiar with. So that was just pretty shocking, that somehow the DMT, I don’t know, is taking or allowing consciousness to go into that same realm that other people report when they’re not given DMT. I’m not sure quite what to make of it, but to me it’s another validation potentially that it’s a real phenomenon, even though we might not understand it. John Mack, not surprisingly, took a great interest in this, because he was studying it from the more experiential, just people came and said they had an abduction event, he helped them with hypnosis. He wasn’t working with DMT, but you have these two researchers independently coming to very similar conclusions.

Rick: Yeah, and of course DMT, and you mentioned ayahuasca, which contains DMT, people see all kinds of beings on ayahuasca, and have all sorts of snakes and God knows what that they perceive when they’re in that state. And it could easily be dismissed as mere hallucination, but it could also be thought of as dipping into an alternate realm or dimension that is around us all the time, But that we ordinarily don’t have access to.

Mark: Yeah, that’s how I see it, that somehow the compound opens up those other dimensions of experience that are typically blocked somehow.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, just for example, if you took the electromagnetic field and made it the width of the United States from San Francisco to New York, the portion of the electromagnetic field that the human eye can see is about the size of a dime somewhere in the middle of the country. So, there’s a great deal going on that is outside the realm of our experience, even in that sense, but that’s just one way of looking at it. We’re also talking about subtler dimensions, which aren’t represented on the electromagnetic spectrum.

Mark: Yes, and to me it just raises so many questions. What are those beings doing there in the event of a DMT-induced abduction? What are those beings doing with that person, and why do they care? I don’t really know, but there’s a consistency of reports, so that has to be accounted for.

Rick: Yeah, and are they always sort of in touch or aware of us, or is it more like we become aware of each other only when we take the substance that opens us up into their world, and all of a sudden we pop up in their world and they say, “Oh, what’s this guy doing here? Let’s mess with him.”

Mark: Right, who knows?

Rick: I definitely think that there are some beings that are always aware of us, you know, guardian angel type things that attend to us, and that there are others that are just in their own realm doing their own thing and are not interacting with humanity, even though they might intersect us in terms you know, of our proximity in a relative sense. Any thoughts on that, Doug?

Doug: Yeah, I think that rituals and things that we do here, even having conversations, can be on the astral plane almost like phone calls, where something is picked up, especially if it’s a ritual and it’s been used for thousands of years by millions of people, it’s gotten to be pretty strong. So, you do a kind of ritual or say some words, and then that can show up in the astral plane as a configuration of energy that can be like a phone call, and you might be able to access contact that way, yeah.

Rick: There’s a few more questions that just came in. This is another one from Tarun Philar in Naperville. “Is ninth density the highest dimension of existence, the God dimension? You mentioned seventh as the highest. What are your thoughts on eighth and ninth levels? Do you think there are more dimensions or levels of density?” This is to you, Doug.

Doug: Yeah, the Law of One states there are infinite levels, and even within our third density, there are infinite strata, seven major sub-levels, but again, always dividing more and more, usually in sevens. The seventh density is considered the density of the gateway density, so there would not be, it’s more of where you have a convergence, and it’s not a total convergence, but you have beings that are coming together in such unity and union, almost like the formation of a black hole, if you will. And then the eighth density is simultaneously the first density of the next octave. So, kind of like on a piano, you can play an octave and the last note on the octave is the first note of the next octave. That would be, so eight and nine are the same density. Where these other beings are coming from, because actually, as Mark said, it’s all happening right now. That’s the weird thing, is that there’s an eternal now. Simultaneity is the only way it’s really working, and so all of these beings are functioning, and the next octave, which is our future, is present now and affecting, and the past octave is also present now and affecting. So, in a sense, as Mark was saying earlier, all of these different elements and God’s sense organs are all happening right now, and in relationship to each other to give the infinite creator an experience of itself. And it’s a very sacred thing, this thing.

Rick: Mark, do you want to say anything before I go on to the next question?

Mark: I will leave it there. Doug said it very well.

Rick: This one is from Mark David Vinsons. He says, “In the Vedic cosmology, there are 14 worlds, seven higher ones, vyārttis, if I’m pronouncing that correctly, and seven lower ones, pāṭilas, so heavens and hells, essentially, seven higher heavens, seven hells that go lower and lower. What can you say about this topic? My feeling is that the ancient Vedic worldview and philosophy are the most complete scientific and spiritual description of reality.”

Doug: Yeah, I am not, I don’t know, so I can’t speak with any kind of thoughts on that, unfortunately.

Rick: Yeah, okay. And then another one from Mark. Well, just on that, that thing about the seven heavens and seven hells is Swami Sarvapriyananda often brings that up. Believe it or not, it’s kind of standard understanding in Vedanta. Many people who study Vedanta just think, “Okay, that’s non-duality, we wouldn’t consider all this hocus-pocus.” But they actually do take all this kind of stuff into account.

Doug: I will say one thing. I had a mystical experience in Mass one time. This was right after my awakening with the whole golden dew, and I was holding my two-year-old, and he was crying, I’m holding him. And all of a sudden, it was an overlay over my eyes, so I saw reality, but I also saw an overlay on top of that. It’s hard to explain. And in that mystical vision, what I saw was heaven was an infinite spectrum, so maybe you could divide them in seven. And that hell was an infinite spectrum, and that there is indeed a spectrum of consciousness that goes from non-dual, not total uniformity, it’s unity and diversity held together, you know? And then hell would be the ethos of separation at its most strong. And the spectrum are all, in a sense, heavens, if you will, and when we die, we simply go to the level of consciousness that we left off with. Yeah.

Rick: And those who hold that model also hold that you don’t get stuck in any of those levels.

Doug: No, you don’t.

Rick: There’s nothing like in the Christian world where you permanently go to heaven or hell. You go there, you work off some karma, and you come back. Or it’s possible that you can go to a very high heaven and actually ascend to full enlightenment from there, although that’s more rare. But generally, you go to one or the other of these things, and you work off some karma. And you could even go from one to the other. Like, there’s a story at the end of the Mahabharata where Arjuna and his brothers die, and Arjuna, or maybe it was Yudhishtira, they go to heaven, and they see the enemy there, Duryodhana. And he says, “Well, what are you doing here?” And then he says, “I don’t want to be here. I want to be with my brothers.” So then he finds himself down in hell. And, “Hey, we’re the good guys. What are we doing in hell?” Well, it turned out that Duryodhana had a little bit of good karma to work off, so he went to heaven first, but then he had to go to hell. And the Pandavas had a little bit of bad karma to work off, so they first went to hell, and then, boom, went back to heaven. It’s a temporary arrangement.

Doug: Richard Rohr, my mentor Richard Rohr talks about it. It’s heaven all the way to heaven and hell all the way to hell. And I know people who have never gone to church and are atheists who are more, let’s say, Christian, if you will, or more loving humanity and serve humanity and the poor than people who go to mass every day or go to church every day, but they sit in judgment of other people. Who’s in heaven? Heaven is unity and union, and hell is total separation. You see? So it doesn’t –

Rick: Oh yeah. There’s a great story about the yogi and the prostitute, but I won’t tell it right now. It would take too much time. So then, here’s another point just from Mark Vinzenz, who sent in the previous one. He’s in Germany, by the way. He said there’s a description of an alien visit in the Buddhist Lotus Sutra. And he provides a link to that, which I can’t read out, but I could post it or send it to somebody if they’re interested. And yeah, we were saying earlier that in a lot of scriptures, there’s all kinds of references and also iconography of things that look a whole lot like some kind of alien being, even in Egypt and elsewhere. Yeah, Mark, you’re not talking enough. I want to give you an opportunity.

Mark: No, I agree. The iconography point is a good one. I forgot about that. There’s art all over the world that depicts beings that are clearly not human, and sometimes the depictions resemble what you hear about in these independent modern accounts. But what’s interesting about some of the ancient descriptions is that they use the words of their time, and we use different words today. So sometimes you have to translate, and it can be challenging. And even in modern times, someone might say that they saw an alien, and another person might have seen the exact same thing, but they called it an angel. And then we take our own connotations of whatever we think that word means, and I think there’s a lot lost in translation because of it.

Rick: Yeah, that’s a good point. And of course, you know, modern day skeptics could say, “Oh, yeah, well, humans have always been imaginative creatures, so people made up this stuff 2,000 years ago the way you guys are making it up today.” But anyone who talks that way has not really dove into the evidence. Speaking of evidence, what do you make, Mark, of these videos that have been released lately by the Navy and so on, with these crafts that are going 30,000 miles an hour and then turning at a right angle and all kinds of things like that?

Mark: Well, when people have described their UFO sightings, they describe very bizarre things. They talk about right angles and the appearance of technologies that seem way more advanced than what we have right now. So in that regard, there’s consistency. But I think it’s very difficult to know these days what is an alien craft potentially or just some government program where they’re working with technologies and things that maybe the public doesn’t know about. So I’m really not sure what to make of it. In the book, An End to Upside-Down Contact, I go into the history of governments and UFOs, and there hasn’t been great transparency. So I have a hard time trusting a lot of the government’s narrative on this stuff, because historically they haven’t been forthright. So I listen to what they’re saying, but it’s not influencing my views on this topic very much.

Rick: Yeah. I mean, most people, I think, would agree that the government – well, everyone would agree that the government is not particularly honest with us or tells us everything they know, of course, by definition. But I think even on the UFO topic – and you could probably quote me statistics – but don’t most Americans think that there’s something really going on? And don’t most Americans – not only Americans, people all over the world – and don’t they also think that the government knows stuff that they’re not telling us?

Mark: Yeah, I think I’ve seen that stat somewhere, and it’s high. I think it’s higher than people who are, let’s say, post-materialist. So people are more likely, even if they don’t believe in anything spiritual, that we’re not alone, just based on probabilities, is what I found. So it’s not – I mean, these “revelations” have come out first since December 2017, when The New York Times published the article about the UFOs. It’s not like it did that much. I mean, it’s not like the world changed with the idea that maybe we’re being visited. People are like, “Okay,” and then people seem to go on with their lives.

Rick: Yeah, well, there’s so much coming at us, and I think people are going to need really concrete proof. Which brings up another interesting point, I mean, the old “why don’t they land on the White House lawn” thing. And probably, the most understandable answer that I’ve heard is that they can’t do that until collective consciousness is at a level at which it would be appropriate for them to do that without creating too much of a culture shock or something.

Mark: Yeah, and then also, there have been some pretty major sightings. So there’s the Phoenix Lights example in the ’90s. There were allegations of UFOs in D.C., I believe it was in the ’50s. So there have been some big accounts, but then they’re usually dismissed, or it’s just not talked about very much. So I do wonder if there were some major event. I guess there could be one that is so big that the media couldn’t sweep it under the rug. That hasn’t happened yet, but there have been some big events. The Phoenix Lights was huge, but it just happened to be nighttime, and you couldn’t quite tell what it was. But, you know, initially the governor of Arizona poo-pooed it, but he eventually came out to say he believed that there was some extraterrestrial thing going on. By the way, that National Geographic series that I mentioned, if you have that channel and you’re interested in this, you might want to watch it. It’s very well done. Did you see that, Mark?

Mark: No.

Rick: Yeah, it’s a really good series. Five or six episodes so far, there may be more. Each one’s an hour long. And they go into all this in a serious way, interviewing serious people, and show… There’s some reporters and researchers who’ve dedicated their lives to this, and they really go in great depth as to what they’ve found, and so on. It’s not sensationalistic in the least, so it’s a really good grounding for those who want to just get up to speed on this. All right, so what else? We have a little bit more time if we wish, another 20 minutes or so. What else have we not covered that either of you feel should be said in this discussion?

Doug: I think something that I guess makes sense to me is if we are a body, that we make up cells in a larger body.

Rick: We collectively, you mean?

Doug: Yes. Yeah, sorry. If we are cells in a larger body, just like when we are in our own bodies, if our white blood cells are doing too much work, then we end up with things like leukemia, or these kinds of diseases, you know, or autoimmune diseases, where the body starts to attack itself. And in the collective, if we as third density beings, in the name of trying to transcend and uncover what’s going on behind the scenes, i.e. government and all of these other things, if we approach it with the same kind of unprocessed bellicosity or reactivity that we’ve had, it might end up being like we have a bunch of warriors, you know, a bunch of white blood cells coming to the scene and wanting to create a revolution, which might actually further entrap us as a collective and not help us transcend into the heart, the collective heart, ready for fourth density living. So, I think it’s important, like the work that Mark’s doing, I think it’s real important that what you’re doing there, because you’re trying to help people awaken, you’re clearly more scientific than a lot of people that I’ve seen writing on this. You have a brain that works that way, and that’s good. It’s important for us to wake up to a larger cosmic reality. And then it’s also important for us to learn how to process what was hidden and conflictual with an open heart and compassion and hold those together. Because how we do that will help us go into that fourth density where all things are held together as paradoxes, you know. So, just I’ll say it this way, as a counselor, when someone talks to me about wanting to get rid of their depression or get rid of their anxiety or get rid of intrusive thoughts or even their ego, and it’s this sense of I have to fix this problem that is very evident in my head. And we bring the same level of consciousness, almost a conflictual battle, just to not have those intrusive thoughts or just to beat up the anxiety. And of course, that exacerbates it. You see, so if this is a spiritual warfare that a lot of people talk about, I think it would be helpful to approach this spiritual warfare in the same way that good conventional counseling does. And that is when we have intrusive thoughts or have anxiety or depression or things like this, we can, just by applying not esoteric at all but conventional techniques, learn how to accept that which we have and then diffuse and remove our sense of ourselves from the intense feelings. And you can learn to do that through good counseling. Acceptance and commitment therapy, for example, ACT, is one way to do that. And self-compassion work by Dr. Kristen Neff would be another one. And I teach these things on the individual level and they really work. They work with me. I have anxiety and depression tendencies all my life and I use these on myself. I think we have to take on as a collective body, we’re going to have to take on the same kind of conventional could be way to appropriate the negativity that is uncovered. Just like a person, a single person, their shadow is being uncovered in counseling. The collective will be uncovered. Whatever was hidden is going to come to the light. How we deal with that shadow will mark the difference between going to having to repeat third density or going to fourth density. And so I just want to put that out there as a final thought perhaps.

Rick: That reminds me of something. Mark, did you want to say something before I comment?

Mark: Yeah, it’s a very important point. The way I think about it is being able to hold the reality of darkness and accept that those things are real, whatever they might be, and not let that bring about more darkness or anger. So it’s holding and acknowledging its existence and remaining strong, but then not becoming polarized in a negative direction, which then perpetuates what you were describing, Doug.

Rick: Yeah, and for some reason what Doug just said reminded me of something that Aubrey Marcus said in your interview with him, Mark, which is that, and it relates to what I said earlier about there having to be a certain level of consciousness in the world before this thing can be more in the open. But he mentioned that in a sort of a skeptical collective consciousness, certain things which might be considered miraculous are not possible. They just couldn’t manifest just because of the mentality. In fact, he mentioned that even if one skeptic were to enter a room, certain possibilities that might otherwise manifest there are prevented from doing so by the influence of that person’s consciousness. So I think that the collective consciousness of humanity very much determines what possibilities manifest in so many different areas. I mean, not only ETs, if they’re going to reveal themselves more openly, but technologies that could potentially manifest that might benefit humanity tremendously. So, it’s like the ground is not fertile for things to grow if it’s lower consciousness. And I have another thought, but I want to give you guys a chance to respond to that.

Doug: I think the journey begins with living everyday life and first off, coming to some place of recognition that the immediacy of our everyday life, those so-called mundane things, are actually supremely sacred. It is the One Infinite Creator emerging right then and there for us as the One Infinite Creator ourselves. So, it’s all One Great Emerging that’s happening and we can’t have the eyes to see that, the heart to see that. And it’s a great joy to be awake on this side of the veil. The second thing is, all of the catalysts that we missed in our past lives or the karma of our past lives or this life, the great grace, honestly, to help us grow is that they’re thrown in front of our timeline and then they trickle down, let’s say, into the present moment and they manifest. And we get a chance to deal with anything that we missed in the past right here and now. So, the reason why I’m bringing that up is because in our lives, when we are activated in a way that is reactivity and we have a sense that we want to be able to move into some sort of passionate reactivity, when we can stop and learn where might this come from, accepting it, move to some level of forgiveness in the sense of seeing things holistically, then we can actually help balance stuff.

Rick: Is Irene okay?

Doug: Oh, that’s funny.

Rick: Another thought I just wanted to mention, you know, you mentioned, Doug, how you had kind of gotten inspired at a certain age and there seemed to be some kind of cosmic source of this inspiration. And I’m sure you’ve felt this kind of thing, Mark, where you feel moved to move your life in a certain direction. And, you know, it’s probably something that your conventional way of thinking, your habitual way of thinking wouldn’t have had you do, but you just felt an inner urge and you did it, you know, like leaving your firm and writing your first book or perhaps the inspiration for writing your other books. And I felt that very much in my life too, teaching meditation and doing Batgap. It’s almost like you feel like you’re a conduit or a representative for something higher, and that something higher or someone higher is putting ideas in your head. I think, you know, great composers like Beethoven and Mozart function that way, and great film inventors, Einstein, people like that, great film producers, you know, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, they feel, “Okay, I think I’m going to make a movie about ETs.” But I often feel like they’re just sort of a representative for some higher intelligence that wants to propagate an idea into society or a great piece of music or something because of the influence it will have on humanity. And they don’t even quite realize that that’s what they’re doing, but they’re doing it.

Mark: I can just speak from my own experience in having written a number of books now. Something, I don’t know how to explain it, but I just become obsessed with a certain topic. Like there’s a passion that I can’t control. And then it’s almost like when the book’s done, it’s behind me. For a period of time, it’s still a big passion, but then it’s like, “Oh, well, that’s okay. That’s part of the past.” And now I’m able to distinguish a bit more on the spot when it’s happening, like what you described, Rick, where that maybe that we are each conduits for something. I can identify when it’s happening because that passion comes versus the apathy that might otherwise be there. It doesn’t feel like there’s another entity. That’s not the sensation at all, at least for me. It’s just that there’s a push, and it comes through with enthusiasm.

Rick: Yeah, entity may not be the right word because that implies some little angel on your shoulder, you know, putting ideas in your head. But somehow, you know, we’re all fundamentally united in a common source of cosmic intelligence. And we’re all expressions or waves of that cosmic intelligence, and we all have different functions to serve according to our makeup. And, you know, I think that if we are willing and able, then that cosmic intelligence moves us in ways that our individual intelligence might not have conceived of. It just bubbles up, and we feel compelled to go in a certain direction and do certain things and serve a purpose that might be much larger than we had actually envisioned.

Doug: The willing part is fundamental, so I think what’s most necessary for us is the archetype of the Mary’s “yes”. Mary, let’s say, the Christian archetypes of having Gabriel visit Mary and Mary saying “yes”. We have to say our yes to this larger reality, and then there is a partnership where our yes and the great transcendent yes kind of connect, I think.

Rick: Yeah, and there’s lots of accounts of that kind of thing in various scriptures of someone feeling like they’re an emissary of God or they have some divine mission, and Joseph Campbell wrote about that sort of thing. I mean, it’s like willingness, this willingness and ability to attune oneself to some higher intelligence that has a function to serve and needs emissaries.

Mark: Yeah, and I think going along with willingness is actually then acting. So let’s just say, use my books as an example, I get the passion about a topic, but then I force myself to act and say, “Okay, this is the book that needs to get written. This is going to be a tough period while I’m actually typing it, but do it.” So it’s both.

Rick: Yeah, it’s kind of good that you were an investment broker or whatever you were, because you were on this incredible burnout schedule where you had to focus like a laser beam until 2 in the morning and all, and then you just carried that same pattern into your work when you started writing books.

Mark: Yeah, that’s what I usually say, is that I channel my inner banker for the period when I’m writing the books. It’s all I focus on. If I could avoid sleeping, I would, but my body usually shuts down and needs a few hours, but that’s what I do when I write.

Rick: Well, I hope you’re still taking time to play tennis or perhaps pickleball and move the body.

Mark: Yes, I do. That’s actually very important too when I write. I make sure I work out and all that, but that’s my focus for that period of time. It’s all I can think about.

Rick: Yeah. Any prognostications as to when they’re going to land on the White House lawn? If you had to conjecture based on everything you’ve learned so far, Mark, draw us a timeline of how things might go over the next decade or two or three with regard to this specific topic. Any ideas or possibilities?

Mark: I think it’s so intimately tied to human consciousness, I think. My sense is it depends on the progress of the collective of individuals. So, it’s probably on us in terms of timing and then the nature of the way it unfolds.

Rick: Yeah. One point I’ve gotten from your book and elsewhere is that, and this is true in the spiritual context also with a spiritual teacher and that kind of thing, is that no one’s going to do it for us. You know, they can help us if we’re willing to do our work, which you just mentioned. You have to sort of you’ve got to get the inspiration, but you have to do the work. But they’re not going to do it for us. No one’s going to smack us on the head and enlighten us. No alien’s going to come in and give us all the magic technologies for free energy necessarily. I mean, they may, but who knows. But we have to deserve it, and we have to do whatever it is from our side to deserve such a thing.

Mark: Yeah, I mean, that’s my sense of it. But there are probably those out there who disagree and think that there is a positive agenda that is going to be enacted regardless of our performance. But I think even if that’s true, it’s a bit risky to bank everything on that.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, if we are generally of lower consciousness and we were to be given much more powerful technologies, you know what we’d do with them. We’d find ways of turning them into weapons.

Doug: Yeah, I would say that it could be also that we are given every moment as an opportunity to embrace the fullness of the positive path, you know. We are doing that individually, and then we learn how to do that collectively. And kind of how I feel that we collectively will move forward is if we keep our eye, no matter what bandwidth of consciousness we are in our society, we keep our eye on the bottom to help the people, the marginalized of society also to grow. And so we have the eyes to see those who have slipped through the cracks, let’s say. And that’s just my own personal way to understand how love gets manifested in our third density way to the degree that we can polarize to the fourth density is that we look at our systems and have a preferential option for the poor, let’s say. And then we can kind of move up in that way. So that would be something that helps me to understand where I want to go and put my energy towards.

Rick: Yeah, that reminds me of another thing that Maharishi Mahesh Yogi once said. He said that prisons are like negativity transmitters. And, you know, it’s out of sight, out of mind doesn’t cut it. Because if there are a couple million people incarcerated like that, living a very frustrated existence, and we could probably throw psychiatric hospitals into the example as well, that has like this dragging effect on collective consciousness. And so somehow these dark spots have to be liberated in order for collective consciousness to really ascend more rapidly.

Doug: Yeah.

Mark: I have a question for Doug. How do you see the movement into these higher ways of being happening? Do you see it as a dramatic quantum shift, as some people say, like a quantum leap where overnight it changes? Or do you see it as something gradual?

Doug: The answer I have against speculation, as all my stuff is, but here’s what I would say is that I think that in time-space, the astral realm, the analog of the earth, is already in fourth density. And I think it’s fourth density positive. I think there’s enough positivity that, because we are in a sort of a galactic area of fourth density, and so we’re already fourth density positive. But there’s a lag time, and that lag time is what’s causing a lot of the, all of the societal chaos coming up right now, being released and to be able to be healed. And I would say that it’s going to be a gradual thing, maybe a few hundred years, that’s what my speculation is, for people to incarnate right now. A lot of people are waking up, and then they reincarnate, and they’re going to pick up where they left off, because it’ll be a little bit easier in the collective zeitgeist to pick up where they left off. And maybe two more generations, and then we’ll be a fourth density proper planet. But it’ll be a slow incarnative way where slowly human bodies might move and evolve to fourth density, early fourth density standards. That’s just my speculation.

Rick: What about you?

Doug: Me or him?

Rick: Yeah, Mark.

Mark: Okay. I really don’t know, Doug. I’ve thought about it a lot. I mean, it seems as though we are shifting as a society, and it’s happening rapidly but gradually. So, I’m in tune with this notion of gradual, long-term change, but at the same time, there’s so much we don’t understand about the nature of reality that there could be surprises.

Rick: Yeah. You know, there’s a phenomenon in physics called a phase transition, and a very simple example is boiling water. The water gets hotter and hotter, and it can be 99 degrees centigrade or 211 degrees Fahrenheit, and it just…it’s water. But all of a sudden, one more degree, and it’s steam. It boils. And you didn’t see it coming, necessarily. So, I think that there have been abrupt shifts in the world at times of various types, and we could be building up a sort of a pressure or a temperature in collective consciousness, which could result in shifts that might be a lot more abrupt than we foresee.

Doug: That’s actually what I do think it’s going to be. It’s going to be that we’re going to reach a certain crescendo. There’ll be a shift, but it won’t be a surprise to people at that time.

Rick: Because they’ll be ready for it. Yeah.

Doug: Won’t infringe on anybody’s free will, and everybody will be ready and open. And I think people are becoming more telepathic. I mean, I see adolescents whose parents are super rigid cognitively, and there would be no reason why these adolescents have desires to learn about some of the stuff we’re talking about right now. And it goes against any belief structure that they’re coming from. And they’ll come into my office and say, “I’m starting to see auras around people, and please don’t call me a psychiatric ward,” or “I’m feeling like I’m reading energies, and I don’t know how to process that because my Christian faith is saying it’s probably demonic.” But I think people are having these experiences, and they’re just going to keep on being able to be more able to swap energy and understand each other telepathically. I think that’s just going to be standard as we move on in terms of evolution.

Rick: I encounter people like this all the time. People are always getting in touch saying, “I’ve had this awakening, and I researched it on the internet. It sounds like it’s Kundalini. I never heard of that before, but it’s incredible what’s going on.” And sometimes they can handle it, sometimes they can’t. But there’s people popping all over the place, some of whom, many of whom, had no real spiritual practice or anything. It’s just something in the water, you know? [laughter]

Rick: Yeah. And, you know, so I don’t know. A rising tide lifts all boats. And I think collective consciousness is definitely rising. And if technology is any symptom of what’s happening at a deeper level, obviously that has been growing at an exponential pace. I mean, we couldn’t have had this conversation 20 years ago, even though the internet existed, but we’d be on, you know, modems and we’d be too slow. So everything has just evolved so quickly, and now we’ve got, you know, chat GPT coming along and AI doing all kinds of things. So I think there could be a continual exponential increase in the pace of change, and that including—not only including, but intertwined with—the change that’s taking place at a deeper level in collective consciousness. It’s almost like all the surface stuff, both the chaos and the innovations, are just in sync with an upwelling of collective consciousness that’s taking place. And that’s not the thing that’s making the 6 o’clock news, but that’s actually the underlying engine for these changes.

Doug: Just in my counseling cohort, we really all disliked online counseling when it first was—we were mandated or forced to do it by COVID. I remember how uncomfortable I was the first couple of sessions, but now it’s, I have no problem. I feel like I can transmit just as much energy, or different, maybe a little bit different than in person, but I don’t feel like it’s not effective. And it’s becoming part of our cultural norm, to which I think it can be used for the good, absolutely.

Rick: Any other comments, Mark?

Mark: Yeah, we’re talking about the evolution of consciousness here, just to sum it up. And I want to emphasize that it appears that the evolution is multifaceted. It’s not just being spiritually awakened. There’s all sorts of things that Ken Wilber talks about, waking up, cleaning up, growing up, showing up, different avenues of evolution. I think it’s important to keep that in mind, because it’s going to have to be a really comprehensive form of evolution. And we’re all doing it in different ways, and collectively, but it’s multifaceted.

Rick: Yeah, I agree, and I see that on the individual level, that it no longer cuts it for people to sort of develop in consciousness, and not develop holistically in all the other areas, you know.

Doug: You mentioned Ken Wilber. I’m a big student of these kinds of models, biodynamics, or Ken Wilber, and the meta-modernism, for example. And these different lines that Ken Wilber talks about. We can have a spiritual axis, we can have a psychological or emotional axis, and we need to try, as you said, to develop them comprehensively. Because if we increase spiritually, but don’t increase cognitively or in other areas, we could have high advanced spiritual ways to understand states. But then when we turn into our normal stage, we’re going to interpret what happened to us, non-dual, from a very dualistic, black and white way. So, I hear what you’re saying, is that we need to all work to raise these different lines of development.

Rick: Yeah, there’s also a lot of spiritual teachers who just are not really ethical human beings, and who really create a mess. So, holistic development is really necessary, I think, at this time.

Mark: Otherwise, it can be a misleading journey, where you think you’re at the peak because you’re highly developed on one line, and you’re not focused on the other ones.

Rick: Yeah, exactly. And it also sabotages your own evolution. It’s not only bad for the people you encounter, but you end up shooting yourself in the foot by doing some stupid thing, and dragging yourself down. And that too has been in the literature for thousands of years. You know, yogis who grew very high, but still had an ego problem or something, and then they had a big downfall. So, what’s your next book, Mark? I hope it’s not the end to Pineapple Upside Down Cake. I know they used to make that. We wouldn’t want to put an end to that.

Mark: I don’t have another book. That’s my typical answer.

Rick: We’ll grab you one of these days. We’ll see.

Mark: Yeah, right now I don’t have one. Yeah.

Rick: Good. All right, well, thanks a lot, you guys. I think this was an interesting discussion. I really enjoyed this, and I’ve been looking forward to it for a long time. And let’s stay tuned. It’s a fascinating thing. And hopefully we’ve opened some people up to the possibility of some possibilities they hadn’t considered before that will have major significance within our lifetimes.

Doug: Well, thank you. It’s been an honor. And, Mark, it’s been a real honor and pleasure for me to meet you and learn from you.

Mark: Doug, likewise. Really appreciate your insights. And, Rick, thank you for having us, and thank you for all that you do.

Rick: You’re welcome, and thank you all for listening or watching. And the next interview I’m going to do just next week is going to be about Meher Baba, whom I had been aware of since the 1960s but had never really looked into. And he was an Indian master, some thought an avatar. And I’m just reading a couple books about him and listening to a lot of talks about him. I’m just going to discuss him. I have some really good friends who are really into him, and I’d never really explored who he was or what he did. So that’s what we’re going to talk about next time. And I also have a couple of interesting interviews coming up a bit later about the brain with Jill Bolte-Taylor, who wrote “My Stroke of Insight” and has a new book about the brain, and another fellow who has written a book about neurophysiology from a Buddhist perspective and whether or not we actually have a self. So if you want to be notified of those things, on the Upcoming Interviews page of BatGap.com, there’s a way you can be notified of the live interviews, put a notification into your calendar. And also, if you want to be notified once an interview is released, then subscribe to the YouTube channel, and/or you can subscribe to the email that we send out every time a new interview is posted. So thanks for listening or watching. Thank you guys, and we’ll talk to you next time.