Gods, Ghosts & UFOs

By SpectreVision RadioSociety & Culture Philosophy

Gods, Ghosts & UFOs episodes

October 30Netflix helped her contact her dead grandfather
Peg Serena is a stop-motion animator and a long-time listener who used to be a science-first skeptic.
But then, when her kids started to ask her about what happens after you die, she realized she didn’t know what to say. Which is how she found herself binge-watching a medium show on Netflix, and eventually hearing the voice of her dead grandfather.
And that was just the beginning.
Peg Serena, circa 2023

Life After Death with Tyler Henry

Bored with her art

Her grandfather’s nickname for her

Forgiveness, 25 years later

Atheist husband

Keeping both doors open

Remembering other experiences

Intense vs. subtle experiences

Talking to a witch

Nudges, bids, and consent

Meditating with trees

Great-grandmother’s nylon stockings

Is unconditional love just what consciousness is?

Psychosis vs. anomalous experience

Grandpa’s pipe

Bliss and the lost art of leisure

A haunted house in the ‘90s

The ghost in the one-hour photo

Grace and umbrellas

UFO memory blocks

Memory isn’t a record, it’s a narrative

Materialism’s influence on memory and perception

“Way, way, way happier” living in an enchanted world
And in the epilogue…
Michael Singer

Fast and testimony meetings

Unanswered prayers
Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com.
Shownotes

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 3 min
October 22Are we living in the corpse of Lucifer?
For almost all of human history, nobody had a word for animism, because they just intuitively knew everything in the world is alive.
Enter: science, which is very good at taking things apart to see how they work. But typically when you take something apart, like, say, a frog, it dies.
This week James Taylor Foreman (of The Metaphor) explains that objects object, and how this connects to the idea that the world is full of gods, including the one that prevents you from facing the wrong direction in a movie theater.
Trust us, it’ll make sense later.
“Reality is narrative, and our only job is to make it beautiful.”

The gods framework vs. the rationalists’ consciousness talk

David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous

David Bentley Hart

Animism

“We live in the corpse of Lucifer”

Materialism is a brand-new psychotechnology

Objective literally means “that which objects”

Science is a basilisk — this was from C.S. Lewis: "Perhaps, in the nature of things, analytical understanding must always be a basilisk which kills what it sees and only sees by killing."

Things that can’t be studied after the body dies

Learning to dance vs. explaining dancing

Being hyper-verbal is a disorder

Point out someone’s gift and they can’t do it anymore

The yips

The letterman jacket problem

Un-knowing something is as impossible as returning to Eden

Is there something it feels like to be an egregore?

The ghost in the green hat

Telos

Christ consciousness (ish)

Progress only gets made by people who break the egregore

Too much order, too much chaos, and the Tao

Plato: learning is remembering

Aiming at heaven vs. surfing the moment

Catholic confession

The kingdom of heaven = behaviors that iterate well

Addiction is a pattern that destroys its host

Why two sexes? Parasites

Also: spiritual parasites

Thoreau (bummer)

George Eliot: despair as “the painful eagerness of unfed hope”

Mal’s college paper on smell and attraction

As in the blood cell, so in the Jordan

Analogy is the rule, not the exception

Why “anthropomorphize” is a dirty word

Science as method vs. ontology

Parasitic scientists

The blind men and the elephant
And in the epilogue…
Did Brian Johnson make a deal with the devil?

James’ childhood seizures that took away his power of speech

Faith, doubt, entropy, death, and psychedelics
Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
39 min
October 15Fact, Fiction, and Fairies with Josh Cutchin
Joshua Cutchin has spent more than a decade exploring the wide territory of the paranormal — fairy food, brimstone smells, Bigfoot, the dead.…
What do most people think isn’t real, but he does?
The line between fact and fiction is very, very blurry.
For example: stigmata. Christ would have been nailed to the cross through the wrists, but stigmatists bleed from the palms, which is where the wounds are in most paintings. Or fairies, who for centuries were human-sized and wingless, until broadly distributed storybooks gave them wings. Now, when people see fairies, they see wings.
So, uh, what’s going on here?
You might have to just decide for yourself.
Josh’s extensive bibliography

Creative pressure builds like a boil

Is writing a paranormal experience?

Academic vs fiction vs casual nonfiction

The thing Josh believes that most people don’t

Nobody is rational

Archetypes, egregores, tulpas

Ghosts slam doors, but you can’t grab one

Stigmata

Fairies

Reality is squishy

“It’s all consciousness” is a boring reduction (so is: it’s all ones and zeros)

The third space of meaning

Josh thinks space is boring, but Jordan is still obsessed

Out-of-bounds video game maps

Escapism vs. awe

Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Scrolling TikTok

Jesus vs. Christ: “the source code of the universe” became flesh

Jeffrey Kripal and the human as two

The yugas

Climbing mountains and Mormon temples

Religion as the ultimate fake-it-till-you-make-it

What’s wrong with the Ark Encounter?

Jung’s Red Book: the problem is how we treat fairy tales

Faith playing footsie with materialism

Load-bearing truth claims

Virtue for its own sake

“Above my pay grade”

Discernment
And in the epilogue…
Ghosts aren’t dead people

Escapism vs awe

Egomaxxing
Subscribe now
Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr
October 08Tom Maxwell and the Night Parade
Tom returns! Mostly to tell us about his new show (the one he left us for), which tbf is straight fire.
Then, honestly it’s just the three of us hanging out for like an hour, just in case you’ve been hankering for some unstructured conversation between the three of us.
What do most people not think is real, but Tom does?

Raised by Depression babies

The Night Parade on SpectreVision Radio — where extra meets ordinary

(Not Festivities in the After Hours)

The goat man and the spirit of coffee

Joseph Campbell × James Burke’s Connections

GGU calved

Aggregate experiencer data

Creative process talk

Diabolical Lies

Shelved with Emrys

“Where is my love for this?”

Mal’s elephants

Anyone who tells you you’re insufficient is out of their mind

Resistance commensurate with change

This from Autumn Christian

Unlimiting other people

Why Lady Gaga tried to be the weirdest person in the room

Jung: the unreconciled becomes fate

“If you want to know how someone feels inside, hang out with them and see how you feel afterward”

Insane people calling Mal ugly

Systems that teach you not to trust your gut

Sovereignty

“Your feelings are real, but not necessarily true”

The physiological reality of feelings, and how they start (and end) in the body

Somatic healing

Self occupies form

Charles Fort and the procession of the damned

The Hyakki Yagyō

James Baldwin

“If you take the time to look at something, it will reveal itself”

Diversity as epistemology

The 1841 Tennessee rain of flesh

Odysseus and the shade of Achilles

You are the arbiter of meaning

Meaninglessness and boredom

Amy Tan’s The Backyard Bird Chronicles

Asking to be entertained is the least agentic thing a person can do

Daniel Noah and rocks

Blake, Auguries of Innocence
And in the epilogue…(which was actually a prologue)
Does your God agree with your politics?

Potty-training your inner critic

Are you a zero-to-one guy, or a 2 to 10 guy?
Subscribe now
Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 2 min
October 01Daniel Noah on the memory of rocks
Daniel Noah co-founded SpectreVision with Elijah Wood, and then spun up SpectreVision Radio Network.
Also, he thinks rocks are alive.
This episode is full of wonderful stories.
Rocks are alive! But what does that mean?

Jordan’s first Hare Krishna chant, and meditating on a polished moonstone

Nothing gets simpler the closer you look

Empaths, clairsentience, and emotional wallpaper

Elder Joshua Tree boulders

A stone triangle revealed by moonlight

His wife felt it. So did Ryan Singer of Late Night on the Astral Plane

The Tongva: a creation myth about harmony, and elders who pass into rock

The Doors lived in Daniel’s house

The Doors of Perception and Death by Astonishment

Why did so many musicians move to Laurel Canyon at once?

The boy who collects rocks on The Telepathy Tapes

Autistic kids don’t feel less

Daniel shows us some rocks

Everybody Needs a Rock by Byrd Baylor

Stone tape theory (and the 1972 BBC film The Stone Tape)

“Pseudo” science

Mystical traditions are soul technology (thanks Kelly Chase)

“Unintelligible intellectually but fully resonant emotionally”

Animism

Negotiating with the spirits of a haunted house

Things vanish, some of them reappear

The trickster gives you enough to keep you guessing, but never enough to convince a skeptic

Robin Lassiter’s Earth: A Love Story and the synchronicity addiction

We are attractors

Hellier and Operation Trojan Horse

Book encounters

Daniel’s books are pulling themselves off the shelves

Attention as magnetism

Alters

One-downing

Jordan’s experience at Old North Bridge 20 years ago

Attention must be trained

Meditation before “cosmic encounters”

High Strangeness
And in the epilogue…
Daniel’s stories of contact with NHI

What are “aliens”?

Deceit and biological envy
Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
48 min
September 25Can consciousness exist without a body?
We discuss a recent claim by a prominent scientist that consciousness can't exist outside a flesh-and-blood body, whether uploading your mind would capture you or just a copy of your cognition, why we understand death about as well as we understand sleep (barely), and whether the first person to live to 500 would be lucky or cursed.
Jordan makes the case that immortality might be monstrous. Mal says death is the salt of life.
A scientist claims consciousness can’t exist outside a body

“You are more than your body” — but you are also your body

“How the hell do you know what happens when you die?”

Prize goes to the first person to die, turn to mulch, then come back and tell us what happened

The pharmacy of the body

The kids in The Telepathy Tapes

Energy bodies, astral bodies, and the limits of Western materialism (round and round we go)

If we don’t understand sleep, how do we understand death?

Uploading cognition vs awareness

Every human project is an immortality project

BJ Miller on why we treat the disabled as angels or monsters

Dracula is a class narrative

People have been saying the first person to live to 500 has already been born

Immortality is monstrous because death is what makes us human

Adam Miller on the unexpected spiritual consequence of “transhumanist” longevity

Oliver Burkeman on the freedom of limits

What the body knows, and the risks of resisting resistance

Mormon stuff
And in the epilogue…
How to protect the part of yourself that creates

Rebecca Black (yep)

Not the Bible (oops)
Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
55 min
September 21Is certainty a type of psychosis?
This week we’re joined by a bonafide listener! Elliott Chadwick emailed us a story about a young man on anti-psychotic meds who turned out not to be psychotic. We had to know more, so we invited him on the show.
Mal also tells us about her brother, and the strange and beautiful world he inhabits, and we talk about how to tell the difference between numinous experiences and psychotic episodes.
It’s a doozy.
Elliott is a psychiatric nurse practitioner turned bodyworker, and co-host of The Glimmerance — a show about creativity and spirituality against the materialist overculture

What do most people think isn’t real, but Elliott does? “Not all hallucinations are psychiatric symptoms”

Nearly an atheist a few years ago

The dark figure in the young man’s room

“Have you ever tried to ask this guy to go away?”

What antipsychotics meds do to a brain that isn’t psychotic

Trauma, fight-or-flight, and the brain filling in the corners

“Magical thinking”

What’s the difference between people like Robin Lassiter and Kelly Chase and psych patients?

Mal’s brother, and the mind he calls “Chuck” (Charles Bonnet syndrome)

“Sometimes I swear he’s connected to something beautiful”

“Certainty is a kind of psychosis”

Too much certainty about death, poverty, or God is delusion

Maturity is the capacity to hold two opposing truths at once

An arsonist who believed he owned the building

Thin places

A case against absolutism

“dead with daddy” (from Taylor Tomlinson’s Netflix special)
And in the epilogue…
Drugs

Anti-materialism conversion story

A story about telepathy between his grandparents
Subscribe now
Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
46 min
September 14Mike Clelland on Owls and Death
Mike Clelland is the owl guy. For fifteen years, people have been sending him their stories — owls and UFOs, owls and meditation, owls and mushrooms, owls and shamanic initiation. “That’s my research,” he says. “I get up and open my email inbox.”
And now he’s writing a book about owls and death.
We had Mike on the show over a year ago, and this is his long overdue return to Gods, Ghosts & UFOs.
Mike’s novel The Unseen

How mythic, archetypal symbolism wells up in the world

Death by Astonishment by Andrew Gallimore — how the brain builds worlds out of noisy sensory data

“All points in time and space are connected”

Thank God for filters

The five owl symbolic relationships: UFOs, meditation, psychedelics, shamanic initiation, death

The owl isn’t connected to UFOs, it is a totem of transformation

“I took a truckload of mushrooms and saw a 30-foot glowing owl in my bedroom.”

Mike’s story about his mom, Alzheimer’s, and a black-footed ferret

“I know there’s an afterlife, and I know because of an owl”

Sometimes an owl is just an owl

What makes a sign a sign?

A stranger’s prayer

Mechanisms vs. magic

Mallory’s owl story (which happened very soon after our first episode with Mike)

God speaks in a language you understand

Resist firmly defining the meaning of synchronicities

Awe pushes us toward bravery and hope

How Mallory got the fire back for writing

Owl biology

Can you invite mystical experiences?

More amazing stories

One owl, two completely different synchronistic experiences
And in the epilogue…
Mike’s new book (and a sequel to The Unseen)

Mallory’s screenplay

Jordan’s novel
Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
48 min
September 07Do religious people actually believe in the unseen?
Kelly Chase (Inquiry with Kelly Chase) is back, which makes her the default president of the GGU returning-guests club. This week, we ask the question we’re asking everyone: what do most people think isn't real that you do?
She gives a spicy answer. She claims that most people behave like materialists, even if they go to church.
From there, we talk about what the evidences of belief actually are, and how it relates to “conversion.” Kelly explains how her own experience rewrote her whole value system in a matter of seconds five years ago.
As usual, we figured everything out and solved all the world’s problems.
You’re welcome!
Most people behave like materialists, even the religious ones

Religion as lava that cools into obsidian

The reemergence of the feminine

“Tell me what music is.”

“The greatest evidence it happened is me”

Great evidence for an individual, terrible evidence for the collective

The old version of Kelly is horrified, tied up in a back room somewhere

Molly Drake — “I remember firelight, and you remember smoke”

Conversion is what you do, not what you say

All behavior is downstream of belief

“I think my job is fake”

Is everyone waking up?

AI is literally sociopathic
And in the epilogue…
Kelly tells us about how she recently maybe saw fairies
(possibly our best paywall-bait yet)
Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Email godsghostsufos[at]gmail.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
51 min
September 04Scientism Is Anti-Science | Robert Frederick on Francis Bacon
Our guest today, Robert Frederick, studies Sir Francis Bacon — the Elizabethan lawyer, spy, and philosopher usually credited as the father of modern science. Robert claims that Bacon is the father of both modern science and scientism.
If you’re thinking, “What the hell is scientism?” then this is the episode for you.
We talk about why saying “trust the science” is motivated by the same thing that makes people say “trust in God,” and how Francis Bacon was both a once-in-a-generation polymath, and also a pompous idiot who stripped culture of metaphysics.
Jordan also contends that true religion and real science should be the same thing, but that they both get corrupted in basically the same way.
Guys it’s a good one. (Isn’t it always?)
Shout out to the God’s Eye View podcast

Science and scientism

Bacon vs. Aristotle

Deductive vs. Inductive reasoning

Scientism is anti-science

How Bacon got rid of metaphysics

Bacon might have been Gnostic (and what that means)

You can’t build a government out of data

Effective altruists are “a special kind of stupid”

We’re already post-scarcity

Yuval Noah Harari is the latest and greatest Bacon booster

We’re definitely coming back for a Part 2, in which Robert will explain how he knows Bacon was actually Shakespeare

Find Robert Frederick’s work at The Hidden Life is Best

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
37 min