Welcome to Skeptico where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and of course their critics. One thing that especially fascinates me is things hidden in plain sight. Things that are not obvious until someone points it out, and then once they do, you're like, yeah, I kind of knew that. It's hard for me to imagine a better example than the stars in the sky and the universal stories that are told about those. I mean, why all the epic myths? Why the heroic warrior god adventures? And why the heck are all civilizations from all different parts of the world telling the same story? Think about that last one for a minute. So there's this ancient guy in Polynesia sitting on a surfboard looking up at some random blob of stars. Because that's what they look like to most of us. And he's telling the same sacred story as some Viking in Iceland who's buried up to his waist in snow. And the same story that some African tribesmen hold sacred as something that's been passed on forever. That's not supposed to happen. That's not explainable by our current understanding of how anthropology works. We don't have any archaeological evidence to support why all these civilizations would be connected in that way. Well, today's returning guest, David Matheson, has almost single-handedly changed the way we think about stars and the starmas associated with them and this hidden in plain sight kind of thing that I just talked about. His books, Starmas of the World, Volume 1, 2, 3. I think you're up to Volume 4 now, aren't you, David? Yeah, Volume 4 is Nor Smith's and it was published in 2018, Alex. You gotta see I'm one volume behind. Hard to keep up with this guy. And he's got a bunch of other books that will introduce you to excellent books. Overwhelmingly clear convincing, I would say at this point, undeniable evidence for the universal star myth hypothesis. But what's really cool, and I'm not going on here for a while, but I wanted to get it up to this point because what's really cool about today's interview and what we're going to get into is the messages behind those myths. So if we can get to the point of saying, yeah, that seems pretty undeniable, then we ought to take the next step and say, what might be the message behind it? I mean, if there was some great teacher and just put a pin in that for a second, who took the trouble to spread this perennial wisdom throughout our world, throughout ancient civilizations, throughout our planet, then maybe we ought to figure out what they were trying to tell us. So that's what we're going to do today with fantastic guest, star myth master David Matheson, who I have total respect for as a fellow seeker on the path. I pronom to you, even though in typical skeptical fashion of inquiry to perpetuate doubt, I'm probably going to have some contentious points with you on a couple of these issues. But that's the kind of stuff I like to do the level three discussion beyond the kind of usual stuff. It's so great to have you back, David. I'm so glad you initiated this because this whole conversation has taken on a life of its own that I am really, really excited to get in the middle of. So let me step back and say welcome and thank you for joining me. Well, thank you, Alex, and thank you for that kind and generous introduction. So the conversation that we will have will be different than any other conversation because you'll bring out questions from your experience and background and perspective that nobody else can. Oh, yeah, you can count on that. Hey, as I, as I told you, I'm kind of into my skeptical jeopardy phase, which has really been fun for me. I hope people are receiving it well. And that's what I thought we'd play today as a way of kind of framing up this chat we might have. And for those who are listening to the skeptical jeopardy board here it is stars, purposely concealed, authentic self, the spiritual path, contact modalities on that wall, myth versus history, academia and ancient aliens. Now we've really probably ought to start even though I did a long introduction with stars because that's what this is about. And on your website, your excellent website, I picked up three phrases that I think are kind of key to the whole thing. So I explained what the star myth thing is, but please do it in your own language. And the three words are verifiable, universal and profound, profound invisible realm that it opens us up to. So maybe you want to kind of take off on that. Great. Yeah, I'm already liking your format. So I'll take stars for 100,000. And if you hear... That's it, 100,000. I like the way you update anybody. That's it. This is a game where you can only win the money. You can't actually lose the money. I can't lose 100,000 with this question, can I? So yeah, I've got my dog is calmly staying nearby. He likes to be nearby. So if you hear any distracting noises, don't blame me. He's in his place. So star myths, the phrase I like to use is that virtually all of the world's ancient myths, scriptures and sacred stories, as you said in the introduction, are based on a system of celestial metaphor. And people sometimes say, what are you talking about? Well, to make it even more precise, I would say virtually all the characters and epistodes of the various myths, whether it's the myths of ancient Greece, the Norse myths, myths from the Pacific, like you alluded to in the opening or from the Maya or from North America, Africa, Australia, virtually all those characters and the epistodes can be shown to be based on specific constellations. The problem that many people have in getting their minds around, even what I just said is, it's very difficult for most people to envision the constellation because we haven't been taught the constellations. That might be in a different square on jeopardy, but for one reason or another, if I say, even to somebody who maybe reads astrology columns every day, if I said, can you sketch out the stars of Sagittarius or the stars of the constellation Gemini, they might have a difficult time actually sketching out the stars, the outline, or even pointing them out to me in the heavens, even though they know very extensive knowledge about the system of what Gemini represents or what characteristics are associated with Gemini. David, I mean just to interject and you do this all the time, the modern understanding of those constellations are that they must have been really, really bored and had a really wild imagination because to look at those random patterns and see what they see doesn't make any sense. That is the modern interpretation of it. So you kind of have two levels to bridge there. One is people are dismissing it because it's like, I can't see those things up there. And then number two, even if you pointed out to me, I'd say, well, it's just kind of silly from a bunch of people who were really bored and had a vivid imagination. That's right. Sometimes the term paradox comes up, you know, seeing shapes in the clouds. Well, we all can do that. Paradoia is the human tendency. Some say it was an evolutionary tendency to see faces because if you're an infant, a smiling adult face could be your means of sustenance. So we kind of start to see faces everywhere. Oh, look at that tree. I see a face in it. There's a term for that called Paradoia. Carl Sagan actually talked about it in this essay he wrote called The Demon Haunted World where he said, oh, people kind of imagine demons. It's kind of an angel. It's kind of an outgrowth of Paradoia. So I'm trying to put the full weight of the anti-argument. And I'll actually even say one further. We have to bridge even a third thing from what you said. You're right. You say, oh, that's just Paradoia. Gabe, you're just seeing some shapes that you see. I don't even see them. I see different ones. Who's to say you're wrong or you're right and I'm wrong?  Even further would be to say, now, it would be very unlikely for a culture in Polynesian islands scattered across the Pacific to connect those stars the same way as ancient Greece on the entire opposite side of the globe without any contact. Not too many people in academia would have alleged that ancient Egyptians were in contact with ancient Maya or ancient Polynesia or Pacific Ocean. And some constellations people could say, well, you know what? The northern brown is very distinctive. It looks like an arc. That being imagined as a necklace or a crown in many different cultures because humans wear necklaces. We all have necks. They wear crowns. We all have heads. That constellation, I could see that cropping up, but some of these connections are so arcane, so obscure. And some of these constellations are very difficult to pick out, even if you know what you're looking for, that it would be very hard to argue that around the world people imagined the same constellations and imbued them with the same characteristics, and yet that's what we find in the myth. So I'm setting up an even higher or high jump that I have to try and jump onto, and yet this is just what the evidence overwhelmingly suggests. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you don't even have to get very far into this.  I mean, you used to teach college there at West Point, right? That's right. You understand academia. You understand what it takes to convince a body of intelligent people. And you've way overshot the target, right?  There's no way this stuff can be explained away. And what's left is this huge mystery which never will be explained away, because at least that's my contention, is that's part of the process. We don't, there's, maybe that's another skeptical, jeopardy board piece here, because purposely concealed relates not so much to the constellations, but one of the things I picked up on what you talked about or alluded to is that at some point in our history, the chain of this spreading of wisdom was intentionally broken. And we kind of wound up with, you know, this disconnect from this esoteric wisdom. Do you want to touch on that at all? Yeah, so this is a, this is a big part of the, part of the story. And when you say we, you know, it's almost worldwide at this point, but really you had up on your skeptical square, jeopardy square Roman, and it primarily happened, I would argue, in the Roman Empire and places that the Roman Empire conquered. And those other parts of the world that didn't get conquered by the Roman Empire, such as India or China or North America, Central America, South America, the Pacific, stayed more in touch with their quote unquote original instructions, their ancient wisdom. The term original instructions, I'll give credit to Peter Kingsley, the author that people might want to check out. Peter Kingsley writes some very interesting analysis and fantastic books. The original instructions of every culture, wouldn't it be nice if we were all still in touch with the original instructions? But what happened at some point, and this is not really debatable, is something called literalist Christianity was instituted in the Roman Empire. How it went from a small group to Emperor Constantine declaring that he was a Christian and then eventually declaring that Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire and some successive emperors between Constantine and Theodosius kept upping the requirement to where okay, Christianity is an official religion, okay, now we've got to get rid of all the pagan gods. Okay, now we're going to shut down the temple at Delphi that had been in operation for at least eight centuries, maybe longer. The Eleusinian Mysteries of Greece, they were still going. The Eleusinian Mysteries have probably been going for 800 years or more when Theodosius shut them down in the late 300s AD. This is all historical, pretty indisputable, some people might dispute it, but it's pretty well established that the Roman Empire became literalist Christian. That in itself is a bit of a headscratcher. If you're a Christian literalist, you would say, well, it's God's providence. It would be pretty hard to take over the Roman Empire by force. We have to throw in there the counter explanation for what's going on with Constantine and the Romans. And it's uncomfortable for people because it sounds so conspiratorial, but it's the best way to line up with the facts. One, the church, quote-unquote, that Constantine establishes is really an exact redo, reboot of the Roman existing system that they have with the 12 pillars and the whole thing. And then further, this is ushered in with serfdom, right? So rights of all the subjects are taken away. You can no longer own land. You can no longer even choose what job you have. You have to choose the profession of your parents and all these other restrictions that basically turn people into slaves. And in turn, what you get for that is eternal salvation. We now have this state religion that we're going to support and you're going to follow it and then you'll get yours in heaven. I'll get mine now. You don't even have to be that cynical to see this as a massive kind of social engineering, social control kind of thing. And certainly, even if you have a hard time wrapping your head around that, then you just fast forward and you see how it plays out. That's exactly how it plays out. So even if you don't accept that that was the intention from the beginning, it's kind of hard to deny that. Well, yeah, that's an interesting way of putting it. I might not choose the exact same words in my description, but I'm in generally agreeing with what you're saying because that is what grew out of basically, I mean, some questions to be asked would be, well, why would you do it with Christianity if you've already got the pagan gods so called or the ancient gods and the Vestal Virgins and all the different institutions of the Senate was kind of the protector of the traditional religion in the Roman Empire. But all those gods that you mentioned, we know we're pretty familiar with the correspondence with the gods of ancient Greece. Zeus goes right with Jupiter. In fact, Zeus Pater, Pater means father in Roman or Latin. Zeus Pater or Jupiter, Zeus the father, Job the father corresponds directly to Zeus and they were very comfortable with this. Mars corresponds with Aries, Venus with Aphrodite and even when the Romans would be fighting the Germanic peoples of Northern Europe, you can read the accounts. There's plenty of texts and surviving accounts where they would say, oh, well, they have this God who corresponds to our Mars. They have this God who corresponds to our Hercules. They had no problem seeing around the world that there were around their world that the gods of other peoples, even under different names with slightly different clothing or characteristics or maybe facial hair, you know, Odin has a beard whereas Mercury doesn't or some slight different ways of worshiping. They still perceive, well, this God corresponds to this God and even today we have Thursday, Thor's day in Latinate languages or Romance languages is named after Jove, Jueves in Spanish or Miércoles, Mercury's day. That's our Wednesday, Odin's day. Really interesting that correspondence was understood. So why did they have to get rid of that system? Yeah, but hold on, I mean, that's awesome and I'm with you on all that but in there I think is the answer to the question that you're asking. The reason that they had to do it, they didn't have to do it but that whole strategy was a co-opting conquer strategy, right? So they weren't interested in really assimilating with the Germanic people. That was just a way of butting up to them before they slid all their throats, right?  But we're a lot alike. You've got Saturn, we have Saturn, you have, you know, all this kind of stuff. But then, I mean, the druids are still going to be slaughtered, right? So it was mass extinction of the druids. It's not like they really respected the religion. This is a Roman kind of deal. I mean, Romans conquer, that's what they're good at. So the fact that they did the reboot for Christianity, I understand you don't have to go there or you don't go there and you don't have to go there. But to me, that seems totally in line with what they always did. You know, it's kind of the bait and switch. Give them this, take it away. That's my deal. Yeah, well, I mean, this is an interesting conversation and it's not the area that I taught at the college level. So, you know, professionals in this area might take exception to the direction that we take it. But I might suggest that the Romans had an empire that was very successful because they did things slightly differently than some other empires. They were actually very syncretistic or syncretic in that they would say to the, they weren't really the cut everyone's throat when we conquered you empire. Certainly, I'm not suggesting they were cuddly and friendly. They were hardcore, very effective fighters, but they would generally say, hey, we'll set your gods up right here next to our gods. They weren't necessarily evangelistic with their gods. Like I said, they would say, oh, you know, well, we corresponded in with Hercules. You want to have a, or her with Venus, you want to have a temple to Isis and actually, you know, the Isis mysteries became a big deal in Rome. And that's really coming obviously from Egypt. So it's really Christianity later on in the time of what you're talking about, the feudal system that was set up after Rome, quote unquote, fell. We could talk about that too. It was actually more convenient for these large families that now have lots of land to say, hey, let's get rid of these pesky emperors because emperors are a pain. They're constantly overthrowing one another and causing havoc and having all these intrigues.  Let's get rid of that emperor and we can have a much more lucrative system of collecting rents off of all this land that we've got. So I think that did happen. We could, you know, I don't want to get too bogged down in it. I don't want to get bogged down in it either because I took us there, but I made a note. I mean, this is a future skeptical episode because I've had this floating around and, you know, certainly I had Joseph Atwell on the show a couple of times. He feels like he's got this wired and that's exactly the way it is, but there's another guest out there and I'm not going to reveal who it is. I think really has this wired as well. And it's great. Everything you said was great, but it is kind of a little bit off topic for all the amazing stuff that you have. So I'm going to back off here and this is the Skeptico jeopardy board and you should pick where we go next, David. Great. Why don't we, just before we pick, keep the listeners in a suspense for just a second and there was another thing you said about academia having a hard time getting their arms around us. I forget exactly how you phrased it, but really I think it's in, along with the Skeptico mission statement of exploring paradigms. How do paradigms change, you know, when you say, oh, David has written so much, has written so many, I've written really over 5,000 pages of books that you say it should be just proven. Now some people might say, but wait a minute, how many pages of peer reviewed papers has David published? And I'll tell you, I've sent in some academic style papers. I know how to write an academic style paper and I've been politely told this isn't very interesting or this doesn't exactly fit or this is, and I'm like, what do you mean it doesn't exactly fit? This is right in your wheelhouse. But the problem is, if it is outside of the existing paradigm or if it threatens the existing paradigm, then it's going to meet with resistance. Not necessarily conspiratorial resistance either, but there are institutional types of resistance where I've worked my way up through academia through all these hurdles that I have to go through and now I'm a tenured or nearly tenured professor. If I start talking about a paradigm that says there seems to be a similar thing or even a common system being operated in ancient Egypt and the sacred stories of Australia, sacred stories of North America or even sacred stories of the North, that causes problems. If I were to show maybe connections between the stars and the Greek myths and stay within that system, that might have some interest. But the minute you say this appears to be a worldwide system, that threatens to explode the existing paradigm. And what happens with paradigm shift over time, we know this in science, we can see let's say plate tectonics introduced in 1906 by Alfred Wegener was ridiculed and people said there's no way that the floor underneath the sea could let those continents move around because they're all solid. Well after World War II with increasing technology and submarine sensing, they said look at all these ridges on the bottom of the ocean. Maybe this theory finally in the 60s and 70s it began to be accepted. And what I would say about a paradigm is it will explain usually a lot of things but there's always this like outlier, I call it the little bag of parts. This is a metaphor.  You're like, whoops, how did all these things fit in there? Well these are like the anomalous evidence that shows that the paradigm is not put together completely right and eventually someone will come along and say, you know if we put it together this way all those bolts would fall into place. All that anomalous evidence would fall into place and this happens over and over I would argue in the world of paradigms, right? On the paradigm thing, I mean that's all well and good and we got 250 shows. But I would disagree with a couple of fronts. I mean, number one, the fact that there's the paradigm change and it changes one funeral at a time is true in one sense. In another sense there's an organized systematic effort on the part of certain individuals and there are different groups for different things whether it's medicine, you know, they don't want the paradigm to change there's economic interest often involved in this. So it's not like it's a fair game.  It's organized, controlled, it's systematic. And with regard to this latest thing, I mean what amazes me and what has happened over and over again just on the recent episodes of Skeptico, I'll have guests on and they're fantastic guests and they've done all this research but you gotta do this silly double talk kind of thing.   Super, but you know he's got to be very careful he's got to talk in this, you know, consider, we have to consider the post-modernist that no experience matters. It's like, no we don't. It's totally freaking absurd. No one in their right mind would wrap their head around these crazy ideas or the guy I talked to before that in anthropology, same kind of thing. I have to carefully tread so carefully. So I don't even like to, it's a, this force, we have this false equality when we say, oh well, you know, we have to kind of give equal time to the consideration of these nitwits who won't let go of their theory. I don't want to go there. Okay, I hear your frustration there and I'm not trying, I'm not in academia so I'm not trying to not step on anyone's toes. That's quite critical but I would say there is, there's room to say there is probably venality at work in some cases, venal, what I was just describing, you know, people who, I don't want my job to be threatened and then there is also, I would certainly grant you and I'm certainly not shying away from the explanation of there's also conspiracy or conspiratorial interests at work, power interests, economic interests, big time power and economic interests going all the way back to what we talked about with the Roman, so I'm glad we touched on the Roman because that gave shape to the Western, basically the Western Roman Empire gave shape to Western Europe with, which was controlled by large land holding families calling themselves noble or aristocrat meaning I'm better and the church and those two were basically a revolving door back and forth between those two and they controlled everything and that's really, if you want to get into the left-right split it came out of France and the Enlightenment's attempts to try to hey, let's try and improve on this feudal system let's get rid of this collect rent for just basically sitting back and hey, I wonder how much rent rolled in today from my lands well I need to go hunting we'll see what the peasants send me today and getting rid of that rent collecting system is still a struggle that's going on today but hold on, I mean back to what we're talking about here in terms of academia kind of throwing the holy water on your work, why, that's never going to happen and I'd go further, here I am I think I'm kind of defending your position I don't know how we got switched in roles here but like you said earlier there is no reasonable explanation on one hand, if you go to anthropology there's no one who would say yeah, those ancient Polynesians and the Mayans and the Romans and the Africans and the Norse they all created these myths this way no one says that, right? so there isn't some when you say, oh well maybe let's give them the benefit of the doubt no, let's not give them the benefit of the doubt based on everything they've published based on what they've said there's no way to explain the universality of these star myths so the fact that they don't is we don't know how much of it is just ego people holding on to their jobs and their work or how much of it is the remnants of hey, we don't want to get into that esoteric wisdom because it opens up a big can of worms but we don't know which of those two it is but we know it's one of those two we know there isn't any reasonable explanation on their part they can't invent something new to fill that gap, right? right, so this is great and I don't think we're arguing against each other I think we're building the point up from from the friction of our conversation of our minds working on this question so I would say, number one my work certainly threatens the literalist Christian paradigm because it shows that what I said about the characters and events of the myths of the world being based on the stars can be shown with overwhelming amounts of evidence for the characters and events in the Bible which has been even up to a couple of hundred years ago it was actually dominated academia to where you couldn't argue against let's say the flood as described in the Bible or the age of the earth and so there's a tremendous backlash that happened against that within academia but anyway this threatens that but it also threatens, so you said well there's nobody talking about all this because there's really no way to explain it within their current paradigm there are ways to explain it we're going to explore some of those you could explain it by that's what Young said or some kind of psychic connection or it could be that's totally off the table that's off the table because we have a materialistic science that doesn't acknowledge that I'm going to hammer you on this because you're going to go far afield with all these different explanations I get into this all the time with all other stuff inside the paradigm there's no way to explain this period, why do we have to try and get them back in the door? well here's what's happening let me go back to my engine being put back together wrong metaphor what I'm holding up is not just a little bag of nuts and bolts I'm holding up things like here's a crankshaft how do you, you forgot this and they're like yeah but my paradigm is working and I'm like, yeah you're firing on three cylinders out of eight and it sounds awful and it gets terrible gas mileage don't mess with my engine I'm moving forward down the road and I'm like, you're on three cylinders and Gobekli Tepe is another giant like driveshaft or flywheel that's been left out Gobekli Tepe is 6,000 years at least compared to earliest dynastic Egypt and it's beautifully precise stones aligned with celestial alignments by the way that throws a problem into the paradigm what I'm discovering it doesn't throw a problem into what I'm discovering at all because you could say well possibly the reason why this is dispersed all around the world is there's some very ancient civilizations or cultures that far predate Mesopotamia ancient Mesopotamia and Sumer far predate Egypt, far predate ancient India because all those cultures are already using this system they must have come from something much more ancient nobody wants to consider something much more ancient that could also be advanced so they say no wait a minute that was only primitive humans or early humans they call them that'll mess up all our textbooks that show we basically lived in caves or we were pastoral or we were hunter-gatherers and then poof Egypt and Mesopotamia just spring out of the ground out of nowhere and they would say well Dave you're obviously you're exaggerating that a little bit but I would say that yeah we just all of a sudden those cultures received what they had from somewhere probably far in the past and that would help explain what's going on around the world but that's also outside the paradigm but the paradigm is going to have to change because Gobekli Tepe kind of recently late 90s early 2000s threw a giant crankshaft into like hey how are you going to explain this paradigm cannot incorporate it and then just in paradigm has a problem with what I'm talking about too and that's why it's almost like when somebody's paradigm is threatened there's like blindness that actually sets in if your wife is cheating on you and it will take over your whole world your gut is going to know it before your mind admits it you're going to actually be blind to the evidence while your gut is like I know something's going on I'm not going to look over there I'm not going to look over there and I would say that when you're talking about conspiracy that's going on in the United States right now there's all kinds of evidence that people don't even want to look at well that's always always been the case gotta move on next category let's go to authentic self let's take authentic self for 300 okay 300 that's very conservative but I like the pig alright so what I would argue people might say man I think I understand what he's saying that all the myths are based on the stars but why would they do that and why would somebody want to get rid of that I mean I don't usually emphasize the conspiratorial part too much but what I would argue is that the ancient wisdom that is given to the world that is given to virtually every culture on the planet when I say I've written 5000 pages I'm not bragging I'm saying there's so much evidence there that it's almost hard to write a short book about it my most recent book is 900 pages it's not really the way you market a book but I wanted to show it all in one place but when I say I've written 5000 pages the next sentence is and I've only barely scratched the surface only barely scratched the surface there's plenty of cultures I haven't even gotten to there's plenty of stuff in one culture that could make 10 books even one book of the Bible I could write a series just on the stories in Genesis in the connection to the stars let alone the Mahabharata of ancient India which is like seven times longer than the Odyssey and the Iliad combined and it's all based on the stars I would argue and I've shown some of those connections so when I say 5000 pages and it's only scratched the surface it's what I'm saying is every culture has this ancient wisdom what was it doing and why was it based on the stars well at this point I've got some suggestions I'm not going to be dogmatic I can be dogmatic about the evidence and say look this constellation is clearly lining up with this and this and this what it means now we're getting into a little bit more of my interpretation but after studying it for 10 years pretty intensively I would argue that one of the things it's doing is conveying to us messages in an esoteric way like Mr. Miyagi taught Daniel son and conveying profound messages to us like Mr. Miyagi taught Daniel son with wax on wax off something that seemed totally different from what he was actually teaching was karate Mr. Miyagi wasn't trying to hide karate from Daniel son he was trying to explain karate to Daniel son but it involved some things that were profound that were invisible so to speak hard to grasp and by the way Daniel son also came from he wasn't a very trusting individual because he'd been he was a very doubting individual and he'd been burned a lot he was I might even argue traumatized and isolated from who he really was but David the natural question that rises up is who would do this and why would they do it in that way because hold on because you talk about this I've heard so many interviews with you and we did an interview before and it seems like we get up to this point and we talk about all this great stuff reintegrating with yourself and the twins and isn't that this which fantastic stuff all into that me man that's me man dual spiritual seeker but what you're saying really begs these questions of who would do this in such a manner as this because if we accept your 5000 pages then there was this is like a very human kind of teaching you know this allegory with look at the stars when you look up here remember this story and then this story you should apply it this way that's not a thunderbolt near death experience voice of God kind of stuff that's your second grade teacher kind of stuff who did this and why did they feel that was important to teach in this way this kind of perennial wisdom yeah good obviously it was quote unquote a kung fu master but not a kung fu master but it's like Mr. Miyagi had to be a master he already had to be he had to have karate or kung fu or whatever he was teaching in his bones to such a degree that he could say well how can I teach this to this guy I'll invent wax on wax off you already had to know profound things to come up with this system let me just say that now when you say it's like second grade stuff yeah maybe it is maybe a lot of our problems started in our second grade age or earlier because look that's a given that's a given I'm just I don't want to get off on that thing I'm just saying in terms of these are not like quantum physics kind of stuff this is kind of basic kind of stuff so keep keep going but I want you also get what you know Mr. Miyagi is visiting all the you got to bring it back to the to the profundity of the totally busting the paradigm and the crankshaft and thousands of researchers around the world who don't get it I mean make that connection how do you have Mr. Miyagi going to all these different places right so like I said before I don't actually believe that you have to have a Mr. Miyagi figure or a Quetzalcoatl figure moving from continent to continent distributing the same system it could also be from a very ancient civilization or ancient culture could have been worldwide could have been in one area we don't know that was wiped out or nearly wiped out by a cataclysm and there's plenty of evidence on our planet for cataclysm whether they're solar flares like professor Robert Shock argues for solar activity could actually make the whole ground radioactive for decades where people have to actually live underground could have been some kind of an impact from some sort of object in outer space like Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson have been talking a lot about recently that caused the remnants of that cataclysm who had their memory of all this very profound and advanced and maybe they were also technologically advanced I mean we see all these giant stones all around the world and then they they had to basically live underground for a long time and then they repopulated or spread around and over the thousands of years the stories changed in different climates like you said the Norse myths have a very different feel from the myths of the Pacific or the myths of ancient India and they're living in a very different climate that's part of the reason why but they had a different culture and different landscape that they were in and different so their gods took on a different flavor but an explanation instead of someone going around horizontally traveling in a boat across the oceans that they all descend like from a tree from some ancient predecessor source that's now forgotten and that potentially was wiped out or nearly wiped out by some kind of cataclysm but let me also go back to your point about well this is simple second-grade stuff I would say look this is profound mastery stuff let me just say we're living in a culture that is severely traumatized so we haven't got this figured out if we've got millions of people dying from addiction that's because you're separated from your authentic self is what the psychologists and psychiatrists like Dr. Gabor Mate Dr. Peter Levine say look I dealt with addicts in downtown east Vancouver for decades and I never met one single addict who wasn't traumatized as a child I never met one single female who came into my clinic who wasn't actually sexually abused as a child so trauma the modern definition of psychological trauma is actually separation from your authentic self and maybe some people are tuning out and saying well just a minute I wasn't traumatized the society we have that came from that society that stamped out all this ancient wisdom is a society that traumatizes you whether it's on purpose conspiratorial or just the way it got set up it traumatizes people and even if you didn't experience I would say almost everybody experiences trauma but if the ancient myths are talking about reconnecting with your authentic self then it must be even part of the human condition that we lose connection with our authentic self and I would say that's not that'd be great if you learn how to connect with your authentic self as a second grader but I would say there are CEOs corporations successful billionaires who get paid $300 million a year who are separated from their authentic self so this isn't a small problem this is a huge issue that's why people take yoga or get into meditation because they're trying to find their authentic self and I would say that myths are part of that ancient system to point us on how to reconnect where their authentic self so it's like a huge issue and it'd be great if you learned it by second grade but a big part of the problem is we're all still struggling with that that's what I would say how's that I mean I'm all about authentic self okay I'm all about reconnecting with my authentic self I'm all about the non-dual path which is the authentic self in yoga right so it's like there is the you and then there's the outside the doer and you are not that but this is my personal kind of 24-7 spiritual path kind of thing but what interests me and is challenging to me as well is that we have to connect that with the world that we live in one thing I thought was interesting about the traumatization is we live in a world you are part of your culture from the beginning and I mean you're going to have to deconstruct that in a way that we can understand it but you were in the military you served and then you taught and there is an ultimate truth to what I have up on the screen you want me on that wall you need me on that wall is real right so one that's real is that I live in my phony baloney lifestyle because someone else has taken care of that messy killing people around the world to quote unquote keep me safe and if I don't like that and I don't like the way they're doing that then I can do it a different way but history isn't very kind to people who aren't aggressively protecting their right to exist more over when you talk about trauma forget that for a second and take about the what whatever people say we live by the descendants of people who engaged in hand to hand combat and murder on a mass scale they were the winners right so whether it's the Vikings that came in there and just mass killed everybody or Genghis Khan you know every or the Romans you know behead the ten heads and leave one a lot I mean we are the descendants of these mass murder so there's there's enough trauma there so I'm just not comfortable with quickly putting all the pieces together because of the Gemini constellation because some esoteric wisdom that we all should have gotten on from the beginning okay interesting lots of stuff to dive into so let me talk about you talked about we're all in society and therefore you know we all get a bunch of stuff laid on us whether you went into that particular part of society like the military yeah I graduated from West Point they use some they use some stress based stress based training during the beast barracks and bleed year and you know we could spend the rest of the time talking about funny quote unquote funny stories of stuff that they do to you when they're screaming in your face I graduated from Ranger school I graduated from Airborne school I graduated from the 82nd Airborne's Jumpmaster school that's a particular part of society it's a grid on your brain even more heavily maybe than other societal pursuits that people could engage in but the connection with society is part of what separates us from our authentic self and I'll go all the way back to the very earliest record very earliest human record that we have is the Gilgamesh well the Mesopotamian clay tablets that were found in the library of Ashurbanipal in the Gilgamesh epic and in there you've got Enkidu and Gilgamesh who are almost twins but Enkidu is this wild man he lives out in nature among the animals he's naked he's covered with hair and Gilgamesh is the king and he's two thirds divine and Enkidu lives among the wild animals and he's connected with the wild animals until he gets entangled with society and the first part is through sexual intercourse with the temple prostitute Shamhat you see the king is approached and says hey there's a wild man out in the woods and Gilgamesh says no problem just take this beautiful temple prostitute Shamhat out there once she sleeps with them the animals won't want anything to do with them in fact he'll get tangled into society and he'll become one of us which is exactly what happens and that myth that most ancient tablet that we have shows Enkidu after he sleeps with her he finds the animals run away from him he no longer has strength in his legs to keep up with them like in the Rocky movie Nick says women ruined legs rock stop that that's what happens to Enkidu he's like I'm not the same man I was before but now I'm getting a haircut like Samson I'm starting to eat bread and wine I've never heard that in other myths before that's the first thing that he's given some people say well it's bread and beer it doesn't matter it's the same constellations this is all related to constellations but what it's showing is once you're connected with society you can't go back to the state of nature Enkidu can't go back to being you can't undo it's like they said after we've invented the atomic bomb but isn't that connecting with herself is going back is the journey back so it's actually a journey yes but it's not back to Enkidu doesn't end up where he was before he meets up with Gilgamesh and actually I would argue that Gilgamesh and Enkidu are not two people Caster and Pollux one twin is divine one twin is mortal they're not two people it's like in I've been lately using the Lord of the Rings Gandalf the Grey before he falls with the Balrog and Gandalf the Light they're not two people but he's different afterwards and Gilgamesh and Enkidu they become so close that they're as close as a husband and a wife is what it says and modern academia says oh good we can talk about homoerotic ancient literature I would say it's not homoerotic ancient literature I'm not saying you can't see that in literature but it's actually two sides of one person that's why the Bible says there's a friend that sticketh closer than a brother it's closer than a brother because it's in you you have to re-find your authentic self in your mind you showed some pictures of Yogananda meditation your mind is not you it's part of you it's a tool but it can run away with you it can trick you your mind has to be put in its place like my dog thinks it owns the house and when a male man comes up with a package my dog thinks he has to defend the house and I have to say hold on you don't own the whole house go sit over there that's what your mind does your mind is this defense mechanism that you developed because you live in society and that defense mechanism there are thousands and thousands of people and teachers who've spent millions and millions of hours trying to instruct people about these very things this is the non-dual path this is the monkey mind sometimes they call it in India now the problem with that is we are going to get really particular because I do I do pronounce you you are on the path and I am on my own path we can all only take this path ourselves so I wouldn't agree with the language I don't try and boss my mind around or wrestle with my mind or try and control my mind I don't think that works but that's a particular understanding I have of my spiritual path and how I do it what I am trying to really get to is trying to understand that in relation to what you are talking about in the star myth so you know David you don't have to convince me that the star myth hypothesis is real you don't have to convince me that it's hidden in plain sight from academic stick in the muds who this totally blows their world away you don't have to convince me that there is an perennial esoteric wisdom that talks about returning to our authentic self what you do have to convince me about is I got a great picture let me pull it up did it ain't aliens it's like I got up on the screen I'm not saying it's aliens but it's aliens you jumped ahead to a new topic before you let me address some of the stuff you said at the start of this where you said I don't believe you have to boss it around or that's not how it works for my mind when did I ever say you have to boss okay I said my dog I put him calmly in his place that's like when you're meditating those spiritual teachers that you're referring to my teacher never taught meditation who are my teachers never taught meditation because you know what so we could get into this whole thing like I heard you say I'm yoga for 35 years I go sit in an ice bath 35 degrees temperature to remind me that I'm not my mind you have all sorts of disciplines you're fricking ranger you know what I mean you understand the kind of things that you do but I don't accept that as really being part of my path if I was better I wouldn't have to sit in that fricking ice bath to remind myself but I'm kind of stupid so I have to go there and go oh okay I'm not my body and my mind can yammer away and it doesn't matter so we're gonna talk that whole discussion is like this you know we could have a heart to heart personal discussion about how we have our own conception of our mind and how it works so please I okay but before we go to aliens I just want to say look and I'm not prescribing any one path I'm saying look ancient world had meditation it had drumming it had breath control which I'm sure you do when you get into the ice baths it had martial arts it had myths so you can become you can rediscover your authentic self by many different paths and you don't have to use the myths either there's probably plenty of masters of men and women who have recovered their authentic self and never used the myth but I'll tell you that those teachers they're yoga teachers like the Ashutanga story of Patanjali talks about him having serpent coils because of a serpent it's mythical it's actually related to constellations we could go into that myth but the myths don't tell you to yell or order your monkey mind around because you're absolutely right it'll just get stronger if you do it if I yell at my dog he'll bark at me even worse but it shows this in pictures like in the Bhagavad Gita where Arjun and his divine charioteer Krishna are getting ready to go into this battle of Kurukshetra Arjun is seized by doubt and wants to withdraw just like doubting Thomas and Jesus or just like in the story of Eras and Psyche Psyche has all these doubts and she loses her connection with Eras in this ancient Greek myth and Thomas Jesus doesn't restore Thomas by yelling at him saying what a crappy disciple you are you're the worst one and Krishna doesn't restore Arjun from his doubts in the Bhagavad Gita by saying you're fired Arjun you're not even going to be in this battle I'll handle it the way he restores them helps us to understand the proper relationship between our higher self or our authentic self and our egoic mind our egoic mind is full of doubts because it's racing ahead into the future or into the past and going all over the place and our authentic self is just who we really are it's our essence it's our be here now mind and so what I'm saying is the myths show that in pictures and it's extremely helpful show that in pictures I don't disagree with you some people relate to I relate to this in very simple logical terms you are not what you observe anything you observe that can't be you you must be something else uh oh light bulb goes off there's another part of me that I didn't realize non-dual part so hey myths are great stories are great you know throughout all this I mean the link that I think you're making that is important here is that you've done this exhaustive important chronicling of these star myths and how they're connected to all these uh ancient civilizations it is not at all surprising to me that those myths correspond to spiritual teachers past, present and current you know present I guess it's current current teachers who are saying the same thing from their personal experience they're not saying oh this was passed on to me they're saying no I sat here I meditated I came to this realization and the realization matches completely with what you're saying the myths say so to me again we're moving maybe I'm taking too much of a tone but my point is that's the point that interests me you don't have to teach me about authentic self integration kind of thing I'm in like I say I'm 24-7 tell me why where that's coming from well who and why these star myths that we can date back that far why they exist and you maybe you felt like you handled that when you said you said in place where you say there was some ancient civilization and they wanted to do that I would then even ask see but then that generates to me an interesting question why would they why would they do that because at the same time you know if you really look at some of the evidence that's come up about Mars right it looks like from a number of different points of reference here one being the remote viewing of Joe McMonicle who I think is like one of the top remote viewers in the world you know secret spy number 0000 and then I just interview Courtney Brown who's currently a remote viewer both same thing independently remote view Mars ancient civilization maybe our ancestors and then I got John Brandenburg who I interviewed and he says hey I take it from a physicist's standpoint ancient traces hundreds of millions of years ago of a nuclear explosion on Mars that has all the signatures of a bomb so I just throw that out because it establishes another data point there is the potential that there are some ancient civilizations that are off planet there's one that's closed by and that comes up over and over again I had a slide up there of the Dogen right so you go talk to the Dogen but you can talk to all sorts of star indigenous people and I just had an expert on and they're all saying the same thing star people star people star people they came and they passed on this wisdom so if you want to say that you stand apart from that and say no I don't go there I think that's necessary I think it could have been an ancient civilization that was at Lantian and was buried under the rocks for 30,000 years fine I just want to know what you think about that because to me it seems that all the evidence points towards alien visitation alien genetic engineering alien passing along intelligence but then that raises a bunch of questions too all right so once again I don't want to get to the thing that you ended with but the thing that you said at the beginning at the very beginning of this question that you're framing you said I got it I'm 24 seven so you don't have to convince me about connection with the authentic self but I would say this ties into the whole story and we'll get to aliens in a second it ties in because we are not living in a society I would say these myths were given to uplift men and women prevent oppression there are people who would argue with me about that and say no these myths are meant to bind you into religion but hold on I think they're there to uplift people it's great that you're 24 seven but there also has to be a societal component we want to uplift others as well we should at least be saying wait a minute half of the 101 and at the off-ramp after 10 after 10 of people who are homeless what's going on there's our society is not we're not all 24 seven reconnecting with our authentic self our society is actually engineered to disconnect you from your authentic self so you're looking for solutions outside of yourself by consuming this or buying that or maybe the next person I date will solve my problems and it's outside of you we're endlessly rushing after a solution that's outside of you David a lot of people are going to point to you and say what are you talking about you're a part of this military industrial complex that has us dominating the world and living our phony-blony lifestyle by basically oppressing everyone else in the world and that's what we've done now you want to stand apart from that I mean I don't know I'm certainly not in the military right now and I wasn't one of the guys at the top I'll tell you that I'm a part of it I was never in the military but I don't want to give up everything you know by virtue of the fact that we don't want to give up what we have I just that's a whole other discussion and when you start talking about societal changes there are a group of people who always stood aside and said you guys can go play whatever game you want with this world I am not I am in this world but I'm not of that world that's the only thing that makes sense for me because as soon as you want to start going handed out money to people in tents then you got a bunch of other people I mean I don't know how you solve that problem if you want to go there let's go there but it doesn't make a lot of sense to me let's go back to the military point there's a proper use for the military there's a proper use for strength, violence or force and swords and spears and now we have rifles and other things and that's to protect people if someone is about to be raped or murdered and I come in and stop them that's a proper use of force if I'm using it to go around and rape and murder people that's an improper use of force and I would draw a distinction between those two things and when I was in the military I thought that the US Army was for defending democracy, peace and freedom by the way I had not yet learned all I've learned about the myths in fact I hadn't even started down this path when I got out of the army and I'll tell you that what I've learned about the myths have changed a lot of the things I believe I was a literalist Christian at that time I'm no longer a literalist Christian I no longer believe that the military is being used for defending peace and freedom and democracy around the world if you want to go there we can go there but the military is not being used to protect this country it's being used to take over other countries and take their resources Afghanistan is not going to invade us and yet we've been there for 18 years but what I'm saying is I don't disagree I don't deny that there's a proper role for force and militaries my favorite of the ancient myths is probably the Odyssey Odysseus was a badass fighter right but Odysseus we see in that we see in that epic we actually see into his mind we see his mind running away from him at certain points where he starts to panic and then Athena shows up and inspires him and he stops panicking and gets back to the moment and actually survives and time after time in that book he would have perished when he met Cersei he would have perished when he met Scilla and Corridus he would have perished when he went down into the underworld all these different times but he had help from Hermes or help from Athena what is that you want to be a better basketball player at the top of your game or a better any human endeavor martial arts or military arts you will do better if your higher mind or your authentic mind and your egoic mind that is able to go into the future in the past are in harmony and you will you will be able to realize your potential better now what do you do with that potential hopefully you do things like defending the weak and helpless rather than oppressing the weak and helpless so I think there is an individual component and there is a societal component so I didn't want to leave that behind when you were saying hey this is all great and we are in agreement that we should be working on you know ice baths or whatever it is that helps you get into touch with your authentic self I totally agree with that but I also don't think that we should as you said drop out from society completely and say well that's great I'm reaching enlightenment to heck with the guys who are I'm saying you can do that but I am saying you can do that I'm saying you know what become more God like and everything takes care of itself you don't have to get into figure out what would Jesus do just become like Jesus maybe you will do like Jesus you don't need to figure it out you don't need to figure out how to solve the homeless problem or how to solve geopolitical problems you don't need to do any of that just be a better you and then you will act accordingly and however you act you know whether you're like my good friend Rick Artre who does a show with 500 shows with spiritual teachers can't wrap his head around the climate change scam and how that's just designed to eliminate rights and take rights away so if you're an alarmist like he is or if you're like I am and take more kind of I don't know why they're playing this game I don't know why they did 9-11 I don't know why they did the coup that was the Kennedy assassination I don't know why the pedophile rings you know in the blackmail rings I don't know that I don't want to close my eyes from it pretend it doesn't exist I agree with you on the military thing our best hope is the U.S. Navy commercials a force for good that's our best hope is to hold to that ideal not true even if we know it's bullshit we have to say you know what we had some guys back a couple hundred years ago that found that this country they had some pretty damn good ideas and they were like everyone just has their own rights and then they'll do the right stuff and you know so I'm just saying I don't I don't buy the leap to you know trust me on all because this has been used to exploit people and manipulate people and create cults is hey don't you agree with everything I'm saying about your authentic self now what we're going to do is this social movement now, pause I'm glad you're going there Alex because you're clearly and you asked me the last time and you mentioned it when you talk about Joseph Atwell the word Syop right you've used that word Syop and our cults were the cults that suddenly popped up a Syop meaning were they more than just an organic cult that just popped up was it possible that there were agencies that were giving some of those cult leaders cover like telling the police well don't arrest that guy out in the desert is firing off machine guns you know and the police are like why not he's firing off machine guns well I don't know but someone higher up said don't touch him and then it turns out it was Charles Manson and the family what's up with that so the cults actually is an interesting point because what I told you about the higher self in the psyche when Eris restores psyche he doesn't destroy psyche the cults are like you need to get rid of your mind you need they're a subtle distortion or twisting of what the ancient myths are trying to do instead of uplifting you they're actually trying to turn you into a slave but and you mentioned Kennedy and all these things I'm not sure if you were saying that just if you get in touch maybe you were posing this as an argument that others do that others do that you think is a false argument well if I get in touch with myself that's the best I can do and society will take care of itself and I would say there's a societal component to it that we as citizens men and women can say to our government yes I swore an oath to support and defend the constitution of the United States I'm totally dialed into the constitution of the United States but I'll tell you that things that are going on like the invasion of your privacy when your iPhone is listening to you or Facebook is writing down your conversations is a violation of the constitution of the United States and Facebook as a corporation gets certain privileges from the government such as limited liability which is a corporate charter and the people of the United States can say you know what I don't really like corporations taking all my data and listening to every single thing I say I don't think that's right congress representatives in congress please pull their corporate charter or take away their limited liability because that's extended by society and when you have a when you have a predator like Jeffrey Epstein allowed out on the streets for decades and preying upon the weakest you know young girls who are under the age of consent so there's no there's no hiring of a prostitute that's what he was quote-unquote convicted for in 2008 there's no you cannot have a prostitute who's 14, 15 or 16 because they're under the age of consent in Florida where this happened so citizens can say hey I meditate or I dunk myself in an ice bath and I get in touch with my authentic self but at the same time I demand that the social contract is the reason we have police and military and allow them to have machine guns when I'm not allowed to have an M60 in my house machine gun they get to have it why because of the social contract and part of the social contract is keeping predators off the street and if I see evidence that there's like predators being protected and allowed then I think citizens you also have to get involved in that and demand just a minute I demand that my 14 year old daughter be protected from pedophiles is that too much to ask no it's not I don't know I'm saying though I guess my point was and I mean this is kind of the world here that we're talking about I mean everything in the world is coming up in this conversation and that's why I keep trying to bring it back to star myths because that's your thing because like I can't tell people how to process all the stuff that you just processed because I sound like just another idiot old man with a bunch of opinions that are different from anyone else's opinion what I can relate to about what you're saying is anyone who is on the journey is on the spiritual journey is on connecting with their authentic self will organically come to the right positions but I have to tell you I know people who are on that path and they come to some pretty weird conclusions that are very different than the conclusions I did and all I can say is I brought on to you my man because you know what that journey I don't know where it's taking you but that person whoever they are clearly you're on that journey so I don't know this gets into the nature of evil question which I think is related to these questions that we've been talking about I mean that's a question that is interesting to me I won't say it's important because I have some pretty fixed understandings of that but who and why in terms of the ancient myths the who and why are the big questions to me and then what is the relation between that force that energy that knowledge and the evil because we do see evil so you know Jeffrey Epstein yada yada we talked about him forever I had an FBI agent on who infiltrated a Nambla is interesting because Jeffrey Epstein is too easy for people to kind of relate to and yeah him and Trump ran around and they picked up some young girls and maybe they were too young no go to Nambla where they trade in four year old boys three year old girls and then when they're done they trade them off and then they make films and then they ultimately kill in a lot of cases so the reason I even go there is not to kind of shock people or anything like that is to say if you have any doubts about the existence of each evil I won't even go to the nature of evil but the existence of evil then that kind of brings you oh okay I get it that is of a different ilk that isn't just something that we can easily understand that is a force that we do see over and over again so what is the relationship between that force and the perennial wisdom of the of the myth that's the kind of stuff I'm interested in yeah absolutely and the reason I raised the Jeffrey Epstein issue is to say was to point out that you can't there's nobody who could argue that if I just get in touch with my higher self whether I do it through meditation, drumming ice baths, yoga or whatever method then predators will be kept off the street what I'm saying is you gotta have a social component as well as a self improvement component because if I just worry about self improving and think that that's gonna somehow stop horrendous systematic traumatization of children by Rambla or Jeffrey Epstein then you're wrong it gets tricky some people will even tell you that in the grander spiritual scheme of things including reincarnation and souls that there is some contract and this is all playing out in a way that we don't completely understand so that the victims and the perpetrators are actors changing roles now I don't get into that I don't endorse that belief but I think there's an element of that that is somewhat undeniable even when we look at our own history and how things emerge for us and stuff like that so the only thing I'd say with that is again I'm treading lightly when someone says grab the pitchforks and the torches because God is on our side on this one it's more like everyone's on a journey and I wouldn't want to be Jeffrey Epstein and facing his near death experience or his after death experience and his life review where he feels the emotions and the feelings that he's inflicted on other people I wouldn't want to be that guy right now but beyond that in terms of you know how I balance all the massive scales I don't know how to do it yeah so I'm glad you brought that up because if like you said the God is on our side if you're I would argue that if you're using your beliefs to justify the violation of other people's rights then that's a form of mind control if you're saying well we can overlook the abuse and traumatization of those young children sexual abuse, physical abuse because of this passage in this scripture or that belief then you're twisting it because the ancient myths show that the gods work their will out through men and women that men and women are precious every single person is so if you're using it to violate the rights of someone else you're turning it upside down and that's what I think actually happened with the imposition of literalist Christianity and wiping out the ancient beliefs in Europe starting with the Greek and Roman gods but as you said proceeding to the Druids then working their way up to the Norse myths and then starting to jump the ocean and saying oh we better stamp out all the beliefs of the Maya we better stamp out the beliefs of the North American Native American nations we better stamp out what's going on in the Pacific islands this has been stamping out in order to excuse and justify well see I would say that the gifts of the earth like oil that's under the earth the ancient Greeks would say well that's a gift of Pluton or Hades everything under the earth all the riches of the earth are given to that nation those people that were allowed to be born there by the gods and if I'm an oil company and I say I want to drill in your country and the people of that country say great that'll be 30% tax to us for the riches of the gods that you're taking out and the oil company says hey politicians could you take care of these pesky guys in that country who are saying we have to pay a 30% tax to them oh no problem we'll get our guy installed in there he'll collaborate with us we'll get that tax down to 2% and if there's any pesky peasants in the way of where you want to drill we've got ways of moving them out of the way too so so I think this is actually all related the to the all these issues but if you're excusing look we've created a society that traumatizes people and you just told me about a group that systematically traumatizes people or we have this Epstein character who is systematically traumatizing people I'm saying you've got less resistance from the people if they're all traumatized you've got less ability for the constitution to work and for self-rule to stop predators if everybody's traumatized so I'm not denying far from it that there's conspiracy type stuff involved in what I'm talking about the traumatization of the world by literalist Christianity is a topic they basically slaughtered all the Native Americans they justified slavery instead well you know David we're talking about the whole world now so we're going to get over to China and we're going to talk about the chai con craziness right which is worse in a lot of respects I don't want to go to China right now I don't want to be I don't want chai con to run things they don't have a literalist Christian interpretation they jumped on the other bandwagon and they're doing the atheistic communist bullshit you know I mean so to me that I don't get the connection that you're making there without getting back to the without getting back to the question that I'm asking is okay who are they why are they here and what's their connection with them okay so let me go to the let me go to the aliens you know you put up the interesting picture of Georgio Sucalus there and I've met him contact in the desert and the point on the alien thing is there's a ton of evidence that points in that direction well we're gonna have to go there you don't have to go there but you can't deny that there's just a ton of evidence you know part of your thing is that and this is like another minor point but it's one that I'd like to hear you comment on we all understand that people are in Stonehenge and they're looking up at the stars we get that but one of the like it's a little detail point it's a David Matheson point they weren't just looking at the stars they were looking at the constellations right so constellations don't mean anything that there's no independent meaning of the constellations why do they build these megalithic structures to look at constellations well because the constellations as you're telling us have meaning that that's that kind of changes the whole thing right because when you hear the kind of standard tripe about Stonehenge it's like well that's you know lunar eclipse and all no all that goes out the window as soon as you say that they were aligning with constellations same thing with the Giza pyramids right Orion right oh my god they align up Orion by that and the other image I have up here is the Dogen right so you go to the Dogen people and they say yeah well we did that because the star people serious came down and told us that so we have all this stuff that lines up and at all points in the same direction ancient aliens and then you seem super resistant to going there why yeah so I'm not actually resistant to going there so people can go to my blog and search for Dogen and find blog posts I've written about the Dogen's more than one the Dogen people more than one blog post and people can go and search on my blog for ancient aliens and find not just blog posts but videos I've made about it so here's why because I would argue that star people these encounters don't necessarily equal extraterrestrials I'm not ruling that out as a possibility if I'm an investigator if I'm Sherlock Holmes I don't go into the investigation saying well I'm going to rule out the possibility that the butler did it I'm not also going to rule out the possibility that the police might be in on it I'm going to have all those options open but I'll tell you that what I think is possible is that all this amazing correspondences that we're talking about the connections to the stars around the world and the megalithic monuments I mean first of all the building of the great pyramid they're slinging around some big blocks and there's still controversy as to how those blocks got put up at those heights because the ramps would have to be twice as big as the pyramids if it was ramps but not only that like you said they're perfectly aligned almost perfectly aligned north south east and west and there are alignments with the shafts to certain stars and there's even this is a mind blower proportional relationships between the size of our spherical earth and the size of the great pyramid and people who are skeptical of that might say yeah Dave there's proportions between your house and the size of the spherical earth we just have to find the right number to divide by and we'll get the proportion yeah but they're proportional to the size of the earth by the number four forty three thousand two hundred which is a precessional number which relates to the procession of the equinoxes the procession of the stars and takes it's very hard to even figure out the processional constant it takes years and years I still don't understand why you don't accept ET you kind of brush past the point I don't accept ET it's like the evidence is overwhelming now we have so we have the DOD videos of these aircraft and I have the guy on the UFOs I don't know how people get to UFOs and accept that there's UFOs that do these things we can't do that a human being can't do and that they're powered by somebody but it's you won't go to ET I got Diane Posoka Jacques Valais who's no stranger in the head Jacques Valais on the show you know Jacques Valais throws that stuff out there that's just kind of automatically equal look amazing craft doesn't automatically equal extraterrestrial now I'm not saying fill in that gap fill in that gap then amazing craft from throughout history you know Bob Lazar who now has come out and did that fantastic moving he says yeah you know here's the craft we had it at Area 51 here's how we studied it here's how I understood the propulsion to work I had Diana Posoka who you know is a PhD teacher she goes out in the desert she finds the craft pieces because a guy goes and shows her and there's all these kind of invisible college that knows all this stuff is going on I just had Maria Rodwell on last week who is a counselor for 30 years and helps people talk about traumatized helps people who are traumatized by their contact experience so you know unless you want to just take all that and pack it up in a box and just throw it all away then you got a big problem if you don't accept ET that this idea that people throw around they just throw about Jack Filet and they're like okay so now I can I can go on like ET doesn't exist and it's all fairies again no you can't hey this is great so I see you're passionate about this Alex let me tell you let me ask you this would you discount the possibility that some of the UFO hype and activity after World War II was a Psyop can that be considered as a possible explanation for some of it because let me tie it back to the myths hold on hold on you ask the question let me answer it of course everything is a Psyop everything is is a control but what I just hit you with there is the physical evidence so you might not like Diana Walsh Besolka everyone does she went out in the desert and she finds these pieces of a craft and they go analyze it and they say that and you've mentioned Jacques Filet I had Jacques Filet on you know what he's really interested in the same thing she's friends with with Walsh Besolka is friends with he's interested in craft right so there's no doubt that that's real the whole is there Psyop is there Project Blue Book was it a complete cover up did they reach some point here's what the history that I think reveals is that hey they were surprised when all this stuff happens back in the 40s like whoa so they're just kind of releasing it and then they're at a junction where they have to go okay which way do we go do we just kind of do the mind control thing like which relates to the star myth thing and just go squash it and just go misinform and just deny deny misinform do we go that route or do we go this route of kind of embracing it and trying to understand it well we know what route they went to and they just went to the misinformation route but that doesn't take away from where we're at today we know that there's a reality the Occam's razor is that there's a reality to it you can imagine all sorts of things but the evidence is overwhelming that that's the reality let me bring my area of expertise into it Alex since you know I'm not I haven't talked to Jacques Filet the reason I brought him up was because he says UFOs does not necessarily equal ET at least not in every case that's why I brought him up but setting Jacques Filet aside I'm not relying on the authority of Jacques Filet let me talk about the star myths for a second it's undeniable that many members of the UFOs must be ET's all the way down through history rely on or point to the myths and say the crossing of the Red Sea was caused by a UFO it parted the waters or the vision of Ezekiel is describing an alien craft and yet in the language that they were trying to understand and what I can bring to but I didn't go there I'm not going there but so I mean I understand that Rael has, Rael tells you that when he was first contacted the space craft with the tall alien and said come back tomorrow bring your Bible and I'll tell you all the things that we did so what there's all sorts of alien cults there's all sorts of alien beliefs and there's the whole Anunnaki and Sitchin and Velikovsky posits that a lot of these myths were a lot of these stories in the Bible the sun stood still for three days that was because of Venus was swooping around according to Velikovsky or the Anunnaki described in the Mesopotamian epic We get that people can become so married to their one kind of hammer that everything looks like a nail you know let's cut them some slack To me everything in the myths can be explained as celestial metaphor I can show you the crossing of the Red Sea I can show you the Holy Grail and I can show you the Ark of the Covenant so what does that get you David I don't understand so you're back to kind of to me though you're just kind of back to pounding on the point that I conceded at the beginning it's undeniable that there's this connection so the question is who why and what is the relation to ET and what is the relation to evil so I don't deny it good so therefore if when people start getting too close to what actually happened we trot out well it's all because of ancient aliens that will lead us off into a rabbit hole well you roll your eyes but I'm saying can we discount the possibility that let's say severe skepticism well take me through your scenario where does that lead you to if I can take you away from the uplifting power of the myths and say let's take it back to we thought it was all about these external characters such as Jesus and Moses for centuries we had them believing that that it was literalistic that kind of started to fall apart in the 20th century because of technology and other things going on so people started to our control system I don't know why you're rolling your eyes because this is because if you plug ET into the orchestrator of your myths how does that lessen your story in any way it's like you're fighting it for no reason because now it's external again these stories are now about they're not external where are they from they're not external where are they from they could be from the spiritual realm they could be what is the spiritual realm well let's say let's say that shamans or people I know that term is overused but around the world there are people there are institutions of the people who have contact with the realm that's not described by our materialist physics let's just talk about for instance you know you have an ayahuasca experience or a mushroom experience and you're encountering and you're getting information that you wouldn't get otherwise or people don't need substances to do that drumming is used around the world drumming was actually outlawed by the literalist christians when they got up to northern Norway they took away all the drums from the shamans this is what I talk about all the time I got 200 shows on near-death experience not because I care about near-death experience so much as because it clearly crushes the materialistic paradigm because now we have a medical reason for that take the DMT experiments of Rick Strassman and when they reach those other realms ET is there as much as well as all these shamanistic kind of things no there you go not I mean you kind of substituted one thing for another but it doesn't explain the fundamental question of why would spirits if you want to just put spirits in there like you want to take ET out and then you want to put spirits in okay that's your choice and then you want to put spirits in tell me why the spirits did it in this way and did it in the stars and then did it you know with all these stories throughout I like your other explanation made more sense which is hey it was some you didn't say Atlantis but like some Atlantean ancient civilization that went around in both explanations Alex I think we're actually in violent agreement because you just said we can get information from the other realm so these star people you said look there's been zillions of star people encounters around the world why did those star people have to come from the planet Syria if I go into the if I go into the realm of the god and I come back and describe it as gods or I come back and describe it as something and someone says oh that's an ET gray or whatever it doesn't doesn't mean that that ET gray came from the star Arcturus I get you this is the stuff I talk all the time but that's why I'm bringing it back to the star myth thing and and I keep bringing up the same question and you don't I guess we're not on the same wavelength or answer at different ways but here's the thing it's like why why is this particular esoteric wisdom and let me back up and say again Dave you've you're the guy you're the man you're the one who's who's kind of stood against the tide and said hey all this stuff connected and you got 5000 pages and now we have to go wow he did it he single-handedly has established and made that undeniable I'm going to the next question which is saying I've talked to all these I've talked to all these different people I've talked to mediums I've talked to near-death experiencers out-of-body experience travelers DMT ethnogen kind of people all these people shamanic people all these people who are accessing the extended realm I've never heard any stories about this kind of thing there's nothing like this in any of the other literature where they come down if you will that's maybe not right where they come down and they say we're going to put this in like a nursery school kind of book and say here are the stars here's the story here's what to think about that that is unique there's nothing else like that so why did they do it like that do you suppose from that extended realm of that extended realm is ET or not I mean I actually think if we just take a breath we are talking about we agree about all this non-materialistic paradigm and if you go back through my blog post I talk about NDE's OBE's because to explain that invisible realm it's like Mr. Miyagi explaining Karate Kid Karate is invisible the metaphor is Karate is invisible the myths are saying there's an infinite realm you could call it the infinite realm you could call it the dream time you could call it the other world I'm going to tell you about it I'm going to use this broad canvas of the stars because they're perfect for explaining it I'm not saying that the constellation Hercules is the god Zeus the god Zeus is an entity that dwells in the invisible realm and whether you want to say well he's part of your subconscious Dave okay I'll grant you that I mean but my subconscious connects to the realm of the gods because our subconscious can somehow there's people who woke up during the Vietnam War this is a an illustration I'd like to point out that shows that our subconscious knows a lot more than our mind can grasp and any materialist will grant you that and say yeah your gut is gathering information that your mind doesn't even pay attention to but our subconscious sometimes even knows things that it shouldn't be able to know like I got a premonition that something horrible happened to my child and I woke up at two in the morning and later I got a call from the army and that was exactly when he was in this firefight in Vietnam right now well how did my subconscious get that message obviously through the realm of the gods or whatever realm they want to call it but it's outside of the materialist paradigm so how do I explain the rules or not necessarily the rules but the functioning of this invisible realm to people who their conscious mind or their egoic mind is going to choke on it just like how Mr. Miyagi taught karate to Danielson his conscious mind would have choked on it hold on I can't just tell you about how to stop Johnny's kick I got to show you wax on wax off that's how they show us somebody who knew all this stuff about all the things you're talking about OBE's, NDE's, the invisible realm the fact that we can our subconscious can tap in somehow to the realm of the gods and you can call it something else if you want said how am I going to explain the operation of this to people because they need it it's profound but it's also very practical I'm going to use Mr. Miyagi's wax on wax off no wait a minute that's for karate okay I'm going to use the stars because the stars arc up from one horizon and then he crosses across the realm of spirit and then they sink down into the earth and that's and it's a perfect illustration of our condition here in this body of quote-unquote clay which is water and dirt water and earth that's where the stars go down into they go down into the earth seemingly from our perspective okay so it's a perfect way of explaining it that's what I okay and so whoever these people were please don't say whoever these people because you just you just had a god doing this and now you say whoever these people are do you realize that's kind of confusing you can't say there was some god sitting up on a cloud and one of the gods decided hey my way of going to do this is going to be through the star myths and that's how I'm going to do it you know then you can't switch and then say these people because then that's kind of out of the so and what I'm pushing you on is that I've talked to all these different people who have accessed the extended consciousness realm and that kind of way that you're thinking it doesn't come up at all so of course it does all the shamanic all the shamanic read Mercia Eliade's book shamanism you're misinterpreting what I'm saying what I'm saying you're now going to tell me how the shamans had all these myths too which is back to proving to me that it's undeniable that all of them I get it I keep coming back to why I keep coming back to why would they do it in this way that is so kind of uniquely peculiar in terms of how it's done that's an interesting question I've been asking for a freaking hour well I was in the infantry I played football I have a lot of head injuries I need it explained to me infantry simple man so I might not be the fastest one to pick up on the question you're actually asking but what I'm saying is why couldn't this ancient culture this ancient sophisticated culture that was so much more ancient than the ancient Egyptians the earliest ancient Egyptian dynasty or dynasty was ancient to us but it was only 5000 years ago gobekli tepi according to radiocarbon dating of the walls must have been buried by 8000 BC so it was as ancient to the earliest Egyptian dynasty as the earliest Egyptian dynasty is to us and probably more ancient so this more ancient culture I say whoever they were because we don't know who they were but why could they not have been using shamanic techniques and I know that word's overused but these techniques that you talk about the NDE's OBE's to tap into the realm of the gods and put together this system why did they put it together this way the same way that the same reason Mr. Miyagi taught Daniels on that way because our egoic minds which is a defense mechanism for dealing with this world that we found ourselves in from infancy it defends us it's there it's like doubting Thomas why was doubting Thomas so doubtful those doubts were his defense mechanism from getting burned when they said we've seen Jesus he said yeah right I'll believe it when I touch it the defense our mind is a defense mechanism Daniel's son had all kinds of defense mechanisms because he'd been hurt he'd been he was full of doubts and he was a very untrusting individual and Mr. Miyagi said the way to reach this kid is not through the direct route it's through the indirect route and the people who put this myth together and I don't admit that it had to have extraterrestrials from the planet circling our tourists it could have been a sophisticated human culture that was tapped into this and said how am I going to teach this well we know that our mind our defense mechanism mind that deals with culture is going to choke on it just like Daniel's son so we're going to have to use the Mr. Miyagi route and go around where did they get this incredible wisdom maybe from the realm of the gods which they might have accessed through plants they might have accessed through breathing I don't know how they accessed it because it was so far in advance of ancient Egypt nobody can tell you for sure but if someone tells you for sure it was Arcturians then my skeptical meter goes bing how the hell do you know it was for sure Arcturians well because we found a craft well what if I say that craft could have been Nazis you go what do you mean Nazis well they were working on some pretty advanced craft and that was 1942 so don't tell me you're sure it's Arcturians that could be a sire that's what I'm saying for sure but we've I thought we probably frustrated the hell out of our audience but maybe so I've had a good time you frustrated now it's not me it was me I take I take blame but hey it's not sure I get to do what I want once a week well like I said I think every single individual brings out something different and you certainly brought out you took it in some different ways and I think that's valuable I don't I don't have any problem with confrontation because as you noticed I was in or as you mentioned I was in the military I don't necessarily love to go that route but I don't really have a thin skin I mean I've been called everything while I was in the army well we are confronting you know like we both have said you know we're 90% agreement and the most fundamental thing that you're saying is this return to self is is I've recapped the story over and over again but it's phenomenal to think that the star myth hypothesis that you've established so beautifully has this deeper connection with all the great wisdom traditions that tell us that the real journey is the journey to ourselves and that that's the journey that we should put foremost in our life and then there's all these awesome awesome stories that are inspiring you know I mean it's not my cup of tea but it's inspiring to so many people and has been throughout the ages and is that what final question and then we'll leave the skeptical board for a minute what is what is your personal kind of way that you like to kind of learn and relate and I guess why do the myths and allegory why do you think that that draws you in because I like to see connections that's a really good question I like to see connections between things and that's what metaphors do they show connections between it's like I want to show you this new concept I'm going to connect it to something that you know a little better to get you across the river to this other side and I'm going to use something that you're some stepping stones that will help you across that river and that's what the myths I think are doing and that's what Mr. Miyagi is doing with Daniel San. Daniel San had no conception of conception of this martial art that he wanted to teach him so he taught him through something more familiar and got him to the other side and it's like a magical moment that everyone remembers when the lights finally go on for Daniel San like his mind jumps across the river well these connections between the stars what are these constellations if not us connecting the stars and then connecting them to our condition in order to convey these like I said profound but also very practical truths about each and every about yourself and then each and every other man and woman you ever meet that they have this invisible component as well and that's what that's why we have to to you know respect and you know we had this kind of discussion that got a little heated but I recognize that every single other person that I meet is this other has this divine components that's down here wrestling with this physical world it's like that's why they say Namaskaram or Namaste is I the the that part of me recognizes that part of you and we're down here wrestling with this I'm not mad about I don't get mad about that and I try and if we all took that view then maybe we would be more better as a society but anyway I do actually have a hard stop in like four minutes so if we could let's do that then but I think it's been a great conversation oh I so appreciate it and I the work is phenomenal I've said that enough so David you write some as you alluded to some fantastic blog posts that cover a variety of topics you podcast as well so people need to check out these books to get the kind of background but where can they stay more up to date on your kind of minute-by-minute stuff yeah thanks Alex so I have a website that is called star myth world dot com so if you remember star myths of the world it's star myth world dot com you can really just search for my last name and the word stars and you can probably stumble upon something but star myth world dot com has tons of content and there's two exciting events coming up I'll be in October I'll be at the conference on procession and ancient knowledge where Robert shock will be there Carmen Bolter Alan Green Christopher Dunn that's October 4th 5th and 6th and there's a discount code if you want to sign up just put my last name Matheson in the discount code to get $50 off on that one that's in Newport Beach California that'll be cool lots of great speakers will be there and then there's another event in April of 2020 that one's almost sold out it's with the guys from grimerica I know you know them and also a couple guys from the brothers of the serpent podcast a newer podcast really interesting that'll be in the the high altitude desert near Bryce Canyon will be going to Bryce Canyon to look at the stars talk about the myths and all these topics that Alex and I just discussed that'll be in April of 2020 and that's contact at the cabin dot com so you can check out the details there on that it's almost sold out to awesome David fantastic you're great man thank you so much for joining me thanks for thanks for going in that direction and keeping me you know under pressure causes you to articulate more clearly what you're trying to say so I'm I'm all I'm all for you're using the old Socratic method on me there I see from your ancient Greek roots Alex alright thanks a lot it's been really fun and we'll talk again thanks again to David Matheson for joining me today on skeptico final question I guess I tee up from this episode and since I've probably frustrated the heck out of Dave with this question I might as well ask you all who created the star myths so if you listen to that show I don't need to add any more context to that but I would love to hear your answer the best place if you're interested in interacting with me and other listeners is probably through the skeptical forum you can find it from the skeptical website which is at S K E P T I K and while you're there of course you can find links to all our previous episodes over 400 of them all available for free download you just get the mp3 and you're often can do what you like thanks so much for joining me on skeptical I do have I think some really good shows coming up I'm continuing to just kind of pound on these issues that are important to me I'm trying to figure some stuff out so this show might sound a little bit different from other book interview shows you hear but hey that's kind of my agenda if you will so I hope you stick around I hope you share it with anyone you think would be interested in it and until next time take care and bye for now