Can consciousness exist without a body?

Peg Serena is a stop-motion animator and a long-time listener who used to be a science-first skeptic. But then, when her kids started to ask her about what happens after you die, she realized she didn’t know what to say. Which is how she found herself binge-watching a medium show on Netflix, and eventually hearing the voice of her dead grandfather. And that was just the beginning. Peg Serena, circa 2023 Life After Death with Tyler Henry Bored with her art Her grandfather’s nickname for her Forgiveness, 25 years later Atheist husband Keeping both doors open Remembering other experiences Intense vs. subtle experiences Talking to a witch Nudges, bids, and consent Meditating with trees Great-grandmother’s nylon stockings Is unconditional love just what consciousness is? Psychosis vs. anomalous experience Grandpa’s pipe Bliss and the lost art of leisure A haunted house in the ‘90s The ghost in the one-hour photo Grace and umbrellas UFO memory blocks Memory isn’t a record, it’s a narrative Materialism’s influence on memory and perception “Way, way, way happier” living in an enchanted world And in the epilogue… Michael Singer Fast and testimony meetings Unanswered prayers Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com. Shownotes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For almost all of human history, nobody had a word for animism, because they just intuitively knew everything in the world is alive. Enter: science, which is very good at taking things apart to see how they work. But typically when you take something apart, like, say, a frog, it dies. This week James Taylor Foreman (of The Metaphor) explains that objects object, and how this connects to the idea that the world is full of gods, including the one that prevents you from facing the wrong direction in a movie theater. Trust us, it’ll make sense later. “Reality is narrative, and our only job is to make it beautiful.” The gods framework vs. the rationalists’ consciousness talk David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous David Bentley Hart Animism “We live in the corpse of Lucifer” Materialism is a brand-new psychotechnology Objective literally means “that which objects” Science is a basilisk — this was from C.S. Lewis: "Perhaps, in the nature of things, analytical understanding must always be a basilisk which kills what it sees and only sees by killing." Things that can’t be studied after the body dies Learning to dance vs. explaining dancing Being hyper-verbal is a disorder Point out someone’s gift and they can’t do it anymore The yips The letterman jacket problem Un-knowing something is as impossible as returning to Eden Is there something it feels like to be an egregore? The ghost in the green hat Telos Christ consciousness (ish) Progress only gets made by people who break the egregore Too much order, too much chaos, and the Tao Plato: learning is remembering Aiming at heaven vs. surfing the moment Catholic confession The kingdom of heaven = behaviors that iterate well Addiction is a pattern that destroys its host Why two sexes? Parasites Also: spiritual parasites Thoreau (bummer) George Eliot: despair as “the painful eagerness of unfed hope” Mal’s college paper on smell and attraction As in the blood cell, so in the Jordan Analogy is the rule, not the exception Why “anthropomorphize” is a dirty word Science as method vs. ontology Parasitic scientists The blind men and the elephant And in the epilogue… Did Brian Johnson make a deal with the devil? James’ childhood seizures that took away his power of speech Faith, doubt, entropy, death, and psychedelics Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joshua Cutchin has spent more than a decade exploring the wide territory of the paranormal — fairy food, brimstone smells, Bigfoot, the dead.… What do most people think isn’t real, but he does? The line between fact and fiction is very, very blurry. For example: stigmata. Christ would have been nailed to the cross through the wrists, but stigmatists bleed from the palms, which is where the wounds are in most paintings. Or fairies, who for centuries were human-sized and wingless, until broadly distributed storybooks gave them wings. Now, when people see fairies, they see wings. So, uh, what’s going on here? You might have to just decide for yourself. Josh’s extensive bibliography Creative pressure builds like a boil Is writing a paranormal experience? Academic vs fiction vs casual nonfiction The thing Josh believes that most people don’t Nobody is rational Archetypes, egregores, tulpas Ghosts slam doors, but you can’t grab one Stigmata Fairies Reality is squishy “It’s all consciousness” is a boring reduction (so is: it’s all ones and zeros) The third space of meaning Josh thinks space is boring, but Jordan is still obsessed Out-of-bounds video game maps Escapism vs. awe Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Scrolling TikTok Jesus vs. Christ: “the source code of the universe” became flesh Jeffrey Kripal and the human as two The yugas Climbing mountains and Mormon temples Religion as the ultimate fake-it-till-you-make-it What’s wrong with the Ark Encounter? Jung’s Red Book: the problem is how we treat fairy tales Faith playing footsie with materialism Load-bearing truth claims Virtue for its own sake “Above my pay grade” Discernment And in the epilogue… Ghosts aren’t dead people Escapism vs awe Egomaxxing Subscribe now Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tom returns! Mostly to tell us about his new show (the one he left us for), which tbf is straight fire. Then, honestly it’s just the three of us hanging out for like an hour, just in case you’ve been hankering for some unstructured conversation between the three of us. What do most people not think is real, but Tom does? Raised by Depression babies The Night Parade on SpectreVision Radio — where extra meets ordinary (Not Festivities in the After Hours) The goat man and the spirit of coffee Joseph Campbell × James Burke’s Connections GGU calved Aggregate experiencer data Creative process talk Diabolical Lies Shelved with Emrys “Where is my love for this?” Mal’s elephants Anyone who tells you you’re insufficient is out of their mind Resistance commensurate with change This from Autumn Christian Unlimiting other people Why Lady Gaga tried to be the weirdest person in the room Jung: the unreconciled becomes fate “If you want to know how someone feels inside, hang out with them and see how you feel afterward” Insane people calling Mal ugly Systems that teach you not to trust your gut Sovereignty “Your feelings are real, but not necessarily true” The physiological reality of feelings, and how they start (and end) in the body Somatic healing Self occupies form Charles Fort and the procession of the damned The Hyakki Yagyō James Baldwin “If you take the time to look at something, it will reveal itself” Diversity as epistemology The 1841 Tennessee rain of flesh Odysseus and the shade of Achilles You are the arbiter of meaning Meaninglessness and boredom Amy Tan’s The Backyard Bird Chronicles Asking to be entertained is the least agentic thing a person can do Daniel Noah and rocks Blake, Auguries of Innocence And in the epilogue…(which was actually a prologue) Does your God agree with your politics? Potty-training your inner critic Are you a zero-to-one guy, or a 2 to 10 guy? Subscribe now Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniel Noah co-founded SpectreVision with Elijah Wood, and then spun up SpectreVision Radio Network. Also, he thinks rocks are alive. This episode is full of wonderful stories. Rocks are alive! But what does that mean? Jordan’s first Hare Krishna chant, and meditating on a polished moonstone Nothing gets simpler the closer you look Empaths, clairsentience, and emotional wallpaper Elder Joshua Tree boulders A stone triangle revealed by moonlight His wife felt it. So did Ryan Singer of Late Night on the Astral Plane The Tongva: a creation myth about harmony, and elders who pass into rock The Doors lived in Daniel’s house The Doors of Perception and Death by Astonishment Why did so many musicians move to Laurel Canyon at once? The boy who collects rocks on The Telepathy Tapes Autistic kids don’t feel less Daniel shows us some rocks Everybody Needs a Rock by Byrd Baylor Stone tape theory (and the 1972 BBC film The Stone Tape) “Pseudo” science Mystical traditions are soul technology (thanks Kelly Chase) “Unintelligible intellectually but fully resonant emotionally” Animism Negotiating with the spirits of a haunted house Things vanish, some of them reappear The trickster gives you enough to keep you guessing, but never enough to convince a skeptic Robin Lassiter’s Earth: A Love Story and the synchronicity addiction We are attractors Hellier and Operation Trojan Horse Book encounters Daniel’s books are pulling themselves off the shelves Attention as magnetism Alters One-downing Jordan’s experience at Old North Bridge 20 years ago Attention must be trained Meditation before “cosmic encounters” High Strangeness And in the epilogue… Daniel’s stories of contact with NHI What are “aliens”? Deceit and biological envy Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We discuss a recent claim by a prominent scientist that consciousness can't exist outside a flesh-and-blood body, whether uploading your mind would capture you or just a copy of your cognition, why we understand death about as well as we understand sleep (barely), and whether the first person to live to 500 would be lucky or cursed. Jordan makes the case that immortality might be monstrous. Mal says death is the salt of life. A scientist claims consciousness can’t exist outside a body “You are more than your body” — but you are also your body “How the hell do you know what happens when you die?” Prize goes to the first person to die, turn to mulch, then come back and tell us what happened The pharmacy of the body The kids in The Telepathy Tapes Energy bodies, astral bodies, and the limits of Western materialism (round and round we go) If we don’t understand sleep, how do we understand death? Uploading cognition vs awareness Every human project is an immortality project BJ Miller on why we treat the disabled as angels or monsters Dracula is a class narrative People have been saying the first person to live to 500 has already been born Immortality is monstrous because death is what makes us human Adam Miller on the unexpected spiritual consequence of “transhumanist” longevity Oliver Burkeman on the freedom of limits What the body knows, and the risks of resisting resistance Mormon stuff And in the epilogue… How to protect the part of yourself that creates Rebecca Black (yep) Not the Bible (oops) Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week we’re joined by a bonafide listener! Elliott Chadwick emailed us a story about a young man on anti-psychotic meds who turned out not to be psychotic. We had to know more, so we invited him on the show. Mal also tells us about her brother, and the strange and beautiful world he inhabits, and we talk about how to tell the difference between numinous experiences and psychotic episodes. It’s a doozy. Elliott is a psychiatric nurse practitioner turned bodyworker, and co-host of The Glimmerance — a show about creativity and spirituality against the materialist overculture What do most people think isn’t real, but Elliott does? “Not all hallucinations are psychiatric symptoms” Nearly an atheist a few years ago The dark figure in the young man’s room “Have you ever tried to ask this guy to go away?” What antipsychotics meds do to a brain that isn’t psychotic Trauma, fight-or-flight, and the brain filling in the corners “Magical thinking” What’s the difference between people like Robin Lassiter and Kelly Chase and psych patients? Mal’s brother, and the mind he calls “Chuck” (Charles Bonnet syndrome) “Sometimes I swear he’s connected to something beautiful” “Certainty is a kind of psychosis” Too much certainty about death, poverty, or God is delusion Maturity is the capacity to hold two opposing truths at once An arsonist who believed he owned the building Thin places A case against absolutism “dead with daddy” (from Taylor Tomlinson’s Netflix special) And in the epilogue… Drugs Anti-materialism conversion story A story about telepathy between his grandparents Subscribe now Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mike Clelland is the owl guy. For fifteen years, people have been sending him their stories — owls and UFOs, owls and meditation, owls and mushrooms, owls and shamanic initiation. “That’s my research,” he says. “I get up and open my email inbox.” And now he’s writing a book about owls and death. We had Mike on the show over a year ago, and this is his long overdue return to Gods, Ghosts & UFOs. Mike’s novel The Unseen How mythic, archetypal symbolism wells up in the world Death by Astonishment by Andrew Gallimore — how the brain builds worlds out of noisy sensory data “All points in time and space are connected” Thank God for filters The five owl symbolic relationships: UFOs, meditation, psychedelics, shamanic initiation, death The owl isn’t connected to UFOs, it is a totem of transformation “I took a truckload of mushrooms and saw a 30-foot glowing owl in my bedroom.” Mike’s story about his mom, Alzheimer’s, and a black-footed ferret “I know there’s an afterlife, and I know because of an owl” Sometimes an owl is just an owl What makes a sign a sign? A stranger’s prayer Mechanisms vs. magic Mallory’s owl story (which happened very soon after our first episode with Mike) God speaks in a language you understand Resist firmly defining the meaning of synchronicities Awe pushes us toward bravery and hope How Mallory got the fire back for writing Owl biology Can you invite mystical experiences? More amazing stories One owl, two completely different synchronistic experiences And in the epilogue… Mike’s new book (and a sequel to The Unseen) Mallory’s screenplay Jordan’s novel Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kelly Chase (Inquiry with Kelly Chase) is back, which makes her the default president of the GGU returning-guests club. This week, we ask the question we’re asking everyone: what do most people think isn't real that you do? She gives a spicy answer. She claims that most people behave like materialists, even if they go to church. From there, we talk about what the evidences of belief actually are, and how it relates to “conversion.” Kelly explains how her own experience rewrote her whole value system in a matter of seconds five years ago. As usual, we figured everything out and solved all the world’s problems. You’re welcome! Most people behave like materialists, even the religious ones Religion as lava that cools into obsidian The reemergence of the feminine “Tell me what music is.” “The greatest evidence it happened is me” Great evidence for an individual, terrible evidence for the collective The old version of Kelly is horrified, tied up in a back room somewhere Molly Drake — “I remember firelight, and you remember smoke” Conversion is what you do, not what you say All behavior is downstream of belief “I think my job is fake” Is everyone waking up? AI is literally sociopathic And in the epilogue… Kelly tells us about how she recently maybe saw fairies (possibly our best paywall-bait yet) Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Email godsghostsufos[at]gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our guest today, Robert Frederick, studies Sir Francis Bacon — the Elizabethan lawyer, spy, and philosopher usually credited as the father of modern science. Robert claims that Bacon is the father of both modern science and scientism. If you’re thinking, “What the hell is scientism?” then this is the episode for you. We talk about why saying “trust the science” is motivated by the same thing that makes people say “trust in God,” and how Francis Bacon was both a once-in-a-generation polymath, and also a pompous idiot who stripped culture of metaphysics. Jordan also contends that true religion and real science should be the same thing, but that they both get corrupted in basically the same way. Guys it’s a good one. (Isn’t it always?) Shout out to the God’s Eye View podcast Science and scientism Bacon vs. Aristotle Deductive vs. Inductive reasoning Scientism is anti-science How Bacon got rid of metaphysics Bacon might have been Gnostic (and what that means) You can’t build a government out of data Effective altruists are “a special kind of stupid” We’re already post-scarcity Yuval Noah Harari is the latest and greatest Bacon booster We’re definitely coming back for a Part 2, in which Robert will explain how he knows Bacon was actually Shakespeare Find Robert Frederick’s work at The Hidden Life is Best Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices