Erik Davies interviews Christopher Knowles in a splendid game of cerebral tag on ecstatic transformation in popular culture, mystery cults, Oracles, the dangers of Dionysus, entheogens, Apollo, Serapis, Mithra and tracking the holistic mind online.
Well that and more but you get the picture (Henotheism is the pick 'n mix of ancient Greek deity worship, much more sensible than all that Zadokite bollocks if you must have a God).
The most interesting audio recording of a personal journey and experiment being shared and explored over the internet I've ever listened to. Joseph Campbell on the Psilocybin he never had the courage or conviction of applied mythology to take.
One of the challenges about the poorly named UFO phenomena is how quickly and extensively it spreads into every area of super woo phenomena. I got into it by targeting quantum mechanics and mysticism for personal study at the beginning of the year and every trail led to UFOs or aliens at some point . As I was studying mysticism, hermeticism and gnosticism I thought it couldn't be that much of a side path to take a fun stroll down.
And so it's important to say that I don't really find UFO's all that interesting. I find the possible occupants of these craft interesting and that interest doubled as I learned from the likes of Dr. Karla Turner and Niara Isley that the military has a close working relationship with, and is often performing the abductions to conduct experiments on people that are all about the genetics, the genetics, the genetics.
So it's easy to be misrepresented as to what I'm interested in but the reality is I'm the last to have cause to complain because I've been deceiving myself. All along I've drawn the line at Cryptozoology because it's one thing to be exploring popular culture mysteries that have a military industrial complex trail of evidence, but did I really want to be investing time in Bigfoot and The Mothman prophecies? They just seemed so lo-tech to me and it is this that unveils my cultural bias.
Well, it took a British Midlander's point of view to hold up a mirror to myself because even though I don't wish to pursue CZoology (look I can barely bring myself to spell it out) as a subject I now accept that it's all one big overlapping Venn diagram clusterfuck overlap of super woo Rorschach testing and exploring of the self. Synchromysticism cranks up around UFOs, and UFO's crank up around Cryptozoology sightings and so on and so forth. You get the picture.
Listening to Nick Redfern and the likes of Christopher Knowles and Mike Clelland of late I've had to accept that as much as I'd like to have nice neat lines of confusion the reality is I haven't got a clue what is going on with the multi dimensional and multiple tiered nuanced and highly contextual subject.
I guess I should have followed my own advice from the way back machine. Everything is contextual. The Trickster is at at play as authorChristopher O'Brien explains to a witless interviewer in this interview and as Nick carefully relates below where he says 'it's not that it's just weird, it's too weird'. I didn't want to be here but here I am anyway so I might as well just accept it. It's not cut and dried. Nothing ever is.
Update: Below Nick Redfern I've posted a two part Christopher O'Brien podcast interview on a similar subject though there's some interesting 2012 perspectives in there too and below that (hopefully) is Mike Clelland interviewing Christopher O'Brien on stalking the trickster.
