Since the very beginning of this podcast, we’ve been exploring the various experiences people report having, across time and across cultures, that speak to outlier events; events that defy easy categorization, especially within our modern, Western milieu. Here we’re speaking of events that are not only unusual, but that manifest in such a way as to appear—simply put—impossible, at least according to so-called “modern” understanding. Because of the bewildering—”does not compute” nature of these events, we’ve often resorted to doubting the witnesses themselves, calling them everything from prone to exaggeration, to delusional, to frauds.
And yet, the vast numbers of these events—once you dare begin to collect and collate the date in a dedicated, objective fashion—suggest such easy—and let’s call a spade a spade here—lazy dismissals, simply can’t stand as a legitimate assessment. Indeed, on this podcast, the sheer preponderance of these highly strange experiences has led us to not only catalog and compare them, but also to ask: what model of reality could possibly emerge to help us understand them? If these are “real”—as a phenomenological approach to the data would certainly suggest they are—then what does that say of the nature of our reality, itself?
Some would suggest—and have long suggested, going back to the dawn of our civilization, in fact—that we have everything upside down and inside out. That is to say, from this perspective, the problem lies not with these so-called outlier experiences, but with our insistence that this—which is to say: everything we see manifesting around us in apparently solid, physical form—is actually base reality. These people would unapologetically suggest it is in fact not; that this is a hall of mirrors, if you will, a carefully crafted illusion that hides, behind a veil, a deeper “true” existence, one not defined by the duality we see so evident in our day to day lives “here”.
The movement and/or perspective we’re speaking of here is colloquially known as “gnosticism.” Gnosis is a Greek term meaning “knowledge,” specifically direct, experiential knowledge of the divine or ultimate reality. Adherents of gnosticism are quick to point out that this is not mere belief—arising from some external authority or doctrine—but rather a knowing based on direct, first-hand experience. This notion of a direct, first-hand, felt-sense of the ultimately real, helps us make sense of why so many experiencers report these events as being “more real than real.” If these people are indeed experiencing modes of existence and/or states of being beyond the veil, as it were, then this of course is exactly what we would expect them to report.
It’s important to ask: why does this notion of our waking experience not being ultimately real prove so enduring? Why does some version of this perspective show up over and over again across time and space within human experience; evident in everything from Vedanta to Buddhism to Jungian depth psychology? Perhaps even more compellingly—at least to modern ears—why are elements of this perspective evident in our most cutting-edge physics, astronomy and neuroscience? More to the point, if this is indeed a truer apprehension of ultimate reality, then what are the implications, and how now shall we live? These are precisely the matters that we’ll seek to unpack in this, the 118th episode of the Point of Convergence podcast.
117 ~ From Abduction to Agency