Over the course of the history of this podcast, I have taken several opportunities to publish a special edition of the podcast, where I answer audience questions, in a feature I call The Inquiring Mind. This week’s episode mark’s the occasion where I do this for a 4th time. Now, since the 3rd edition of the Inquiring Mind, which launched several months ago, you could say a few things have changed.

Perhaps the most significant change came recently, when I posted an actual photo of myself to social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. I followed that up this past week with my first two video interviews, first for James Iandoli’s Engaging the Phenomenon podcast and YouTube channel, and then for Kelly Chase’s The UFO Rabbit Hole YouTube channel. There are other interviews scheduled in the near future as well, which I will let people know about as they become available.

Part of the interest that has arisen lately relates to an event I attended at the Monroe Institute back at the end of May. Regular listeners to the podcast may recall that I discussed events from that multi-day retreat in Episode 67, which was titled Human Initiated Contact: On Proactive Communication with Non-Human Intelligence. That event marked a new season in my history as a researcher of the UFO Phenomenon and its intersection with other topics of interest, such as near death experiences, out of body experiences, and psi phenomena like telepathy, psychokinesis and precognition.

This new season involves me doing actual field research, where I travel to various locations to join with others in actively exploring these various points of convergence. As it turns out, at the time of the launch of this podcast, I will be away for a second time doing active field research. The fruit of that experience I hope to report on in future episodes of this podcast.

These new opportunities to connect with various players in this field, including both leading researchers and individuals Joseph Burkes has deemed, prime contactees, is yet another of the many profound opportunities that have arisen since I first started this podcast, some 18 months ago. It goes without saying that I really had no idea then, the many avenues this profound path of discovery would open up before me. Here’s to that journey of adventure and fascination, as it continues to manifest in each of our lives.

But for now, without further adieu, let’s get back to the matter at hand: which has to do with me answering more of the thoughtful and thought-provoking questions that you, the audience, have sent in, for this latest edition of the Inquiring Mind feature, in this, the 69th episode of the Point of Convergence podcast.

In the long history of strange events occurring in the lives of human beings, the drive for understanding has been, not surprisingly, shaped by the model of reality prevalent at the time. Thus, while our distant ancestors saw the appearance of strange, awe-inspiring non-human intelligences as a manifestation of angels and demons: entities normally bound to the spiritual domain beyond this mortal coil, modern westerners have tended to see more recent appearances of these non-human entities as the arrival of extraterrestrial entities who’ve traversed the vast expanse of outer space to get here.

In both of these described kinds of encounters, the interpretation has less to do with the elements of the encounters themselves, and more to do with the overarching meaning-making model of a particular civilization. And, of course, this is not just a time-bound phenomenon. Because, even today, a Shamanistically-oriented culture is likely to see these Others in a very different light than a scientifically-minded society shaped by the values of the Enlightenment.

In fact, when the gatekeepers of a particular society are convinced that certain kinds of described encounters just simply cannot be – as in modern western societies – then when these encounters are cloaked in a particularly potent degree of what is often termed High Strangeness, the event is just suppressed altogether, lest the witness be deemed mentally unstable or of questionable credibility. This of course doesn’t mean that such events don’t happen, but merely that they have no place to be categorized and analyzed within a particular framework.

All this is to say, the annals of non-conventional encounters from across time serve as a kind of road map for our shifting collective attempt to describe reality itself. And to separate the understanding of these kinds of encounters from the overarching meaning model of a particular time and place in which they occurred is to miss a major point of the exercise; for these matters work hand in hand, in a coordinated and interwoven feedback loop of event and interpretation.

Typically, while a certain brave subset of pioneers are willing to question the meaning model of a particular time and place, the overarching metanarrative doesn’t begin to break down – making room for new and transcendent hypotheses – until the sheer volume of outlier data has created enough collective cognitive dissonance so as to make it clear that there is no other feasible way forward than to trail-blaze a new metanarrative.

Speaking of trailblazing new metanarratives, today we’re going to discuss the work of just such an individual. Donald Hoffman, an American cognitive psychologist and professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, with joint appointments in the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, the Department of Philosophy, and the School of Computer Science, is someone who – decades ago – became convinced that the reality model that western society has been living under over the last several centuries simply cannot stand. From his perspective – and he is one of a growing segment within the scientific establishment – the data arising from diverse fields of study has made it clear that physicalism – the metaphysical view that all mental phenomena are ultimately physical phenomena, or necessitated by physical phenomena – is simply incorrect.

Make no mistake, Hoffman’s postulations are not based in imagination and wishful thinking. No, truth be told, mathematical theorems and the implications of the theory of evolution by natural selection are what drive this new line of thinking. These ideas, put forth in a model he calls Conscious Realism, have profound implications for our understanding of all that is. And as it pertains to the usual subject matter of this podcast, Hoffman’s work opens up new, tantalizing and explanatorily powerful ways of making sense of the strange encounters we’ve been discussing, while also offering a robust explanation to make sense of the so-called Fermi Paradox. It is the implications of Hoffman’s Conscious Realism as it pertains to the UFO Phenomenon and general paranormality that we’ll be doing a deep dive into in this, the 66th episode of the Point of Convergence podcast.