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.

In our modern, technologically sophisticated world, it is something of a wonder that a medium such as the podcast continues to thrive. When podcasts first began to emerge in the new era of mini audio devices known as iPods (which speaks, of course, to the origin of the name), many saw them as a nostalgic throwback to the era of radio plays, before even the advent of television. The fact that the podcast medium continues to hold its own, even well into the 2020s, suggests there is something deeply enduring about the experience of tuning into real human voices, in order to feel an authentic human connection.

For me personally, it has been a profoundly rewarding experience to build that connection with a dedicated podcast audience that feels very much like a kind of extended family; a tribe, if you will. And as we make note of this, the 100th episode of Point of Convergence, I think it bears pausing for a moment to celebrate not only this milestone in the life of the podcast, but also the human journey we all share, one that draws each of us to this mysterious collection of topics centered around anomalous – and therefore extraordinary – experience.

Truth be told, what you have primarily witnessed over these many episodes is my own indulgence of curiosity. For it is primarily questions, rather than answers, that have driven this quest; one centered around both hard and incontrovertible data, but also an intuitive sense that the world we are all a part of is made up of so much more than what we’ve been led to believe in our conventional, reductionistically materialist society.

To mark this turning over into the triple digits, I plan to make this episode partly a retrospective of sorts, one in which I take some time to look back at the meandering – but also synchronistically orchestrated – path that has brought us here to episode 100. What lessons have been learned along the way in exploring the so-called UFO Phenomenon and related topics? And how might some additional but associated notions – such as that of a hologram, or a “holomovement”, which we’ll delve into today – help shed further light not just on the anomalous, but also on the ultimate nature of reality itself? These are the particular questions we’ll seek to indulge in this, the 100th episode of the Point of Convergence podcast.