Episode Transcript
[00:00:09] Speaker A: Hello, Serge.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Hello there, Steve. How are you?
[00:00:13] Speaker A: How are you? I. I believe you're just recovering from. You had pneumonia, didn't you? But you. You are recovering.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: I had pneumonia, but really interesting.
It was a joyful time. I had to let go all my business and lie in hospital with, you know, tubes going into me and, you know, all those drips that they love to give you. Drips. You feel a bit of a drip lying there, but actually it felt quite a relaxing time.
And only I've been a bit careful because it's taken so some time to recover because when you're a bit older, you need to beware these things because they can sort of take over a bit. But I'm in good shape. And. Steve, you are.
Are regurgitating your old role as a rock and roll star.
[00:01:12] Speaker A: That's a good way to put it. Regurgitation is a good way to put it.
[00:01:15] Speaker B: You are regurgitating your. Your sort of role as a. As.
As.
It was part of the Great Romantics.
[00:01:26] Speaker A: I guess so. Yeah. Yeah. It's 30 years since I was in. I used to play in bands.
I used to play the bass guitar and sing in bands back then.
[00:01:35] Speaker B: Sort of like Paul McCartney.
[00:01:37] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Only not. I wasn't quite as talented or. I'm not quite as talented.
[00:01:42] Speaker B: Oh, really?
[00:01:44] Speaker A: Not quite. But yeah. To. To coincide with my new book on the Beatles, I've been performing some Beatles songs. We had an event, a launch event for the book last weekend, and I played a few songs and people sang along. It was wonderful. It was a really fantastic atmosphere.
[00:01:59] Speaker B: Well, well, absolutely fantastic. And I look forward in our new podcast that you're going to be dressed in a Boy George outfit, you know, a nice pink hat, you know. Well, Steve, you need to bring a style now that you're regurgitating the New Romantics. It's very exciting. Anyway, I think.
I think. I think our guest is waiting, so we'd better.
[00:02:27] Speaker A: Yeah, okay. But it's. It's wonderful that you're. You're feeling better and that you recovered so quickly. So, yeah, let's. Let's speak to Jim, our guest for this episode of Fierce Grace.
Hello, Jim.
[00:02:44] Speaker B: Hello, Jim.
Jim.
[00:02:47] Speaker A: Hi, Jim.
[00:02:48] Speaker B: Hi, Jim. Welcome. And you have a tanker behind you. And I also have a tanker behind me.
[00:02:56] Speaker A: Ah, A tank.
[00:02:58] Speaker B: Both tankered. Jim, I'm so glad you've made it. And yes, I really welcome you.
[00:03:05] Speaker C: Apologize for my elusiveness over the last month. I was traveling pretty frenetically and hurt 60 people around and, like, something got lost in my Scheduling.
[00:03:16] Speaker B: Well, Jim, it's understandable. Everyone will understand because I'm going to introduce you and say a few words about you. In fact, it won't be a few words because one can't say a few words about you because you're such a multifaceted person.
But anyway, I just want to say that we feel honored to have you on our show because your life bridges so many different worlds and realities.
Indeed, you've established yourself, as I see it, at the boundary between established systems of thought and whole new ways of looking at the world.
And among the many, many notable things you've done included Having started in 2005, the state of the World Forum with Mikhail Gorbachev in the days when it seemed that that country would remain peaceful. And I remember, you know, following it in great detail and thinking, you know, what an extraordinary, visionary thing to have done.
Jim, you know, as your organization, I remember it brought together world leaders, scientists, CEOs of major corporations, and indigenous people to discuss how best to deal with serious global challenges.
In fact, Jim, you've been associated with efforts to build dialogue around global governance, sustainability, and education.
In 2005, you founded Wisdom University, which I believe morphed into the new successful ubiquity University.
That is, you're not just a mystic and a scholar and a diplomat and.
And a theologian, but you're a real mover and shaker.
And in the past, you were busy, I remember, with anti war and anti nuclear movements, as well as with an organization connected with citizen diplomacy.
Jim, I hope your ears are not getting too red, but they deserve to.
You moved through Harvard, Cambridge, Esalen, Soviet, American diplomacy. You've entered into a profoundly.
And your work is about changing how we see the world.
And it's hard to define you. I was thinking, how do I define Jim? You know, you're not a conventional diplomat, a conventional academic, although you've written a lot of books about American foreign policy, about who killed jfk.
And you're really. And one of your latest dodges, and I call this a dodge a bit, is that you're now an emissary for letting people know that UFOs do actually exist. I'm going to ask your question about that later. So you won't be able to get away with it. But anyway, Jim, you've been director of Nuclear policy for the Jesuit movement. You are director of the. Well, I could go on and on, but. But my friends, we feel very honored to have Jim on our podcast. So welcome. Jim.
[00:07:09] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:07:11] Speaker A: So, Jim, I was reading about your Background. And I've met you a couple of times at conferences and so forth.
And it strikes me that the thread which runs through your whole life, really, in all the different areas that you've been active in, the thread is really, or the theme is really service, I would say service to the world in different forms.
And I was wondering if you were consciously aware of that at a young age, or has it just been sort of kind of involuntary transpersonal impulse, or was it something that you were consciously aware of when you were younger, that you felt a desire to serve humanity?
[00:07:52] Speaker C: Well, I think that's a big question. I think, you know, as Shakespeare said, no great act is ever done with a single motive.
You know, oftentimes we have the experience and we. We don't really understand the meaning until sometimes years afterward.
I've always been intrigued by acts of imagination, you know, coming up with ideas and then just making the ideas happen in the.
In the real world. That's always been a fascination for me. I.
I made a vow very, very early on that I was never going to work.
I was never going to sell my time, because that seemed to me to be an ignoble thing to do while one is on earth is to sell one's time to somebody else.
So that placed me in an extraordinary position to figure out what I was going to do. And I realized that if one applies one's creative intelligence to works of art, essentially that one becomes an attractor to people.
It's almost like the Tom Sawyer effect that I would have these big ideas and I'd run around trying to effectuate these ideas, but there was always motivated by the greater good.
Although equally, I would say I've been motivated by fighting evil.
I think the two are not disconnected. You know, I oppose the Vietnam War.
You know, I oppose nuclear power plants.
You know, I'm opposed to the genocide in Gaza.
I think it's important in the spirit of Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela to stand against evil. And that clarifies, at least in my experience, what one is for.
So I think the positive and negative aspects of perception for me have always been integral to one another and have really guided my life path.
[00:10:10] Speaker B: You're a fighter for things. You're not fighting against things.
You're a true spiritual warrior. I see you in the tradition of things, spiritual warriorhood, going back to the Samurai, going back to King Arthur and his noble knights of the Round Table. You stand for those values of integrity, perseverance, sort of moral purity, sort of helping the weak chivalry and let me ask you, I remember when this happened with Gorbachev, what enabled you to, you know, to move yourself onto a level that you communicate with a world leader. I mean, you know, you've also got a hell of a lot of chutzpah to you, Jim.
[00:11:16] Speaker C: Well, I think that's, that's probably a true statement, a lot of chutzpah.
That's actually an interesting story. Gorbachev, because he, he and I did come together in a very powerful way right at the end of his presidency in December of 1991. I was in fact, the last foreigner that he received in his Kremlin office.
And the reason for that, which is an, is an example of the kinds of things that I've done, but it was also what really catalyzed a 10 year, 15 year relationship with him through the State of the World Forum.
I'd been working in Soviet American relations for some time, beginning in 1985, actually, when I joined the Esalen Institute, Soviet American Exchange Program.
And one of the things that I was particularly interested in in my work in the Soviet Union at that time
[00:12:18] Speaker B: was
[00:12:21] Speaker C: how the leadership functioned. So I really focused my attention on the Politburo and the Central Committee.
Many of my colleagues were interested in more people to people exchanges. And I was interested in how this totalitarian system really exercised power.
And so I began to really just hang out at that level.
And one thing led to another and I ended up organizing Boris Yeltsin's first trip to the United States in September of 1989.
I ended up working with Edward Shevardnadze when he resigned as Foreign Minister in December of 1990, brought him to the United States in the spring of 1991.
And then in August, after the coup attempt against Gorbachev, remember when Yeltsin crawled up on that tank outside the Russian Parliament in Moscow and the coup attempt collapsed and then Gorbachev came back in.
But in the meantime, Yeltsin was doing to Gorbachev what the KUA plotters were doing, but at a much more sophisticated subterranean level. And Gorbachev was overthrown by Yeltsin, who had defeated the coup plotters in December of 1991. And anyway, in the middle of all this, Chevron called me up and said, Jim, you know, the Soviet Union is falling apart and the hospitals don't have syringes or anesthesics and they need everything. So I said, well, what about mobilizing massive airlifts? Let's put together some what we call the Russian Winter campaign. So I started, I called people I knew George Schultz, who was former Secretary of State, and I knew James Baker, who was the current Secretary of State at that time, and various other people. And I said, would you be willing to support airlifts to the Soviet Union because it's in the state of collapse? And they said, sure.
So we put together Probably a dozen 20 massive airplane cargo airplanes full of food and medical supplies and toys for kids and all of that.
And the little incident came right at the end of that.
It was in December of that year, 1991.
And I just had a wild idea. Why don't we bring an Antonov 124, which is the biggest aircraft in the world, with a Galaxy C5A, which was the biggest military aircraft that the US had, and fly them together to Moscow.
So we did that and I was in the Antonov and I got out at Sheremetrovo Airport and Yaakov Lev was there and Shevardnadze was greeting and they said, there's going to be a press conference. And I had this little tweak in my head and I thought, you know what? I don't think I should speak. I think I should go find the pilot of the Galaxy C5A, the American pilot, and see if he wants to say something. So I had never seen him. I walked over to the airplane and he was just getting out of the aircraft, they were unloading the cargo. And I said, would you be willing to say a few words? And he said, sure.
And he was a very distinguished guy, the crew cut. And he gets up and he said, ladies and gentlemen, I'm a four star general.
And all my professional life I've practiced simulated flights to the Soviet Union carrying thermonuclear warheads.
And here I am at the end of my career, really flying to the Soviet Union, and I'm bringing humanitarian relief.
And he starts to cry and Yakov Lev leans over to me and he said, garrison, this is unbelievable. You got to tell this story to Gorbachev.
So I went, whoa. Okay.
So the next day I'm picked up and I'm driven into the Kremlin and, and I meet Gorbachev with Yakov Lev. And it was.
It was about the 17th, 18th of December. By that time, it was very close to Christmas. He resigned on December 25, 1991.
And that's how I met him. And then that sustained itself. And I went back in January of 1992, and then we brought Gorbachev over in May of 1992 for the inauguration of, of Ronald Reagan's presidential Library in Simi Valley in Southern California, did this trip for him all over the United States and that, that launched what became known as the State of the world forum between 1995 and the year 2000. And we traveled all over the world. We held conferences in Moscow and Beijing and New Delhi and Johannesburg and Brussels and all over. And it was all around the tagline of transforming conversations that matter.
[00:18:13] Speaker B: I'm thinking all the incredible work that has been done by you and other people at that time, amount of goodwill.
What has happened that our world has fallen into this state that it's in now. I mean, you know, in, in, in three, in four sentences. Could you give four bullet points? What has happened?
How healthy seeing everything seemed to be, how, how. That we were filled with inspiration. I was so filled with inspiration as a young man at that time by the work that was going on. What has happened? What has happened to them?
[00:19:07] Speaker C: Oh, boy.
[00:19:08] Speaker A: Well, I'm just.
[00:19:09] Speaker B: How is it that a Putin, that, that the world is controlled by tyrants and billionaires with Armageddon inspired agendas?
Jim, just in a few words, because
[00:19:27] Speaker C: I think, I don't know whether I can do it in a few words, but I will say I'm just getting set to publish a book on that question because I've been pondering it for many years and it's going to be coming out next month on Amazon called the Magnitude of Our Moment, Archetypes of Antichrist, Joshua and Sophia in our time of Apocalypse.
You know, we need to take in everybody the, the magnitude of Serge's question.
And I believe if I had to condense it down to just two or three minutes, I think what we're experiencing is the simultaneous collapse of the collective west and Western civilization, the American Empire, American democracy, Zionism and Judeo Christianity as we've known it.
And I think we are dealing with what I call in the book the Politics of Possession.
And my reference for this is Carl Jung.
Carl Jung understood that what possessed the Germans in the 1920s and the 1930s that produced the Nazis and Hitler and so forth, was the archetypal possession of the German people by the archetype Wotan.
And at the end of the war, in the fall of 1945, after, you know, 60 million dead, after the Holocaust, after dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he wrote an essay called after the Catastrophe, in which he said that what had just happened was merely a curtain raiser for what is to come, and that what was coming was Antichrist.
And to say one more word so people understand the magnitude of what we're dealing with. He said that we've. We're coming to the end of the Christian age.
The Christian age corresponded with the age of Pisces.
Pisces are the two fishes in opposite directions.
So that he said, what we're experiencing is that 2,000 years ago, the world experienced the incarnation of Christ, the light of God, and that 2,000 years later, that is now turned into its opposite.
And we're experiencing the darkness of God. We're experiencing Antichrist consciousness, and you see it all over.
And that spirit is gripping us, and it is also catalyzing another archetypal energy, which is Sophia, which is wisdom, which is redemptive in its. In its intent.
So we're in one of those moments where it looks like everything we know is collapsing, but something else equally powerful is unfolding.
And our task is to track that vector.
[00:23:07] Speaker A: And
[00:23:11] Speaker C: that's what the book is dealing with, is that complexity.
But we're in what I would call a once in a species moment.
I think the time that we're in, say, between 2025 and 2030, is a time of reckoning.
It's a time where the human species is going through more transactions and more contradictions than any time in the history of our species.
And therefore, all of us need to be aware of what's going on. And all of us need to understand that every action counts, all of us are accountable for what's.
[00:23:54] Speaker A: That's a.
Sorry, Jim. There's a concept which I think is helpful, and I'm wondering if you're aware of this concept. It's a concept I've written about quite recently in my books, and it's the concept of pathocracy.
The concept of pathocracy, which was developed by a Polish psychologist called Lobacheski after the Second World War. And it's a very simple idea. It's a basic idea that people with narcissistic and psychopathic traits, who I would call disconnected people with low empathy and intense selfishness, they are attracted to positions of power, in particular, political power. I mean, obvious examples are Hitler, a severely disconnected person with no empathy, probably Putin, Trump as well, people with severe narcissistic traits.
I mean, at the moment, a lot of the world's positions of power seem to be filled with these people.
It wasn't really the case in the 1990s, I don't think. I think there were more. At that time, there were more kind of reasonable and sensible people in positions of power. But now pathocracy seems to be the Standard form of government. So I'm wondering what you think about that.
[00:25:03] Speaker C: Oh, I completely agree. And I have several chapters in my book exploring.
What that implies for the culture. I mean, you're absolutely right. Pathocracy rules. We are governed by pygmies.
There are no giants amongst us anywhere.
And the, the analysis that Young made, which I think is the. It undergirds pathocracy, is he said that the most fundamental reason why the German people succumb to the archetypal possession of Wotan and gave rise to the Nazis and to Hitler was because they were cut off from nature.
[00:25:55] Speaker A: Right.
[00:25:56] Speaker B: They were disconnected.
[00:25:58] Speaker C: They were disconnected from nature. And when you become disconnected from nature, you become alienated and disconnected from each other. And then you become susceptible to pandemics of ideologies.
You become susceptible to xenophobia and the demagogue and what Jung calls the mass man.
[00:26:23] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:26:23] Speaker C: And that's what you see all over.
[00:26:28] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:26:28] Speaker C: Is the mass man is. Is people disconnected from the world, disconnected from nature, disconnected from even their own humanity because they're now receding into the realm of. Of AI and artificial videotapes and surreal social media enclaves. I mean it. And the more cut off you are, the more susceptible you are.
[00:27:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:27:01] Speaker C: To the demagogue.
[00:27:02] Speaker A: Yeah. This is what Labochevsky said. He said that there are three stages in pathocracy. First, you have a charismatic, disconnected individual with narcissistic or psychopathic traits who becomes a leader.
Then a cohort of similar people collect around that person, while responsible and sensible people leave the. The cohort of. In the government. So eventually you have a government consisting almost solely of disconnected people. But the third stage is when the pathology spreads to the population.
The pathocracy becomes a virus which infects the whole population, which obviously happened in Nazi Germany and to some extent in. In America at the present.
[00:27:44] Speaker C: Well, it happened in Bolshevik Soviet Union. I mean, that was one of the things that fascinated me was that the. The Bolsheviks built. Built one of the most powerful totalitarian systems. And, you know, the. This is a point that Hannah Arendt made.
She says that the big difference between a dictatorship and a totalitarian system, a dictatorship is just interested in power, but he doesn't really kind of care what you think as long as you don't talk or act.
Totalitarian system wants to control everything, including what you think.
And that's that mass formation of the Nazis and the Bolsheviks, it was a new phenomenon in world history, totalitarian systems. And now one of the ideas that I play with is we're now emerging into what Hannah Arendt predicted and that is technological authoritarianism.
And if you look at the way they're manipulating social media, look at the way that they're controlling information flow. They're creating alienated, isolated individuals which are the easiest to control.
The, the Peter, the Peter Thiel digital authoritarianism.
[00:29:14] Speaker B: The digital.
Well, Jim, I have also written a book about this coming out at the beginning of next month. And my thesis is basically that the only force that is going to deal with the evil in the world because we have to, you know, as you, as you talk about the Antichrist, it's evil, is a tremendous spiritual force. And I'm reminded something that Ted said after the bomb had been dropped. He said there's more power inside the awakened heart than in the atomic bomb.
So, so I'm seeing that the only power that we have to somehow amass those of us who care for the world, those of us who see ourselves as being into service a kind of powerful heart infused spiritual force that will be able to produce so much light that in some way that the darkness is going to melt. I mean, I know that sounds rather idealistic and I try to explain how practically this is going to happen. Happen. But Steve and I, our thesis is that somehow these dreadful times are evoking a whole deeper domain of spirituality inside many of us and that actually we need this unraveling, we need this great show of darkness and evil in order to produce inside ourselves the necessary spiritual force that is going to, you know, be able to move beyond it. So Steve and I are both optimistic.
And are you optimistics?
I mean, I don't go along with my friend Pete Russell's book Forgiving Humanity. I think that we're going to be able to move beyond it and somehow some extraordinary things are going to have to happen this century and there's going to be a great death and a great rebirth.
All the great visionaries, you know, the, the great spiritual teachers on Sri Aurobindo, etc. That they all say that somehow we're going to break through, that death is going to lead to a resurrection. I've tried, I've held that argument in my book. I'm not sure I believe in it fully, but I've held it because I think it's more important to hold positive ideas, you know, a positive vision for the future.
So what's your sense of that?
[00:32:29] Speaker C: I take a kind of a middle way in the sense that I think nothing is written until we write it.
[00:32:38] Speaker B: And I think we've got to write it.
[00:32:41] Speaker C: I think we, we have the opportunities, but I think it is highly likely that we could destroy ourselves. I don't think that the universe is here to ensure the survival of humanity.
95% of all the species that have ever lived on this earth are extinct.
And I think that that's very important and very sobering. I don't believe the, you know, the universe again is here for humanity. We are, we are part of, of the created order and we have opportunities.
But just like the rise and fall of civilizations, the rise and fall of kingdoms, everything that rises, falls.
And to survive like the Chinese have for 5,000 years and the Persians have for 5,000 years is no small achievement.
And most of the people have been killed off or died off. So survival is a high art form in my view.
And I think what's exciting about this moment is that we're at the, we're in the best of times and the worst of times.
Things are getting worse and worse, better and better, faster and faster.
And therefore the, both the centrifugal force and the cohering forces are working in opposite directions. And that's why choice matters. Because every thought you think, every choice you make, every act you transact is either feeding the death force, Thanatos, as Freud would say it, or, or eros, the life force. And one of the things that, that I, I'm trying to track in my own thinking and what I'm, I'm looking at in the, in the, the magnitude of, of our moment coming out is what are the vectors that are in play? And I, I, I note just to take a moment on it, because I think it's very interesting, I would note that right at the moment when the United States developed the atomic bomb in 1945 and then dropped it on Japan, four or five other things happened simultaneously.
Number one, the ET showed up.
Robert Oppenheimer, who was the mastermind of the bomb, reported later that on July 16th when they did the Trinity test, an orb appeared in the sky.
That was one.
Number two, it was in 1943, just a few years earlier, that Albert Hoffman discovered LSD.
[00:35:58] Speaker B: LSD, right.
[00:36:02] Speaker C: It was at that same time that women's liberation was ignited. That gave rise to all the gender fluidity and everything that we're doing around the sexuality and gender again, death wish, life force.
So this to me is the work of Sophia that the cosmos began to show up.
[00:36:30] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:36:30] Speaker C: Psychedelic drugs began to appear.
The most massive recalibration of the human relations from thousands of years of patriarchy all over the world. Has been upended by the liberation of women. Then it was in 1945 that you had the discovery of Nag Hammadi and the Dead Sea Scrolls.
And those completely upended what Christianity thought it was. Up until Nagamati and the Dead Sea Scrolls, all we had was like the canon, the Bible. And that was a very narrow interpretation of what happened also in the. We learned about Jesus and Mary Magdalene, we learned about the Gnostic Gospels. We learned about everything.
You know, all these things happened. And I would add, it was in 1949 that you had the People's Republic of China established Tiananmen Square, October 1, 1949.
And that initiated the rise of China as a superpower.
[00:37:37] Speaker A: Yeah, it's so interesting.
[00:37:39] Speaker C: And now you have. With the, with the collapse of the collective west, the collapse of the United States, the collapse of American democracy, the complete discrediting of Zionism. Zionism. And I mean, what does it mean that the Star of David has become the swastika of our time?
[00:37:59] Speaker B: That the, that.
[00:38:00] Speaker C: That the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians what the Germans have done to the Jews? Take that in.
[00:38:06] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I would say that's an example of pathocracy. You know, that just.
[00:38:09] Speaker C: That's a. That's an example of pathocracy.
[00:38:11] Speaker A: Yeah, but it's.
[00:38:13] Speaker C: You've got all these things in a jumbo surge. And so how we play this out.
That's why I'm so excited to be alive. I want to see what happens.
[00:38:27] Speaker A: There are certain pivotal times in human history. I mean, one was the actual age of 600 BC when Daoism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Greek philosophy all flourished at the same time in different. In different parts of the world. And then I've written a lot about the Romantic movement or the late 18th century. That was a pivotal time. The Romantic movement and the emergence of concepts of democracy and equality.
That was another kind of pivotal time for the women's rights movement as well. The first time that women had voiced their desire for rights in a formal way and started a movement on that basis, animal rights movement. So there were certain phases or pivotal times in human history.
Maybe as you say, it's Sophia, it's the spirit of Sofia, the archetype of Sophia, manifesting itself in different times, different eras. And yeah, I think, you know, we're living through a very pivotal period at the moment.
[00:39:27] Speaker C: No, there's no doubt about it.
[00:39:29] Speaker B: There's no doubt about it. Bringing the spiritual thing in. Jim, do you feel that there are higher order spiritual forces that are working to help humanity that in a way that it's a great cosmic struggle between are the forces of light sort of going to triumph or is the darkness, you know, going to destroy us?
And again, I find it interesting that you've been involved with UFOs, and I've heard some of your talks about UFOs, where you've suggested that there are beings from higher civilizations who are here on Earth and helping us.
Although I do have to say that I listened to your talk about John Mack's book.
But the Grays didn't seem to be very kind in their treatment of human beings. And do. And are the, the Grays.
[00:40:46] Speaker A: What are the Grays?
[00:40:48] Speaker B: Jim will tell you.
And, and are the aliens on this planet who are. Who are very eminent and sort of built into society, who are kind of great figures?
I mean, could you be an alien, Jim, you know, with everything that you're involved in? I mean, so maybe you could just say a little bit about this, because I think it's quite important.
Yeah.
[00:41:24] Speaker C: I think just to address your first question first and then to get into the ufo, ET phenomenon.
I, I agree with those who believe that the entire cosmos is a unitary complexio, ultimately of light and dark dimensions.
We know that everything we observe here on Earth lives and dies.
And we also observe that at the farthest level of the cosmos, not only galaxies, but super clusters of galaxies rise and they fall.
So that means that what Freud talked about in terms of thanatos, a death impulse and Eros, a life impulse, is always at play.
And that light and shadow dimension refracts itself through the ethical practices of whatever sentient being is involved in a particular place at a particular time.
And so bringing that into the current exploration of the UFOs, one of the things is that UFOs, if you look at all the religious traditions, have been with us for thousands of years.
The indigenous peoples have been talking to extraterrestrial beings not only from other star systems, but from other dimensions for thousands of years. The Dogon in Africa contract their lineage back to the star system Sirius, and other.
The ancient Egyptians similarly.
And so we are. We are in a universe, in my view, full of powers and principalities, full of what the, you know, ancients called the hierarchy of being, a hierarchy of being. And we're in the middle of that.
And that existed long before the human race was ever conceived of. It's present now.
And I think part of what's happening in our once in a species moment, as I'm viewing it, is that when, according to the people who've communicated with the ETS when the United States dropped the atomic bomb that sent alarm bells through, you know, our quadrant of the galaxy, and other life forms far more advanced than we are, began to show up to find out what was happening.
And if you look over the last 80 years, whether it's the John Mack material or all the other people who've studied thousands of experiencers, the most consistent message that they're receiving from these other beings is that we came out of concern and the humanity needs to stop its nuclear weapons and its nuclear power and you have to stop degrading the environment. Because they say that our planet is one of the most biologically diverse, rare planets in the known universe.
I mean, just think if you grew up in Venus or Mars or Jupiter.
They're not hospitable systems. The United States, you talk about the Goldilocks zone, and they can't believe that the human race, which is the product of all this, is now destroying everything.
They can't kind of calibrate why we would be so out of touch when we live in paradise. Literally.
[00:45:27] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:45:29] Speaker C: So the, the, the, the, the different beings that are showing up, whether the small grays, you know, what you see in Steven Spielberg's movies, you know, ET Come Home and Disclosure Day, his most recent one, those are the classic grays, the little people that, you know, with the big eyes and so forth and so on. But there's all kinds of others.
Arcturians and there's crypto terrestrials and ultra terrestrials are discovering that some of the extraterrestrial beings are coming from the future.
There's some of them, the crypto terrestrials that they're discovering are, are here on Earth and have been living here the whole time, deep under the ocean or deep in mountains.
So we're, we're in, we're in a multi intelligence revolution, in my view.
We are, we are having. The human intelligence is having to deal with simultaneously. This is part of this once in a species moment. Human, human intelligence is, is dealing with nature intelligence, artificial intelligence, and cosmic intelligence.
And how we interact with these different intelligences, how we co create and collaborate with these different intelligences is going to determine in part our survival strategy, and it's going to determine in part how humanity and the larger planetary ecology begin to blend together in a singularity of sacred reciprocity.
[00:47:18] Speaker B: So do these beings communicate with the Putins and the Trumps and the Netanyahu's?
[00:47:34] Speaker C: I'm not privy to those conversations. I think that, that I'm sure they're aware of.
Of what's going on. They're aware of the genocide in Gaza. And I think they're aghast at what we're doing.
There appears from what they say to people who've experienced them and our own observation, there appears to be some kind of Prime Directive, if you remember Star Trek, a Prime directive among superior intelligences, that you can't come into a planetary system and just begin to coercively change things. That whatever you do, you've got to do it through persuasion and through the subtleties of permission.
So it may be that they're working in the White House or in the Forbidden palace in Beijing in ways and levels no one understands or the Kremlin.
We don't know. But I think there's growing evidence that they're more and more deeply aware and more and more deeply present and more and more deeply involved in the human situation, because we are very close to destroying ourselves in the world as we know it.
I mean, if you think about it for, for a minute, the most, the most fundamental truth about our time is that we're, we're facing rising ecological turbulence because of climate change.
Number two, we're facing deepening dysfunction at every level of human affairs.
And in the middle of this, Number three, we've unleashed artificial intelligence.
And then number four, the ETS are here.
You know, we are in an explosion and implosion simultaneously. And somehow we humans, in my view, have to start paying attention or we're going to, at a minimum, lose our sovereignty. We're about ready to lose our sovereignty. To AI, To circle back, just to finish, to circle back. Sergey, your previous question.
I just don't see it being foreordained that we survive.
I think survival in this universe, like liberty, requires constant vigilance and mature choices.
And when you think of the immaturity in leadership because of the pathocratic individuals that are in positions of power, it makes one deeply concerned as to how we of the light are going to manifest a critical mass of energy to turn the tide.
Because the objective observation is, in my view, that things objectively are getting worse and worse,
[00:50:58] Speaker B: faster and faster, faster and faster.
[00:51:01] Speaker C: And so how we calibrate for that and then how we navigate in a way to bring coherence into such a critical mass that the chaos uplevels, you know, back to precision to the new level of coherence is what I spend my time and I know the two of you, you know, 24 7, 365, trying to figure out, yeah, we're moving
[00:51:29] Speaker A: towards the end of our hour together. But I wanted to ask one, one question. I mean, what really impresses me, Jim, about your outlook is on one level that the sheer kind of universality of your wide ranging vision, both in terms of time and in terms of the, you know, the wide ranging nature of our universe, of our cosmos, but also how integrated your vision is. A lot of some spiritual people are quite indifferent to politics and worldly affairs. You know, they kind of detach themselves. And some political people are kind of opposed to spirituality. They see spiritual development as some kind of selfish endeavor, you know, ignoring the world and focusing on your individual inner development.
But for you, obviously, there's this. Everything. Everything is integrated. You obviously see the world and the spirit as integrated rather than. As opposed to each other.
[00:52:23] Speaker C: Totally.
[00:52:24] Speaker A: And I was wondering about what. Do you have any, any particular metaphysical perspective that you align yourself with? I mean, you got a background in theology.
You were aligned with the Jesuit tradition. Did you have any particular metaphysical outlook that you ascribe to or align yourself with?
[00:52:44] Speaker C: Well, I was born the son of a conservative Baptist missionary.
And I realized when I was 5 years old that orthodox Christianity is completely delusional, that it's just not the case that my little Chinese friends were going to go to hell and burn forever because they didn't believe in some guy that lived 2000 years ago on the other side of the. The planet. That's just absurd to me.
So I never became a Christian.
I've always been more comfortable in the Eastern metaphysical traditions. I'm more comfortable in a understanding that everything is unitary, that everything is sacred, that the one and the many are connected and there's no other.
And so my practice has been basically Eastern since I was a little boy.
And.
But I'm also, you know, a warrior in the sense that, that I believe we have a moral obligation from the, from the container of wholeness to do combat against evil. I'm with Martin Luther King. I'm with, with Gandhi, I'm with. I'm with Mandela. I think. I think you need to take a stand.
And that's what's motivating my book. The magnitude of our moment is the heartbreak I feel about what the United States and Israel are doing in Gaza.
And I can't change Netanyahu, but I can as a scholar of religious and historical matters. I can write a book that explains how did this happen and how did the Star of David become the swastika of our time.
I mean, that is a huge thought.
You know, Hawaii is the United States actively supporting Israel.
What's wrong? I mean, they've done studies. You know, 50% of all the. The violence that has been perpetrated by the human race in the last 2000 years has come out of the west, has come out of Judeo. Christianity.
[00:55:12] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:55:12] Speaker C: Why is that?
[00:55:15] Speaker B: What.
[00:55:15] Speaker C: And we're the west guys.
[00:55:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:55:20] Speaker C: How did all that happen?
How did we produce a world where climate change so out of control?
[00:55:26] Speaker B: The divine feminine fell apart and was replaced by the patriarchal warrior mentality that we have to conquer.
[00:55:38] Speaker C: And so we have to. And in the end, Sophia, which is the subject of your book, we have to re. If you had to distill it all down, Jung was right that the pathway to individuation, the pathway to wholeness, is a feminine pathway.
And that's why the liberation of women and the equalization of the sexes and genders has been such a fundamentally important impulse and development in human history.
And after thousands of years of patriarchy, it's the divine feminine that needs to lead us and the sacred feminine that needs to guide our onward journey. So that. That to me, at the level of ultimate, fundamental existential abstraction, is what's going on.
[00:56:39] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:56:40] Speaker C: In our time.
[00:56:41] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:56:42] Speaker C: So thank you guys. Beautiful pleasure.
We.
[00:56:47] Speaker A: We have a four quick questions we always use at the end of our podcast to ask our guests. So I just want to give you four quick questions.
One is, could you. What is the most inspirational book you have read?
[00:57:01] Speaker C: Oh, my goodness.
[00:57:02] Speaker A: If you could name one.
[00:57:03] Speaker C: Too many to name one.
But the book that has guided me, I think, in some ways the most deeply is the Dowdy Ching.
[00:57:16] Speaker A: What about the most inspirational person in your life?
[00:57:21] Speaker C: I think probably Carl Jung.
[00:57:26] Speaker A: And the most spiritual or inspirational place you have visited?
[00:57:32] Speaker C: Chartre.
[00:57:33] Speaker A: I thought you'd say that.
And finally, music. What is the most inspirational or sublime piece of music that you can recommend?
[00:57:41] Speaker C: Oh, I'm a Beatles guy.
[00:57:45] Speaker A: You should look at. You should read my new book.
I'll get a copy of my new book to you.
[00:57:50] Speaker C: Please do. Please do.
Music. But I was always a Beatles guy.
[00:57:57] Speaker A: Any particular song?
[00:58:01] Speaker C: Day in the Life.
[00:58:03] Speaker A: Oh, wow. Great song.
[00:58:04] Speaker C: I think John Lennon's Imagine is probably the greatest song of the 20th century.
[00:58:10] Speaker A: He was an avatar, really, John Lennon, wasn't he? He was, yeah. He was touched by genius and also by the zeitgeist. He was a channel of transcendental creativity.
[00:58:21] Speaker C: Totally, totally, totally.
[00:58:24] Speaker A: Anyway, thanks a lot.
[00:58:25] Speaker B: And yet the tragedy with John Lennon was that the reason why he died from the gunshot wound was because most of the last three years, he'd lain in bed, taking drugs, and his body was so weak that it couldn't sustain. Well, Steve, you're the expert.
[00:58:48] Speaker A: Well, I think that's.
[00:58:50] Speaker B: So I will bow to your.
[00:58:52] Speaker A: Well, I think you've probably been reading Albert Goldman's book, the Rights of John Lennon. Yeah, that's a very jaundiced and spiteful book.
[00:59:00] Speaker B: Okay, okay, I take that back. I take that back.
[00:59:03] Speaker A: Yeah. Actually, there's evidence that John Lennon became more spiritual in the last few years of his life. He returned. He let go of some. Some of his excesses and returned to a spiritual path.
He started to visit the.
[00:59:16] Speaker C: You got to jump, guys. I have another call.
[00:59:18] Speaker A: Oh, sorry, Sorry, Jim, thanks. It's been great speaking to you. Thanks a lot, Jim.
Thank you.
[00:59:23] Speaker B: Bye, Jim. Thank you.
[00:59:24] Speaker A: Bye, Jim. Bye, everybody.
Well, Serge, that was inspirational, wasn't it?
[00:59:31] Speaker B: Fantastic.
[00:59:32] Speaker A: Shame we had to rush a bit at the end, but it was very inspiring and. And I hope everybody who has watched this episode has found it inspiring, too.
Feel free to leave your comments.
Also, feel free to subscribe to our podcast or. Or my YouTube channel, where the podcast. And also Sergi's YouTube channel and podcast is.
[00:59:53] Speaker B: And two books to. To.
To.
To think about. Jim. Jim Garrison's new book. I can't remember what. What he called it, but I think we definitely need to buy a copy of that book. And of course, Steve's wonderful new book about the Beatles, which is terribly, terribly exciting. And I just want to say Steve is my old friend and I'm so excited at his creativity because he's not only a poet, a psychologist, an author of many scholarly books, a teacher, but he's also reinventing himself as a musician. And now he's talking about his new book and he's going about with a guitar around him and is singing when he gives his talks. So maybe in the future you're going to be listening to our podcast and we'll have a song or two from Steve, hopefully.
[01:01:01] Speaker A: Yeah, I have a few events where I'm bringing my guitar and singing some Beatles songs with the. With the audience.
Okay, everybody, Steve, thanks for watching very much. We'll see you soon.
[01:01:12] Speaker B: Yes.
