The PK Man and Mercurial Hermeneutics with Jason Reza Jorjani

The PK Man and Mercurial Hermeneutics with Jason Reza Jorjani

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[Music] thinking aloud conversations on the Leading Edge of knowledge and Discovery with psychologist Jeffrey mishlove hello and welcome I'm Jeffrey mishlove today we are going to look at the PK man and Mercurial hermeneutics my guest is Dr Jason geani who is on the faculty in philosophy at the New Jersey Institute of Technology he is also author of a very significant book Prometheus and Atlas which is the winner of the 2016 book award from the Paras pychological Association welcome Jason I'm especially


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looking forward to this discussion Jeffrey this will be most interesting I'm looking forward to it as well and I think many of our viewers will understand the reference to the PK man is I've done three interviews on this subject earlier based on my book the PK man but when it comes to Mercurial hermeneutics we better unpack that term for our viewers well Mercurial hermeneutics is playfully redundant because of course Mercury is the Roman version of the God Hermes so I'm really sort of saying hermetic hermeneutics and


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Hermes is the trickst and thief in the Olympian Pantheon he's The Courier of Zeus who transmits messages from Olympus to humanity but he's also a joker figure who um sort of confuses deceives and misleads with those messages and Hermes is also uh the god associated with the Hermetic tradition which is the esoteric tradition in Western culture that's right and Carl Yung wrote an essay on the trickster archetype focusing on Mercury or the latinate version of Hermes and hermeneutics hermeneutics is the art of


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interpretation I believe in the dialogue cratus Plato tells us that Hermes invented the art of language both to um lead and mislead people so uh when you have written language the possibilities of gaining a second order of reflection on things is such that you're also able to manipulate people by the use of words uhhuh and and so hermeneutics is the art of proper interpretation of words would you say Yes um because writing is not as transparent as Communication in an oral culture you also now need an art of


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exegesis so if if I were to use the term hermetic hermeneutics the the Hermetic part would mean sealing esoteric wisdom up so that it's not accessible to the exoteric mind and the hermeneutics would be unpacking that and making that wisdom available right and historically hermeneutics first referred to the interpretation of religious texts specifically and then uh developed a wider significance so one of the things that I argue in this chapter and Mercurial hermeneutics is that um religious scriptures involve the


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communication uh of a trickster figure who has been um shaping and reshaping human societies and in order to understand the Dynamics of our interaction with this archetype we need to very carefully interpret these texts and you in my opinion wisely selected the PK man as an Exemplar of uh a contemporary case in which this Mercurial figure this trickster figure is manifesting itself that's right uh Ted Owens um his case is significant in two regards uh one it highlights the inextricability of psychic phenomena and


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UFO phenomena and also Ted Owens explicitly compared himself to the prophet Moses claiming that the space intelligences who were guiding his tremendous Feats of psychokinesis had been searching for centuries to find another figure as capable as Moses was to carry out their mission uh and um he compared his eventual struggle against the United States government to Moses's stand against Pharaoh it's an interesting compar Arison and yet at at the same time I guess because we live in a judeo-christian culture Moses is a


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highly revered figure and Ted Owens the PK man existed always on the fringes of society and very close to Poverty throughout his life well if you look back at the story of Exodus you see the same elements that you see in the Ted Owens case um Moses uh engages in wondrous Feats of telepathic and psychokinetic ability in competition with The Magicians of Pharaoh's court and uh The Exodus is Led is Guided by an aerial object that's described as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of Fire by Night the pillar of Fire by


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Night reference is actually quite specific when you uh read the text carefully this is an illuminated cylindrical object which gives off enough light so that the Israelites can March uh during the night time mm and during the Red Sea episode the Egyptian Army is at the back of the Israelites and so when they camp that night the object shuts its light off so that uh it won't give away the position of the Israelites the next morning the Israelites wake up to see this cylindrical object hovering over the Red


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Sea and a channel has been cut through the Red Sea when they start to cross the Red Sea they notice that the water has been uh damned up into almost perfect walls on either side of them and what should be a very muddy seabed uh is perfectly firm so somehow it's been pressed down and all the moisture has been uh uh pushed off to the sides the Israelites cross the Red Sea with this cylindrical object overhead and then when the Egyptian Army enters the channel in pursuit of them there's a very curious description of how suddenly


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their horses and chariots appear to be moving in slow motion and then the Chariots are pushed down the wheels are uh basically um they explode off the sides of the Chariots as if a force is crushing them from above and then the walls of water all of a sudden pour in onto the Egyptians but they they uh they do that unevenly they start to drown the Egyptians whereas they remain in place uh ahead of the Egyptian Army so that the last of the Israelites can finish crossing the channel people often leave this out of their


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account of the Red Sea Story the fact that an object appears to be causing these effects on the ground well I gather what you're saying here is that uh the god of the book of Exodus uh is the trickster archetype at work yeah and uh this trickster you know is rather merciless at several points in The Exodus narrative uh we see him lash out terribly against the Israelites first of all he sanctions Moses's Massacre of the Israelites who are worshiping the golden calf yes some 20,000 yes and uh later on the object


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descends uh on the Israeli camp and starts to attack their tents um so you know this is a rather a harsh God and at the same time uh there are various examples of a kind of diabolical humor on on the part of this entity now if it wasn't for the case that I had engaged in a 10year study of Ted Owens the PK man and uh have good documentation for the many psychokinetic Feats that he produced involving control of large scale phenomenon in including earthquakes tornadoes hurricanes volcanoes and and so hurling lightning


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bolts which is one of the trademarks of Zeus and of Indra uh if it wasn't for my actual study of these things I'd be inclined to consider all of this as as you know Pleasant uh myths to consider uh not not real history well I take my lead from William James in this chapter uh James suggested because of his experience in psychical research that perhaps we ought to interpret religious scriptures as vertical accounts of Human Experience of course not every detail is going to be accurate right but uh his


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approach to religious scriptures was that we should treat them as phenomenological descriptions and not necessarily buy into the ideology that is being promoted in these scriptures to uh evaluate them scientifically and this was an example of his radical empiricism and I'm certainly 100% in favor of assuming William James approach to these matters let's look at the UFO component now because Ted Owens is one of many UFO contact these who claims to have psychic powers uh connected with that relationship URI Geller was another uh


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also noted for psychokinetic powers and uh uh if one reads the book URI written by Andrea puharich there are many episodes in that book involving UFO sightings that were connected with uri's abilities uh I have interviewed uh some of the witnesses to those sightings and URI himself while he likes to downplay that he has never denied that these things occurred so it would suggest based on the Contemporary UFO circus if you will and these religious scriptures that there's a trickster likee archetype


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the God Hermes if you will uh that's been interacting with Humanity for a long time and uh often um whose intentions are not at all obvious let me give you two examples of that that I feature in my chapter uh one is I believe a 1959 case uh discussed by jacqu valet where um six agents of the CIA and I believe one Naval intelligence officer were sent to a certain Miss ke who was a medium claiming to be in contact with an intelligence from Europe MH and U she would receive uh messages that she transcribed in the fashion of


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automatic writing yes and they took careful notes on her methodology she even trained them to be able to produce UFO phenomena in association with this entity uh they contacted a radar operator who should have been monitoring that uh sector of the sky where they three of these officers witnessed the phenomena and somehow radar returns for that particular sector were knocked out at the time the sightings were produced so some kind of psychokinesis was involved at the very least the interesting thing is that uh this entity


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who claimed to be getting in touch from out of Uranus called itself AFA and uh in the enoan language developed by John D Queen Elizabeth's um court occultist and adviser going back to the Renaissance Era yes and this inoi language which was adopted by the 20th century magician Alistar Crowley AFA means empty empty as in there's nothing really here as in you know hot airh so I think this is one example of the trickster at work another one which is more disturbing is that in 1975 uh the cattle mutilations in


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western states uh reached their Zenith um a federal investigation was coordinated mhm uh based in in Colorado where I believe the governor of Colorado got directly involved there was so much property damage to the uh cattle across 15 Western States and to my understanding these cattle mutilations are continuing to this day yes uh but the interesting thing is that now we have laparoscopic surgery and in the 1970s and long before that I'll come to that in a minute in the 1970s uh they were seeing laser precision and


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extraction of organs through very small holes uh things that we're just starting to be able to do today under highly controlled conditions inside of a a laboratory or a hospital sure and the fact that we now have laparoscopic surgery hardly explains the cases in which cattle mutilations occur in the winter where there's snow around the mutilated body of of the cattle but no Footprints whatsoever it gets more bizarre than that sometimes you see that uh the extracted organs are neatly placed on top of the the carcass by the


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way no blood in the environs the extracted organs are placed on top of the carcass sometimes they'll find a rusty Army Surplus knife left at the site as if to make the joke that it's with this Implement that the mutilation was carried out uh at any rate it got so bad in in uh 15 of these western states that they conducted a federal investigation FBI couldn't even identify a um suspect now the interesting thing is that in Greek mythology Hermes is the god the cattle sacrifice and so I wonder whether uh


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this is in a sense the calling card of mercury these cattle mutilations well if one looks at the history of paranormal research over and above Paras pychology which is a very rigorous scientific field with a more limited Focus than we're discussing today uh there are many many uh confounding and yet well-observed phenomena that have been reported now for a good 150 years you're suggesting that there's some sort of a an autonomous conscious uh somewhat malevolent entity behind all of this so one way you can interpret all of this is


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as a series of projections from the collective unconscious yes Carl Yung wrote a a small book called flying saucers where he advanced thesis mhm I don't believe that uh that's a sufficient explanation because we have plenty of cases of near collisions with UFOs uh collisions with what appear to be structured objects from very very close I mean they're near collisions and um Landing traces um so I think there's enough hard evidence that we're dealing with structured objects also if you look through the history of Close Encounters


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uh let's say at the Book of Ezekiel there are fairly detailed descriptions of at least four different types of unidentified flying objects uh another element that's fairly consistent throughout the spectrum of Close Encounters is the phenomenology of the objects themselves you you see a certain set of uh structures to these objects saucer shaped cylindrical uh triangular they don't uh have an infinite variety okay so this suggests to me that um there is some degree of objectivity to this phenomenon and there are uh real


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entities of some kind behind it at the same time jacqu Val makes a good point and uh one that is at the core of your book the PK man some Mastery of psychical ability is also evident in close encounter phenomena another exploration that I think is worthy of being mentioned is George Hansen book the trickster in the Paranormal yes it's one it's a resource that I also draw on and in particular Hansen's idea that the trickster operates in terms of the manipulation of binary uh opposites is very significant in promethus and Atlas


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uh to the extent that we can identify an agenda to the uh activities of this intelligence that's engaging various human cultures it's uh a destructuring force which seems to invert the binary oppositions uh that underg the social structures of various cultures different epics of History well the uh observation that you make is that this same entity that uh manifests itself in contemporary paranormal observations has been involved throughout world history and in particular uh engages Humanity through


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the uh implantation of miraculous events and and and throughout the world various religions have been formed around um miraculous kinds of observations right I'm suggesting that uh Twitter and Tweeter the grasshopper space intelligences of Ted Owens you know uh were kind of you know using uh Muhammad as a ventriloquist dummy and pulling the strings of Jesus uh and that effectively they represent an invasion from Uranus I mean this is absurd yeah okay but the point that I make is that this absurdity


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is being used as a tactic of psychological warfare when you hide behind the shield of absurdity you're able to infiltrate a society by getting past its intellectual and political Vanguard the phenomena seem uh too nonsensical to be treated seriously by the scientists of uh given civilization even if it's the civilization of the Roman Empire right so I think that part of the way Christianity was able to transform the Roman Empire was that none of the men of learning of that time took uh the phenomenology of Christian


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scripture seriously they thought it was absurd as absurd as we would take the Ted Owens case to be today and so you're able to address the dregs of society and uh people who don't have the highest level of Education are thrown into direct uh contact with this uh intelligence and because they are mocked because ridiculed and ostracized they form a kind of uh close-knit cult that's alienated from the rest of society and the more alienated they are the more fanatical they become and eventually this leads to the kinds of uh religions


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uh the kinds of um cultural movements that we see in the history of the abrahamic revelations which have been largely destructive well if I get your meaning correctly Jason you seem to be suggesting that uh this intelligence is deliberately creating many many problems throughout human history perhaps for the purpose of challenging Humanity to wake up and see what's going on yes I think that uh if we were to develop a type of science which acknowledges the spectral then we would become less vulnerable to


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uh manipulation at the hands of this trickster mhm and that perhaps as a species we won't achieve full maturity until we do so yeah um My ultimate conclusion is that we need to engage this trickster by embodying the archetypes of Prometheus and Atlas and and let's just talk then briefly about what those archetypes mean to you well Prometheus uh is the uh projector of the future he is um what allows us to get a grasp on phenomena for the sake of getting a better handle on the world and uh Atlas uh stands for models of the


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world modeling the world and working with different maps of reality so these are um emblematic of our Titanic Spirit of scientific exploration and Discovery and of human self-reliance and I gather uh that this is what higher Consciousness means to you I think it's a kind of Consciousness that um allows Humanity to determine its own future course of development as opposed to being under the sway of these powerful subconscious forces even if they are projections of our own mind uh of of which we're usually uh not fully


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aware yeah it's an acknowledgement that scientific exploration and Discovery have their own religious ethos it's a very liberating and empowering religious EOS and it it gives us the possibility this suggestion of yours that we can begin to to look Inward and develop more of a science of uh of our inner life and how it interacts with the World At Large right it's a lot to contemplate I mean it's it's a very deep and profound vision and I have to give you credit for taking my book the PK man and placing it


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within a larger historical and cultural context to to bring out the larger meaning of uh what was for me a 10-year exploration well uh you know the the credit really uh belongs to you because in some ways I think people don't want to acknowledge with cases like this one after all it was handed off to you by Russell targ and and Hal POF who I think didn't want to deal with Ted Owens at SRI right they were doing research for the CIA at the time and their reputation was already being questioned because uh they had


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brought Erie Geller into the laboratory and he was a flamboyant public figure and they figured they they just felt they couldn't handle another uh flamboyant psychic like that I was an eager young graduate student at the time and this seemed like an amazing case from all that I knew of it and even today I can look back and say that uh I'm not aware of any other case that's been documented in the history of parapsychology and psychical research that involves so many dramatic uh demonstrations of a stens psychokinesis


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well it seems to me that it was more than flamboyant that scared them I mean this is a man who eventually I think by 1980 or so started psycho kinetically attacking nuclear power plants uh that's quite frightening and what I'm suggesting is that this kind of capriciousness or perhaps even malevolence extends all the way back throughout history in a phenomenon that interweaves what we call the psychical and what have been identified as UFOs you know uh in Muhammad's uh extraordinary extraordinarily and


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inexplicably successful series of military campaigns sometimes people would report that um a cloudlike object descended down onto the battlefield and uh released invisible horses Angelic Warriors that fought together with Muhammad's armies and this manifested itself in heads being severed from the uh enemy soldiers without any apparent cause uh and um their horses being cut down on the battlefield without being engaged by Muhammad's armies so you know and then if you go back to the initial Revelation event in the Quran uh


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Muhammad's first encounter with Gabriel in the cave which terrifies him he runs out of this cave and scampers down the hillside at that moment he sees a bright glowing object and every time he turns his head this object rapidly moves on the horizon so you know you can't find any more um catastrophic or calamitous historical event than the initial spread of Islam over two World Empires the Persian and the Roman Empire within a 100 years Muhammad's armies were at the gates of Paris if indeed Twitter and


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Tweeter are behind something like this then uh we're faced with a very significant challenge which is using absurdity as a shield what and you're suggesting that uh probably today a good half at least of humanity has been brought up and socialized within one of the abrahamic Traditions largely Christianity or Islam and to a much smaller degree Judaism and how many other religions have been uh developed on the basis of such miraculous events May account for practically all of humanity I suppose and and you're saying


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we've we've don't really understand what's going on that there the the power behind all of these religions is not what it appears to be well one significant point in response to that is that I don't think say Buddhism has the same Foundation uh Buddhism or the Buddha Dharma is not based on a belief in a certain Doctrine uh on account of being awed by miraculous events uh so I think that this is very unique to the abrahamic tradition among those major religions that have survived and that's why I draw on Buddhism in Prometheus


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asce for the development of a Cosmopolitan spirituality so in other words what you're suggesting is you're drawing a real distinction between I I think it was Balzac who described the difference between the god of the philosophers versus the god of Abraham Isaac and Jacob well gatama Buddha you know people often don't recognize that in the tripitaka in the sermons of the Buddha he explicitly says that some of the gods are tricksters and that they ought not to be followed sometimes they deliberately mislead people and they


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become Drunk on Power well Jason raaza Geor johani this has been a very enlightening interview and I uh can't tell you how much I appreciate your your willingness to apply your intellect to my work the PK man thank you for being with me thank you Prometheus and Atlas wouldn't have been the same without it and thank you for being with us us [Music] [Music]