#2091 - Diana Walsh Pasulka

The Joe Rogan experience.

Train by day. Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

It's a scary podcast for me because I feel like. Because I know a lot of the things that you've said and I've related to them and I've said, okay, this makes sense.

Why is that scary?

Okay, so it's scary because it's not consensus reality. And because it's not consensus reality. We could talk about it over hot chocolate, near a fire or something, but here we're talking about it, and lots of people are going to be listening.

Yes.

So that is somewhat.

Yeah, that's the hurdle that we all have to get over. And the good thing about this is it really is just us talking.

Right.

And there are a lot of people that are going to listen, but they're just people, too.

That's true. And they've probably had these experiences.

Some of them have, yeah. The experiences that are available through psychedelics. I've always wondered. I mean, the thing that it's always struck me about the UFO experience, particularly the abduction experience, is that it always happens when people are asleep. It always happens at night. It either happens on the road when people are tired and it's late at night, or it happens. Like, why does it have to happen at night? The universe doesn't give a shit where the sun is in position to the planet. That doesn't make any sense that all these UFO abduction experiences would happen only when the sun is on the other side. That's so dumb. It makes no sense. It's such an egocentric, earth centric perspective. And not even Earth centric, hemispherical centric. Right. It depends on where the sun is in position to the earth. For that to be the only time that ufos come, I was always like, this seems like horseshit. There's something about it that seems like horseshit, but there's also something about it that seems real when you listen. Like Betty and Barney Hill when they're talking. Boy, that sounds like people talking about a real thing. Boy, that sounds like a real experience. It really does. And these people, like the Whitley Stribers, these people that talk about these experiences that happen at night, we know for a fact that when you are sleeping, your brain is producing endogenous, psychedelic chemicals. We have no idea why. We have no idea what the purpose of those things are. We have no idea what the quantity is. We used to think, until recently, they weren't even exactly sure, like, where it was being produced. But now, through Straussman's, work and through the work of the Cottonwood research Foundation, the people that do those DMT studies, they know that now your brain is producing this and so is it producing a chemical gateway into another dimension? And is that why these people are experiencing these abduction air quote, abduction experiences, these encounters, let's say encounters. Is that why they're happening at night? Is that why they're happening while they're lying in bed? Because that seems to make way more sense.

Yeah, that's a great question. I can talk a little bit about think that.

I think we're starting weird. Can we just start with how did you get involved in this?

Okay.

And please just tell people your background.

Okay, sure. So I'm a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington. And I grew up in California. And I've always been interested in these experiences, but religion. And also I was going to graduate school during the.com boom, so I saw how technology was changing everything. Our schools were the first to adopt computers and that type of thing. So what I did was I was very interested in. I was working your parents, you tell them you want to study religion and they're like, why not be a doctor, right? So I was going to college, but I kept taking courses in religion and philosophy. And when I got out, I got a job doing technology and things like that and I made, all right, money, but I still read about religion and philosophy. So I figured if I could get scholarships to continue that, I would. And I kept getting scholarships and that's how I got my phd in religion. In religious studies, by the way, we actually were not ministers or anything like that. We don't advocate for any religious tradition. We study them. And since most people in the world are religious in some way, it's a good thing to know. But how did I get into studying ufos? So I studied christian history and that's what I did for a long time until I was what's called a full professor. You can't go any higher. You're a full professor. That's it. And I studied these things called ascent narratives. So ascent narratives are when people levitate in the christian tradition. People either levitate or they see things that they call angels or demons and things like this. And I always studied them from a historical perspective. And I found that going through looking at these ascent narratives through the historical record at the Vatican, actually, I kept coming across aerial phenomenon in the historical record from 1000 years ago, from 500 years ago, from very recently. And I recognized that this was happening in UFO literature. And so I started to look at abductions and UFO sightings and things like that, and I wanted to do a cross cultural analysis of this. And that was in 2012, and that's how I got into this. I just want to point out that not all abductions happen in your sleep. A lot of abductions actually happen in daylight. But I do agree with you that something's happening in your brain and you're perceiving something and you called it. Is there some type of mental gateway? And I think there's absolutely a mental gateway. Does this discount that this is objective of us? The question is, is this something subjective, or is this something objective of us? My opinion at this point is it's something that is objective of us. There's something that we're accessing, and I don't think it's within our spacetime reality, to tell you the truth.

So you think it's from somewhere else?

I do, but that doesn't. I mean, it doesn't have to be a location, a geography, right.

That's where it gets weird.

It gets totally weird, but so does quantum physics. Quantum physics is totally weird.

It's the weirdest stuff ever.

Yeah.

And it's completely accepted that you could have something that exists in one place and also in another place.

Now it is moving completely still. Yeah. The Nobel Prize in, what was it, 2022? Was about that.

Yeah. Which is like. What are you saying? You're saying witchcraft's real? What are you saying, magic is real? Quantum physics is the nuttiest stuff of all time. I've had 100 people explain it to me. I don't get it still.

Yeah, well, see, okay, so you were talking about accessing this space. And if I can go back to something you were talking about about, and I'm going to say this. So what I found was. And I had this experience, too. When I was around 13 years old, I felt like the world was going to end. I felt like there was going to be some kind of war. And it was a visceral feeling. It was something that made me depressed as a child, and it was real. I believed it was going to happen, and I believed it was going to happen at any time. Well, after studying religion and studying, by the way, this kind of prompted me into studying religion and recognizing that if you look at, say, Christianity or even other religions, people had ideas that the world was going to end and extinction events have happened and things like that. So it could very well be that information like this is coming to us, but it's out of our spacetime. So to us, it seems like it's going to happen now because our senses of linear time, right? So if we get a feeling, and it's not from any of the input that we're getting, like our people telling us this is actually going to happen, the news telling us this is actually going to happen, but it's coming to us as this feeling that you and I were just talking about. It could be coming from that space that we've just identified as people are talking about. I think that we're at the very beginning of doing a taxonomy or looking at this space in terms of the scientists that you just referenced and people that I think that actually people have. Indigenous cultures talk about this space, they have language about this space. I talked about this in encounters that religious traditions do talk about these spaces. But in secular culture, we've lost that language.

Well, it is interesting that that language exists when you're discussing things like quantum physics, because that is a language of like, it's a bizarre, nontangible, impossible to understand to the layperson. When you're explaining that these things are all interacting with each other without physical contact. What do you mean? What are you saying? Can you show me these things? Are there photos of them? No, we're just drawing it. We're writing it down on paper. We're pretty sure we have these equations and we know what it is. Like what?

Yeah.

Why am I supposed to believe you? Because you guys are phds. This is nuts. But because this is like a field of science, this is a field of