56. Dr. Jon Klimo on Channeling and Consciousness

Guest: Dr. Jon Klimo, discusses his 30 plus years of research into channeling and other unexplained aspects of human consciousness.

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On this episode of Skeptiko, Dr. Jon Klimo discusses his 30 plus years of research into channeling and other unexplained aspects of human consciousness.

“This is positive psychology really, where we learn from not the damage goods of our fellow beings but from them on a very good hair day of being a human being and say, ‘Gee, could I go there, could I have a little bit of quality of life? Could I be a little smarter, could I be a little more self-fulfilled?’ Of course you can. So, I focused my at Rutgers during those eight years was how to make accessible these realms that in the extreme could be considered off-putting or threatening because you begin to then label them as psychism, or metaphysics, or “don’t be so open-minded your brains fall out”, so, you stay more tightly wrapped.”

Alex: Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris.

On this episode of Skeptiko, I have what turned out for me to be a very, very interesting discussion with Dr. Jon Klimo, and I’m going to get to that in one minute. But I just want to take a second and thank all of you who have connected with me and offered your help and support in the research projects that we’re working on, and at the same time I’d like to encourage more of that. So if any of you are interested in helping really dig into this research, formulate these projects and figure out how to most effectively communicate this research to other people, please drop me an e-mail. Let me know who you are, what you do and how you think you might want to get involved. Well, with that, this is a rather long interview with Dr. Klimo, so I’m going to move right into it. I hope you enjoy it and please stay in touch.

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(Start of Interview with DR. JON KLIMO)

Alex: Our guest today is professor of Clinical Psychology at Argos University in the San Francisco Bay area. He’s an expert on Channeling and Mediumship having authored Channeling Investigations On Receiving Information From Paranormal Source which is more or less the definitive book on the topic. Dr. Jon Klimo is also an artist and a poet, a real renaissance man who’s not afraid to speak out on what he’s discovered on 30 plus years of research in this topic. So, Dr. Klimo, welcome to Skeptiko.

Jon: Thank you.

Alex: I ran across your website and I was fascinated. I really got to say you are brave, and I think that comes through you. You thought deeply about this subject from a number of different perspectives and we want to get in to that. A good place to start, at least for me, is that you do bring quite an interesting and diverse background to this area of inquiry that you’ve gotten into or that you’re best known for, that is channeling and Mediumship. Can you give us maybe a brief sketch of your bio, maybe along the way define as you are using the term channeling and how you became interested in that both intellectually and scientifically. I’ve kind of teed up probably an hour’s worth of topic right there, but give it your best.

Jon: Sure. At the same time we’re talking about channeling, I see that as an entry point almost like a Rosetta Stone, that if you can understand that anomalous domain, you can understand an awful lot of other anomalous and currently inexplicable domains that are kind of portals to advancing a scientific and even a spiritual understanding and being in the world. So, for me, I am not overly attached to channeling per se other than that it is terribly useful because it gets you into consciousness, higher dimensionality and non-physical realms, pushing the edges of science on a number of disciplined fronts. So, in that sense, I’d like to talk about channeling. At the same time, the starting point when you talk about a number of other things that I’m also interested in talking about and that I’m digging a lot of work in, but we can see what the big [inaudible 00:04:34] or not.

Alex: I would just interject there because I think that it’s one of the challenges that we all face when we talk about any of these subjects, is that our vocabulary is so limited. I think its kind of a recursive kind of dialogue. Why is our vocabulary limited? Well, we haven’t intellectually and scientifically addressed these areas enough. Well, why don’t we address them? It just kind of gets back on the same thing.

Jon: Then you enter the politics behind it. But show me more data, show me more research, get my attention, maintain it. Earn the right for me to sit here and break bread with you together, so to speak. Then one feels on my end of it, people like myself, we kind of go limp with frustration inside because we are kept from the table. We’re kept from the funding, we’re kept from the jobs, we’re kept from the conferences. We can’t do lunch on that town with other people who are part of the priestly knowledge, and so it’s frustrating. It’s like no, we are not going to support that or take it seriously, but at the same time show me the same kind of evidence and system of argument and so on that we have in our other scientific areas. Parapsychology is one of the member sciences of the American Academy for the branch of sciences. They wish they could take away that invitation, but it was hard earned.

Alex: So, there’s so many thoughts that spring to mind when you say all that. Before we jump into that, take us back a little bit, was it a choice that you made academically in your career to go in this area? If so, did you foresee some of the challenges that you are just talking about there?

Jon: Well, I began this life as a poet and an artist, as a creative person, which is kind of a bohemian outsider as Colin Wilson would call in his book. I said that as probably by the definition of being more of an outsider. I don’t sit in the center of academia and the scientific and intelligence community, not until recent decades. But when I began, I was far from it. It had nothing to do with teaching or research or anything like that. It began as a creative person. After a while, after years of doing this, it started really at very adolescence or late childhood, being involved with the creative process; intuition, inspiration, imagination. It’s kind of a self transcending process. I would come up for air after these episodes, these kind of often unbidden episodes of I guess you can call extreme inspiration and kind of a self transcending quality to them as I experienced them. Analogically, I’d come back from these bouts and I’d say, “What was that all about? Was that me? Where did I go? Was that out of body? Did I stop being me and somebody else was there? Was I overshadowed by a larger me? Did I go out of my normal limited me into a larger me? Does it transcend all me into something impersonal, a kind of ground that I entered into that gave me the images, the words, the lyrical impulses and qualities that I could then drink from and bring back and quote as a poet or as a painter?” Well, that is the gist of what I wanted to get across, was that when people say, “How did you get involved with channeling?” I began involved with channeling as a creative person. In my channeling book, I call it open channeling for a lack of a better term. It’s what I’d call entity list channeling, you don’t lose control or consciousness or step aside. I began kind of surrendering or giving myself over to some kind of self transcending larger presence and locust or source of information, energy, guidance, ideation, meditation, energy, even healing energy it could be; and that was all available to me. The only place I have to put it as a frame of reference was the arts, the arts and creativity, the poet.

Emerson wrote a long essay on The Poet which I very much identify with, and [inaudible 00:08:22] refers to Emerson as being what Seth calls the speaker and that poets are sort of speakers. So, I just gave a conference this weekend about that. For me, being a Poet was always a kind of a form of being a channel I would say because it was self transcending. I’m giving you a definition now; something seem to be coming from beyond me, beyond my normal ego when no one is going to capsulate the ego, my normal experience, my normal realm of competency and inabilities. It came to or through me, then I would just sort of ride it bareback and try to capture as much as I could to witness it, to symbolize and quote it, to make it communicable and share it with others, to make that private more public; and I’ve done that really all my life. I began as an artist and a poet and it’s been that way ever since.

Alex: Okay. I was afraid that this was going to happen. You have probably five or ten minutes there summarized probably a year’s worth of shows that we can potentially do on this subject. I’m not going to be able to parse that, but you touched on so many areas that are very interesting to me and to a lot of folks that listen to the show.

Jon: Okay. So, we need to stop and break it up into smaller chunks.

Alex: Maybe, but I don’t mean to edit or suppress anything that you’re saying. I just want to deconstruct it a little bit because when I did listen to a couple of your earlier interviews, it’s a cliché term, but I was blown away. I mean, there’s just so much information there. The edge that we have played on in the show, it’s an interesting edge to play. It’s kind of the intersection of skepticism and belief in these things, and too often it seems like it. I think you even alluded to this in your earlier talk, part of what you’re saying before. Instead of that being an edge, we’ve turned it into this huge chasm where folks who have not shared this experience; 1) they haven’t shared the experiential things that you have and then 2) intellectually, they haven’t approached the subject in the same way that you have. They see no middle ground for coming together and exploring this issue. I’d say just something that you mentioned just in passing very early on is how it is viable to set up an experiment to test some of these things. So, that’s one of the things that we want to go into.

What I thought I might start in just kind of rolling that back is something that we almost touched on in the beginning. As a public intellectual and a person who has a variety of interests, you’re obviously drawn to this because it seems like these topics that we’re talking about are so fundamental to humanity no matter what your political or religious stripe, no matter what field of academics you’re in. Why isn’t there any kind of real discourse about this? Why as soon as these topics are brought up, they’re either kind of quickly swept under the rug or there’s the giggle factor in terms of exploring it seriously? What inhibits this serious intellectual public debate about these topics that should be central to anyone who’s interested in knowledge?

Jon: Well, I’ve been long interested in on how successful I’ve been at looking at how a consensus reality, a mutually agreed thing that this is reality like what psychologists would call reality testing, you kind of know the limits of it and the shape of it, you can repeat it back to a [inaudible 00:12:09] so they don’t psycho-pathologize you, “You’re in the real world, you’re in a real shared world right, we’re on the same page.” That’s called reality testing. Well I’m interested in how consensus realities, that kind of conjoin agreed to reality at any one time, basically materialistic and media driven and what Noam Chomsky would call manufactured consent within it right now; that whole thing. How does a consensus reality get set up, how is it maintained; and especially, how is it possible? If so, how would you do it to transmute that consensus reality from within by the very people who are the shareholders in that consensus reality? If the consensus reality is a pooled minute by minute input of our psycho energetic systems, our belief systems and as well as our behaviors, then we’re holding it still. There’s a homeostasis to that consensus reality. If you are a changed agent like I am, if you’re sworn, you pray for guidance and help to be kept clear and clean about it, you really want to make a difference. Like Harry Truman said, “If you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen.” Since I was about 12 I was saying, “Please, Lord, put me in the heat of the kitchen. Put me closest to the stove. I want to be part of this change. I want to be born into these interesting times,” as the Chinese would curse you with.

So, I’m here. I’m fascinated by is it possible to transmute consensus reality from within? With the Sheldrakan fields and 100 monkeys, it’s a cliché, also with the Maharishi effect and with the notion of the PEAR lab at Princeton affecting random event generators away from chance as a function of mass events of pooled consciousness, intentionality. There’s a whole set of interrelated things that support the fact that if you could get the old telephone tree go, the old whatever the thing is, and just say “Okay, boys and girls in this world, let’s all put our consciousness together and come from the same place, holding the same intention.” According Maharishi, you only need one-tenth of 1% or whatever it is, and you can actually bring about that kind of change. So I’m a student of actually just sitting here like a victim being slowly boiled like a frog in a stock, constrained and stultified consensus reality, I’m out the box of it; and many of my friends are in the same boat, I’m hardly alone. Well, what do you do? I look at things like channeling and I say its possible to pull things to aerated air holes and poke some holes in kind of an encapsulated ego or they’re medically sealed kind of thing, get more information and guidance and ideas; especially if it’s a heartfelt connection to be of service to others, to really help the system and those in and not just yourself. So that’s one of the things I bring to this interdisciplinary effort, in my own part, is how can I make a difference to the system, channeling as a way to self transcend the system or to breathe some fresher air into a box. I also train clinical psychologists for a living. It’s part of what I have done for the past 34 years, especially the past 10.

What I’ve learned from the clinical domain, the abnormal psyched domain as well as the cognitive science domain, is that we’re lazy. We don’t want to change the homeostasis and all the autoimmune system metaphors over there whatever, how we maintain the way we are. It’s easier to do that, or we don’t really know how not to. Change is hard, very often we will not change within ourselves, let alone conjointly as group systems unless something like the bank break meltdown or something landed the White House lawn or whatever. My friend John Peterson, the futurist, calls it “wild cards,” how to be a wild card. They might come in on the left field, hit upside the head, this homeostatic stuckness; help to learn and grow. So a clinician sits with a client one-on-one and thinks, “How can I get them unstuck from their own baggage, their own limitations, their own somnambulism and their own defense mechanisms to try to get some growth and change?” You can say that to the whole consensus reality, you can say it of the scientific and academic community. I’ve been in there for 34 years now and I’ve never found a place not having what I was promised I would have; intellectual curiosity, open mindedness, tolerance, wanting to learn and accommodate from new things.

Alex: Let’s take that and look through the clinician’s view – who you’re training – and look through that lens that you just said. How has it changed in the last 20 years, how is it still stuck? How is the perspective that you’re able to bring to the future clinicians that come under your tutelage; what is the difference in the perspective you give them than they might receive if they were at standard university?

Jon: First of all, I’d put things like channeling or psychic abilities, consciousness worker, all those states of consciousness, I’d put it all under a much more user-friendly, less threatening, garden variety set of variable characteristics or abilities that we could all identify with, and nobody can say that it isn’t me at all. I can’t draw, I can’t make a tree look like a tree when I paint, I can’t act, I’m not a poet; don’t come up with that stuff. The eight years I was at Rutgers, pyramiding down and working with hundreds of graduate students who will go with field tests of the stuff we were talking about and bring them back and say, “That worked and that didn’t. That was true to people out there or it isn’t.” We really kept [inaudible 00:17:56]. What happened was that I saw the arts and creativity and intuition and inspiration and the imagination as being the royal road to that human potential that is part of the same context, the more scary or strange or threatening psychic and anomalous and miraculous or the devil’s work or whatever it might be construed as. It allows you to get your foot in the door, kind of get the horse inside the gates and then release some time release capsules, trouble their sleep a little bit without seeming to be pushy.

Alex: We can explore from the creative perspective, and I think there’s plenty of examples you might be familiar with. But with Stephan Schwartz in his recent book Opening to the Infinite, I think he does a great job of kind of chronicling how that creative genius touches an inner sex with this connection, with an infinite that we can’t really totally get our arms around. So take that creative realm and then move that to the clinicians chair; intuition. So, are you then using these ideas of intuition as a means to make people more comfortable with the idea of the role that channeling and Mediumship might play?

Jon: A larger access of information, insight, energy, understanding, and guidance even, I would see it as self transcending. We never thought of things like that. For one, there I am, 12 years old as a little artist poet thinking, “What is going on here? This is mysterious. It’s wonderful. I’m in awe of it.” But then you don’t often find creative people or people getting their PhD’s in English Literature or Art History really getting into the creative process that way as much. Then I found people from the psychology realm, like Howard Garner and [inaudible 00:19:50] and many others who were so popular on the outside looking in to the creative process. Well I’m not really that, but I like to study geniuses and people who really are the case of it, maybe can learn from them. This is positive psychology really where we learn from not the damaged goods of our fellow beings but from them on a very good hair day of being a human being and say, “Gee, could I go there, could I have a little bit of quality of life? Could I be a little smarter, could I be a little more self fulfilled?” Of course you can. So I focus at Rutgers those eight years, in this program I ran, in how to make accessible these realms that could in the extreme be considered off-putting or threatening because you begin to then label them as Psychism or metaphysics, and I’m not going to let that happen since they’re more tightly wrapped.

Alex: Fascinating. Again, a lot of jumping off points there. But let me take on a couple. A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Carol Tarvis who wrote the book Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me). She really is coming at things from a very skeptical perspective, and we had an interesting dialogue. But the point she makes is of course from the book, and you probably know the author of the book When Prophecy Fails.

Jon: Yes, Festinger.

Alex: Festinger. So, it’s really based on that research. What that would suggest – and I found this with my dealing with skeptics – is that kind of thing where they’ll reach the edge and they’ll start entering into some kind of dialogue, some kind of interaction with the anomalous information. But then, just as predicted in When Prophecy Fails, they wind up incorporating that in by strengthening their belief. In coming around, they’re doing it that way, too. So, that leads to this question, what works? That’s the question. Also, is it fair to kind of categorize and group and label? Of course it isn’t, but there are dogmatic skeptics who are going to be totally close, and then there are these people in the middle. Then there are the closet believers who are in academia or some kind of institution that they’ve learned how to play the game and can’t even venture out. Do you want to touch on a couple of those topics?

Jon: Well, the last part of that is not fair. If you’re someone like myself – and maybe yourself, too – you’ve learn from experience what it feels like to be in that skin when somebody does it to you. It’s like all you people, all you black skin, all you white skin, all you this and that, you’re that way; here’s the generalization I make about you, the one size fits all. You say, “Wait a minute, I’m an individual, I’m not that.”

My first wife was a strong feminist. I mean radical, stubborn stuff. She and her sisters, they would just crucify me and say, “You, you’re all alike, you’re a man.” I say, “Wait a minute, we are unique individuals.” So, if you’ve had that happen to you, if you experienced “isms,” racism, ageism, sexism and whatever it is; and also the intellectual domains of the beliefism, the paradigmism of it from someone else’s paradigm, then I got to the point that I wouldn’t want to do it with anybody else. If I did feel bad that way, I don’t want to make someone else feel bad that way. Why just multiply with the thing? So I’m going to hold my tongue if I can and do unto others as I wish had been done unto me. So that’s my little story about having to learn on the job of life.

One of the things that work I think, I’m looking for things that seem innocuous, that seem non-threatening, that are likely not as strange; like using terms, complimentary and alternative medicine. We’ve settled on some of these terms like this, and I have been on the kind of kitchen heat with some of that with the people that would come help with some of these things, like alternative medicines and things like that, where you choose terms that don’t further estrange or antagonize this kind of political situation, like this loyal opposition thing. This is politics of consciousness again that we’re are all voting each moment, usually almost totally unconsciously…

Alex: Hold on, I just have to interject because that just doesn’t feel right to me. You were mentioning feelings before, and I want to go there for just a minute. I did this interview with Dr. Tavris and we kind of got into on that, and the turning point or the fulcrum point was really Freud. I said, “Okay, but you seem to be on one hand kind of owning up to what a complete charlatan is and how discredited all his ideas would be.” In modern day, we could certainly just cast them all out. I said, “We carry all these baggage with us and you seem to a certain extent be kind of carrying that baggage along because it’s useful to a certain community that you talk to, and it would be too off-putting to say let’s just kind of own up to this.” She said, “Well, that’s kind of how you have to do it. We have to kind of meet people where they are,” and you are kind of saying the same thing. I guess I feel like isn’t the promise of science that if we do come with a heart that is open and well-meaning, can’t we just get down to the facts? Can’t we get down to the data? Can’t we always just come back to finding a way with this beautiful gift that we’ve been given, the scientific method, to design and experiment and collaborate and let the data drive where we go rather than try and PC massage the words so that you’ll listen to me?

Jon: Well, first of all, although I do my fair share of the PC-ing and the massaging of the words in a discrete diplomatic choice of things, at the same time I am – from some feedback I’ve got – anomaly. Especially when you plunk me down in the middle of academia with a bunch of professors, I am anomalous. When my mouth opens it’s relatively anomalous stuff. So I’m already doing damage or planting seeds or destabilizing or de-automatizing an expectation

Alex: I agree with that.

Jon: So, in other words, I’m doing the work but not in an overt way that allows them to go get their guns, kind of grab a knife and shove you with it or say, “You’ll never do lunch in this town again. That’s the last conference you would ever go to.” Whatever it could be, to just keep this stuff minimized so that I can stay non-lucid. In lucid dream doing research, lucid dream tends to emerge from a non-lucid dream as a function of an anomaly experience in a non-lucid dream, where you say, “Wait a minute, am I dreaming? This shouldn’t be happening, you’re floating towards the ceiling. Wait, have I been dreaming up until now?” So, if the analogy is regular dreaming as to lucid dreaming, it’s something like regular awakeness is to something like a lucid awakeness. Then what is our role or function? What a psychologist call the courage to create one of these titles.

I think I have this reputation to a certain extent, to stand forth and be unusual or different or an outsider or anomalous or speak from a place so that it’s not just preaching to each other’s choir and is destabilizing; and it’s a necessary prerequisite to altering consciousness and the growth and change, whether you are talking clinically or cognitively. So in that sense, what works for me is just to take my own [inaudible 00:27:32] approach which tickles people open or leaves them different than I left them, but they didn’t even quite know what hit them because it will probably hit them hard. It’s going to be a more feminine view, but it’s also post modern. So I can actually say, “Let’s talk about post-modernism. Do you believe there’s one modernistic, “one size fits all” explanation of things? They say, “Yes, that science is the only thing you can trust.” I said, “Well, let’s talk about that.” What I’m trying to do is to tickle at the edges of the erodibility or the vulnerability of this totally inclusive quality of physical reduction, [inaudible 00:28:08] which doesn’t work anymore and [inaudible 00:28:10]. So, I’ll take facts like that, for example. Also, just someone in the presence of the way my mind works. Half of my students here don’t like the way my mind works. They wouldn’t recommend me as a teacher to somebody else because they can’t follow me; I’m not linear, I’m multileveled and I’m also talking more to their higher self a bit or something like that, and they don’t even want to own up that that’s there. “Is this is some test. Is this on the test, am I going to get a B here?

Alex: This is on the test, right?

Jon: I’ve lived with that for 34 years. Now, that’s not to say the other half of the people aren’t saying, “Give me more, can I pull an all-nighter with you?” There’s that, too. Let’s look at the fact that the system is run kind of top down by the more entirely rapt, the ones that are still guarding the gate of the reigning scientific paradigm that which is dominant to the physical reductionism, and the other kind of ancillary things that are related to it. Now you could say I’m the loyal opposition in the politics of consciousness. I’m sworn to get people to stop voting for that party, for that paradigm coming from that place, and more vote from a more modified, more moderate, maybe moving toward a more liberal place or more idealist place or something. By doing, we could actually – where people are coming from – co-constitute a different consensus reality, [patch-ibism] [00:29:25], rival pockets of consensus realities, and we’re not all now stuck in the same being boiled alive in the one main one that is still dominated by a scientific paradigm.

So, in that sense, the artist in me, not the scientist, not the scholar, not the debate team guy because I’m not that much good at that either, but the Dionysian, idiosyncratic moving target multileveled channeling I guess you could say of the universal through me or my own higher self; that that gets in there, the spirit moves me and I do what seems to be needed in a situation to affect change even though it’s very subtle. People come back six months later and say, “I heard you gave that talk at [inaudible 00:30:03]. I could put in all my pigeon holes all that stuff that was coming up there, but now I’m coming back to you because something is different. I feel different.” In the clinical domain, change happens but maybe not until it has to happen. I’m a cockeyed optimist, but we can appeal to the people, to the voters, to the existential transpersonal side of the voter in all of us; I believe that. Certainly, if you do your homework enough and you give positive regard to the other at the same time, you don’t want to leave it the way you found it. It isn’t okay the way it is. Now it is not isn’t the best of all possible ones, and I’m talking about the righteous warrior right now. No, I don’t leave it the way it is. I don’t just coddle and let them go on the way they were because they’ve done a lot of damage to me. I’m damaged goods. I’ve been traumatized by people like that. I don’t want to traumatize them in turn. But at the end of the day, I can lie in bed with kind of a little warm, fuzzy feeling if I actually got to that person. Now, do I get to everybody? No, I don’t. But I’m not in some kind of delusion of grandeur situation; I’m the only one walking around on whose shoulders that job is.

There’s so many people kind of waking up to these things, and then they begin to have the courage to create, this is to open their mouth and be slightly anomalous to the more closed people around them. You begin to think maybe the consensus reality is not as predictably closed, and just like me or as I used to be as I thought it was. Then of course the side that comes out closet is very important. It’s almost like they wait for the Professor Emeritus stage when they have the courage to create, the courage to stand for, to speak because you can always be gotten earlier before the Professor Emeritus stage. Bill Taylor was very courageous and taken for…

Alex: I think that’s changing, too. I mean, I can agree with you on a number of accounts. One, I certainly think that it’s a desperate situation to find yourself in terms of having a different view of things and where you want things to go, and in the end you just have to put your shoulder behind that rock. Like Sisyphus and your fellow Sisyphinians, just push down that darn thing up the hill and not really worry too much about it. By the same token I’m a cockeyed optimist like you are, too. I certainly respect and honor the artist and the poet in you because I think that that’s such a wonderful way to kind of dance with this information. I come I think from a different perspective, in just a tiny way. I’m more as a computer guy and as a former businessman who is forced to be strictly pragmatic and goal-oriented. One of the things that I see that is maybe a crack of light is this technology that we’re using right now, the other way around that institution and is holding on to the power because it’s self-perpetuating in the way that it works, is that we can go around it. We started a little something called Open Source Science which is the idea of taking the same open source technologies that disintermediates so many of the institutions in every other area of our life like the Internet has done and say, “Can we disintermediate the institutions from science? Can we get the right minds together to devise appropriate protocols, appropriate redesigned experiments? Then can we run those experiment and use the communication vehicle that has become the Internet as a way to make it that much more efficient? In the end, can we generate results that help move the dialogue along for those folks who need that kind of empirical evidence?” I think that’s a lot of people, to one extent to another. I guess I kind of balance the two. I wonder if you have any thoughts on some of those topics and how we might create another body of empirical evidence, do it faster and better than we could ever hope to do inside of the academia.

Jon: You’re right. I clearly agree with you. How can media be used; we’d all like to be Bill Moyers. I’ve worked a number of times with people where the common denominator was – and none of it came to fruition – we wanted to have a nova show. We wanted to get a gig, an hour of nova that will be nationally distributed. All kinds of things, like survival of physical death or extraterrestrials or electronic voice communications. We are actually getting voices from the dead supposedly that’s actually recorded, there’s no medium involved. Why doesn’t it come to fruition? Maybe the timing isn’t right, maybe the consensus reality, the energy…

Alex: Jon, in the first part of that you kind of brought this up, the whole thing is changing because you started talking about YouTube. I think the whole idea of an ABC one hour special is quickly becoming irrelevant. I think in that same way where the dissemination of information which we’re calling media is undergoing this just kind of a rapid turn around where your presentation on YouTube, if its successful at all within a short period of time is going to reach up larger more targeted audience than anything on the Discovery Channel that will run in the next year, and that’s just the way that it is. I’m wondering if that same kind of same transition is coming in science where a scientific experiment properly done on the Internet with the proper controls, with the proper consultation from the right representatives, with the right credentials; if that won’t in the same way kind of revolutionize science and we can then say “I don’t give a crap what research you’ve done and what view process you’ve done. Here it is for everyone to see, and here is the momentum behind it.” I don’t have a good example at this point to point to of that happening, but that seems to me to be just around the corner.

Jon: Yes, and thank you very much for pointing out to me that I was backsliding into a kind of earlier a generational way of thinking about a more modernist view of reaching people on information conveyance like primetime TV or something. But I’m sort of new to this other side. I’m not quite even sure what a podcast is. I know what a website is now. But I thought I was going to add new things to it each week and kind of talk to people over to check some [inaudible 00:35:55] to get in the habit of that. But that’s already existing, it’s called something different. It’s not your website necessarily. I’m just admitting that I’m pretty naïve about a lot of these things, but everything you’ve said makes all the sense of the world to me. Yes, that’s the direction things are going. That’s where I would like to put my eggs in the basket, that’s where I put my bread in the water, not a publishing house where I just a proposal off to Random House. But the point is that I agree.

Let me jump to a couple of things. Dick ([inaudible 0:37:19), he’s not the only one but he really kind of pioneered it. When I was over there many years ago for an old defense for dissertation of a friend of mine where he got his PhD from University of [inaudible 00:37:31] is Para-psych, one of the few places in the world you could do that, a 500 year old institution. So, we were having supper, after supper we go in the study, we we’re staying with them. He gets on a computer and he shows us an ongoing running experiment where people are trying to do a kind of an aimed intentionality to effect the pattern of pedestrians walking across an intersection area where there’s constantly a going a camera [inaudible[00:37:59]. He became one of many nodes on that. To brainstorm this, let alone to see who has already tried inventing that wheel, more and more people are actually doing that. We don’t need a journal, but we need some kind of way to remind each other who is doing that and who the new kid on the block is with it, and how it begins to accrue together. So, do we have a conference on it, do we have a teleconference, how do we share that, how do we then turn to the more established community and say here’s a word during our subculture…

Alex: You know that is such an interesting thought. As were talking about enabling science with the technology, I think your mind can immediately go to two ways. One is, what are the unique opportunities that technology kind of creates? We can have as many as we can probably think here, and we probably have more than we could do in a lifetime. Also, just improving through technology, more or less, routine or experiments that are more traditional, and I think that just using the Internet and the other computer technologies as an enabling and expediting kind of tool, which is a little bit of what we found here, too. I was just going to say, you’ve been extremely generous with your time. But there was something that you talked about a few minutes ago that I wanted to kind of bring up. This may be the last topic we talk about today. I want to get in and talk about spirituality a little bit. I didn’t want to leave that alone because I think that, again, you just need to be so credited with being brave enough to even include the word “God.” Just to say, “My lifelong desire to understand the ultimate secrets of the universe including how God works and how Jon Klimo is God and localized, individualized, vastly stepped down form. That’s a wonderful quote, and I don’t know why it has to be so brave.

Jon: It’s true for all of us, isn’t it?

Alex: Yes. I don’t know why it has to be so brave for a public intellectual to say that, but it is and we have to acknowledge that. There’s an analogy you brought back, you were talking about kind of one too many sermons on the mount, speaking too many, and you’re saying maybe that model has passed. I think you’re alluding to that, at least that’s where I took it. I think that model has passed and I think that we’ve seen that also in spirituality. I saw a recent pew survey of Americans and you can read a lot into that depending on whether you’re a conservative or whether you’re a liberal. But what jumped out at me was how many kind of folks are kind of rolling their own spirituality. When they do, they’re no longer ascribing to this kind of hierarchal model, and we’re seeing this idea of this said “stepped down God” that is in all of us. Do you think that’s a trend? Maybe just speak for a minute about what that’s all about?

Jon: Yes, absolutely. It’s a trend, it’s like a “pillar that does you damage” as to a scientist or to priest’s notion of this tropism, this theological tropism within the Noah sphere or the kind of spirit consciousness envelope of our species and our planet. This revolutionary movement toward the omega point, which he calls Christ-consciousness, you could insert other things and stuff, but something like that. People like the terms, [inaudible 0:41:31, they kind of stepped it up sooner to this mind counter kind of things. Things have to go ballistically non-linear and kind of quantum coherent out of quantum incoherence. I absolutely believe that the faith, it’s eco-potentially in each of us human beings. We’re a node of that God potentiality in being in consciousness and this dormant or somnambulistic – it’s disassociated, it is repressed, it is not reinforced, it’s not much modeled much by people who would stand forth and say, “Come join me in Christ.” We need Christ today is what they’re saying essentially, who are not off putting or like “Gee, I could never be like that.” Sure you can. I believe that. So the potential for everything, again, I also believe that it is a spiritual movement. It’s a revolution of [Stan Groth] and his wife, coining the term spiritual emergence and spiritual emergency. Part of what I do clinically is – I’m not a clinician technically – I help people having these emergences. The protestant wing of it where it’s not religion anymore, they’ve either elapsed from that or they never had that. But they are trying to cobble together, find and hone in on, be drawn toward their own spiritual connectedness and so on. This means the world to me, and I’ve been involved with these confluence of science of spirituality for a few decades now. Oftentimes I have ached to have more of a platform or a talking stick or a way to talk to other people about it and have them talk about it. But part of the shyness of the introversion is I’m not very good at pitching that, I have no agents or anything like that. But the point is that I see that sole central and everything. The spirituality is central to everything. On the website, I take an attack a philosophical idealism, which sounds kind of dry, but it just means that everything is consciousness. But not only that, Hegel the Philosopher said that everything is absolute Spirit. That’s just another way of talking about the [inaudible 00:43:36] science because it’s all just a consciousness field. It’s a living being that’s got a heart, too. That’s my spirituality. I see more and more people kind of awakening out of somnambulism toward that each in their own respective way. They just want to encourage it not knowing what shape it’s going to take with them, but in model my version of it that wouldn’t be your way, that will be my way. That’s really the main work that I see myself doing from here forward.

Alex: Well, Dr. Jon Klimo it’s been extremely interesting, just wonderful, speaking with you. I appreciate you taking so much time.

Jon: Thank you, it’s my pleasure. That is with the old paradigm, but someone like me is very dependent upon someone like you and your situation and your set up and your vehicles to do anything other than to talk to myself.

Alex: Well, I think you’ve also planted a seed in dinner with Andre. I’m going to go check the availability of that domain name because it’s a good resting place to kind of germinate that idea of can there be a place where we can invite certain people to come together and share in a dialogue that’s directed and at the same time let loose to kind of run wherever it goes. Also, I would love to follow up with you more about any ideas you might have on a new paradigm for how to move science outside of the system, and at the same time engage the system. As you were talking about that, the model that sprang to mind is if the Internet and these other technologies enable science to sprout over here, maybe the intersection is not with the folks probably in a traditional way – but as you mentioned it at your university and every university they’re also saying, “ How can I move to the Internet? How can I disseminate this information differently?” Maybe the meeting point is up at a different level, you just do it and then come back around and say, “Hey, I’ve done this over here. Would you like the opportunity to kind of join in and direct where it goes in the future?” I think that sometimes works a little bit better. It’s easier to get forgiveness than permission.