Alexis Brooks, The Intersection of Consciousness and UFO Journalism |416|

Alexis Brooks interviews on extended consciousness and UFOs, and goes where mainstream media can’t.

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Start 00:00:00

Alex Tsakiris: Today we welcome Alexis Brooks to Skeptiko. Alexis is a well-known journalist into consciousness and UFO communities, as well as being a bestselling author and host of Higher Journeys Radio, a show you might have checked out if you’re at all familiar with these fields and you’ve come across her excellent work. It’s really a terrific show, some fantastic interviews with many bestselling authors, many folks that you’ve already listened to here on Skeptiko but Alexis brings so much to those interviews.

It’s just a great pleasure to meet her. Alexis, thank you so much for joining me on Skeptiko.

Alexis Brooks: Alex, what a pleasure and just said my namesake, I love it. You know, I’ll never forget your name. And listen, let me just say right off the bat, I have somewhat recently become familiar with Skeptiko, but I’ve got to tell you, a quick study and I’m loving it already. I think I said to you offline that we have several mutual colleagues in common, all of which sing your praises. So I am delighted to be here, honored.

Alex Tsakiris: Well, I think that’s super nice of you to say. I want to give people a little bit of the background of the origins of this interview because it really did just spring from listening to your show and saying “Wow, this is the kind of stuff covered in the way, in the in-depth way that really does try and get at the deeper questions on things, that I really want to engage in conversation with.”

I have this thing where I think that journalists like yourself, podcasters who are going through and reading these new books as they come out and then digesting them and assimilating that information and trying to make it fit with everything else that they’ve learned. You’re just a wealth of knowledge.

I just think of all of the interviews I can do; these are the kinds that I think can be most valuable because you do have such a unique perspective and that goes beyond just kind of singing your praises or patting you on the back. I think you sit in a really unique position and I’m excited to take advantage of that and bring that to the Skeptiko audience.

Alexis Brooks: Thank you. I do appreciate that, and I have to tell you, as I’m listening to all of these accolades which I don’t know that I can live up to, I will say this time and time again Alex, I am no more than my guests. I am the one who is blessed, as I think we both are, to have such a spectrum of knowledge. I say I’m the luckiest gal on the planet, that I get to engage with these clearly thought leaders that are leading the charge on what we call this new age, if you will.

So every show I do, and as I said, as soon as we finish up, I’m going to be getting on with someone who I greatly respect, Neil Kramer for the third time he’ll be on my show. I learn so much. I’m really the one that’s getting the gift, I have to tell you and because I do have a natural thirst, hunger if you will for these big questions, I always have, it feels right, it’s easy to engage, to talk about things that you enjoy, absolutely.

Alex Tsakiris: Well, that’s a great lead in for, just the real basic question. Who is Alexis Brooks? You have such an interesting background. Tell folks a little bit about your bio because it’s pretty cool.

Alexis Brooks: I’m so tempted to come up with a sarcastic answer to who is Alexis Brooks. I’ll say it with a little tongue in cheek cut I think a part of me is still asking that question. Isn’t that one of the big questions we all ask; who are we? May I use that as a segue? I don’t know that that is the number one big question that I have had; who am I? Why are we here? I think that’s part and parcel of the bigger questions that we ask.

I will just say Alex, and I’ve said this before, I think I came out of my mother’s womb asking big questions. I’m really, really lucky that I grew up in a household with inquisitive parents, although they did both have left brain positions. My mom was an educator, a high school educator, my dad was an MIT scientist, very left brained, very normal, if you will, but when they sat down at the kitchen table, you know, the discussion shifted very quickly to UFOs and reincarnation and life after death and all of the orthodox religions as well and they explored that. That invited me to the table, literally, to participate, as soon as I was old enough to do so.

That coupled with my own set of, let’s call them anomalist experiences, sort of just launched me on a course of natural inquiry, which I think many of us have, I think that’s part of our journey.

I think the only difference with me and others like and maybe everybody else who I believe all have some form of experience at some point in their lives, is I did not seek to shove it in a box, put it in context with something that I had been told, but rather became determined to understand what is the true nature of reality? Really, that’s the big question for me and that’s what really drives me. What is the true nature of reality? What is this that we’re looking at here? And then comes the question, who is Alexis Brooks, who is Alex, what is this and why are we here?

So, I don’t know if I’m talking in circles or not. It’s been lifelong.

Alex Tsakiris: Not at all. It’s funny you say talk in circles, it’s like, I think what you’re really saying is, mam we could talk for an hour about that kind of stuff because it’s the most important stuff and I love the way you break it down, I love the way you lead into some of these things. Experiencer, I think, is such an interesting topic because first off, we have to talk about the kind of anomalist experiences that you had as a kid. People are going to be interested in that, so let’s just kind of put that on the table as much as you feel comfortable with. What was happening to you?

Alex Tsakiris: Well, I’m going to preface by saying, in so far as I can remember. My experiences were not, I don’t think unlike many others. We’re talking about things like precognition. That was chief among the experiences that I would have, dreams primarily of something that would invariably happen in the next day or so. It was a collection of these things over years that got me really pondering the idea of time. What is time? If I’m able to dream about something that invariably is going to play out the next day, then am I understanding the concept of time properly? So that launches me into an investigation of that. Not immediately, because these things were happening all of my life, even as a kid, but eventually.

I would say that primarily my experiences were centered in the dreamscape, hearing messages. It’s very hard to explain because we’re talking about a scope of, I’m not going to say how many years, a lot of years. Precognition I would have to say, or premonition would have to be the chief among them. I can’t say that I have seen ghostly apparitions. You know, we hear in the more traditional sense people seeing something at the foot of their bed. No, I can’t say that I have experienced that, but I have seen subtle energy, you know, a scope of things Alex, it’s so hard to pinpoint.

Alex Tsakiris: Let me ask you this then. When did it start, because I think it’s really interesting when you say these started at a young age, and then the related question is, what do you do with that?  

Alexis Brooks: What do you do with that?

Alex Tsakiris: I mean, what do you do with that at school? Fortunately at the kitchen table you didn’t maybe have to hide it so much but at the Thanksgiving table, you know, it’s not a cool thing. It changes everything about your childhood, right?

Alex Tsakiris: I suppose. I’ve been asked that question before, I think it was Jimmy Church that asked that question and basically his question was, “Did you feel a sense of inhibition when you were having these experiences and perhaps unable to talk about them?” Well guess what, no. I don’t know why, call me strange, but I have welcomed bringing other people into my circle to talk about these things because I also had a sense, and yes, even at a young age, that other people were having these sorts of experiences. So I didn’t feel any inhibition in so far as I can remember being in school. Not that I necessarily thought about it that much. I mean, these things weren’t necessarily happening on a day-to-day basis, but they were certainly happening enough where it raised a fundamental question for me. What are we dealing with here?

I want to go back, you’re causing me to reflect on so many years ago, certain experiences that I’ve had, and I will tell you a couple that I recall, outside of the broader sort of ESP, what we broadly call ESP. I recall seeing a craft.

Alex Tsakiris: Really, at what age?

Alexis Brooks: I want to say it was preadolescent, certainly no more than, you know, maybe in the adolescent years, 13 or so, 12 or 13. I’m an only child and my parents didn’t fly, they were afraid to fly interestingly. So everything we did was a road trip. My mother, being from Ohio, we would take annual visits to Ohio, we would drive, and this is a vague recollection, this is why I have not talked about it this much because a lot of these things are just starting to, sort of crystalize in my memory now, which I’m finding with a lot of other people by the way, kind of triggers for remembering things.

I have a vague recollection Alex of being in the back seat of the car. It seemed as if we were in close proximity, we were closer to Ohio than here, where I am on the East Coast, we were driving from the East Coast. I have a recollection of seeing what appeared to be a cylindrical silver craft. When I say cylindrical, I’m looking at my microphone right now, my Blue Yeti microphone and it almost looked like that, oblong but cylindrical. I have a vague recollection of seeing it, perhaps out of the right side of the window but also the back and I do not recall my parents reacting at all. It seems as if I kept it to myself.

End 00:10:37

Start 00:51:40

Alex Tsakiris: One of the things I want to do today is draw that out and give you some space to talk about it. Take like Mary Rodwell, a very interesting person and of course she is a UFO contactee facilitator, counsellor, helper through hypnosis and progression but that, a lot of times turns people off because sometimes her technique isn’t even “hypnosis”, it’s just creating a space where people can deal with their contact experience. She’s extremely gifted and at this point extremely knowledgeable in having dealt with thousands of cases. Just a fascinating person and we could spend an hour talking about her discoveries.

Alexis Brooks: I love Mary. I was just with her. I love her to pieces. That’s my friend.

Alex Tsakiris: Well, she’s also part of this organization, this free organization. We just interviewed Rey Hernandez recently, the first scientific survey where they really went and said, “Okay, let’s study this in a scientific way and let’s ask people who have had these contact experiences,” and what falls out of that immediately is stop calling them abductions. Most of these people who have these contact experiences, they’re not calling them abductions, they’re calling them, in some cases, spiritually transformative experiences, healing experiences or just contact experiences but most of them are not calling them abductions.

But here’s where I’m sitting that I want to get your point on. I really came into the UFO thing through the consciousness thing. So I’m over there talking to parapsychology researchers, that was where I started and then I went, “Okay, if the game really is this ridiculous materialism, you’re a biological robot in a meaningless universe, and why is that message being propped up in such a silly way?” Well, that led me to near-death experience because that kind of definitively puts an end to that discussion. These people no longer have a functioning brain and yet they’re having these consciousness experiences.

But when you delve past the science of it and get into… and you know this because you’ve interviewed these people, you get into that experience, that near-death experience and what that means. It’s challenging because there are parallels to the contact experience but there are also differences and I’m a little concerned like Grant, I love Grant to death, he’s been on the show multiple times, I consider him a friend, but this idea of the multiple contact modalities and just kind of smoothing it all over and going, “The paranormal is the paranormal and it’s popping up all of these ways.” You’ll hear that from Jeff Kripal, you’ll hear that from Whitley Strieber too.

I’m not so sure. I’ve looked through all of the near-death accounts and talked to the scientists and I’ve just had a guy on, I thought he was a fantastic guest, and it’s like, the number of incidents of near-death experience where someone’s being raped by a reptilian is zero. The number of [My Lab 00:54:43] near-death experiences are zero.

I’m open to the spiritually transformative experience as part of the contact experience, but I want to pump the brakes a little bit and say, do we really understand the nature of what we’re calling a spiritual experience and how does all of this fit together?

Alexis Brooks: Obviously, I’m not only well aware of FREE, I consider myself a friend of FREE. That would be the Foundation for Research into Extra… Well, they’ve changed it now, Extraordinary Experiences and Extraterrestrial… FREE, a wonderful organization. Rey is also a friend and has done some stellar work. He and Marion, Dr Rudy Schild etc. Kathleen Marden is on their board, etc. Here’s my zoomed-out postulate for the moment about, I think what you’re talking about.

I’m going to go back to a philosophy that I have, it’s very broad. I have always said, “It is not this or that, it is this and that.” People get stuck in one or the other. The ETs are bad – the ETs are good. The experience was malevolent – it was benevolent. It was a spiritual experience – it was a hellacious experience. This or that. You’re talking about a phenomenon that could be striking the masses and I don’t know if we have time to talk about it, but I could tell you a little bit about the presentation that I gave in January in Australia about, this is a mass phenomenon.

How on earth Alex, can we take a phenomenon that I know is ubiquitous and put it into nice neat little boxes. My sense has always been and will remain until I learn any more, that there is a spectrum of experiences. I know that Rey has got some great numbers. l believe their count now for their survey over at FREE is north of 4,000. So there’s clearly a solid sample there, but we’ve got to look at a couple of factors here when judging the experience broadly.

First of all, these are still subjective experiences. I mean, it has been said that according to the way our brains work, you can  have an apple in the middle of the table, you on one side, me on the other, and we’re seeing two completely different things, even though fundamentally it’s an apple.

So the experiences are subjective, they’re subject to interpretation because it’s still going through the human channel in terms of trying to capture what it was and I think we do ourselves a disservice by taking a side, the phenomenon… the aliens are… What aliens, which ones are we talking about?

Do you know how many species, it’s been said, that have been identified? In some cases 3,000 is a number I’ve got. Now, I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I think the inference here is that we’re dealing with a very large, complex, multidimensional phenomenon with virtually every aspect of experience from the most hideous to the most euphoric and everything in between. The entities themselves, the most benevolent, loving to the most hideous we can imagine.

I refuse to take a side here. I, again, want to just stay in an act of observation and know that this sucker that we call reality and all of these things that are happening within it are just absolutely too broad to want to put a label on.

I don’t know if that at all answered your question, but I am absolutely so determined to get that message out and we would do so much better if we would start to take our foot off the gas pedal of that a bit. That goes for Rey as well. Rey, if you’re listening, and Rey and I will talk about that, I have no problem, you know. We have to start making proclamations about things we still just don’t understand. That’s where that humility comes in. We’re out of our league here.

Speaking of Whitley Strieber, I actually just introduced his talk about contact in the desert. I love Whitley and he’s been on the show. He said something. Now, you probably know that the love of his life Anne, who’s been gone several years now, according to him remains in contact with him, and I’ve listened fervently to the stories that he’s told, regardless of what’s happening there. Whatever messages he’s getting are worth hearing, whether from Anne or some other source, it’s not the point.

But one thing he’s told before and he told me again in our interview, is Anne came up with something, based on a question that he had and he said that Anne said to him in response, “Humans would be better off not believing but in asking questions. Not adopting a belief. Take your foot off the gas pedal.” We’d be better off with questions. There are a lot of questions that we need to be asking and it seems like we’re putting more emphasis on adopting a position rather than asking a question, if that makes sense. I bodged the quote. I’m going to see if I can find it.

Alex Tsakiris: I think I understand where you’re coming from with the overall point and yeah, I get the humility of asking questions. One of the taglines of this show is inquiry to perpetuate doubt. I think doubt is the thing and as your certainty goes up, I think your closing off to more things.

But I want to pull you back into one part of that question because I’m interested in your opinion and I maybe didn’t frame it up right. I’m curious about the nature of these extended realms and whether we’re seeing a hierarchy and whether, what we’re getting so worked up about, in terms of the contact experience is much  more familiar to us because it is us in this middle ground, in this time-space continuum that is probably, by all measures, a tiny part of the overall consciousness.

Alexis Brooks: Absolutely.

Alex Tsakiris: We look at our lesser reality, which is our time-space reality and we extrapolate out of that, we make all of these conclusions and people slip out of that, either through contact experience, but what I really want to focus is the near-death experience. They slip out of the time-space continuum and they come back saying a lot of different things. I contrast the near-death experience and the spiritual transformative aspects of that to the ET contact experience and I just have a hunch that something doesn’t exactly jive there. I’m trying to equate those in a way that we maybe are misguided in doing so.

I don’t want to make any conclusions about that, I don’t want to say one’s demonic or satanic or any of that, I just want to sit back and go back to Alexis’s pattern thing and I want to say there’s a difference in this pattern than that pattern. Yeah, we can go and talk about the similarities, but what about the differences?

Alexis Brooks: You’re questioning, are we looking at apples to apples, if I could just break it down? Are we looking at apples to apples here? Is near-death experience, can you equate that to a contact experience, can you equate that to an OBE, can you equate that to a shamanic journey, an ayahuasca trip [unclear 01:02:57]. Apples to apples, the answer in my humble opinion is no, it is not apples to apples.

However, from my perspective and what I have seen and studied, particularly with out-of-body experience, OBEs and so-called abductions, there are common threads inherent in many if these experiences, crossovers if you will. Enough, if my estimation, to beg the question, what is the common denominator here that is allowing for these experiences to happen?

Alex, I’m very conservative in any proclamation on any of this. This is a position I refuse to relent on. I don’t know but I do have a feeling about certain things.

Alex Tsakiris: Is there another level of this stuff that is completely different? Is there a God, spiritual, soul, path that doesn’t really… it’s completely different than your alien contact, DMT?

Alexis Brooks: Listen, let me tell you something that I find interesting, maybe I’ll answer with a question. Are we living in assimilation? Maybe I opened up a can of worms there, I don’t know, but these are the questions I’ve asked myself, what, if anything, is triggering all of this? Now, you’re bringing God into this, well, the question is, what is God? What role are we playing in the God force overall? Forgive me, but I’m the question man. I don’t have an answer. I have thought about these things, but I absolutely have no idea.

Now, you mentioned one thing that’s interesting, you talk about hierarchy in all of this. I always take an issue with hierarchy from a broader perspective. We toss this term around, ascension and ascended masters. I’ve just had a conversation with someone about the ascended masters and what it means to ascend, and I’ve always had a little bit of an aversion to terms that denote hierarchy, including ascension. Maybe the question is, is there some aspect of intelligence that we would think to be more evolved than us that is, sort of orchestrating or architecting this, perhaps, game that we’re in? That’s really what I’ve kind of pondered.

Alex Tsakiris: The reason I go towards the hierarchical stuff is, I feel like I’m just following the data. So if you go and look at the NDE accounts, to a lesser extend the alien contact accounts, but the NDE accounts are clear, there is a hierarchy, there’s a hierarchy, there’s a hierarchy. Not my words, it’s just what they say. “I felt that there were realms and then I felt there were realms above and beyond.”

Alexis Brooks: Oh, I see what you’re saying. Okay, I see what you’re saying. Yeah sure. Look, so here’s how I would come back at that, in terms of the description of a hierarchical. So you’ve got the astral and then you’ve got the causal plane, they’re different planes. All of these have come through our ancient texts in some form or fashion.

Here’s the common denominator in this hierarchical explanation. Human beings and what roles do we live by? We live in a linear timeframe and we live hierarchically. So no matter whether we’ve experienced these, whatever it was, ourselves or we’re just reading the literature, we still process information hierarchically. As long as the experience is coming through the human filter it has to be an interpretation, it cannot be pure because we’re still corporeal in form.

Alex Tsakiris: That’s kind of limiting because then why are we even having this discussion, but we are having this discussion because we are trying to find these patters. It’s back to find these patterns. I love not getting too attached to it and having humility, but I don’t want to shy away from the data and I’m not coming at this at all from a religious perspective and I get bashed on the show all of the time for being anti-religious, which I guess I am. But I’m just following the data and the data is saying God, it’s saying God over and over again and not a guy on a cloud with a white beard but in terms of being this organizing principle.

Could it be that ET is tied to this time-space continuum and is playing that game in a way that we don’t fully appreciate and that there is a bigger game outside of that, the spiritual game, the God game and that ET isn’t totally in that game either?

Here’s a question, is ET having a near-death experience? Is ET having a soul journey, kind of live review?

Alexis Brooks: It could be. Let me stop you there because I don’t want to lose the thought. It could very well be. This is where it gets mind twisting and is really, there are no words to really describe what you’re contemplating here.

Again, I go back to this idea of the possibility of assimilation, implicit in this model assimilated reality, not just this reality but other realities are assimilated, that they are nestled one within the other. So that one reality is created by… you’re calling it ET, let’s say our reality has been created by another, we’ll call it ET, I don’t like that term, I like NHI. But within that, where ET lives so to speak, I’m speaking figuratively of course, they’re having an experience of which they’re nestled in a reality that’s been created by something or someone else and on and on it goes. It’s been described as the Russian Dolls.

Linda Moulton Howe and I have had this discussion before in the context of assimilated realities. So I think your question’s noble. I don’t know, it could very well be. All I know is, what we are trying to parse is nearly impossible to do so appropriately in human terms and I think it can be futile. We want to make sure we’re asking the right questions as well.

Alex Tsakiris: As long as we’re going to play the game of the illusion of moving towards an answer, we might as well play it the best we can.

Alexis Brooks: As we can, of course. Well, I say never, ever, ever stop asking the questions. Never be shy about exploring the mystery. I love Richard Feynman who says, “It does not harm to the mystery to know a little bit about it.” Hopefully we’re getting a little bit closer.

Alex Tsakiris: I love that, I love that. Alexis, again, I do hope that people check out your work, Higher Journeys Radio, higherjourneys.com, which is awesome. They’ll also find you at the Consciousness Life Expo a lot of time. But you’re at a lot of other events, you’re doing a lot of things. Tell folks how is the best way for them to connect with what you’re up to.

Alexis Brooks: Sure, well again, as you said, higherjourneys.com is my home online, as much as websites are these days. It seems like people are spending more time on social media but in that regard, I do have a Facebook page as well where people can reach me and learn about the events that I will be showing up at. One is coming up actually next month, July 18^th and 19^th or 19^th and 20^th, I’ll be in Manchester, England with my buddies, Richard Dolman and his beautiful wife Tracy and Linda Moulton Howe and David Childress and I believe Grant Cameron is coming as well for the Awakening and Conscious Life Expo, UFO and Conscious Life Expo in Manchester, England.  

I’ll be going back to Australia though to lecture more about this great stuff. My second time there, so I’m really excited about that, and I see you’ve got a visual of my book that I cannot believe has been five years since I put this out, Conscious Musings. But that book is still available, available in, I believe all fine bookstores, but of course Amazon as well as Barnes & Noble etc., and my website.

Alex Tsakiris: Well, it’s been just awesome connecting with you.

Alexis Brooks: Likewise.

Alex Tsakiris: I just so appreciate your work and I appreciate you joining me today on Skeptiko.

Alexis Brooks: And I appreciate you and what you’re doing. Keep it up, I love it and I love your line of questioning. You’re wonderful.

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