Whitley Strieber, Jesus Stuff |498|

Whitley Strieber knows a lot about the alien abduction phenomenon and has written new book about Jesus.

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His new book: Jesus: A New Vision

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Skeptiko-498-Whitley Strieber

That’s a clip from the movie, the last temptation of Christ and that’s David Bowie. Believe it or not. Playing Pontius pilot. You know, I usually like to keep these introductions rather short and kind of let all of us kind of figure this stuff out, have our own experience with it, but I kind of feel like I need an expanded. Introduction to this one, because I’ve had a couple of interviews lately with some Christian friends, people I really, really like honor and respect who seemed to just not be grokking the basics of my understanding of this. So let me kind of lay this out. Number one is.

I honor her. Your spiritual experience, your Christ consciousness experience. If that’s what it is. And not because I’m a particularly nice guy, but because as you’ve heard the data compels me to understand that you are more than a biological robot, meaningless universe, that there is this extended realm and that you could very well be connecting with it in some way that makes.

Christ consciousness. Very real.

So I’m down with that. But if you’re going to connect. Your spiritual experience with history and history is tricky, but let’s just pretend there is this shared consensus reality that we call history and we all try and agree on. Let’s just kind of make that a given if you’re going to connect your spiritual experience with some texts, with some documents, with some archeological evidence. Well, then that’s a different discussion.

And here’s the rub. The gospels.

Are not historical. Like if you go to seminary, And you study this stuff deeply. You learn that pretty quickly. I said, Okay. Yeah. You know, there’s different translations. There’s contradictions, there’s conflicts, all that kind of stuff. Even most Christians kind of get that. They’ve kind of been beat up by that enough and there’s enough popular books. They get that they can’t take their gospels. Literally.

but there is this lingering, false impression. Among Christians that, you know, despite those problems. The gospels are still well, basically historical. I mean, I kind of got the gist of it. Here is Jesus meeting with poncho pilot. I got to tell you, go look at your gospels. That is right out of the gospels.

But it didn’t happen. I mean. The best evidence we have.

And before I get to that evidence, let me just stop right there. Because if what I’m about to present to you is true or even close to true or leaning towards true. Then I want you to start wrapping your head around the implications of that. Cause it’s not just about the movie. It’s about the gospels.

And the gospels are talking about a scene from history. Jesus sitting down kind of hashing it out there with old ponchos pilot. If that didn’t happen. And it is in the gospels and it’s reported by all the gospels, just in different ways. Well then. You see what I’m saying? The gospels are non-historical in a way that’s much bigger.

Than most Christians think.

So why do we think that scene probably didn’t happen? Well, that gets us back to this guy. I keep fucking hammer and on it talking about. And that is just enormous. Because. As you already know from listening to the show, or as you will know, if you keep listening. Josephus is purely a propaganda agent for the Romans pure and simple. Just follow the money on that one.

but he also in serving his role as propaganda agent is doing some quasi. historical stuff in, including in real history so that people believe him. That’s kind of one of the things you have to do as a propaganda agent. You have to mix the truth with the fiction. Otherwise it doesn’t go down so well.

So he was pretty exhaustive about writing down every little event that happened. Now. He might’ve spun them in a different way, but he got the gist of stuff that happens. I mean, take, for example, the Aqua duck, right Have you ever heard of the Aquidneck riot? You ever heard about Pontius pilot during the same period that we’re talking about? Putting down Aquidneck rebellion. I bet you haven’t because it’s so obscure. It’s such a minor thing in history. It’s a bunch of Jews that got together in the streets and there.

Ah, protesting about the Aqua duck. And the really Josephus his story, I think, is to show you how clever punches pilot is and how clever the Romans are that he infiltrates. I mean, this was like right out of our history today, but he. , infiltrates the crowd with his own goons who are not dressed as Roman soldiers, but are hiding the kind of clubs and sticks. Think Antifa think.

You know, all this crazy stuff. And they turn on the protesters and creates this big scene and they’re getting beat up and some of them die all the rest of it, but it’s not a huge deal. It’s just not a huge deal. But it’s the level of detail. That Josephus would go into to record all the events that happened.

Now think for a minute about this event. Patches pilot is the guy. In Judaic, he’s the guy. You know, you think about gatekeepers in terms of, you know, modern thing. Like you want to talk to a celebrity or you want to, if you’re in business, you want to get to the CEO or whatever, there’s all these gatekeepers. You never get a meeting.

Jesus gets a meeting. . He gets to sit with patches, pilot. That my friend would have been recorded most certainly by Josephus or by someone else. But Josephus has the most extensive history we can look at. And we look at all the other stuff he recorded. He would have recorded this.

And the fact that he doesn’t suggest that it doesn’t happen. Now, the content of the, of the meeting also suggest that it just wouldn’t happen. It’s out of context with what the Romans would do and how they ran their whole show, but that’s almost . Another issue and gets into the whole propaganda stuff for a minute. I just want to.

Pull up on the fact that the gospels are non-historical, they can’t be relied on for,

historical account of the life of this Jesus character. And I’m telling you just see fizz can’t either, but. You’re going to have to sort this stuff out and in that way, At least you’ll see, fuss is closer.

Than the gospels are.

Because I’m on a roll this clip a little bit further, I want to get to one final point, which is to me, The main point of this and the main point that I’ve been trying to get to with some of my guests. But all this other Christian bullshit gets in the way and you can’t get to the real important point. So listen to this.

And the first, this isn’t exactly in the gospels. But this is the strange way that Christianity works. Most Christians understand this to be a fundamental part of what happened. Right? So whether you can point to particular line in the gospels, most Christians understand. That, this is what it was about. It was about Jesus.

Talking to power, talking to Rome and say, we’re going to bring your ass down. My followers will eventually bring you down. The mustard seed will grow and Rome will be destroyed. Now, this is exactly the kind of stuff that Whitley Strieber puts forth in this book. We’re going to talk about today’s show.

And it’s really, really important to figure out whether that’s true. Because I think it’s not only not true. It’s actually completely the opposite. It is a scripted social engineering project. Intended to take you in exactly the opposite direction. I can’t get all the way there now, but stick around and you’ll hear in shows that come up. What really happened, but I’ll give you the short version. The Romans co-opted Christianity. And used it to essentially reboot the Roman empire in a way .

That allowed the Roman empire to decline. While it wasn’t really declining. It was still business as usual through this little entity that they created called.

the church. The Pope. Christianity.

. That’s why this history is so important to me. And that’s why if you listen to this show, you know, once I kind of got into something, It’s hard for me to get off it.

But that’s why , if you’re going to stick around with me, you’re going to hear. A bunch more shows on this topic. Hopefully, they won’t all be as contentious as this one with a guy, I still stand behind everything I said, I think is one of the. Most important people in our history.

And someone who I greatly admire for his nonlinear thinking. I just think he’s kind of not done his homework on this history. And I think it, it comes through, . But that’s okay. Like, I like to say way, way higher than hall of fame, batting average.

And Whitley Strieber is definitely in the hall of fame. Here’s a couple of clips from the show.

(===)

Whitley Strieber: [00:10:34] Well, I, I don’t even know why we’re talking about it. It has almost nothing to do with my book.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:10:40] Well, it has, it has everything to do with your book,

Whitley Strieber: [00:10:42] , the only references I made, I was well aware of Josephus and his, uh, and in fact, in that time, no one was writing history as we think of it.

Now that hadn’t, it not even been invented yet so why are we talking about Josephus? I agree because you

Alex Tsakiris: [00:11:03] should care.

, there’s some really important points of connection between what you’re saying and what I’m saying. I mean, what you’re saying about Constantine, what you’re saying about the Romans, co-opting the religion.

Is is central to what I’m saying. You’re just taking a slightly different direction. And a lot of times that’s how it is when people talk about, even with people are in sync, the differences are what get kind of exaggerated, like the message of Jesus, love everyone. And tell the truth, the message of Jesus, about humility and compassionate about the boot.

I mean, that’s all, we really don’t need to talk about anything more than that. That’s the most important part. And then the fact that the Romans tried to co-op that in an evil way, we are essentially we’re in agreement on those important things, but it isn’t going to sound like that. That’s okay.

Whitley Strieber: [00:11:51] All right.

Thank you very much for having me on.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:11:55] Okay. You are very

Whitley Strieber: [00:11:57] welcome. . We’ll we’ll do it again sometime soon.

(===)

Alex Tsakiris: [00:12:02] Welcome to skeptical where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Securus. And today I am very excited to have Whitley Strieber back here on skeptical. Whitley has a new book out Jesus, a new vision.

We’re going to talk a little bit about that. Cause that’s certainly a topic I’ve been talking a lot about lately on this show and you’ve heard a lot of interviews on that Roman history. So it was really exciting to me the last time that Whitley and I talked and I heard that he had this new book on this topic.

So we’ve been exchanging some things and that might get pretty interesting. but I also hope to broaden the dialogue on that. For example, how has his contact experience influenced his spirituality? How has his after death communication experiences with, and how has that affected this larger question of spirituality?

And more generally, I guess, how has this amazing life that he’s had affected his spirituality? You know, the first time I had Whitley on the show, I kind of took a minute to remind everybody that just, I don’t know, to put it what an important person in history Whitley represents. And, you know, as we talked a little bit about before we cannot, and I know Whitley would not assume.

That that is accidental. I mean, in a lot of ways, Whitley is our first contact D I mean, he’s not technically the first contact D but in a lot of ways, the way this whole thing has rolled out the way that the, our, our relationship with what Whitley calls the others, the way that whole thing has evolved in our culture, Whitley is really kind of the first contact D.

And if you can wrap your head around that for a minute, then the other thing I’d ask you to wrap your head around is the other contacts that he’s made in that world. You know, I was just reminded, I was listening to an interview, uh, with Whitley in preparation for this interview and all the people that he’s influenced.

Through his work through his life, through his experience. And so many intersections in strange ways. I mean, jock filet asks him to write the introduction to his book. Uh, he writes a book with Dr. Jeffrey cripple, who we’re all associated with. There’s a whole other world, there’s the whole world of comparative religion and they write this book, the supernatural.

And, um, and then I was mentioning to Whitley, you know, I have an interview coming up with Ralph Blumenthal who is kind of very cool guy, New York times reporter, and just has written an amazing, important biography about John Mack. I mean, these are all, all over this thing all over that history of John Mack and Budd Hopkins and, you know, Leslie cane and you know, everybody in that it’s, Whitley’s popping up again and again, so.

I just think it’s such an opportunity. I’m so excited. Whenever I get a chance to talk to this guy, because I’m talking to someone who is chosen to be this kind of important person, who’s carrying this message, but is also in the kind of hero. And now real world has written all these amazing books and then has interacted with all these other people who are on the, the edge of this new understanding that we’re trying to wrap our head around.

Now that doesn’t mean that I’m gonna agree with him on everything. We’re gonna have some, a lot of points of disagreement, disagreement, uh, today, but not on the bigger pictures, not on the bigger picture items. Cause it’s just, he’s just too awesome. Whitley. So glad you’re here. Thank you so much for joining me.

Welcome here. Welcome back.

Whitley Strieber: [00:16:16] Well, thanks for having me as always. It’s always fun to talk together. We’re we are, uh, Sort of joined at the hip intellectually. I think I had a lot of fun when you were on dreamland and I have always had a wonderful time on skeptical too.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:16:33] Well, thanks. So let’s start jumping right in on this book.

Tell us about this new book. You have it, you know, it was something that I wasn’t really expecting to come from you in many ways, but let’s dive into

Whitley Strieber: [00:16:47] it. Well, I have a bad habit of not fulfilling expectations. Um, I am the author of quite a range of nonfiction books and people forget that. Uh, they, they think of me, people think have, you know, think of me as being related to the whole alien UFO controversy, but I also published Superstorm, uh, which became, um, meme in the world.

And. War day before that, which did also in its time. Um, I published a, um, mixed facts fact and fiction. Those are all mixed fact and fiction books and natures. And, uh, and, uh, so, you know, I have a definite, uh, uh, habit of moving in from one area to another. And this book came to me because I, um, I am deeply connected with my wife at this point.

And in a it’s almost, it’s the same dialogue that we had when she was physically alive with the difference that her perspective is very much more evolved than it was. She knows a lot more and. We began to dialog about Jesus about a year and a half ago, she was extremely interested in Jesus when she was alive, physically.

And, uh, one of the things she hoped most to do was to find out what had actually had happened, because she didn’t feel that the, uh, that the narratives that are available to us are correct. That they are not the story, that there is another story that was buried somehow or misunderstood in, in, in, in, in profoundly fundamental ways.

But we could never get to the right place to understand what was missing. But now. With the use of my implant, which I have talked about on your show before, but I’ll just briefly reiterate this for those who don’t know about it. It was put in my ear in 1989. Uh, it has something to do with communicating, not with necessarily with aliens, but certainly with our own dead, it is associated in some way with an electronic voice phenomenon researcher called Constantine rod Evey.

I was told that when the its functionality was explained to me by two rather mysterious people who have popped up in my life from time to time, about six months ago. So he apparently designed this either while he was physically alive or. Afterwards, and it, uh, is there and it facilitates communication. I, it used to open up a little slit in my right eye and words would go through that slit.

And these words would not, wouldn’t be moving too fast to see, to comprehend the individually. But I was ex it was explained to me that they would move into my, that they were drawn from my sort of unconscious and we’re like an enhanced, uh, into enhanced intuition call it that. Um, however, I lost the sight in my right eye by working too hard.

I’d learned to see into a parallel universe folks. You’re going to have to live with it. I don’t lie and I don’t live a normal life. So just suck it up. Uh, anyway, you too.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:20:56] Let me, let me interject something because you actually touched on an important point that I wanted to talk about.

When you said you don’t lie, that’s been my general perception about you. Yeah, it comes through, it comes through in kind of an intuitive sense, but it also just comes through in the way you present yourself and the way you stand up to criticism, the way you, which you are battle tested over the years, the way you stand up to recalling events and other people’s versions of those events, you know, like.

Again, we’re going to talk about, maybe we’ll talk about the whole John Mac thing, but you know, the Budd Hopkins thing and you say, well, here’s what happened, you know, and it was kind of professional jealousy, jealousy, and sometimes authors get into that and I understand it, and you just lay it out and it just seems to be true.

So this is such an important point though. Let me broaden it because what’s, you’re saying is impossible to, uh, literally comprehend and process in kind of a normal way. This guy got an implant after having contact with aliens. And now he’s telling us, well, the implant isn’t just to talk to aliens. It’s also to talk to dead people.

And it’s connected with this other guy who developed it while he was living or dead or dead. I don’t know which one. When you say, suck it up. I’m telling the truth. Boy, I love that because I don’t know. Uh, you know, I don’t know if this is real on one level, but I know as much as I can know that what you’re telling me is your attempt to be as honest, genuine, real, as you can be, um, within all this stuff.

And I think we also have to understand that, that we cannot possibly understand all these dimensions and realms that we’re talking about. So of course it should be comprehensible if it’s, if it’s not incomprehensible, we’re probably not getting very close to it.

Whitley Strieber: [00:22:55] I think we’re getting a lot closer because I’m not the only life unfolding right now that is Testament to the fact that there is much more to human experience than simply living in the material world and moving through time.

But let me get back to what I was saying about the Genesis of the book. Uh, and, and I will, we’ll dialogue. There’s a specific time of day for it, which in some, uh, yoga traditions is known as problem with hearts at a time. That’s about three or four o’clock between three and four o’clock in the morning. I get up every morning and every morning we often we dialogue, we didn’t this morning, but we, we often do.

And the book came out of that, the fact that she had. Gained knowledge began to be able to access, access that knowledge using the implant as my tool, because it’s a, it’s a really wonderful research device. Uh, it will, what will happen is if you have an open question using some kind of organized system of synchronicity, the answer will soon fall in to your hands.

Not in the answer from the beyond the answer that’s available in this reality from a book or something somebody says, or some thing you meet or something like that, to the extent that I use it, it’s a high, I’ve got to the point where this is a highly organized research methodology. I will, I will. Open questions.

And then within usually hours today’s one way or another, I’ll be I’ll end up able to address this and whatever the question was. And that was how the book was, was built. Uh, I was able to, uh, find a new insights into the gospel of Thomas, the gospel of Mary, uh, the actual, what happened to Jesus, how his, his story relates to the, or was related to the stories of the solar deities of the Roman world and how he is Jesus.

The teacher was taken over. By constant scene and turned into Jesus. The God, because the Roman gods were failing the, to protect Rome, which had been cursed by plagues and invasions and inflation and climate change that none of which they understood only they were praying to their gods for support. And what they didn’t know was the Roman climate optimum was ending.

And so they were being, uh, It visited by terrible droughts and they were being weakened because they had not, um, enough food. And the result was that this very, these very crowded little communities, uh, all of them linked together by sea and by roads that the Romans had built or becoming infected in ways that had never happened before.

And they didn’t understand because their immune systems were compromised by hunger. And these it starting in the age of Antony, uh, uh, the Antonin age when Marcus Aurelius was emperor, the first plague, the Antonin plague started it with on and on with one play after another, until they were desperate and losing faith, the Temple’s being abandoned.

The population of the empire dropping Germans pressing from, from, from the East, because they in turn were being pressed by the MacArthur’s East of them who were in turn being pressed by the Huns who were, had left central Asia because of the drought was destroying the forage that their horses depended on.

So all of this enormous complex series of events combined together to cause constant Jean to think we need a new God, because the empire is being abandoned by its own people because it’s gods don’t work. And you, you have to understand in those days there was no such thing. The thing is, uh, the idea of, uh, of, uh, some kind of split between.

Religion and church and state, it didn’t even exist. Church and state were integrated, completely integrated. It was one system and the state part, a big part of the state’s job was to engage the gods on behalf of the people. And it did that through its priesthoods and its temples and sacrifice, uh, and real sacrifice.

I mean, the, the, the temple sacrifices were very demanding. They weren’t just, uh, go in and drop off a dead pigeon. I mean, you, you had the sacrifice for sure. So all of that was happening and I sound in that history, a thread of truth. I think that’s in the Jesus book of what really happened to this man.

And to his story after he left this world.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:29:06] Okay. So here’s the deal though. And let me make sure I understand, I asked this question rather than I assume you’re not asking us to accept any of that as regulatory, right? You’re you’re, you’re saying you got this, you got this download and we’ll leave aside the means the technical means of it, you know?

And we’ll say, and then you’re saying you did research that you would just put on par with anyone else who would research and write a book of this. Right kind. And then you stand by that. You don’t say you can’t, you can’t question me beak because it came in my download in

Whitley Strieber: [00:29:49] there. Right? No download. It’s not like that.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:29:51] You get my point. We’re not going to have much of a discussion if you’re going to say, well, that’s, that’s what I was told. So I know this is true, right? I mean, it has to

Whitley Strieber: [00:30:00] listen. I’ve heard so many people with things that they’d been told that turned out not to be true.

I don’t do that. I don’t get downloads. That’s not how it works. What I do is I dialogue and the dialogue results in a journey of research in this world. And that’s where the information comes from. It’s, it’s really a method of finding the right. Needles in the haystack. And that’s why Jesus, in new vision, it’s got a long, a long bibliography because many books are, are referenced in it.

It’s it’s not downloaded from the beyond. Right.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:30:45] . It’s fallible.

Whitley Strieber: [00:30:47] Well, I wouldn’t say it was fallible.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:30:50] Well, it’s, it’s open, it’s open to being fallible

Whitley Strieber: [00:30:54] discussion. Like any book would be any scholar book of scholarship would be of course, th

Alex Tsakiris: [00:30:59] th that’s that’s my only point.

, I don’t agree with a lot of the conclusions that you’ve come to. And I, I. To kind of cut to the chase kind of thing. I want to bring up one quote that I sent you that I think puts an entirely different spin on this and is absolutely critical to this understanding.

And I just cannot get over the fact that so many, not all, but so many biblical scholars have completely misunderstood and misinterpreted that. And that’s from Josephus. Let me pull it up in this.

Do you want to remind people who Josephus? Yeah.

Whitley Strieber: [00:31:38] Josephus was a, uh, a Jewish scholar and historian who. Uh, became, he became famous in the Roman world because he, uh, predicted the ascendancy of Vespasian to the emperor ship, to the Imperial, to the Imperial purple.

And when Vespasian this happened, Vespasian honored him and gave him a very special place in his court, especially for a Jew because of the fact that, uh, the Jew, the Jewish rebellion was underway at the time. And the Romans were during this whole period, they were in the process of destroying the Jewish.

S provinces. It existed pulling the temple down and dispersing the Jews around the whole empire and forbidding them to even live in Jerusalem. And then later under, uh, the emperor Hadrian, it was even its name was changed to Eylea capital Lena, but that was after this time, the point is this, uh, by making that prediction, uh, uh, Joseph became an important figure and also was free to do a lot of writing, which he did and the, uh, books like the antiquities of the Jews remain a primary source material for anyone studying this whole era and the history of the Jewish people.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:33:19] Yeah. I just don’t think a lot of that is really believable. I mean, anyone who goes and looks at the history of, of Josephus and I’ve brought it up on the screen here, just in terms of the highlights. he just makes a lot of stuff up. So, and it’s proven that he makes a lot of stuff up.

One of the first things that he, well, one of the first things he does, if you talk to, uh, Jewish scholars and rabbis and folks I’ve researched, they’ll say one of the first things Josephus says is like, Hey, I am like super Jew. 14 years old, I was down in the temple telling those old guys how to really interpret the law because I was smarter than all of this is what Josephus says.

He says, I knew all the different sex, right? Cause there’s all these different competing sex. And some of them are very kind of friendly to the Romans, which is kind of where his family lineage are. And some are revolting violently and causing all these rebellions and stuff like that. But he says, no, man, I am the super Jew.

I know everything. And I’m going to be the guy. And then at a very young age, he actually gets this. If you believe his story, he gets this honor of going to Rome to negotiate the release of these rabbis who are in Rome. Again, his whole story I think is manufactured. But if you’re just going to follow what he says happened.

Oh. And just to go back to that first part, the reason we know he, isn’t kind of the super Jew knows the law better than any of the best, is that he contradicts the law over and over again and his writings, right?

So he says, I know all this stuff, but then he, he doesn’t really seem to know the law, all that well, but back to his story, he claims to go to Rome and negotiate the release of these rabbis. And he’s welcomed by the emperor. And particularly he’s friends with the emperor’s wife. Again, impossible to believe he gets back to Galilee.

There’s this revolt that’s brought, that’s breaking out. And he, again, this is not really believable, but he is put in charge of the role of the Jewish troops in Galilee. And now here’s the important part of the story that most people do know is that he fights tooth and nail. And finally he’s cornered by the Romans and they go into a cave and they go, well, there’s nothing we can do.

We can’t surrender to these people will commit suicide. So they make this pack 40 of them to commit suicide. And they kind of do this complicated math problem where they draw straws because it’s against Jewish law to commit suicide. So they have to kill one another. And then lo and behold, wouldn’t, you know, it gets down to the final two and Josephus just randomly happens to be one of those two.

And he says, you know what? I just had a revelation and the revelation is no, we shouldn’t commit suicide. We should go out and join with the Spacey. So he goes out and he here comes a really important part of the story. Everyone makes a big deal of the fact that he predicts that like the Spacey and sitting there waiting like, ah, what’s this guy have to say, because we’ll be emperor in a couple of years.

And they go really, gee, you know, here’s, here’s this guy, we captured making this a prophecy. That’s going to be so important, but really the important thing that he, and then he becomes part of the entourage, if you will. And he goes with him from location to location as they’re sacking Judea, and they’re taking over these towns and on the way to sacking Jerusalem and he is recording all this history.

As a reward for that. And probably what he probably did was he probably cut a deal with FIS faisean to give the spazy in kind of the keys to the kingdom to let them know where all the gold is, because this is something we actually have archeological evidence of. If anyone wants to go Google the arch of Titus, you will see this big arch that is still in Rome, and it shows the Romans after they’ve kicked ass and Judea on the Jews, they’re carrying all the gold over their shoulder.

Well, that gold, we should probably assume was buried somewhere. And the guy who really makes out great in that whole deal is Josephus because Josephus is given. This Bayesians old townhouse after vis hazing comes, becomes a emperor. He’s not only given his freedom, but he’s allowed to pick 200 other people off of his list to go with them.

Live in, live the high life in Rome. And then he has to go and write all this history down of what happened. Play by play war, the Jews, how they sacked. Judea and how it wasn’t really the Romans fault. It was really the Jews fault and how, you know, give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. And he says all this stuff that winds up sounding in the make, making the Bible sound very pro Roman.

And again, we’ve got to remember the date of all this. This is, he’s probably writing this in the seventies, early seventies, maybe eighties. We can’t be sure, but this is after Jesus has died and it’s after the sacking of Jerusalem and I’ll stop there. Cause the, the, the big punchline is coming in a minute, but I want to give you a chance to respond to that history, which I think is, I mean, I’m maybe flavoring it a little bit, but the main points are undeniable as far as I understand.

Whitley Strieber: [00:39:05] Well, I, I don’t even know why we’re talking about it. It has almost nothing to do with my book.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:39:12] Well, it has, it has everything to do with your book, because if you don’t.

Whitley Strieber: [00:39:17] Um, because because of this, the only references I made, I was well aware of Josephus and his, uh, and in fact, in that time, no one was writing history as we think of it.

Now that hadn’t, it not even been invented yet that idea of history as an accurate narrative, uh, form, uh, these were all these, th these, for example, the gospels are perfect example of that. They’re not historical documents. They are, these are things that the authors of the gospels thought probably would have happened.

They were perfectly willing to, to, to, to do that. But I don’t, I don’t use Josephus as a, as a critical source or a fundamental source in my book at all. Uh, and I’m saying you should. Well, I didn’t. So why are we talking about Josephus? I agree because you

Alex Tsakiris: [00:40:18] should care. Well, you, you, you have to, and here’s the reason why in, in my opinion, obviously we’re just having a nice heated discussion here.

It hasn’t heated up too much, but here’s why, here’s why you should care because here’s who Josephus really is. And this is from war in the Jews. This is 70, and it relates directly to Constantine. Even though Constantine is almost 300 years later, And this is a message that he’s writing to everyone, but particularly to the people of Judea, particularly to the Jews he writes, but what more than all else incited them to the war was an ambiguous Oracle, likewise found in their sacred scriptures to the effect that at the time one from their country would become ruler of the world.

So this is the Messiah. So what you’ll see if this is saying is, Hey, the reason these Jews got so worked up in the first place is because they kept expecting the Messiah. They were waiting the Messiah. So they were pushing against the Romans because they felt like that was their job to kind of hold out.

Whitley Strieber: [00:41:38] That’s exactly correct. It is

Alex Tsakiris: [00:41:40] This, they understood to mean that one of their race and many of the wise men, the people in the temple, the rabbis went astray in their interpretation of it, the Oracle.

However, in reality, signified the sovereignty of the space alien, who was proclaimed emperor on Jewish soil. So what he’s saying, this is just CFUs speaking to all the Jews. He’s saying your religion. Judaism is completely misunderstood by you guys. Vespasian is the Messiah, give it up. Judaism is over the spazy and is the Messiah now?

To me, I think to most people when they really process this, there’s no other way to interpret this as an attempt at the ultimate attempt at social engineering at PSYOP at control the people by co-opting their religion. I mean, this is a propaganda agent of the first order who speaking to the Romans and telling the Jews, Hey, you don’t have a religion.

Whitley Strieber: [00:42:58] .

I don’t understand at all what this has to do with my book in my book. I don’t claim that the Jews thought Jesus was a Messiah at all. In fact, very much the contrary, they didn’t, they didn’t because he was killed. He was, he was hung from it from, uh, a tree across. And that was something that the Messiah specifically would not happen to him.

But it happened to Jesus. That’s why the Jews rejected Jesus as Messiah and reject him to this day as Messiah. Uh, and I don’t think, uh, I don’t see what, I don’t get a connection between what I re read Josephus references in my book, which are all very carefully chosen because every single one of them is corroborated by other, other historical narrative.

And because I’m well aware of the fact that these ancient historic histories are not, uh, factual and based in fact like history is now that, as I said before, that hadn’t been invented yet. So I don’t know where you’re going with this. I mean, of course my book doesn’t in fact say that the Jews thought Jesus was the Messiah.

In fact, I don’t even think Jesus was a Messiah. I think he was a rabbinical teacher of the first order and it, his life ended in an extremely unusual and unexplained way. Minute. None of it has anything as far as I can tell it all to do with Josephus and, uh, uh, or Vespasian, I don’t think this page, I don’t recall that Vespasian is even mentioned in my book.

In fact

Alex Tsakiris: [00:44:51] again, and this kind of, Oh, this is kind of a tweak ish issue for me. Whenever someone talks about their book, your books about history. So anything I’m pulling about the history of that time is relevant. It doesn’t have to reference back to what’s in the book. Here’s the point? I mean, it’s

Whitley Strieber: [00:45:10] why, why is it important?

Yes. In a discussion of my book. Yes. You talk about whether or not

Alex Tsakiris: [00:45:17] best because the gospels are dependent upon Josephus. So anyone who does careful analysis of the gospels they will find, and this is, uh, understood by many, many, I would say a majority of biblical scholars.

If you go look you’ll, you’ll see, and they put it in very kind of coded words. The gospels are dependent upon Josephus. And what they mean is the gospel writers had access to Josephus and they were using Josephus to write gospels. And in that way they were really, you can say that that’s just how history was and this and that, but it’s deceptive because they’re now taking the words of a quote unquote historian, even though he’s a propaganda, artist’s Josephus and they’re turning those into prophecies.

So when Jesus is standing on the Hill saying, Oh, the temple will be raised to the ground and every stone will be overturned. Well, That is right out of Josephus. But when Josephus writes it, he’s saying, Hey, I was there with Titus after Vista Bayesean went out, went away to be emperor. And that’s what they did, man.

They kicked ass and they knocked the whole thing down. And then, uh, but when it comes out of Jesus’s mouth, it’s prophecy, well, no, it’s not. He didn’t relate to him. Jesus, whoever Jesus was, didn’t really prophesize that. It just sounds good when you take the history and you’re right. It is prophecy. So that’s, I don’t

Whitley Strieber: [00:46:47] get it at all.

What you’re even saying. Uh, because you say the gospel writers all were aware of the works of Josephus. The problem with that is the Jewish war is written in, in, in about 75, which was at least five years after the earliest gospel Mark was written and the antiquities of the Jews doesn’t come along until 94.

And the only, uh, uh, gospel written after 94 was John.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:47:18] Well, then we have a problem. Don’t we? Because if the, if the gospels can be shown and you know, we can have a, I could show you that offline, or we can pull that up. Now, if the gospels can be shown to have a statistically off the charts, parallel play by play, consistency with Josephus, then we do have a problem, right?

Whitley Strieber: [00:47:41] It’s no problem at all. They all emerge out of the same, uh, the same narrative, which may have been written down at the time by somebody, but it’s now been lost or was oral, an oral narrative. And the Jew, the gospel writers and Josephus were all aware of it, but who was copying?

Who, who the hell knows our cares? It’s irrelevant.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:48:11] Well, again, I’d come back to the point why it’s not irrelevant is if it is history. So even take your assumption there that someone wrote it down as history,

Whitley Strieber: [00:48:22] but we don’t, we don’t write a book about, I put together a lot of different possibilities in my book, and I don’t know why you don’t want to talk about my book, but you don’t.

And that’s fine. I’ll talk about instead, I’ll talk about the way, the, the way narrative, uh, stories like this, like the antiquities of the Jews and the gospels were created in that time. And these were created by people who were extremely isolated from the incidents that they were describing for the most part, Josephus was apparently involved in the Jewish war.

So some of his statements might be. Might be accurate, but many of them won’t be, uh, because they, they, they took, they didn’t, they couldn’t tell the difference between hearsay, what we would call now, hearsay an actual factual narrative. I mean, if you pick up, um, and his bizarre tales of the emperors, the emperors, he liked come off well, and the emperors, he didn’t like come off as maniacs.

And, uh, nobody knows the truth of any of that. And the same is true of the gospels or Josephus or any of these authors. W we have to struggle through these narrative threads to try to find some consistency. And that is what for example, scholarship is of this era is all about. And my book is, does the same.

It doesn’t use Josephus as a, as a source of fact at all. I mean, there, there, there are mentions of Josephus, but they’re all only things that were corroborated by other historians so that they, it other narratives at the time. I mean, we don’t know what happened, Ben really? Oh,

Alex Tsakiris: [00:50:26] well again, again, I mean, I almost want to shift off of this in order to bring it back into focus in a different way, but I can’t quite leave it yet because I think you do leave a couple of gaps there.

So again, that’s why I mentioned the arch of Titus. Cause a lot of people can get kind of lost in the weeds and kind of listened to that. Well, we don’t really know the history and this and that. Well, I don’t know. We kind of know some of the history we know who we can go look at that arch. And wouldn’t you look at those guys with all that gold, the Jewish booty that they got from sacking Jerusalem.

And we can know at least what historic history tells us Basie and built the Colosseum with the goal that he got from Judea. Right? No, you don’t

Whitley Strieber: [00:51:11] know that. Well, we know what the Romans wanted to say, not what NES necessarily happened or didn’t

Alex Tsakiris: [00:51:19] happen. Why would you pick that , I mean, the, the general consensus is that the spazy in was kind of the ultimate, super general paid as guys. Well, which was his smart way to do it. And that it’s generally accepted that he used the goal from Judea to build the Colosseum and do the, you know, circus and bread kind of thing.

Are you saying, that’s not your understanding,

Whitley Strieber: [00:51:42] not saying anything, I’m simply saying that you’re saying you’re using words like generally accepted. In other words, you are, you are regarding this history in exactly the same type of mindset that Josephus would have,

Alex Tsakiris: [00:51:57] Just to get back that prey, I skip off done.

This other thing is when, when we hear about like the sacking of Rome in the gospels, it’s coming through as prophecy from Jesus,

Whitley Strieber: [00:52:11] You mean the sacking of Jerusalem by the Romans?

Alex Tsakiris: [00:52:14] Yes. I’m sorry if I misstated that, but yeah. I mean, that’s, that’s in the gospel. That’s prophecy from Jesus.

Whitley Strieber: [00:52:20] Well, yeah, but no thinks that he did that. I don’t, I don’t think he actually prophesied that. I mean, he’s, he was a very bright man and it’s not beyond belief that he might have have.

I mean, I’ve prophesied things that, uh, w it wasn’t miracles that came true. I didn’t know Superstorm, for example, but it’s not because I had some magic power from on high it’s because I’m not stupid.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:52:47] The point here is that I can, I can prophesize stuff that happened 30 years ago, too.

Whitley Strieber: [00:52:53] Well, look. When I wrote Superstorm, none of that material was in the record and people scorned me. It was left off of with art bell off of the today show because our ideas were so radical. Now, if you Google the word Superstorm, you’ll find millions of references to it. The Superstorm scenario is even the, is even the center of one of the major environmental papers written in the past 10 years, years.

And I’m telling you right now, I didn’t have some kind of messianic skill at all. I just looked at the science and that the reality of it in a different way, as I was describing earlier, I didn’t have the implant then, but I, or I may, I guess I did have it, but I didn’t, wasn’t aware of how to use it. But, um, as far as the stories of.

We know, I’ll tell you how the, my book’s not really about the historicity of the narrative, but if you want to really learn about the relationship between the various narratives that appear in, in the, in, in the Roman world and what might’ve actually been happening on the ground, then you have to go to archeology and you, you and, and analyses of things like population densities, age at death, uh, con uh, Conditions of, uh, bodies in so far as we can determine that, uh, et cetera, and so forth.

And that is been done brilliantly over many years by by archeologists. And so we do know, for example, that the Roman, that Roman Rome was, it was visited by numerous plagues. And not only because of the historical narrative, but because we can find skeletons that show sample show, uh, evidence of the diseases that were involved.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:55:06] You see what I mean? I do see what you mean, but

Whitley Strieber: [00:55:08] I don’t honestly care about Joseph Joseph. This is peripherally important to my book. Uh, whether or not he fell he’s central,

Alex Tsakiris: [00:55:17] he’s central to this history

Whitley Strieber: [00:55:18] is entirely irrelevant to me.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:55:20] Well, not to me, he’s central to this issue because he’s the clear example of the social engineering that Rome is engaged in.

And you actually said this in the very well, hold on, you can’t, you can’t say so what it can be, so what to you and it isn’t. So what to me, so, okay.

Whitley Strieber: [00:55:38] Beginning me on this show to talk about a book now.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:55:42] , I don’t ever invite anyone on, on skeptical to talk about books.

I just have people on to have conversations and, and, and give us,

Whitley Strieber: [00:55:53] and it seems like it seems like a completely unimportant and irrelevant argument about something that doesn’t matter. You know, even, even in, even the, his, even in the context of history, there’s whether, uh, Joseph thought vis Pacey and was the Messiah or not in the Jews were very confused about it.

And they did end up being badly beaten up because of their belief in their, in their Messiah. You’re right about that. It’s not what I said. So what

Alex Tsakiris: [00:56:25] it happened, so what, it’s not, it’s not what I said, so it’s not accurate to say you’re right about that, because that’s that, wasn’t my point. Well, uh, what is

Whitley Strieber: [00:56:33] your point?

I’m very, very curious to understand that because I don’t at all.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:56:38] I know. So I’m not going to keep hammering on it from the same direction I’m gonna come in at, from a different direction. Cause I just heard an interview that you did with, um, with Jeffrey Michelin, and you, you had a great quote in there that I thought was just phenomenal in, in a way, if I, if it does link back to this, then I will have been successful in helping you understand where I’m coming from. But you’re trying to understand the relationship that we might have with the others, with ITI, if you will, to keep it simple.

And you use the analogy of a dog, of us being the dog, you know, not being, being, I, we have a foster dog here and I’ve been enjoying getting to know this dog. And at times I think the dog is so smart until I see the dog do something, you know, just get run around, chasing their tail, or run around, chasing a stick on it.

God, that doesn’t seem all that smart. And that’s the analogy you made and then you further extended that analogy in a way that I thought was very interesting. You said if we’re the dog ate, maybe can be understood as the boot, the boot on the neck of that dog. And then you talked about.

How futile it is to not at that boot because the boot can get ya. So what is the relationship between us and the various boots, whether they be ITI, which is where we can start, but also that’s how it relates to this. The picture that you paint actually from the beginning Whitley before you got all agitated with my questions is that the Romans were the boot and they became the boot and they used the life of Jesus or the spiritual experience.

What I would say that people are having with Christ consciousness, they use that to create the boot on the neck of the people. So what do you think about the boot and the dog?

Whitley Strieber: [00:58:49] Well, uh, that’s exactly my point about what Constantine did. He turned this rabbi into a Roman God. And as I pointed out in my book, a religious dictatorship emerged out of that.

That lasted until really it only completely died away in the 19th century. And for much of that time, because of it, the Western world was plunged into superstition ignorance and darkness and terrible suffering, uh, millions of people, probably over the years between the fifth century, when it began to really take hold.

And the L the last of the inquisition in 1823, I think it was must have suffered. Persecution from it. And it still went on in a sense when the Holocaust emerged, uh, because I don’t think that there would have been a Holocaust if the long standing tradition of animosity between Christians and Jews had not persisted.

And it all starts with Constantine, it all starts with him.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:00:10] Well, and, and this, this is to my point, does it start with Constantine or does it start on some other realm that we don’t totally understand? You know, the last time we talked, I asked you a question that just still Rez still rings in my ears and I bring it up all the time.

And I asked you how far away is ITI and you immediately said inch away into way. So if we are to understand. The larger consciousness soup that we’re in, including our dorky here. Now reality, if we’re to understand that with a light, with a wider lens lens, a lens that includes ITI a lens that includes Leslie cane, trying to talk to bud Hopkins through after death communication.

I’ll leave your after-death communication out of it just for a second. If we’re trying to talk about, um, the connection to evil and malevolent forces, which I think is what’s relevant in Rome to think that Constantine is making all this up on his own is to deny the rich spiritual experience that all these people throughout history had.

Whitley Strieber: [01:01:24] Well, uh, uh, I pointed out in my book, uh, uh, something that Tacitus reports that, uh, a, um, defeated, um, Scottish warrior called

Said, um, after he had been vanquished by, um,

a gorilla in the round 80 something, 80, 85, I guess a D two plunder butcher and steal these things. They mistake his empire.

They create

a desolation and call it peace. Now I hasten to add that in view of our previous conversation, I have no idea whether Tacitus was quoting a speech or made it all up.

And it doesn’t matter because it’s a very accurate description of what Rome did and was doing. Now, as far as Constantine is concerned, the. The chapter I have on Constantine relates back to the story in the gospels of Jesus’s 40 days in the desert and his temptation by the devil or Satan. And I pointed out that Constantine succumbed to that same temptation, which Jesus did not.

So to. And whether that temptation emerges from some kind of an entity outside of us or not. You tell me, I mean, I’ve no, you tell me no. Why can’t I, I’m not going to because I can’t I’m I, as we talked about at the very beginning, I do not. I am not a channeler and I don’t have downloads from the beyond.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:03:38] History would tell us that it extends way before boy, but when Montezuma was standing on the top of that pyramid, pulling the live hearts out of the people and letting the blood drip down the stairs, he, he was in connection. With some entity in that extended realm, that would probably be really comfortable with what you just read about, how Constantine solvable world

Whitley Strieber: [01:04:03] but, uh, I, I don’t think that you can, you can draw the conclusion that these things happen because of something outside of us, when it’s perfectly clear to see it for anybody to see, for example, that the Romans were, they were very primitive people and, uh, ethics.

They had no ethical focus. It hadn’t been invented yet. Their job was to go in and take as much out of their provinces as they could. Uh, that was what the governors were about. And that’s why a lot of them were called pro procurators because they were there to procure. And eventually even the Romans as thick headed, as they were discovered that if you taxed people to the point that they would starve to death, then you, you, in the long run, you lost out and gradually things changed.

Uh, but, uh, uh, is that, uh, our Constantine was terrified that the empire would go, it was going to fail. And is that, did he act as he did because he was in league with some sort of satanic entity or Moctezuma if indeed he did stand on the pyramid, but in any case, somebody certainly did it. We know that because we found some of the skeletons of the people who were, who were killed in that way, in both, in all, through.

All of Mesa we’re America.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:05:36] And we also have, I heard that they say that they were connecting with spirit entities. So I don’t know, but I don’t know why you’re pushing against that or qualifying it. And you know, the other thing with the Romans that I would add, cause I think this is, I really disagree with you about the Romans being block headed or characterizing them this way.

I think this is the major, one of the major, major problems in history. And I would expect you to be more tuned into this and that history writes these people into the books as if they are not living the same rich. Spiritual life that you and I live. I am not a perfect person. I’ll probably yell at my wife or scream at my daughter to do today in a way that I’m not proud of. And I’ll wake up at two o’clock in the morning and I’ll be wondering how that has impacted my soul because I am living a rich spiritual life. So as Vespasian, so was Josephus.

So was every Roman, whether they were a slave or whether they were, you know, whatever they work, because that is our nature is living rich, spiritual life.

Whitley Strieber: [01:06:48] Well, I don’t know what to say. I, I am very much engaged in these extended realms and I don’t, um, I just don’t know how to respond. I have no idea what you’re talking about, where you’re going, what you’re trying to say. Um, if you believe in demons, then get some Sage and go, go flying around your house with Sage burning or whatever you need to do.

Um, I live my life and it’s a good life and that’s really all I have to say.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:07:24] I guess, I don’t know why. I don’t even know why that would be so difficult. I’m not, I’m not into the demon thing because I’m not a Christian because I don’t believe, I believe that the Christian narrative is a co-opted religion.

Co-opted by the same people that you describe in the book. So I don’t know why we’re, so what the book is about. Well, so I don’t know why we’re so out of, out of joint, out of sync with that. And when I

Whitley Strieber: [01:07:52] talked about it, I just don’t understand what you’re talking about. What, what evil entities and, and if you, well, well, again,

Alex Tsakiris: [01:08:01] why were you talking?

Why were you talking about ETE being the boot on your neck of the dog?

Whitley Strieber: [01:08:11] Whatever I said then and whatever the context was. I don’t know, but I was probably talking in terms of the, um, All of the negative stuff that has gone on, and there’s been a lot of it. Uh, I had a hell of a bad experience and frankly, so did my wife. Uh, but we don’t, she did not wish to talk about her aspect of it.

And I honor that to this day, but, uh, it was very terrible and, uh, there was nothing we could do about it. Are you there’s people who have been beaten up and scarred and God knows maybe some of them have even disappeared completely. We don’t know, but there is an aspect of it that is dark and difficult and dangerous.

And you know what that doesn’t mean? It’s some kind of supernatural thing. It means that we are looking at something that is very complex, just like us, because believe me, I can gather together plenty of very dark dangerous. And evil people. Why are they that way? Is it because some dark force has entered them?

Maybe I wouldn’t doubt. Wouldn’t say that’s impossible, but what I can do is I can react to what is present and not to what I believe may be its origins. And that’s why I was talking about the boot because the dog doesn’t see the man who’s kicking him. The dog sees the boot, the dog bites, the boot, he doesn’t leap up and bite the throat out of his oppressor that does not occur to him.

And we’re in the same place. The dog, that dog. Doesn’t understand the relationship between the man above him and the boot that’s kicking him. And we don’t understand the relationship between getting beat up by whatever it is and what it is, because we don’t understand what it is.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:10:23] That’s what I always thought.

Yeah, you met when you use that analogy. The only thing I was here, here’s what I was attempting to substitute in there, which again, I do not know why you would find this controversial or need to push back on it, but your experience as a, probably I’ll put probably in there apart of MK ultra, if we understand that history, which is well-documented with tens of thousands of declassified documents, is that they were exactly trying to reach these extended realms and not just the ITI realms, but the other realms in order to conjure spirits that they thought they not only thought, but they had evidence could be another boot could be a different boot and Hey, we got to do it before they got to do it kind of mentality.

That’s in play, right? Or do you want to say, you know, do you want to kind of wave your fingers and go use supernatural freak? Of course it’s supernatural. Natural is, is scientific materialism. That’s out the window.

Whitley Strieber: [01:11:30] Well, it certainly is in play. Um, and I would assume that I was affected by something by a free, a precursor of MK ultra. When I was a little boy in 1952, something happened to me that was done to me, uh, that was very oppressive and done by people. Um, there are 48 boxes of four or 48 boxes of files. I’m sure they’re long gone by now, but the judge in the MK ultra case ruled that the government could withhold because they contained material that that should remain classified.

I have often wondered whether or not. What was done to children, if anything is in those files, but when you open a door like that into a child’s life and into a child soul, you can never close that door again, nor can you control what comes through it. And my life has been an enormous battle

stand by the good and to him, Santa, find myself with the light.

And there has, I have lived out this battle and I’m not going to say that it’s superstition because it’s not, it’s real at the same time, demonizing things. And, and, and, and, and trying to. Organize it at our level is trying, is you end up seeing your own reflection in the toe of the boot?

Alex Tsakiris: [01:13:23] Yeah. Maybe, maybe not.

I mean, here, let me, let me kind of put a, put a little bow on that because when you’re nice enough to have me on your show to talk about, uh, My book that investigates this why evil matters. And the one thing I’ve found out in doing that, and I’ll remind you, this is that the work of a clinical psychologist in grand Rapids, Michigan, who really kind of closed the loop on this.

And what he said is it’s about dissociative identity disorder. And when we talk about this, you were all over it. You understood immediately that what they were attempting to do with MK ultra and the documents that are released in Canada are definitely point to children. Definitely, definitely point to children, the documents at Harvard re Blumenthal.

And I are going to have a really interesting talk about that at John Mack, because there were MK projects going on at Harvard all over the place, you know, but back to, uh, this disassociative identity disorder, which is the breaking. Right. You’re cracking open. It was to use your term. You know, you’re cracking somebody open.

They were trying to, it looks like this is conjecture, but it’s informed conjecture that they were attempting to do that in an, in an effort to understand how they could weaponize it. So in the same way that your implant, if we’re still to understand that as you describe it, they said, Hey, here’s another way.

Just take a two year old and scare the crap out of them and create this incredible trauma and boom, there’ll be outside of their body. Now, once they’re outside of the body, let’s start seeing what we might do with that. And we have to, because we have to know, because if we don’t get them, they’ll get us kind of a stuff to which you said, be careful with your black magic flypaper, because you’re never going to get your hands off of it,

which I agree with.

Whitley Strieber: [01:15:14] Absolutely true. I’ve seen that happen to many people. You get you get, once you, once you start playing with the dark side, I know people who have just gotten lost in a black magic and stuff like that. Uh, because the reason is that we don’t know what we’re doing in these areas. And there is something there.

Certainly I, I’m not sure that you can, we, we tend to characterize it as good and evil, but I’m not sure it sees itself that way at all.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:15:54] Again, if let me interject, because I think that’s a contradiction with what you said earlier. And what you said earlier is the part that I agree with because it jives so closely with the research I’ve done into near-death experience because no one comes back from a near-death experience and says, Oh, you know what Alister Croley is.

Right. Do what thou wilt is the way Michael Aquino is right. I should go molest little kids. Nolan comes back, you know, the number of cases of the thousands of cases that meticulously reported of near-death experiences, zero, zero, come back and say that what they say is there’s light. There’s love there is God and we have the choice to move in that direction and we always have that choice.

That’s what I understand. So I am not, I’m not interested in engaging in a deep dive into the evil or exploring it or practicing it, but I do need to understand it. I do need to at least identify what the playing field is like. So when I make that choice to choose light to choose good, I’m better informed about what that choice is.

That’s my only point.

Whitley Strieber: [01:17:08] Well, let’s get back to the boot in the neck. We are not going to be able to understand it. What we are going to be able to do is to understand our side of the relationship that we can understand. And that’s all about the. Journey toward the good. It was the, it was, it’s been the message of Buddha, Jesus, even Mohammed in the Mecca SSRIs.

Uh, uh, it is, it is a message that is, that fills humanity. It is the human message and embracing that is embracing humanity. Be

explicit about what that message is. Cause you’ve said it before, but I want you to say it again. If you could about compassion, about love, about forgiveness, even when you, even when you were the dog with the boot on your neck, there’s only one way out and it’s not the obvious way.

It’s not, it’s not the fight, the boot because you can’t, there’s something else there that you can’t see and you can’t address it is to live by love, compassion, and humility. To live that way. That’s what changed me. My experience of the visitors was the absolute effort to really understand my relationship to those three things, to understand where am I when it comes to love, am I living a loving life?

And what does that mean in terms of my relationships with the people around me, the people I know and don’t know, and the friends and the enemies and all of that. Uh, what does that mean? And then humility, I’ve said many times the first lesson I got from the visitors and the first indication I had that I was in volved with somebody who had a different viewpoint, not, it was simply a dark, evil, terrifying, Um, we’re going to eat you if we can kind of approach was the fact that they taught me beautifully and very brilliantly about the importance of humility.

And then I learned about compassion from my wife, not only from the way she lived, but from what she said about it, which I think is one of those powerful statements. I know in my life, when I asked Anne what compassion was, how to understand it. She said, simply each of us is all we have. And when you hear that suddenly a door opens in you, at least it did in me and you see the others in their vulnerability and pain, the good, the bad, and the ugly and.

If you really let that door open, you soon find out why it’s so hard to be compassionate. It is because it hurts to feel the pain of others.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:20:38] That is so, so beautiful. It is so, so amazing how that fits now. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but that is exactly the message from the near death experience is that you will stand in judgment of yourself.

And the most difficult thing about that judgment will be you will be fully compassionate, fully compassionate of all you’ve ever done. All you’ve ever thought. And it’s not anyone imposing that on you. It just becomes your reality.

Whitley Strieber: [01:21:17] That’s an man was, that’s why this, that that’s what, and I mean, Ann had such extraordinary and has such extraordinary insight.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:21:29] I obviously want you to, to, to go back and speak some more if you would about humility, because I think that’s a tricky, a tricky term, especially in our times, especially among men, especially among men who are kind of geared to achieve, you’ve achieved a lot in your life. A lot of success with literary accomplishments, with media accomplishments that, you know, Make make humility, I’m sure at different times in your life difficult, what speak more about humility?

Whitley Strieber: [01:22:07] you know, it has to be understood that we’re all equal, uh, that the man or the woman with great accomplishments and the, the one who appears to have few or even negative accomplishments are in the end equal. I’ve been out of my body in a couple of instances when I was in the presence of large numbers of other people.

I’m not going to get it there where I was not witnessed in these cases. So I don’t talk about them much, but I will say this when you’re in that state and you’re with. You’re in a group of a large group of people. Yeah. Quite an astonishing thing happens. They all look both utterly and completely unique and exactly the same at the same time.

And when you live that you find yourself living in a state of humility,

Alex Tsakiris: [01:23:16] That’s quite, quite beautiful, you know? . I don’t know how much we accomplished in terms of maybe what you want to talk about in terms of Jesus, a new vision, but I accomplished what I wanted. That was the kind of dialogue I wanted. Make sure to check out our show.

So good. That’s it is my show. And I do honor my room right. To do what the hell I want, because I don’t have a paywall. I don’t have advertisers. I never have. And I never will because it doesn’t cost that much money to run a podcast. And I got all the money I need anyway.

So I like trying to expand my understanding of who I am and why I’m here. And that’s why I am continuously. No matter how much I piss you off, I am continually open to. And just so thankful for who you are and what you bring and the life that you’ve lived and the contributions you’ve made you are just an amazing, amazing, spiritual being and communicator.

And I, I so honor what you’ve done. Uh, w what you continue to do, because, you know, sometimes people, you know, th the Whitley is not going anywhere. He’s still cranking out stuff, you know, go to unknown country.com, go to dream land, listen to that amazing podcast. I think I just, I mentioned earlier in the show, the interview with Ralph Blumenthal, it’s phenomenal.

You cannot read Ralph’s book and not listen to Whitley’s interview with them. The two would be there. They should be, he should be sending those out on MP3 with it, because one doesn’t even fully, you tell the story without the other, because Whitley is so central to so much of this experience that we’re living as we’re unfolding into this larger reality, that is, you know, this ITI UFO thing Lake.

Phenomenal that you’ve joined me. And I thank you so much. I’m sorry. I, I put you on tilt, but I’m not gonna apologize. Really. You’re on

Whitley Strieber: [01:25:36] tilt a few times in my life. I bet. But I, I would like at some point to discuss my book, which we did not do

Alex Tsakiris: [01:25:46] well, you’re going to have to find somebody else to do that, I guess.

Whitley Strieber: [01:25:49] Cause I can’t it. So yeah, because I, because Joseph is, is, uh, is a very peripheral aspect of the book, but I don’t want to, let’s not go back there. We’ve been there on that. It’s over.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:26:03] See there there’s actually, uh, which you don’t, you don’t see it that way, which is fine. There’s no, there’s some really important points of connection between what you’re saying and what I’m saying. I mean, what you’re saying about Constantine, what you’re saying about the Romans, co-opting the religion.

Whitley Strieber: [01:26:59] All right.

Thank you very much for having me on.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:27:03] Okay. You are very

Whitley Strieber: [01:27:06] welcome. Thank you. We’ll we’ll do it again sometime soon. Okay. Take care.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:27:13] Bye.

(===)

Thanks again to Whitley Strieber for joining me today on Skepta co. You know, I’m hesitant to even tee up a question from this interview because I don’t know. I don’t know how down you all are with this, but you know, if I was going to tee up a question, it would be along the lines of what I was talking about at the beginning.

Do you see the connection between the co-opting of Christianity and the.

False flag fail.

Of the Roman empire.

Or do you think, well, do you think otherwise, let me know. Love to hear your thoughts. Got lot more of this great stuff coming up. Until next time, take care and bye for now.

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