Up next is a discussion by UFO Experiences for the latest UAP Con,
which was an online conference sponsored by UAPedia.
We'll have Meredith Spearman, Holly Ann Wood, and Richard Monk
to discuss UFO contact and other contact experiences and group discussion afterwards.
This program is sponsored by UAPedia.ai, the most trusted source of UAP UFO information.
I'll start with you, Meredith.
I'll just do a quick introduction to let people know you're a writer, professor,
registered nurse who's focused on UAPs, at UAP and anomalous experiences,
and consciousness, and your sub-stack, the maze of metanoia,
uses unusual experiences like UAP encounters and threshold states
to explore transformation and challenges of living with experience outside our cultural frameworks.
I think that's so important because how do you integrate this into a culture
that makes it unacceptable?
So you're also writing your first book and a narrative fiction
about a lifelong impact of carrying extraordinary experiences in silence.
So what I also like about your sub-stack is that you go into the consciousness level,
how these experiences are symbolic in a sense of deeper layers of existence
that we already exist on.
So, okay, Meredith, please share with us your insights for about 10 minutes
and then we'll bring Richard in and do a panel discussion about all this.
Thank you.
So my name's Meredith Spearman.
I write maze to metanoia on sub-stack.
I am also a nurse and an experiencer.
So thank you for letting me present carrying the impossible on initiation,
silence, and what disclosure owes the witnesses.
So I have had a conduct experience.
I've had it since I was eight years old.
And for the first 30 years of my life, that sentence never made it out of my mouth
in a room like this.
I grew up in a house where I was not safe.
I had learned to take very little space.
The window in my bedroom was the only place in that house that asked nothing from me.
One night I did something I had never done before.
I called out and not to anyone in particular to whatever was out there.
I felt invisible in the pain and I called out to be seen within it.
Something crossed the sky and stopped, flat in a way that defied physics,
moving with what I can only describe as intention.
And when it was directly above me, the boundary between the thing I was
looking at and the child doing the looking dissolved.
I was looking up into the light.
I was also at the same moment looking down from inside it.
Both were equally and completely true.
Whatever had come had not come to show itself to me from a distance.
It had come to meet me in a place where the subject and the object no longer
sat on opposite sides of the encounter.
The contact was mutual in a way I still do not have adequate language for.
Whatever came through that night was careful with me,
but I wasn't the first person in my family that's happened to.
The phenomenon runs through family lines and so does the silence around it.
What I inherited wasn't just the experience.
It was the architecture of not speaking about it.
The learned understanding passed down without words that there was no room for this.
So for 30 years, I carried it alone and then I made a different choice.
I started writing.
I started saying it out loud and not because the professional risk disappeared,
but because like Ellie Allen, air away in the movie contact,
sitting before a congressional committee with no evidence
facing every rational pressure to walk away from what she knew,
I couldn't because I can't.
The experience changed me to disown it would be to disown myself.
And I'm not alone in this.
The person across the dinner table from you may be carrying the same thing.
Experiences are everywhere and they are one of the most underserved populations
and any conversation about this phenomenon.
So what does the experience actually do?
Because I think this is where the field really gets stuck.
So we keep asking what are these things?
And that's a really valuable question, but I think it's not the only one.
The question this panel here is trying to explore is what do these contact experiences
due to the person having them?
So when you look across encounter types, whether we're talking about UAP contact,
near death experiences, spontaneous mystical states,
the outputs tend to be strikingly consistent.
The anthropologist Arnold van Gennep spent his career mapping the structure of threshold
crossings across cultures.
And what he found was a four stage pattern that the experiencer literature
keeps confirming regardless of encounter type.
Dissolution of prior self concept, forced epistemological revision,
expanded relational awareness and permanent ontological shift.
This is not the structure of a hallucination.
It's the structure of initiation.
The Western alchemical tradition from medieval Europe through the Renaissance
and into Carl Jung had a freezer what this kind of experience does.
Solve at coagula dissolve and coagulate.
Break the old form down before the new one can take shape.
What looks like disruption is the first stage of transformation,
but only if there is a container strong enough to hold the dissolution.
So before we get to what those containers used to look like historically,
I want to mention one thing that the literature keeps pointing towards that
changes what we mean by container entirely.
Kierkegaard wrote that life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lift forwards.
That is the most accurate description I have of what the 30 years after my encounter felt like.
I was living something I could not yet read.
And what I've come to understand reading other experiencer literature across traditions
and across centuries of testimony is that what I experienced at the window
was not the phenomena showing itself to me from a distance.
It was reciprocity, not exchange, but a recognition.
We send signals into the dark and the dark sends us back to ourselves.
The strangeness of the other is the instrument by which something intimate about you becomes visible.
And this is not my interpretation alone.
Multiple researchers working independently across different cultures and populations
arrived to similar conclusions.
The encounters appear calibrated to what the experiencer can hold within consciousness.
Jenny Randles, who spent decades in the field, put it this way.
The consciousness of the witness is the focal point of the UFO encounter,
not the craft, but the receiver.
So what did initiation containers look like?
Outside Athens on the coast of the Sironic Gulf, there was a town called Ellusis.
And for nearly 2,000 years, it was the site of the most significant
initiatory tradition the Western world has ever produced.
Plato was initiated here, Cicero Marcus Aurelius.
The initiates descended into the darkness.
They took the Kaikeon, a ritual drink now believed to contain naturally occurring psychedelic compounds.
They encountered something that reorganized the relationship to consciousness and to death.
And surrounding all of it was preparation, ritual, and the mister go goi,
guides who are not chosen because of their credentials, but because they had also crossed that threshold.
The mysteries were designed to show the limits of reason,
to take the philosophical mind to the edge of what it could hold and let the encounter do the rest.
Cicero wrote that it gave him not only a reason to live with joy, but to die with better hope.
We've kept that philosophy. We've discarded the chamber.
But Ellusis wasn't an anomaly. It was one instance of a pattern that appears anywhere serious traditions live near those thresholds.
The anthropologist Mircia I. Lide documented across Siberian Central Asian and indigenous American traditions
that future shamans rarely choose the path.
The path chooses them often through illness or crisis or an encounter that arrives without invitation and cannot be unexperienced.
What distinguishes the shaman from the person who simply breaks under the same experience is not the experience itself.
It's what surrounds them. The community, the elders, the container that allows the crisis to become transformation rather than collapse.
Without the container, the same experience produces a broken person.
But with it, it produces someone who can walk between worlds on behalf of others.
The philosopher Charles Taylor calls the modern western self buffered, sealed against the encounter.
It's inner life private property. Anything that arrives from the outside is automatically suspect.
But the poorest self, on the other hand, is open to presences that exceed the individual.
It is a precondition for the kind of contact these experiences require.
The West didn't lose these encounters. It lost the architecture for receiving them.
And I want to use an analogy here because I think it makes the argument more precise than language alone.
A cylinder viewed from directly above looks like a circle. From the side, it tingle.
Both observers are completely right. Neither is hallucinating. Neither is limited by poor perception.
They're seeing genuinely different accurate dimensions of the same object.
Now, this might sound a lot like the blind man in the elephant, and it isn't.
And I think that distinction matters here because in that story.
Everything is groping in the dark, building a false picture from the incomplete contact.
The moral is about humility, but that's not what I'm arguing here.
What I'm arguing is that neither observer is wrong.
The problem isn't the quality of the observation.
The problem is whether your database only contains circle courts.
Because of all you ever have a circles, no matter how many circles you accumulate,
no matter how rigorously you study them, you will never reconstruct the cylinder.
You cannot add your way to the side view. You have to change the position of the observer.
And that is the epistemological problem in the field.
The map is incomplete and not because observers are wrong,
but because we've been taking reports from two narrow range of positions.
Who speaks? Shape what we can see.
But this problem has already been solved in a very different domain.
So for most of human history, medicine dismissed pain.
There aren't scans for suffering.
Women's pain was dismissed at higher rates than men's, an entire centriastral disbelief.
I personally have seen these dismissals in medical charts,
and I know what that mechanism looks like from the inside.
And it's the same mechanism that's operating in the UFO field.
The same populations told their testimonies less credible, and the same structural dismissal.
But then medicine made a choice.
Pain became the fifth vital sign.
We trained clinicians to believe their patients, not because we could prove the pain from the outside the body,
but because we understood that the prior question,
is this person experiencing something real,
could be answered without settling the harder question of what was causing it.
The silence does not reflect the rarity of these experiences.
It reflects the effectiveness of the architecture surrounding them.
An analogy asks you to notice a resemblance, but a precedent tells you it's already been done.
The pain argument is not an analogy. It is a precedent.
So here is what applying that precedent actually looks like.
Two questions we routinely collapse into one.
The ontological question of what is the status of this experience in external verifiable reality?
And the empathy question, did this person experience this?
Does it deserve witness regardless of what I can confirm?
The second can be answered without settling the first.
And here's what we already know about this.
Nobody has ever produced proof of love.
No instrument can measure it.
There's no controlled study.
And yet we don't tell somebody who's lost the love of their life that before they are permitted to mourn,
they need a corroborating account.
The most significant experiences in human life are not provable.
And we have never once required that they be until this category of experience.
The demand for proof isn't epistemology.
It's a loyalty oath to a version of reality that was always incomplete.
Failing to answer the empathy question is the violence of demand
that experience justify itself before it receives recognition.
And that demand is not neutral.
It is a cost the experience our community pays entirely alone.
And I know what that cost pays.
So I want to take a minute just to speak directly to the experiencers for a moment because I know what it's like to start that sentence and stop.
I see you guys creating safe spaces.
I see the support groups, the sub-stacks, the late night phone calls.
I see you making your art, your paintings.
I see you trying to put language around something language wasn't built for.
Keep doing it.
Keep making the rooms.
Keep speaking your truth.
But use discernment.
Not every voice in this space deserves your trust.
But do not let the noise make you small.
You are not a data point.
You are not a case study.
You are not a liability in someone else's credibility calculation.
You are the primary witness to one of the most significant phenomena in human history.
The field needs your voices at the table.
Whistleblowers came forward and took professional risk.
Scientists published in hostile environments.
And the experiencer community has been doing same thing with less protection and less recognition for decades.
Who speaks shapes what we can see.
And the map is incomplete without you.
So disclosure without the mixer problem addressed is disclosure that abandoned its own witnesses.
The experiences are not rare.
The rooms to hold them are so build the room.
Thank you.
It's actually very touching.
I mean, you've hit some beautiful points.
Thank you, Meredith.
That was Meredith spearmen.
And I think all of it is very important and we're going to discuss it after everyone does a presentation.
I'm going to introduce Holly Wood.
You're known as that UAP girl.
You're in Britain as a UAP researcher and writer in Northern England and you create spaces for witnesses sort of what Meredith was saying to share their to share their experiences and what it's like to really encounter this phenomenon.
You focus on conscious psychology and spirituality and you're known for you for working with human initiated contact events.
Maybe you could talk about that.
And you encourage audiences to view consciousness as central to understanding UFO phenomena.
I think that's why we're all here.
Hello.
Thank you so much for having me.
I think the phenomenon's been quite at work for the past 15 minutes.
I've had every technical challenge you could get but perseverance.
We are here.
So yes, my name's Holly.
I'm so grateful to be here for this wonderful event.
And I'm I'll dive straight into it.
I'll be at little frazzled.
So why have the phenomenon isn't just something we are observing, but something that really is responding to us?
Most conversations about UAP begin from a distance.
They ask what we are, what we knew where they come from and we ask whether they're real.
But for some of us, it becomes personal.
It stops being about observation and becomes about experience.
And that really does matter because at the center of all of this is people and people absolutely matter.
Not as an afterthought, not as something that can be explained away, but as a critical part of understanding what is actually going on.
But the moment you have a direct experience, the framework shifts.
You are no longer looking at something.
You are inside it.
But for me, this didn't start as an idea.
It started as an experience.
I was eight years old sat in the eye of the ancient white horse, which was carved into the chalk hills of the world in Wiltshire.
And I remember looking up and seeing three orange orbs at that age, though.
You don't really have a language for it.
You definitely don't have context, but you don't have a need to explain it.
You simply just experience it.
But what stayed with me wasn't just what I saw.
It was how it felt.
Now, it didn't feel distant.
It didn't feel random.
It felt present and it felt aware.
This moment didn't stay just in my childhood.
It has followed me throughout my life to this day.
And I still experience interaction, but it's not an easy path because being an experiencer isn't just about a moment you can point to.
It's something you carry and it shapes how you move through the world.
You notice things differently.
You question more deeply and you start to see how limited some of our current explanations convey.
And at times that can feel very isolating because you're holding on to something that feels completely real to you, but doesn't necessarily fit into the world around.
So you learn to filter what you say and you learn who you can speak to and who you can't.
But sometimes you just don't speak at all.
But alongside that, there's also expansion and a sense that reality might be bigger than we've been actually taught.
That consciousness might not be confined in the way we assume, but that, well, for me, can be both unsettling but deeply meaningful.
And this is why the experience of dimension really matters because experiences were not looking for attention, but looking for understanding, trying to make sense of something that doesn't yet perhaps have a clear framework.
So when we talk about meaning and conclusions in the experience of dimension, this is what I've come to understand.
First, these experiences are real in their impact, regardless of explanation.
They affect people psychologically, emotionally, and sometimes very spiritually in really lasting ways.
Psychologically, they challenge perception, identity and how we define reality.
Emotionally, it can bring all in curiosity, but also confusion and certainly in my case isolation.
And spiritually, it raises questions about meaning and connection and whether there is something more to our existence.
Another center of all of this is consciousness.
Because I don't think consciousness is just something we have.
I think it is something that we are part of.
Now, like I have many times, if you look across experience or accounts, you do see something consistent.
It involves perception, it involves awareness because encounters are not always purely physical.
Sometimes they involve a sense of communication that also doesn't follow normal language.
So we have to ask, are we observing something external?
Or are we interacting with something itself through consciousness itself?
Now, I certainly don't sit here with all my technical problems today having the answers,
but I do think we have to take that question very seriously.
Because if consciousness is involved, as I very much suspect it is, then this is not just a technological mystery.
It's a relational one.
It suggests that the experiencer is not just a witness, but part of the event.
And this is where for me, the gap becomes very clear.
Because right now, I feel there was very little support for people going through this.
People are left to process these experiences with the phenomena, often on their own.
Court between curiosity and the fear of being dismissed, the stigma, no clear frameworks, very inconsistent language, and very little safe spaces.
Experiences do deserve safe spaces because no one should really have to process something this profound alone.
But this isn't just anecdotal.
If you look at the work from the Unhidden Foundation, which there are a few on the potential effects, health effects associated with UAP exposure,
you start to see something really, really important.
There are reported physiological responses, neurological patterns, and psychological impacts linked to these encounters.
Not a definite answer, but enough to show that something real is being experienced.
And what stands out the most, is there is still no clear system for how people, like myself, many experiences, are supported.
And that really matters.
Because when people can't speak about what they've experienced, they often internalize it.
They question themselves, they doubt themselves, and carry something that feels very real with few places and spaces to take it to.
But for me, that has become a real responsibility because I kept seeing people having such profound experiences with the phenomena and not knowing why to go.
So instead of waiting for the world to catch up, I built a space for it called Project Nano.
And what that does, it exists to do three things.
To discover, to discuss, to discover so people can't get that information and importantly realize they're not alone.
Discuss so experiences can be explored openly and understood collectively and disclosed because without openness, this conversation stays very fragmented.
And for me, that's where the opportunity is.
Because if we can create spaces where experiences people feel free to speak, we don't just support them.
We start to build a much needed understanding.
The more we create space for these conversations, the closer I believe we get to it, understanding them.
And when you bring all of this together, the experience that I mentioned, the psychological impact, the heavy emotional weight, even the spiritual questions, and the role of consciousness, you start to see something more complete.
And, as the great and wonderful Jacques Valais said, the UFO phenomenon cannot be carpmentableized.
It touches every part of human knowledge and that includes us.
Because this, it's just not, it's absolutely not just a scientific question, it's a human one.
So, we can't keep just looking up at the sky.
We really have to be willing to look at ourselves.
Thank you.
Fantastic.
That is another amazing, amazing analysis.
I'm really excited about the upcoming discussion that we're going to have when Richard finishes his presentation.
But I think you hit a lot of key points within the experience or community and it's valuable what you've said.
So, I'm just going to introduce Richard.
Richard, thanks for being here.
Richard, actually, is part of the UAPD staff.
And Richard, that was pretty impressive so far, wasn't it?
It was indeed.
And I'm intrigued.
I was delivering holding off listening to both of your experience stories until I got to get to that.
I got to get, got together with you today.
So, yeah, would you like me to talk about your experiences and then we will have a discussion among all of us to see what direction forward we can go in.
So, Richard Monk from the UK is a writer, researcher and focuses on UAP and high strangeness for UAPD.AI.
Your director of photography, Dartmoor episodes of legendary seekers and conduct field experiments with the center of Fort Tien as in Charles Fort, zoology, and your memoir, the cartography of high strangeness.
And I'm going to talk about that.
Explores a lifelong anomalous experiences and considers the phenomena as an ongoing curriculum drawing insights from Harper, Kio, Valet, Wago, and Cripal. Those are some of my favorites too.
So, Richard, share with us your experiences and fill in the conversation and then we'll all talk about it.
Yeah, thanks very much for having me having me on. I'm not usually used to speaking to an audience like this. So it's a great opportunity.
I used to think some of the strange elements of my life were just strange, but never really seemingly interlinked.
And then I read a fantastic book called Fourth Wall Phantoms by Joshua Cutchen.
And as I'm reading through this book, I was presented with not one, but three different explanations for some of the weird things that have happened in my life.
The first I was presented with whilst reading this book was an account about Terrence McKenna seeing a UFO in the Amazon basin.
What he saw was an interesting UFO, but it was seemed like a relic from the 1950s.
I'm sitting in bed reading this book and my jaw dropped Terrence McKenna UFO looks like a saucer from the 1950s.
As I say, my mouth dropped and it took me back to my childhood.
I'll be honest, I thought about this many times before, but actually being presented with a piece of work by Terrence McKenna, having a similar experience to what I had.
Was enough to get my peak, my interest, shall we say Terrence McKenna's a Ken counter occurred on the Amazon basin mine was not on the Amazon basin.
It was as far from the Amazon basin as you can probably get 1980.
I was nine, nine and a half years old. I lived in the northeast of England.
I lived in a town called Washington and I went to school.
It was Victorian school called Fatfield.
I know it was just a regular spring morning, early spring in 1980.
I'm out in playground playing around.
And for some reason, I look up into the sky.
And as I'm looking into the sky, it's a nice blue sky clouds and I'm looking at this cloud and beneath this cloud.
So if you can imagine looking up, seeing a cloud, looking at the bottom of it and moving to the left hand side of the cloud effectively.
And there behind this cloud, slightly obscured because the clouds in the way was a flying saucer.
I can't call it a UFO. I've never been able to be kind of identified as a UFO only because I could see exactly what it was.
And that's what really confused me. This is 1980.
If you ask me what my favorite movie was in 1980, it was bound to be Star Wars.
Maybe I ought to throw in some Star Trek, Battle Star Galactica, or Buck Rogers.
I wasn't really one for watching 1950 sci-fi movies.
But what I was presented with in full, glorious battleship gray was a flying saucer.
It looked, as I discovered much later on in life, rather like a dam skis flying saucer.
It was bell shaped. It had a dome on the top. It had portholes. It looked like portholes.
It was slightly tilted back from me. So I couldn't quite see the full effect of the bottom.
But I could make out there was three classic domes. Look at any sci-fi movie from the 50s. That's what you're going to see.
And that's what confused me. I wasn't expecting to see that.
I certainly wasn't expecting to see a relic from the 1950s, not on the school day looking into the sky.
There was a girl standing close next to me. I turned around to her, stopped looking at the sky.
I don't know how long I was looking at it for, but it was there. And I'm watching it.
But then I slowly turned away from it to this girl right next to me and said, I've just seen a flying saucer.
Her words, back to me, verbatim, were, no you haven't.
I looked back up to where it expected to be and it was gone. The cloud was still there, but the flying saucer wasn't.
Now that confused me. It being 1980, you don't go running to school teachers and say, look, I've just seen a flying saucer.
To the best of my knowledge, nobody else saw it, especially that girl standing next to me.
What do you do with that information when you're a child? I sat on that for a very, very long time.
Until one day I read Passport to McOnia by Jack Felle.
And there's an account in there. There's actually more than one account actually.
But there's an account in there where there's somebody seeing a flying saucer or some craft and the person next to them doesn't.
So that was kind of helpful to a certain extent, but also being aware of this through reading this book,
Fourth War Phantoms by Joshua Cuttshin, kind of really rounded home to me.
I never thought at any moment what I saw was unique because obviously other people are seeing flying saucers.
I just never got my head rounded as to why it was there. And quite honestly, I've always wondered, did I imagine it?
Or was it really there? And then later on in life, having read numerous books on this subject mostly the nuts and boats aspect of things,
but again being introduced to stuff like Passport to McOnia by Jack Felle or Operation Trojan Horse by John Keel,
you're presented with this notion that it could actually be both.
What I'm seeing is something I could be potentially manifesting.
I wouldn't have understood that at the age of nine, nine and a half.
But I'm slowly starting to understand it now.
Don't ask me for any answers, but I'm truly understanding there is a lot more to understand about this.
And that was it. That was my UFO encounter. And if that's all there ever was, that would have been amazing.
But I'm carrying on reading this book.
And the next thing I encounter as part of my strange life or what I've always thought were just kind of strange little aspects of it,
but strange nonetheless, but never really interlinked was the discovery that those people who often have childhood imaginary friends
go on to have UFO encounters, UAP encounters in late life.
And again, my mouth drops open. My jaws further open.
And that really flew. That really threw me.
Only because I had a childhood imaginary friend when I was little from the age of, let's say from whatever I was,
the age of four, I had an imaginary friend. His name was Nicholas.
Nicholas followed me everywhere apparently. It's a good job having parents.
You can ask them these questions and interrogate them for such information. Very handy.
So according to my parents, Nick has came everywhere so much so that if we went to a cinema, my mother would insist.
I would not mention Nicholas because she refused to pay extra money for a child.
It was far as she was concerned was imaginary.
There he used to always have a place set at dinner, which I subsequently discovered is quite a common theme with people who actually have childhood imaginary friends.
There aren't that many people I've interrogated or questioned about this.
Only five myself included, but funny enough, all five of us have had UFO encounters.
And funny enough, most of the five would have all ensured that their parents laid a table, a place at the table for their imaginary friend.
One of the most amusing aspects of this, this childhood imaginary friend, Nicholas, and it was a tale often told to me by my parents as I was growing up.
However, comes in handy at this point in my life is the fact that Nicholas was sitting with me on a bus one day when I was about three.
There's a long seat at the front of the bus.
Nicholas is starting next to me, obviously unbeknownst to anybody else, a lady comes on the bus and sits down next to me.
That poor lady, I really do feel sorry for, sorry, if I could tell you that now.
I bought that bus down. I cried. I screamed. I was doing all sorts. The way a four year old or three year old could only do.
That poor woman apparently jumped up off her seat and ran to the back of the bus thinking she'd sat on me.
Turns out I was crying because she'd sat on Nicholas.
So I'll be in all be at that Nicholas is an imaginary friend. He took up a real space in my life.
And he was there.
And what does that have to do with the phenomenon? What does that actually have to do with anything really?
And I'm still trying to work this out.
But I'm on a course, I'm on a path of investigation.
There are those that believe childhood imaginary friends are a diamond.
They have the highest soul, the one that guides us.
The science behind that could say it's the non dominant brain, the side of the brain, which deals in symbols interacting with the verbal side of the brain.
It takes the romance out of it slightly, but mystics and scientists have been coming out this from different points of view.
And looking at the same answer. So whether you've got a lab coat or a gown.
They are looking at this phenomenon in its own particular way and they're looking for the same answers. So.
Who knows what this is and how it may link in, but the interesting part for me was always that those people who had these imaginary friends do have a UFO encounters in in further life.
Not everybody apparently has a UFO counter has an imaginary friend, but it's something to worth bearing in mass. It's worth bearing in mind.
So if any of you did have a childhood imaginary friend at an early age, have you had a UFO encounter, let me know.
So that was an interesting aside and I'm currently looking into the aspects of the of the diamond and seeing where that sort of fits in with the higher elements of the phenomenon.
But the third bit, the most interesting bit apart from these two really interesting fascinating bits was the next bit in Joshua Kuchin's book about near death experiences and the ease.
And again, my mouth is further open. It's so wide open at this point. I could not believe it.
Near death experiences. I've never really studied them.
Even though I had one of my own. And I'll come on to that in a moment.
It's not something I've ever explored because my own experience I came away from it at the time with a certain amount of disappointment or embarrassment behind it. I'll explain why.
It was many years ago.
How do I put this in case my mother's watching.
I was voyaging where Timothy Leary liked to voyage and it would what we be called a heroic event.
I was with some friends were all fairly well seasoned psycho nuts.
And this occasion happened.
I've spay the details, but hours passed and then some more hours passed.
And then before bed kicks in before you could find a get to sleep in those states, it's always nice to put on a movie chill out trying to get yourself back into some sort of semblance of reality before trying to hit the sleep before I'm trying to get to sleep.
Often my favorite movie of choice would be Woodstock. I traveled there so many times into those various states.
But on this particular occasion, I chose to watch gentleman Broncos.
It's a slightly obscure film. It's definitely worth watching if you've never seen it.
It's directed by Jared Hess and it's the second movie he made after Napoleon Dynamite.
That aside, very funny movie.
I've settling down to watch this.
Cold upon the couch with a blanket, cup of coffee in front of me and a Jaffa cake.
Now, Jaffa cakes, for those of you who don't live in the UK are essentially there's an argument. Are they a cake or are they a biscuit cookie?
Essentially, they're a sponge with some jam in the middle and there's chocolate on the top. That's effectively what they are.
Britain's most best selling biscuit effectively.
And they're not normally known for their spiritual powers.
However, on this particular occasion, I think maybe the fact that the combination of all three may have had something to do with it.
I'm sitting there watching this amusing film. It is very funny. I cannot and we're emphasized how funny it was.
So funny, in fact, I'm laughing and I went quiet.
Next thing I know, one of my friends is sitting on top of my back. My back hurts like heck. It really does.
I cut the coffee, his strewn across the room. I don't know what even happened to the Jaffa cake.
What has happened? I said, looking around on my friend who's on my back. Why does this hurt so much?
You went blue. You were quiet. We looked over. You had literally turned blue.
I said, disappointing. What had happened?
Now, in the time that I stopped laughing and turned blue and then came back again, something else had happened.
Now, when you know, you know, and if you don't know, you don't know, and I think that's generally a good rule in life and I'd rather the time I didn't know.
But what I do now now is somewhat different. What I experienced and when I say I, there wasn't an I, there wasn't Richard Monk.
I didn't exist. But what was left was this sensation of nothingness. Just pure nothingness.
But when I say nothing, it didn't feel like a void. All it was was a comforting, loving embrace. It was so beautiful. Yet so nothing.
It didn't really make sense at the time. And I came back out of this. I don't know how long I was in there for because it felt eternal and I could have been in their moments and it was.
But it felt so much more. And what I meant when I mentioned this earlier was what I felt a slight disappointment was like everyone talks about a big white light and maybe going down a tunnel and you get to another end and there you see your granny in your favorite dog.
None of that happened for me. I just had nothing. But it was a loving nothing, but it was still a nothing. I didn't really have an understanding of that.
And then again, presented with this information in this book, I thought, Oh gosh, I'm going to have to read some more extra books on the subject of near death experiences, because what I'd actually experienced, according to this book and according to subsequent reading was the play play Roma.
This, this, this all encompassing being this all encompassing void of nothing and it lo and behold described exactly what I experienced.
So this book is fantastic but once again I do recommend Joshua Coaches fourth world phantoms, but it's very helpful book. He's full of notes and bibliographies. So I'm there at the back of the book scribbling around looking for books on near death experiences.
So I took me down various avenues such as Eric wago's time loops, which was one in particular interesting one to explore. And in that, that notion that in my near death experience, I could have actually reached out and being that person who instigated my own UFO encounter and being in part being my own childhood
and I can't imagine it. I can't prove that, but it's an interesting exploration to do so. So that's kind of what I've experienced in the briefest of nut shells and I think I'll just kind of nicely wrap it up there.
So that's kind of me to a point. Anyway, that's a condensed version.
I think all of it has to be considered the imaginary friend, the psychedelics, the near death. These are aspects that are now being integrated into our culture very slowly.
So we're at the edge of defining new realities, which is what we're really all talking about. So to get back to the actual contact phenomena, I'll start with you Holly.
There seems to be something I would call epidemic going on and we are on the outside of a cultural acceptance, but something has to be something has to shift in order to include our population into the interface of this larger reality.
And how do we, you as proposed, we start to make an impact. Is it what Meredith said, just having discussions or do you have a plan, Holly would for this.
I think really strongly, Alan, and I know Meredith and I share this, that having dialogue in the right places and spaces with everyday folk is really important.
Janet and John, who live at number 72 on Jorilane, that might not even comprehend that we are not alone, may not have even stood forward to accept the reality of this entire thing.
So I just feel it's really, really important that we have real strong conversations and those of us that are experiences and those of us that have dealt with the phenomenon, we're able to take these big, big topics and we're able to bring them into the everyday zeitgeist and have conversations with people
and make it more accessible. We watch Star Trek, we watch Star Wars, we watch all of these things. I believe for the past, however long, a lot of the kind of stuff that's been in the media has been part of a slow acclamation process anyway, but I do feel that we as experiences and those of us vast in this topic can really hand hold people as they come to the proposition that were not alone.
And yes, it is a little unsettling, yes, it can be worrying, but it also allows us to think bigger about our actual place in this cosmos and how wonderful is that that we could be part of something much bigger than ourselves.
I think dialogue is where we start that and taking the stigma away from little green men and flying sources and you're a bit kooky. No, we're not. We're ordinary people that have had an extraordinary experience.
So the reduction in stigma starts with conversation and making that accessible and we're kind of on that journey. So that's my response.
And that's excellent. I think it's very important people hear this and I'm going to go to Merith where it's like you're talking about initiations of Merith on a personal, but are we in a planetary human kind initiation?
Representative Luna talking about interdimensional beings, you get 10 per shirt saying, well, this is going to alarm the public, but we, it seems to me from what you said about the personal initiations, we're in a global initiation of the human species.
Would you say, you know, if you talk to a lot of experiencers, a lot of people had this kind of initial experience or kind of like an awakening to their experience.
And so we see a lot of people very recently are starting to kind of say, hey, yeah, no, I had some weird stuff happen to me as a kid.
And it is strange that those things are kind of happening in sequence now that we're seeing more people kind of collectively come to those realizations.
I will say, I don't know. I don't think anybody knows what the answer is. And I think if anybody tells you they know, I think you should be suspicious.
And so, coming to the phenomenon with that kind of like a Bayesian reasoning saying, what's my confidence score on this like I personally do not think this is nuts and bolts at all.
I think that's a tiny component of it, but I'm not going to say it's impossible and that I'm confused right, but I think this idea that multiple people are having these experiences and that there's some sort of coordinated effort behind that.
I don't think that that's impossible. I think that we're seeing a lot of experience. I would say follow the pattern. What does it mean?
I think it means that we are in a global initiation. I mean, and that may take 200 years. We may be at the leading edge or somewhere in there, but something's changing for humanity.
Richard, I believe those are not imaginary friends. I used to see beings at the window. So, how do we start to believe in our own solid experience and not by the collective narrative that, oh, you're crazy, you're making this up.
I mean, is there a way we can change it for ourselves? I think you talked about that too, Meredith, but what do you say about for you, Richard?
I believe you. I believe all that's true. And how do we convince yourself and others that it is?
It's a difficult one to be perfectly honest. And for years, I sat on it because I never really had a frame of reference in which I could explain my own encounter.
Like, why am I seeing a 50s or so in my own nine and a half year old mind? And I never fully understood that. And I can say, when you get introduced to the works of Saint Valet or Keel, et cetera, whether to exclude the notion that actually the phenomenon requires somebody to observe it.
The observer and the phenomenon are part and parcel of the same thing. You know, it's a subtle impact because I was looking at these things that I would consider random until fairly recently.
You look at the common thread. It's subtle. It's not a landing on the White House lawn. It's the personal transformation of the self. And it's one thing I didn't touch on on my NDE when it's sort of coming out of that.
And I had this amazing sensation that I needed to change my dietary habits. So, you know, and I became vegan. I'm not going to sort of get evangelical on that.
But equally, it was a big change for me. And it's been changed that stayed with me ever since. And prior to that, I would ever have considered it. But it didn't feel like a, sorry, gone.
No, no, go ahead. Didn't feel like what? Sorry. It didn't feel like the that when you say read the the flip by a cry put Jeffrey Cripal. You know, some people have these massive changes and I thought what I've experienced has always been that little bit more subtle.
It's been guiding. If it's going to guide me, it's been letting me make my own choices or at least steering me slowly in in in directions I should be going into to explore.
Well, that's the comment that was going to make it seems like there is an upgrade. I mean, Linda talked about some, you know, unfortunate experiences, but I do think in general, this is an upgrade of the individual and the collective. Don't you do you think so merited from your perspective.
Yeah, I mean, if you look at the actual data, you know, people who've had these experiences vastly say that it was positive that they've gone through transformation and growth.
You know, even people who had these completely uninvited experiences or they were scary at first, they'll still in mass report that it was positive in the end that they had some sort of growth through it.
And so when you look at those patterns, it does look like an initiatory process that you're kind of going into the darkness or going into something new, but you're coming out with a new knowledge or new understanding of your reality.
So I would definitely say I do think that there is something positive here. I see that in most experiences.
And I think we just really need to look at the phenomenological data that lived experience that these experiences are having instead of relying solely on objective data.
Well, there's a comment in the chat by think Marie come say we the people are initiating disclosure in the sense that we can't wait for the government to say guess what we have company it's coming forward, not being ashamed of.
I mean, I'm an experiencer and I wouldn't talk about it for a while, even though it's into Star Trek and want it to be an astronaut and everything like that. But now with enough discussion, I think you said with enough.
It's okay to talk about to share it more people are having these experience with.
I mean, I'm not particularly a plant medicine person, but they do open people up like the mysteries of a lusus to these other realities.
And there's an influx of I've called my show new realities is an influx of new realities that we are just going to have to contend with as a human race. And this is sort of on the forefront. So,
I think we are, I keep saying we're hitting a threshold point, but what is going to take us over that threshold, Richard, if you could imagine, is it a world event? Is it a planetary awakening? What will a world event?
Would people actually fully believe it? This is the problem in this day and age, but do think those of us, not necessarily me personally, but those experiences, though, that have had this ontological shock early on are going to be better place to help those
the majority later on down the line. Once disclosure happens, we've had these experiences, we've learned from them, we've grown from them, and we've got maybe something to offer.
So, you know, having this opportunity to kind of talk about this, if it gives another person a voice to come forward and say, I've had my own encounters and then the more people that come forward, because it's not unique.
It happens to people on a regular basis. And yeah, let's not hide behind it. Let's talk about it and say, hey, we're not alone.
Yeah, you know, Jeffrey Cripo talking about ontological shock and maybe Tara will jump in here because she wrote a paper on. He says, if there's no such ontological shock, there can be no real reckoning with the experience. That's Jeffrey Cripo.
So maybe I think the world is in for a rude awakening at some point in the near future.
You just listen to what some of the members of Congress of saying, it's like, you know, we're not ready for it. But guess what? We have to be ready for this, because it's like, Linda was saying, it's too late for lies.
And we need to be told the truth that and validate our experience and realize that humanity can wake up into this other level of possibility that we've been kept from. I think that's what's so important about the way you're
writing about it, Meredith, is from this initiated point of awakening a greater consciousness. Would you say?
The contact experience is in itself painful, because you are isolated. It is a one-on-one experience. You are the sole person going down into the darkness and coming back up.
It is a journey. It follows the hero's journey, right? Like, you're coming back with this knowledge and you're trying to share that knowledge with other people.
And it mirrors kind of like Plato's allegory of the cave, right? You go out, you see the sun and you're trying to come back in and you're trying to tell people, hey, there's more to this than we think.
And more often than not, people have a lot of backlash to that. But I do think that, you know, experiencers will be at the forefront of this when it does come to be a very public issue.
Right. I mean, Edgar Mitchell said it's the experience or the contact experience that's going to help us understand what consciousness really is.
So we keep talking about this thing called consciousness, Richard, but how do we define it? How do we define the consciousness of the normal human in the abnormally or the ultra normal or the ultra supernatural experience?
I mean, how would you go about doing that, Richard?
Nice easy question. Thank you, Alan.
It's one of philosophers have been trying to answer for a very long time and I'm certainly desperately trying to figure that one out myself.
What is consciousness?
I think the universe is a conscious entity, and I think we've lost that.
Mystics have been talking about this for thousands of years.
One of the things I discovered when I started exploring the idea of consciousness in the UFO phenomenon was how much of it mirrors sort of magical and mystical practices which have gone on thousands of years before.
Since we do think we've lost something along the way, we've lost our ability. I think we all have a natural ability where we can kind of tap into some sigh powers or whatever they may well be, but we just don't give it the time or the dedication because we're
finding ourselves inhabiting a planet where most of us have to go to work on a daily basis and we don't get the time to necessarily work on the internal self.
That internal self allows us to connect to that higher consciousness. Whatever that higher consciousness is or whatever the label you want to put on that.
We're being awakened, the root of reckoning with this higher consciousness, and I do think it will be a planetary experience at some point.
We need to, like Merit said, we need to keep talking about it and sharing.
And one question, Merit from the chat, I think you've seen, and how can people have had experience and are able to share this reach and help people are uncomfortable afraid to do this and who doubt their experience?
What do we tell those people who doubt?
So I doubted my experience at first. I did initial experience where kind of that object subject barrier dissolved happened at eight years old.
And, you know, I believe the experience initially, but then, you know, very quickly when I got to kind of be 10, 12, I had a huge backlash to it because I knew that it wasn't something I could talk about publicly.
And so I leaned very heavily into like atheism and science and I didn't want something I couldn't control. Right. If I say the world's black and white, then that seems predictable and controllable to me.
And so I can see why people doubt their experiences because I doubted mine as well. But I think that first step is if you have even just one person in your life that you can talk to.
I know for me, my dad was the first person that I could tell my full contact experience to with all the high strangeness and all the real weirdness in it.
And just kind of breaking that seal and having that one person, I could tell that full story to gave me the courage to then start talking about it more publicly.
Right. And you know, after Whitley wrote his book on communion, he had 200,000 letters from around the world saying, yes, I've had that experience.
So we do need to talk about, we do need these forums that will assure people they're not crazy. You know, people used to ask John Mack and say, tell me I'm crazy that they had these experiences.
And he'd say something like, I have good news and bad news. The good news is you're not crazy.
It's those experiences seem like it's happening to a lot of people. So, but the overall theme here is that we as human beings are evolving to an expanded state of consciousness that seems to be at odds with the with the going narrative.
I mean, but that's falling away. Richard, you're working with you, a Pedia. What do you think our move can be with this organization to start to open that door a little wider for people.
I mean, you, a Pedia is doing, but what else that comes to mind.
What else is UFP? What else can you, a Pedia do?
All of us do. Yeah. And yeah. All of us collectively. I think like, keep pushing these things out. You've married it. You've got a great platform that you know you've got a place where people can come and explain their own experiences.
One of the things I would guide people to, because I'm a reader, you know, and it's one of those things I'm, I would book recommend to anybody. Well, that's, that's my own personal pick. You've got to take your own strengths and find a way in which you can kind of use that in or as a platform to get your information across.
So whether it be a platform on YouTube or, as I say, me giving some read this book, this will kind of give you, give you some information. It won't necessarily give you answers, but it'll give you an opportunity to kind of explore some ideas that you may have previously never thought about before.
And then it's a, it's a case of we've got to work together. It's the, and I'm going to sound like an old hippie here, but it's true. We have to work together. It's the us and them.
I think we've got to get beyond. I think we're, we're, we're a unified whole, but we spent too much time worrying about worrying about the other rather than embracing the other, shall we say.
And I think, I think seriously, if we, if we as a planet, that I get ourselves together a bit, and this sounds a bit far out for some folks, but.
You know, as a collective planet, we could do a lot more. And I think we find a new way this, this, this.
What we've had before worked to a point. I'm not going to sort of be an apologist for it in any way, shape or form, but it needs to kind of end because it's old ideas. It's old ways of thinking.
We need to embrace new ways of being on this planet. And I don't know. I think that will enable us to kind of then take it further.
It's a Star Trek. Yeah, I do appreciate, but it's, but Star Trek was always about that humanity can do better.
Yeah, that was John Max last book, Passpost to the cosmos where he talked about the indigenous ways of thinking.
And we are being, we, I feel we're totally being initiated into another way of thinking, which is more indigenous, which is less logical materialistic based the materialistic worldview just doesn't work anymore.
If you're talking to people who had near death experiences and out of body travel and visits from people who have passed on, you know, there's, there's another reality that is peaking its head into our ordinary field that that must be acknowledged.
Also, I think gathering at places gathering here, but there's a big conference I love going to called contact in the desert.
And you gather with like minded people and you feel you're in a community of people where you can share these and not get left and not get ridiculed.
And that is a growing population.
And also I got a message from the guy who runs it. Captain Ron. He says, if anybody wants a discount for contact in the desert, use the promo code, Captain.
C A P T A I N 10. Captain 10.
And you'll get a discount because we want as many people to gather in these places.
So then we can gain information, gain knowledge and maybe initiate other people into possibilities.
I think one thing that was brought up in this discussion is about we don't have to understand it to acknowledge that it's real.
How would you go into further detail about that, Meredith?
About understanding.
Yeah, I think.
Yeah, I think so often people think if someone comes to you with their contact experience that you have to believe the like objective ontological reasoning behind it.
But we know that a lot of contact experiences have that trickster element.
Right. They may tell you information that isn't correct.
And I think taking these experiences at face value is absolute fact is a mistake.
I think there's a lot of symbolism there.
There's a lot of deeper meaning in these experiences.
And so I think if somebody comes to you with a story, I think a lot of times people go, well, I don't believe the objective fact of that.
So I'm not even going to entertain listening.
And I think that the empathy forward answer to that is to say, I don't know what you experienced and I can't prove it.
But I know that you experienced something because all we ever have is our experience. All we ever have is our perception.
And even if someone has a hallucination, that's upsetting. Right. That could be very upsetting. And so just acknowledging the fact that people are experiencing things.
Regardless of its ontological factual kind of background, I think is the human response to that.
Yeah, no, that's really good. I think you cannot argue with experience because unless you've had an experience, you can know it's true if you have the same experience.
If you don't, then we have to value people who people are.
You know, there was that James Fox movie called, I know what I saw. And that kind of talks to all that.
So to wrap up, Richard, this area of discussion, how would you like to conclude about the value of what you just did today, share these maybe impossible things, but also put value on your own.
Your own worldview and what you know is true for you. How would you wrap that up?
Well, one of the things that was just mentioned previously was this, this, the belief factor. And it's, for me, it was not so much what I saw, but the actual realization that others had had very similar experiences.
And that was a really big part for me. It was, I wasn't alone. Like, I never felt I was alone seeing a UFO, but I always felt it was a very strange thing to actually see.
I've kind of lost the train of what was your question there. Alan, but I just wrap up how to qualify and quantify the personal experience in terms in a world that is slowly, slowly awakening to what we are doing.
And then we're beginning to what we actually really know. So how would you, how would you start to make a dent in the old worldview, I guess, is the question.
Brad Lydley effectively leave a nice imprint on the earth, but don't leave a different friend behind. And very much of that, just go carefully, be nice.
That's kind of where you should leave it out, really. Be nice, smile at people. It confuses them sometimes, but it also gets a good response. There we go.
And what about you, Meredith? What would you conclude here?
I mean, I just want to echo what Richard said. I think we have to deep empathy for each other. And I think a lot of times there's people think of the ontological test with UFOs.
I have to prove what this is. But I think there's a deeper test there of an empathy test. Can we believe one another? Can we extend our empathy to other people whose stories seem outside of our understanding of reality?
And so I think when we can get there, because I think we've been failing that test pretty horribly, I think that will kind of usher in change on a wider scale.
One more question I'd like to ask everyone I interview about this subject. What does the post disclosure world look like when this is all out and acknowledged and saying, yes, there's another level of reality.
Okay, I'll start with you, Meredith. What does that post disclosure world look like?
That complicated question. I think for a lot of experiencers, disclosure timelines and disclosure discussions for them tend to kind of be this side thing, because for them, they're like, I know it's real, right? It's been communicating with me for my whole life.
And I think for the greater public, what that kind of looks like is kind of coming around to understanding that the world is bigger and more different than they had understood.
I think, you know, we talk a lot about ontological shock in the community, but I think people are kind of coming around to the possibility that this could be real.
And so I think it's more just pushing people in the right direction. We'll get there.
Yeah, and rich, I think personally a post disclosure world is one where there is a lot more empathy, a lot more understanding, a lot more freedom, and a deeper level of soul connection to the cosmos.
What about you, Richard? What's the I agree with you on that one. I also think that means I have more of a deeper connection with each other as well.
We will stop hiding so much behind certain masks and feel a bit freer as people to actually express ourselves and be better people and be better as a result of everything.
I look forward to a post disclosure world, but I was reading an interesting article by Ray Palmer from 1966, and it starts with the heading is disclosure imminent brackets of course not.
And that was written in 1966. So I'm not going to hold my breath, but I think personal disclosure is really important. And the more that it happens to individuals, the more slowly people will see it.
You know, it would be nice to have it on the White House lawn, but it'll still be happening to individuals regardless.
I do think we're getting closer to the goal post, you know, speaking of Woodstock, Grant Cameron said this is the Woodstock Festival for human race, you know, this is up coming out and meeting the others but I think we're getting closer.
Thank you both for being here. Merrieth, what's your sub stack again so people can find you.
I'm going to go back to Meta Noya.
Great and Meta Noya means why can you just give a quick explanation isn't that.
Yeah, so Meta Noya is kind of this like earned knowledge it's like true knowledge. So getting to Meta Noya is kind of that initiatory process. You really need to go into the darkness to come back up to feel that you know true knowledge.
Well, this is where we're at. We're in the darkness, the human race and we're definitely going to learn it.
Daryl Anka Beshar says it doesn't get any denser than where we've been as a human race so.
So there's only Meta Noya possible, I think. So thank you Richard any any how can we find you Richard Monk.
You can find me again inspired by Meredith. Thank you very much on sub stack. I've got my own sub stack page now cartography of high strangeness general musings and mutterings for me.
But you're more welcome to come and have a read.
Thank you. Thank you both. Great work. Thanks for the courage of speaking out and actually shifting people's minds about what's possible.
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