35.07 - MU Podcast - 30 Years Among the Dead

Hakeem Sh eruptions Hi There! nawet nawilhui Quadra YoU I think I just saw it and veryاح Welcome back to Mysterious Universe. This is Season 35, Episode 7. How many times do we have to try this before we get it right? That was it. You did great. Okay. I'm Joe Hodgkin. Joining me is Brandon Thomas. Thank you. Thank you for joining us again this week. And if you missed it, the boys are back in town. They are... Inescapable is live. It started on Valentine's Day, actually. What a nice gift from them. back in our ear holes and you have until April 14th they extended it so if you are into this or if you just want to listen to Ben and Aaron that's fine too but you get both shows for one price and there's so much content I totally forgot that they're doing the same schedule so their new plus episode for Inescapable came out on Tuesday and I'm like yes so I get them twice a week I was uploading the episode for Tuesday and I looked and they'd already beat me too because they're in the future. They're a day in the future. So if they're promising Tuesday releases, they're just going to come out before us and that's just how it works. But I saw up there, it was published. Aaron Wright published. And I was like, man, it's nice to see a break in my name on the published and see his. It was really cool. I'm like, man, that's awesome. And it sounds great. The guys are just, man, they're coming back with the heat, aren't they? And good on them. Yeah, you can tell they've been wanting to say these things for a long time. And MU is not really the place for that kind of a show, but I'm so stoked to get a peek behind their mental curtain. And it's amazing. It's Ben and Aaron. It's funny. I told them months ago, I'm like, dude, you guys can sit there and talk about washing your feet for two hours. I'd probably still listen because I just want to hear you guys. I'd listen to at least an hour of it. Yeah. Yeah. Because they've got some good rapport and back and forth. But they're doing great. And really, the inescapable should be all the targets that they've got on their sites, which is all this nonsense and bullshit. Man, they're calling out fuckery. I love it. I absolutely love it. Not holding back at all. Nothing is inescapable from their gaze and grasp and tongue lashing for sure. And just so witty. So witty they are. So fucking witty, man. Well, I'm pumped about this episode, dude. For sure. Hope everybody had a great week. We're both dealing with some plumbing issues in our house. Opportunities. Opportunities in disguise. That's right. And so it's been a fun week trying to wedge all of this in between normal life stuff that everybody has to deal with. But I won't go over the weather report today because it's just cold and I don't like it. It's sunny and hot here. Wild. Yes, we're going to be like 90-something this weekend. Holy crap. Or next week, yeah. Well, it's cold for us. We've got a freeze this weekend and then we're going to be in the 90s next week. And this is Texas. We don't get a winter. We get cold fronts. So we had a cold front blow through. We'll have another one. And the trick to Texas, this is something you guys, you know, this is some fun facts for some folks here coming out of winter. that don't go to the store and start buying all these plants and planting them. The rule is before Easter is what the farmer's almanac says. But I will say this. If you've got pecan trees in your area, they will be the last to bloom. So they won't throw a false positive at you like some other plants, and we know who we're talking about, around in the yard there. But these will only bud and bloom when the last freeze is done. They just know. They've got the inside scoop through the roots or something, and they just know. So wait until you see your pecan trees bloom. Yeah, there you go. absolutely wait to see pecans bloom just that first little bud there and then you're good you're good to start planting yeah we i mean cold to us here in northern california is like 43 degrees but uh it it's a really it's a dry dry cold unless it happens to be raining but i think i've mentioned it before if nobody's familiar with this area we're surrounded by this horseshoe of mountains on three sides south of us is just more valley but all three side the other three sides is nothing but ice and snow. So we're in this little bubble of just cold. And it feels colder than it is, especially with the wind. I know that we did it ironically, but that has truly been the MU weather report. It has been. It was great. But we are going to get into the book I'm covering today, and this is 30 Years Among the Dead by Carl Wicklund. And this is an old book from 1924, and it documents his, I guess you could call it, parapsychological he was a psychiatrist or uh you know that in that field and uh he started documenting all these weird happenings and his wife is a key figure in this uh anna is her name and she is quite a gifted psychic or she was i'm imagining she's long since dead but thank you to mandy k 77 on twitter or x sorry for uh pointing this book out and as soon as i saw that recommendation and I'm like, oh, let's check it out. And it was on Kindle. Perfect. And started digging through it a couple days ago. I woke up at 7 in the morning and just started reading. So that's how this comes about. You're making good decisions, man. You really are. This transition's been interesting, and you're just doing great with it. You're just choosing better. You could have been scrolling. You could have been anything. And you're choosing to read and take up suggestions and shout out for the recommendation. Thank you. Yeah, and we appreciate that. Again, anybody who has recommendations, Joe or Brandon at MysteriousUniverse.org and we would be happy to look over the stuff you guys send us. I think half the shows I've done have been listener recommendations. That's outstanding. Definitely appreciate it. So, Mr. Wicklund here, Dr. Wicklund. In 1909, he became the chief psychiatrist at the National Psychopathic Institute of Chicago. And this is back in the days of, you know, insane asylums were kind of a big thing. It seemed like there was a lot of people that were committed back then. I don't know the metrics for that nowadays, but it seemed like that time period, late 1800s, early 1900s, that was a big thing. There are interesting theories around it, like that there was this new world being adopted in, which was heralded by the world's fairs. And then also around that time, you had the Cabbage Patch babies, you had the orphan trains. Yep, nailed it. Yeah. And this perspective aligns perfectly with that because if you were still going, that's not the way it went down. Allegedly, you were rounded up and thrown into some of these buildings that were adapted for folks who spoke out. And then they were just quietly dealt with so that the regime and narrative could continue kicking along. and that's baby incubators and cabbage patch kids all that stuff there's a great author side note real quick there's a great author Guy Anderson that does he has a whole book on that I think it's called Tesla and the cabbage patch babies or something but he goes into all kinds of crazy stuff it's great it's really entertaining so he continued Carl Wickland he continued in that position at the Chicago loony bin until 1918 when him and his wife moved to LA in California and And in kind of a collaboration with his assistants, he wrote and published this book in 1924, 30 Years Among the Dead. He went from a loony bin to L.A.? Yeah. How was he able to tell the difference? He probably didn't. Shots fired L.A. Nice. So he starts out with almost kind of defensively because especially at the time, I mean, this is right before the spiritualism movement, you know, in the late 1800s, early 1900s. It was a big thing, especially in the 20s, the seances and Ouija boards and mediums and all this stuff. For some reason in that time, people were really getting back into that kind of thing. I'm really into it. So, yeah, I don't think it was accidental that it was defensive because he knows what this sounds like. And he's a professional, right? He's a doctor. So he's kind of walking on eggshells with it. Let me go and separate out from this bullshit right now. Yeah. Yeah. He's kind of bracing for the eye rolls right off the jump here. Yes. Yeah. So he's saying, I'm not a mystic. I'm not a spiritualist. I didn't go looking for this. And that tone never really leaves through the whole book. Even at the wildest moments later on in the story, he still sounds like a guy who would rather be doing literally anything else than explaining to you why a dead drunk is riding shotgun in one of his patients. So this is kind of a cross between walk-ins, but it's specifically people who are dead or ghosts. But he goes, I'm going to start out with how the book starts and it's what he thinks they are or how they're related. At the time, it was more the mainstream view is that it was insanity. And there's a lot of different, he goes into quite a bit of different ideas of what they called it at the time and the way that they treated insanity. And he's not talking about insanity philosophically or abstractly, just clinically from a doctor's point of view. He'd seen thousands of cases. He worked with every classification available, which was things like mania, melancholia, dementia, hysteria, moral insanity. And he knows the textbooks, and he knows what improvement is supposed to look like. And what bugs him is that some people just don't follow the rules when it comes to typical treatment. They don't deteriorate the way a degenerative disease should, but they also don't stabilize the way functional disorders should. and they weren't responding to rest or routine, medication, any of that. And he noticed more of a fluctuation. They shifted and they argued, not with the doctors, but with these invisible counterparts. And every so often they speak with a confidence that doesn't belong to them or at least shouldn't belong to them. And Wickland says more than once that what finally broke his resistance wasn't belief, it was repetition, the same strange mechanics showing up in different cities, different hospitals, different social classes, all having these, you know, he's tracing patterns. He's doing science. And that's when he started having this thought that he clearly didn't really enjoy is what if some of what we call insanity is actually interference. And that's when he that brings us to what he thinks these entities are before the stories even start. So this is what I mean by kind of like tiptoeing being on eggshells. He's like really clearly laying out. There's pages and pages of just introduction of him laying out like, I know this is going to sound crazy, but hear me out. Perfect MU fodder. Mom, just as scientific, trust me, I don't really believe in this stuff. I love you, all that. And you can tell he's struggling with the correct words to use too because, and we've mentioned this too, that people call devils or demons could simply be discarnate entities. or there's so many different ways you can go about it. But as soon as you say demon, people say, oh, you're a Bible thumper or you're this or that. Labels, man. And this is another level to the need for him to put this work out. And so apprehensively is probably why he felt that way is because there's a lot of tiptoeing he did need to do just as a scientist because he's finding things with his observation that shouldn't jive with scientific observation established at the time in the new narrative. Even though there was spiritualism and things like that as a clinical doctor, You're supposed to have separated yourself out from the woo-woo. And so it's interesting that plus the other mindset element to it that his, again, observations are challenging to express just to make it. It's just ineffable to a level for him because he feels pigeonholed whichever way he goes with it. It's very interesting. Yeah. And yet still he put it out. The way the book is written too because of the time period it was in is really old-timey language. I love that. I read the whole book in the, was it the transatlantic accent? Yes, in my head. Yes, when I'm reading Florence Scovel Shin or, God, what was that dude? Napoleon Hill, anything like that. I do it in that transatlantic. Well, see now. It's great. Grainy 30s radio. Yes, and it sounds like it. It's like, well, here we are. And I'm like, why do I do that to myself? I can make it really clean audio in my own head. But there's an experience we're after here for sure. Yes, it was analog days, right? Yes, time period appropriate. Inner monologue. So before he even starts with any of the possession cases, he even hesitates with possession. Sometimes he calls it obsession. It's like a spirit obsessed, and we'll get into that a little more. Yeah, yeah. He wanted to make one thing clear, though. He's not talking about devils, and this matters to him. He spends a surprising amount of time drawing a line between the more theatrical idea of demonic possession and what he's actually seeing. These entities are not masterminds or ancient intelligences to him, of course. They don't speak in riddles or prophecy. They're boring. That's his takeaway. They're boring. They're petty. They're confused and obsessive. I like this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And what's funny is that's exactly why he takes them seriously. He starts using the word discarnate, not ghost, not spirit, but discarnate, a consciousness that once operated through a body and now doesn't, but hasn't fully reorganized itself around that idea. But he kind of leans into scripture and actually has quite a few verses he included. And not to preach, but just to show that this idea isn't anything new. He references passages about unclean spirits, about spirits seeking rest and finding none, about voices speaking through people who aren't themselves. And he's careful. He's not saying the Bible explains this. He's saying the Bible noticed it. So just a couple I grabbed out of here is Hebrews. It says, we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses. Another verse says, beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God. And I think about that verse all the time when people are talking about these entity experiences. It's not, even the Bible isn't saying these things don't exist. It's saying watch out for them, question them. Yes, saying look out. And it's funny, we haven't even said it yet, so we'll just briefly touch on it here. The plus extension involves the Bible. It's funny that you're bringing this up. And there's a little moral insanity that we're going to cover in that thing. So stick around for that. And we'll talk a little bit more about it when you're done. But just popping that in there. Nice little spoiler. You're not supposed to tell me what you're doing first. Well, you have to plug the plus extension. So there you go. Oh, right. Okay. There you go. In another verse in Samuel, David took a harp and played with his hand. And Saul, the Saul guy, I don't know, was refreshed and was well. And the evil spirit departed from him. So if you have a possession, just grab a harp. Bob will be your uncle. Wow. And so to Carl, Mr. Carl here, death isn't a moral sorting hat. You know, it's not like heaven or hell. It's a transition. And like any transition, some people screw it up, especially people who die emotionally just destroyed, deeply addicted. If they die violently, and that's a big thing. You know, people who die suddenly from a violent, that seems to produce a ghost more than. See, and that's messed up, too, because they may end up in some fucked up realm. But they're like, dude, I was the one that died in a weird fucked up way. how did I end up in some dark realm? But really it was their disposition that drugged them to the dark realm in the post-life life that then perhaps is the motivator for it. Basically like what is talked about in many, in a lot of disciplines is that it's your disposition at the end of this thing, which is why it's so important to remove all attachments so that you don't end up back here because of some, you're like, oh man, I really like cat videos. So, and then you're like, back in the soul portal. You got to like remove all of that shit. Right. And that's the Buddhist way. And you don't have time to do that if you die violently, you know? Yeah. And he also mentions people who are completely unprepared. And that's why a lot of these ancient mystery schools like in Egypt or the, you know, all those ancient mystery schools, they focused on practicing dying. Yes. Like getting you ready for the transition. That was the whole point is to get you ready for that so that you don't end up as a ghost, I guess. I heard this doctor. He had a great quote. This was years ago on the old show, man. And I thought about it the other day and here it is. He said that there's this wonderful quote about death, and it goes to something to the effect of, I'm not scared of death. I'm scared of an unprepared death. And that's an interesting correlation to this whole concept is that you want to be ready for it. So you're just kind of like always ready to die kind of a thing. Like you don't have any attachments. You're cool to just leave that project. Somebody else can finish it, whatever. Release it. So instead of shifting their awareness away from the physical world, they kind of remain oriented towards it. So they still have the, they crave, you know, sensation, the 3D sensations, agency over their own body. And what's the easiest way to get that? Attached to somebody who's already neurologically or emotionally vulnerable. Yes. And that's the hypothesis he walks into this asylum with in a lot of these stories. And that is, that does go back to the idea that things like drugs or alcohol, especially meth, very specifically methamphetamine, seems to be this portal, this gateway to allow these kind of discarnate spirits in. So stay away from meth, kids. Not a good one. And maybe that's what the activities are. It's not them. It's just that they're so vulnerable that something else is hopped in that sucks at life and being a human and is fumbling around in their vessel because they've just offered it over because they're just phoning it in anyhow. This is interesting. Astral carjackers. They just see an unlocked car and go boom That exactly the reference I was going to make is seeing a bunch of cars out in the parking lot and thinking well nobody driving that one So I just hop into it Nobody will notice that it missing or nobody will notice that I driving it The other one isn't. It's so interesting. This is the other thing is the agency over your life. You know, presence in the moment. Don't, you know, choose your distractions wisely. All of these things. You could get one of these vessel hijackers. Yeah. Choose your nothing box wisely. That's right. You want to get a Netflix ghost jumping in. Oh, we're going to talk about Netflix and the thing too. Man, you're right on. Wow. Fascinating. Our periods really have synced. It's a quick jelt in because of propaganda, but, well, man, fascinating. Nice. So this is where he gets into his wife, Anna, and her abilities, and he does it kind of awkwardly like he's confessing something he knows sounds bad on paper, especially coming from a doctor. So she doesn't convulse or dramatize. She's not performing. She just sits and relaxes, gets quiet, and then someone else answers questions. just that easy. Like she's not even meditating or going into a trance. She just sits there and the ghost or whatever comes through. It's really weird. And you think of how many times you're talking to somebody and this is what's occurring. You're not talking to that individual because they're so checked out. You're just talking to some ghost. Yeah, every time you see Biden on TV, you're like, oh, that's not that guy. That's something else. Probably most politicians and actors and everything. I mean, another quick side note, you think about these alter egos that musicians talk about or actors. Beyonce, she has an altar she calls Sasha Fierce. Yes. She's like, when I get on stage, Sasha takes over and she does the performance. And this is the lady that's whipped her head back and we've seen demon face in her hair as she whipped it back. Remember the still that was from a performance of some kind and it was like this witchy demon, huge, it looked like Two-Face from Batman or something with the eye bulging out and the face all gross. She definitely gets a weird face when she starts performing for sure. I would not be surprised. Sasha Fierce, I think is what she calls her altar. Sasha Fierce is fugly. And what convinced him of her abilities early on is the consistency of this apparent ability. The personalities that came through Anna weren't symbolic. They didn't speak metaphorically. Like he said, they weren't speaking in riddles or prophecies or anything like that. And they don't reference Anna's life or anything to do with Anna. It's really strange. they complain a lot they interrupt a lot they misunderstand questions and they get bored and most importantly they don't know they're dead so that's a big thing and that detail kind of hits wickland like a brick because if this was fantasy or a subconscious projection or a role play of some sort why would ignorance be you know the default why would these personalities need convincing like no bro you are you are dead is it so a dude hops into this lady's body and it Is one of the questions that they're upset about the lack of penis? They're like, where'd my penis go, dude? So that actually comes up. Of course it does. Of course it does. But before that, so he does reference a couple cases that he wasn't directly a part of. I have the book pulled up here. And I've heard this story before for sure. It was a newspaper reported a young man named Frank James. He was a thug of New York City who, after a fall from a motorcycle when he was 10, changed from this cheerful, affectionate, and obedient child into a surly, insolent boy, developing into a confirmed robber and criminal. After several terms in the reformatory and five years in Sing Sing prison, he was declared hopelessly insane and sent to the state insane asylum. But he escaped, and when the pursuers tried to capture him, they clubbed him over the head and knocked him out. So he was taken to the hospital. The next morning he woke up, totally changed. He was back to the sweet boy that he used to be. And that comes up a lot with, I can't remember the word for it, but when people have a brain injury and all of a sudden they have a Chinese accent. Yes. You know, all those kinds of stories. Kicked in the mule, you go cross-eyed. Kicked again, they go back. Then one asks, is this a technique then that they, you know, go in the back room, they hit the dude in the head real hard. You know, they say, what was your injury? Oh, I got hit real hard and now I'm a dickhead. Oh, they take you in back. They have some huge stick that just pops you in the head. They've got it all fit science. They've got it all sorted. And they just pop you in the back of the head with this thing and then you're good to go. You're not a dickhead anymore. I wonder if this is a protocol because it's so recognized. That's the thing is we all know about this. I wonder if it is part of it. If they could figure out the exact spot to club you, you could probably fix a lot of things. And that's the thing is, could you do that? Could you just, you know, like bumping a TV or something, the signal's out. It's like, oh, there you go. Just give it a whap. Which is funny too, because if you think of the brain as a receiver, an antenna, then that makes sense with the TV. And maybe your tinfoil hat is the bunny ears that you used to put fool on to get a better signal and stand there and hold so your grandma could watch TV. So one of these first cases is an alcoholic woman who is institutionalized for uncontrollably drinking all the time. And what's weird is that her personal history doesn't support that at all. She didn't drink before, no family history, no obvious trigger or anything. The craving came out of nowhere and overwhelmed her entire personality. so during a session with Anna his wife a male presence comes through immediately this coarse impatient irritated uh he wants a drink he assumes Wickland is obstructing him uh and Wickland just asks simple questions what's your name age occupation and the answers don't match the patient then he asks about the family then about how he died and the man becomes totally evasive more irritable he insists nothing happened that he was fine that he was just drinking that everyone else is being dramatic so when wickland tells him directly that he died not metaphorically not spiritually but physically died the response isn't rage it's laughter he starts cracking up dismissive drunk laughter only after wickland describes details surrounding the man's death verified independently does the laughter kind of trail off and what follows is one of the most haunting moments in the book it was silence then confusion then this total fear he had no concept of elapsed time. He didn't know years had passed. He didn't know the body he remembered was gone. He had simply just been writing. And when he finally disengages, the woman's alcoholism recedes. Not gradually, but rather abruptly. And Wickland's disturbed by this. How did he disengage? Did the doctor talk him out of it? Or was the fear like recognition and then he was able to, air quotes, move on? Almost every case is pretty much that easy. Once he convinces them that they're dead, They just kind of leave. And he does have what he calls his invisible coworkers, these probably entities or whatever. He's even got a Sasha force or whatever? I think it's outside of himself or outside of Anna. It's just they're using Anna and Carl to get these people to move on. And my question was, why would you need humans to do that if you're there to help people move on? And it's because they – from what I remember, the way he puts it is that they can't directly – it's like the non – what do they call it? Non-interference clause. Non-interference type thing. And not really because of a cosmic law. It's just they can't. That's bullshit because it's all interfering. So who's holding the ones accountable for the ones that are interfering but the ones that tell you they can't? It seems like a big circle jerk to me if I'm honest. It seems like something's obsessing with these people. I do like that obsession over possession. That's funny. Because then they're just in there. They laugh. They know that they're not dead, but they know that they can pretend to be dead. It's like another way of going into a vessel. Like when I got bored when I was in sales and nobody was in the store for a while, somebody would then finally walk in and I would do my best to put on an accent the entire time just because I was fucking bored, man. And I would see if I could go the whole conversation and sail and make a sail in an accent that I was not familiar with. I usually would try a variety of them. they always ended up like Pakistani or Australian every single time, no matter what I did. Nobody called you out? No. Oh, yeah. Plenty of times, man. It was it was hilarious. But I did make a couple of them and with a variety of accents like it shouldn't have gone through. They just were nice and didn't say anything. But the whole point here is, is that how do you know there? There's so many possibilities to this that it could be I know he keeps claiming no demons and devils, but that doesn't rule out that it's demons and devils and that they could just be fucking with you, even though this guy doesn't want to recognize that it's possible or one of the options. I think it's more because, like I said at the beginning, the consistency and the repeated way that he dealt with it, that's what I think made him think it wasn't demons. Well, then that just means that that particular demon just continues to inhabit, pretend to change, do different things. It could have all been the same damn thing that was just cycling through in different ways, just having its kicks, you know? Yep, all possibilities. And he doesn't really take it off the table either. He's just saying this is my opinion on it. Right. And I know how we are about dead people. We have a leaning that we'd prefer not to get stuck here, not to inhabit some poor lady's body that doesn't want us there in the first place. I'd be shocked with the sand's penis, man. Where'd that go? I'm out. Mm-hmm. So he did some dissection of bodies, too, and this one stood out to me. So he says, one day I left home without any intention of immediately beginning my first dissecting work. Therefore, my wife's subconscious mind could not possibly have taken any part in what transpired later. The students were required to dissect a lateral half of a body. The first subject was a man about 60 years of age. And that afternoon, I began dissecting on a lower limb. So he just starts hacking him up. Yep. Cutting this guy's leg off. So he comes home about five o'clock and had barely entered the door when his wife was apparently taken with a sudden illness and complaining of feeling strange. She staggered as though about to fall. He says, at the institute. Yeah. The morgue or wherever and he comes home and the apparent spirit of this guy he's cutting the leg off just jumps into his wife to talk to him and be like, what are you doing? Damn. This is another thing. Maybe you don't, you know, you got to be careful with everybody, right? But another STD could be if you're dating somebody that handles bodies that if a spirit transfer can, like if it stays in a limb or a vessel, because isn't there some religions that say that your spirit stays in the body for like seven days and you want to leave the body alone and all that so that it can yeah there's some uh yeah religions or something or cultures that think that yeah so if you're hacking folks up right away is that little now pieces of them like osiris that are going out little spiritual pieces of them that are now being split up and this could be a soul fragment thing that yeah my soul was fragmented again sort of like the osiris thing his penis was never found woman fashioned a nice gold one for him because she liked that color but if you think about it It could be just this all interaction with these odd entities. Like you said, man, it's a pliable vessel it seems that we're in. If you're not paying attention, somebody can just hop in and take the wheel. Very interesting. So realizing, he continues here, realizing that the spirit owner of the body on which I had been operating had followed me home, I began to parlay with him, first placing my wife in a chair. To this, the spirit vigorously objected, saying that I had no business to touch him. To my answer that I had a right to touch my own wife, the entity retorted, your wife, what are you talking about? I'm no woman. I'm a man. Damn. Nice balls, ma'am. He says, I explained that he had passed out of his physical body and was controlling the body of my wife and that his spirit was here and his body at the college. when he finally seemed to realize this i said suppose i were now cutting on your body at the college that could not that could not kill you since you yourself are here that could not kill you it's like i said this is a really strangely worded book uh the spirit admitted that this seemed reasonable and said i guess i must be what they called dead so i won't have any more use for my old body if you can learn anything by cutting on it go ahead and cut away and then he said suddenly, say, mister, give me a chew of tobacco. Again, this is his wife talking. So he told him that, he said, I have no tobacco, and then he begged for a pipe, saying, I'm dying for a smoke. This request was, of course, also refused. The fact that Anna has always abhorred the sight of anyone chewing tobacco precludes the possibility of her subconscious mind playing any role in this episode. After a more detailed explanation of the fact that he was actually so-called dead, the spirit realized his true condition and left. Subsequent examination of the teeth of the cadaver indicated that the man had been an inveterate tobacco user in life. Whoa, so his wife just reappeared after this dude was like, oh, I guess I'm dead. You can cut up on my body. Okay, bye. Yeah. And he has another one about that, too, where he's dissecting the body of a woman about 40 years old who had died at the Cook County Hospital in Chicago the previous June. In January, seven months after her death, a number of students, myself included, were assigned the subject for dissection. I could not be present at the first evening, but the others began their work. Nothing was ever said to me of what occurred during those few hours, but for some reason, unknown to me, the other students never touched that subject again. So the next day, there was no school in the afternoon, so I began to dissect alone, working on the arm and neck. The dissecting room was in the rear of a long basement and very quiet, but once I distinctly heard a voice say, don't murder me. And the voice sounded faintly as from a distance, but since I am not in the least superstitious and not at all inclined to credit small incidents to the actions of spirits, I concluded that it probably came from children in the street, although I had not heard any playing nearby. Man. The following afternoon, I was again working alone when I was rather startled by a rustling sound coming from a crumpled newspaper lying on the floor. A sound something like that produced when a newspaper is crushed, but I paid no particular attention to it and did not mention these occurrences to my wife the episodes had quite passed out of my mind until a few days later we were holding a psychic circle in our home and our invisible co-workers like he calls them had already departed when i noticed that my wife still remained in a semi-comatose condition i stepped up to her to ascertain the reason when the controlling spirit rose suddenly struck at me angrily and said i have some bones to pick with you what after a period of struggle with the stranger i asked what the trouble was and it's struggle with his wife yes this could explain some domestic violence too or be passed off as some domestic violence if you're really psychotic we don't condone domestic violence but i get it talk it out folks talk it out uh and the entity demands why do you want to kill me he says i'm not killing anyone and the entity says yes you are you're cutting on my arm and neck i shouted at you not to murder me and i struck that paper on the floor to frighten you but you wouldn't pay any attention then laughing boisterously the spirit added with great hilarity but i scared the other fellows so it's the this woman had scared off the other people who started the dissection and then so all these things happen and he didn't mention to his wife and then it comes through his wife to basically you know show that that's what happened so wild does she have any memory of this does she know what's going on she's like i some guy steps in i'm just a passenger or is she just blinking when she's back and he's gone. Wow. So every time this happens, yeah, it's like a blackout, like a light turned off and then back on when it leaves. Did she drink? I don't think so. Okay. It mentioned if she was, because around that time period too, they were just, you know, licking meth out of bottles just saying that it was good for you, you know, and healed the ghost in your blood. And cocaine and speedball and like crazy, which can explain a lot of these stories. Well, and that's right too. You would think that if that's one of the, you know, predispositions for this, then they would, they would probably be in abiding some crazy shit. You know, and another thing I was thinking of is if you're doing all this cutting on things, do animals apply to this? Think of all the frogs. Did you ever dissect a frog in middle school or high school or anything? No. Okay, well, yeah, because you were homeschooled. That's right. You didn't just grab one out of the yard that wasn't part of your curriculum to murder something and then cut it open? Nope. Oh, well, we didn't mean to do the murdering, but they definitely required that we cut it open. And it's interesting if you think about the symbolism with frogs and the, like the Heket, the Egyptian, there's uh the ung dad the more egyptian you got kek the egyptian as well you got mesoamerica china all kinds of cultures that revere the frog and was there something going on with the frogs and you cutting them up was it symbolic or was there some sort of little frog spirit in there that then we were kind of lily pad hopping around passing around everywhere probably some kind of dark magic one of those yeah shit and this is what freaks him out is why this keeps working he thought this was a fluke, but it isn't. So over the years, he documents dozens of similar cases, different patients, but same mechanics. Alcoholics attached to the living, sexually obsessive entities amplifying compulsions, depressed personalities feeding despair. So the spirits didn't invent new problems, they were just exaggerating the old ones they had when they were alive And here the thing that really messes with him many of the spirits don want to stay Once they understand their condition they willingly leave No force required But this is when you shine a light in the dark, the shadows escape. They have to because they've been seen and recognized. And the thing is, is just by interacting and playing with this guy, they've already gotten some energy from him. And then, you know, they've got other participants, his wife, all of those. I'm curious to see if anybody else was being possessed or obsessed whenever he was around. So did he make any stops on his way home? Like he cuts something up, he goes to his butcher, he cuts a body up, he goes to his butcher or something to the grocery store to pick something up on his way home. Was the next person that he interacted with possessed? Or would that be the way? Or did it only need to be his wife? Or again, the myriad of ideas. Could it have been any, like you walk to the grocery store and someone taps you on the shoulder and is like, why were you cutting on me? And it's like, ah shit, it's that guy I was just cutting on. You know, but it's a random stranger. That's what I'm saying. It's like the next person you see, or is it, again, depending on because of familiarity with wife, he knew they would be alone, and spirits know this shit, you know? Yeah, I think it's just because she was so sensitive to it, and yeah, like you said, because they live together, and if the spirit's really kind of hitchhiking on his way home, it's probably waiting for the nearest open vessel to talk shit to him. but apparently it's his wife all the time. And that's weird that he doesn't get possessed and talks to himself in the mirror, lashes out in some possession form or get any of these entities in himself. It seems like he's a carrier, but not a, he's a host, but not a carrier. You know what I'm saying? So he wouldn't be affected by it, but he can pass it off to other people and they will then animate with the spirit that he's been toting around on his shoulder. It's odd. Crazy stuff. Weird. This kind of raises an uncomfortable question And they never really outright ask, but it's pretty clear that if these are hallucinations, why do they respond to education when you tell them that they're dead? So this is his clinical view of it. He's like, okay, these are hallucinations, but I don't think they are because these spirits respond to the new information that they are dead. So what? Or at least that they've been found out and seen and recognized as something that shouldn't be where it is. And then it's like, ah, shit, jigs up. All right, I got to go. Yeah. so by the time uh wicklin gets a few years into this work something shifts a little bit in his tone so early on he's cautious and almost apologetic like we mentioned at the beginning but as these cases kept piling up you can kind of kind of feel a weary certainty not really enthusiasm but just resigned to it like a guy who's realized the problem he's dealing with is way bigger than the tools he's been given yeah and what uh really pushes him further isn't the alcohol cases those are unsettling and at least kind of makes sense but addiction latching onto addiction habit feeding habit what rattles him are the cases where the behavior is completely out of character something sometimes grotesquely so and those start coming fast one patient is a quiet withdrawn man with no history of violence then seemingly overnight he becomes explosively aggressive not just irritable murderous he threatens attendance screams obscenities and has to be restrained repeatedly. Doctors chalk it up to degeneration. When Wickland works with Anna, the entity that comes through isn't confused or needy. It's furious. The voice is sharp, domineering, contempt, contemptuous. This is a man who died violently, carrying a lifetime of rage and grievance. He isn't attached to the patient because of similarity. He's attached because the patient was weak enough to be used. The entity openly admits enjoying the control. and that detail matters to wicklin uh he's careful not to romanticize it though not all attachments are accidental some are opportunistic just as humans are yeah uh but even here there's no sense of like a cosmic evil grand plan or anything just a human personality that never let go of its worst instincts uh when confronted with the reality of his death and the damage he's causing the entity reacts with denial first then mockery it takes time several sessions before anything changes. When it does, the patient's aggression drops noticeably, not cured or transformed into a saint, but just no longer hijacked. And he distinctly notes this because release doesn't create perfection. It just creates baseline humanity. It's like pushing reset. All right, you're back to normal now or some kind of normal. Man, but again, you'd like some enlightenment at the end of this. You'd like to know you're dead. You'd like to know that that was a fun ride and that you're off of it now and that you can move on. So again, these things are interesting. It takes the, you know, your invest, I guess your mental and emotional investment into the idea that the dead can still walk about for this to be the way, but there are other possibilities, of course, but I like his, he's got a really interesting singular focus. And so when you come at it from that way, it will unfold that way, because that's what you're looking at, right? This is the observer effect. He's seeing what he thought he would, and there it is, even though he made excuses for it the whole time, there it is. Right. He's not coming at it from any dogmatic or, you know, I mean, I guess it's biased. Everybody's biased to some degree, but he's coming at it as much as a scientist could. Just observing what he sees, writing it down and going, here's what I saw. I don't know. And with the understanding and worldview that when people die, there's still something that exists after death. Like the soul either sticks around or is just using this consciousness for the body for a little bit and then moves on consciousness interchangeably. But then maybe it can stick around. But that's a narrative. That's a presupposition that that even occurs. And that's a very human narrative as well. Yeah. And the next case, it made him so uncomfortable, he almost didn't like he kind of hesitates to include it. This woman is institutionalized for extreme sexual behavior, public indecency, compulsive acts completely at odds with her background and personality. The diagnosis is moral insanity. But you wonder as well if this is just repressed sexual energy or if somebody like just stuffed all their serenity now and all of their shit down instead of dealing with it. And then that made them vulnerable as well. Almost like adding to a bank account for an entity just to hop in it someday and just give it permission to carte blanche explode or, you know, go tits out, if you will. Quite literally. So this moral insanity diagnosis is just a polite way of saying we don't know what the hell is wrong with it. And that seemed to be a lot of the insanity diagnoses back then was just, we don't know. He's just acting crazy. So during trance, a male entity emerges, lewd, crude, and unapologetic. He speaks openly about using the woman's body for gratification. There's no confusion here, no lost soul wandering aimlessly. He knows exactly what he's doing. This is one of the few times Wickland is just disgusted. But even here, same mechanics. Again, the entity died, consumed by appetite, and carried that appetite straight through death. The living body is simply the nearest outlet. But when confronted and redirected, this guy that's coming through just fiercely resists, does not want to leave. Eventually, though, through repeated sessions, it does. And the woman's behavior changes dramatically, not overnight, but quite unmistakably. So he doesn't try to soften the story or moralize it. He just presents it as evidence that death doesn't erase character. If anything, it just freezes it. man so as these cases start accumulating Wickland starts noticing something else that really starts bugging him sometimes there isn't just one entity sometimes there are several he describes patients whose personalities fragment in strange ways not the kind of fragmentation you would associate with like hysteria or disassociation hysteria was a funny thing they used to diagnose people with just hysterical Hysterical. Yeah. Get out of here, you. You're just hysterical. So it'd be different voices, different emotional tones, different memories, and sometimes they actually argued with each other, too. So in trance, Anna would occasionally become the battleground for these different entities arguing with each other, which had to have been hilarious to watch. Oh, God, that's kind of fun. Just her voice, but arguing with herself. Different perspectives, seeing both sides. Wow. It says one entity will speak only to be interrupted by another. They contradict each other. They compete for attention. And they accuse each other of lying. Wickland, he compares it to a crowded room where no one agrees on why they're there. Whoa. In these cases, treatment takes a bit longer. The patient's improvement is slower and more uneven. Each entity has to be addressed individually. Some leave readily and others just cling. Then there are the ones who are afraid. one of the most devastating ones involves a young woman suffering from what appears to be deep melancholia which I guess nowadays they'd call what? Depression, yeah. Yeah, just lethargy, hopelessness, withdrawal and nothing dramatic or theatrical just the slow fading that doctors dread. So during Trance Again Anna has this entity pop in that is a female and profoundly sad. She describes dying alone, unacknowledged emotionally abandoned. She doesn't express anger. She's longing. She attached herself to the patient because the patient felt familiar because she recognized, I guess we call like the emotional topography or terrain. So she's like, oh, this is a good fit. Does it say how old this young woman was when this happened? Late thirties, early forties? It does. Well, I didn't write it in my notes. At least it might have been a book. And I was curious just simply because of this midlife transit, uh, they call it, it's also called the, uh, what do you call it? Midlife crisis, something like that and that that word i think is kind of soft for it too but when you go through that you will open yourself up for some crazy shit and this could be and again it's like attracts like if we go with the model then you would attract something like that to anthropomorphize or to manifest within you to enact because you're so in that state so it makes sense at a level that a spirit like that doesn't have to be somebody dead but a spirit like that would come in and see the opportunity to kind of complete this lesson for you and help you really, really drive it into the ground. Yeah. So when they, when Wickland explains what's happening to this entity, she doesn't panic or anything. She just starts sobbing. And this is when you realize that some of these attachments aren't parasitic, really. They're just a grief seeking company. Misery lives company, right? Yeah. So when this one finally leaves, though, the patient's depression lifted gradually. not cured in a miracle or anything but just no longer anchored to something heavy heavier than her own life at least I bet she had some PTSD you know some post traumatic depression depression yeah I mean yeah especially if she knew that she was being inhabited by this depressed ass dead lady yeah let's just talk about that if you know that you've been possessed you've been put through this shit your body feels all of that and again the body keeps the score so you've got to You've got to work that out. You've got to alchemize that in some way. And I would think that it would play a psychological role on somebody, even though, yes, you're free and gone. The demon or whatever this dead dude was is gone now. You're not pulling your vagina out on the city square anymore. But it's still got to play an impact on you psychologically, I would think, and emotionally. I would think, yeah. Because then you'd be, I would think, a little gun shy. If it can happen once, it can happen again. So are you walking around just going, shit, am I possessed now? Or if you get in a bad mood, you get your menses, something like this, stub your toe, you're like, shit, am I now another guy? Did it happen again? Like getting struck by lightning. Are you more prone to the phenomenon now that it's happened once? You know, is it just a slippery entry now? A literal lightning rod for these entities. Exactly. Lubed up. Come on in. So around this point in the book, though, he starts talking about the asylum itself. And he's not, he doesn't have very good things to say about it. Okay. So ward after ward filled with these people whose conditions just worsen over time, not because they're incurable, but because the environment amplifies what's wrong with them. Like putting a crazy person into an asylum is going to make them more crazy. Probably not good. And to a discarnate personality already disoriented, an asylum is like a, well, not living hell, but it's a hell. Yeah. You know, all the locked doors, the sedation, isolating people in these little padded rooms, what do they call those, straight jackets, stuff like that. so from the entity's perspective these are punishments and punishments reinforce the attachment he also suggests that many chronic cases are manufactured not inevitable that the longer obsession is allowed to persist unrecognized the more entangled it becomes and this is where he starts sounding like a fringe thinker and more like a man deeply angry at his own profession then one of the strangest patterns he observes is when entities are told they're dead many of them respond not with fear but with indifference they just don't care earth still feels real to them since they sensation still flows through the host so why leave uh he begins to suspect that some spirits remain earthbound not because they're trapped but because they're comfortable and that thought unsettles him more than the angry or violent cases because it suggests that attachment isn't an anomaly it's an option yes it's a feature oh yeah and i that would be that would make the most sense actually is people that don't know they're dead and they're like well screw it I'm in this kick ass new body so why go anywhere or you got this fourth dimensional whatever's going on that is comprised completely of spirit maybe some of them have been in bodies before maybe some haven't and if you're just on autopilot and if you know that thing wants to drive around and go on a joyride and you've got a car sitting there that you don't use you're not doing anything with it maybe a case is made that you get to an energetic level it's just again it's slippery slope it's just the thing hops right in and goes well shit i'll take over and then maybe even that integration process sometimes dramatic like the cases you're talking about maybe some of them are really good at this and can sort of get in weasel in and change the individual over time in small increments that's dangerous man because then you think well shit i mean you look at the psychopaths in office and things like this the air quote i don't call them elites the lizard turds kind of calling shots and have their buttons on imagine their fingers on imaginal buttons that do imaginal things. These ideals, it could just be these really fucked off parasitic entities if that's what's occurring. Again, I don't know about the dead individual thing because, again, I don't know that it's necessarily got to be somebody that died for this to occur. And if that's the case, then it could be anything. Yeah. Very interesting, dude. He also did bring up that a religious belief doesn't seem to necessarily help anything. some of the entities quote scripture and insist that they were saved and they just think they're being tested and others think they're in purgatory which pretty close we could see that yeah and again we're going to talk about why I'm laughing at that in the extension because that's hilarious that they would do whatever they want with the Bible they wouldn't take it as spiritual gospel and it's not holy indeed yeah so by the end of this middle section of the book he's he's no longer saying perhaps, and he's not really tentative about his conclusions, he's saying in my experience. Because he's been doing it for years and he sees the same patterns over and over and over again, so he's like now I'm not really apologizing because I have enough data right here to show that something's happening. Still not sure what it is, but something's happening. Been through the school of the hard knocks, he's seen it. He's been in the streets. Lived experience. So then he talks about when the dead start lying. And at this point, he's kind of settled into this routine of doing this. It's a job, patient after patient, same basic mechanics. And it goes like this almost all the time. Discarnate personalities attach themselves to the living, distort behavior. They feed on the physical sensations, and then they resist leaving when confronted. And this could be some people's wake-up call. Like, again, you know, it'd be traumatic, but if you go through one of these experiences and then it's exercised from you or whatever, maybe this is your wake-up call to say, oh man, I've got to take more actionability over my life and more empowerment over my self-actualization. Yeah. And these aren't, so the ones that start lying, so he says every now and then a case comes along that breaks even those rules, the general pattern. One of the first signs that something more complicated is happening comes from the patients with intense religious fixations. These aren't your average devout believers. He's really careful to distinguish between sincere faith and pathological obsession. These patients don't just believe, they are commandeered by belief. They preach compulsively and endlessly condemn everything. They speak in absolutes and threats. And doctors at the time would label this religious mania. And initially he agrees until the voices start answering back. In one case, a patient became convinced he is divinely chosen, not metaphorically, but literally. He speaks with authority, condemns others, issues proclamations. His speech shifts depending on context as though something behind him is adapting. So when Anna enters trance, the entity that emerges identifies itself not as a lost soul, but as a guide. this immediately puts Wickland a little bit on edge up to now most entities have been ignorant of their condition this one is quite articulate and polished it claims higher knowledge And yeah that would immediately set off some red flags It channeling yeah And then he realizes that this entity is lying. So when pressed with inconsistencies, the guide deflects. When challenged directly about its origin, it becomes evasive. It warns Wickland that interference will have consequences. Well, that's new. Sounds like AI, honestly. It just sounds like an asshole. And that could be the difference between a truly dead person and just somebody who is a low-level entity or a demon or a devil. These all sound like that. They all sound like something that just wants to take a joyride for a minute because they don't have a body to do it in. They do it under the guise of a story we're already, as humans, kind of attached to or at least have an affinity for. Dead people exist and all that. And then they can just kind of exist still. Maybe it is this. Well, and what a better way to do it than through somebody who does this every day for a living. Like, why not? Nailed it. And again, this could be the same damn thing hopping around to each of his patients in this circle jerk because he'll heal one, hops on another one. Inevitably, it entrapees back again because of the environment. Yeah. Man, and then that makes the doctor the one in the madhouse because it's this masturbatory process of thinking that you're doing all this good, but you're really not and infecting your wife every now and then with some shit. Yeah, and so he kind of calls us out. He said some spirits attach themselves not out of need, but preference. Like we said earlier, like it's an option. And so he thinks that not all attachments are accidental and not all possession is just passive. Some of these entities are seeking hosts deliberately on purpose. They're looking for emotional vulnerability, intellectual openness, or any other things. Like we said, drugs or, you know, getting blackout drunk is a big one, apparently. You get blackout where you don't remember half the night. it's like a car without a driver and the key is turned and you can just hop right in. And what's the difference between missing time? People would report it the same. Oh, I have this chunk of time. I don't know what happened. I got my car home just fine. I don't know how that happened and I'm okay. You know, and then his wife as well, she's in a bath now. She's all pruney. She's like, I just got into this thing. What are you doing? But really she was taken over by something and her conscious awareness of that time. She's not aware of, She doesn't have conscious awareness because she wasn't there. That's odd. Yeah. It's really strange. So odd. So around this time, though, he starts describing what he calls the earthbound condition in more detail. He explains that the discarnate personalities experience the physical world indirectly through the host nervous system. Sensation is dulled, but not absent in emotion. Still registers the desires. The cravings are still there, but the experience is unstable. So they can't sleep properly, can't act independently, and just always frustrated and annoyed and irritable, all that. And I guess that explains why some of them get manipulative, too, and why they lie and resist release. It's like a crackhead. They just want to stay in the body. Man, I'll suck your dick to stay in the body. Where'd my dick go? I got these cheeseburgers, man. One of the strangest cases in the book involves a patient whose symptoms intensify whenever Wickland attempts intervention. And every time the entity is confronted, another one surfaces to defend it. They argue through Anna, as they do. They accuse Wicklin of interference, and they try to argue spiritual law and all this stuff. At one point, one of the entities just admits that if it leaves, it fears disillusion, not punishment or hell, but loss of identity. and Wickland realizes that some spirits remain attached not because they're trapped but because they believe moving on means ceasing to exist. Ah, yeah. Because it's all they know and that makes sense except for when we covered the NDE stories. It doesn't seem to be a ceasing of existence. It's a transition. And it depends on your worldview. This is very interesting. It does sound like spirits that don't have access to a transition and so they're unaware that one is even possible. Yeah. like there's any other way to do it like what do you mean go up or go to something else i just go from where i am floating around where you guys can't see me now i'm in a body and that's how i do things that's my options yeah and he he ends up not being really surprised by the actual possessions he's uh what really kind of shocks him is how systematic it is in widespread i mean like you were saying earlier like how many people are just walking around with one of these things taking them for a ride and they don't even know it. Most government employees, I'm going to say quite a bit of anybody involved in some of those really famous charitable organizations because they're really messed up stuff that they do. Definitely, yeah, any municipality, I'm thinking that sort of attracts that mindset. And I heard also that the police will only take you if you have an IQ below a certain level. They won't take you if it's too high. This guy actually got, didn't didn't make it through the exam because his IQ is too high. So if you're able to rationally think and form good questions and things like that, then you're not going to be a good host for one of these things. And maybe that's what's being recruited for military. Also probably shout out guys. I love you and thank you for your service, but potentially one of these things, because we know about the military fuckery, they could be beaming y'all with all kinds of shit. Yeah. Blizzard. No, I've definitely all politicians. I mean, they have different, different show, but the Vril idea of putting the Vril into the eye, and you see these compilations of all these actors and everything that have black eyes, and the idea is that, oh, they're all getting Vril inserted into their eye or something. It gets crazy, but it's interesting to look at. Is that a way of tuning your receiver, tuning your brain to make sure that there's an unbreachable gateway, just this uncut thread between you and that force, whatever that is, so it can hop in your vessel and be you anytime. And maybe this is like the Legion thing, and really this is a huge game going on, I guess I'm going to say above just for spatial orientation sake. And really the idea is it's like a risk and you've just got to take over the whole place and to see maybe it's two entities. And really they're just trying to take over as many vessels as they can and influence in that way. And that's whoever wins is how many lizard turds you get into the vessels, whatever, or sans lizard turds, whatever. Who knows, man? So I mentioned it earlier about his invisible coworkers. Yes. and uh he describes what he calls helpers these intelligences that seem to have the job of assisting these newly departed uh entities and detaching from earth and they're not they're not really a big part of it they're not like dominating the session or anything and they don't announce themselves either uh they just appear quickly like right as the entities on the verge of leaving they don't argue or do anything they just wait um and so he says these helpers don't force anyone and they don't threaten. They don't even persuade or anything. They simply make themselves available once the understanding clicks in their head that they're dead and you need to move on. And so he gets this growing suspicion that free will doesn't end at death and that many cases of obsession are the result of choice, not entrapment. And that is a bit unsettling to him. And then he reconsiders evil. And he doesn't dramatize this, but it's obvious that it kind of bugs him. So this patient was exhibiting deeply disturbing behavior. So cruelty, manipulation, just a POS. And not really violence, or like impulsive violence at least. It was more like calculated, so just evil. That's what makes him rethink this. Doctors assume congenital moral insanity. So it was the arrow's way of saying, this person was born wrong. That boy ain't right. The boy ain't right. So Anna enters trance and the entity that comes out is cold, articulate, and very self-aware. And it knows it's dead. And it knows it's attached. And it doesn't give a shit. It openly admits that Earth provides opportunity. Not necessarily just the physical sensations and all that, but influence. It enjoyed steering the patient's behavior and it enjoyed the reactions it provokes. So it's like a psychopathic entity. Yeah, it likes fucking up your life. It was born wrong. Wow. So he tries reasoning with it and explaining the potential consequences of doing this. And maybe he throws in karma. He even tried to tell this thing that, hey, there's a possibility of growth beyond Earth too. like if you move on you could probably do better things like after this and nothing's working man and what what eventually shifts this entity's whole thing whoa my mouse just did something really weird sorry that's okay uh what shifts the whole situation is just boredom it gets tired of being questioning being questioned and it gets tired of explaining itself and it finally does leave and disengage but it uh it's not out of remorse or like oh i'll be a better person now just straight apathy it's just indifference it's just like i'm you guys bore me i'm leaving yeah spite and the patient immediately improves so because this case doesn't fit the the comforting idea that you know possession is rooted in uh confusion or fear some personalities alive or dead are simply predatory and death doesn't seem to redeem them and it didn't damn them either just remove the body and they just don't care they're just like i'm just continue doing whatever i want so yeah just because you're dead doesn't mean you're enlightened obviously you're an asshole uh you die and you're just still an asshole or you're punished either you know it or it's just your punishment to be this disincarnate thing that thinks it's that knows it's dead but doesn't have a body anymore and doesn't that chooses not to move on it does it does feel more about choice at that point yeah not karma and getting near the end of the book though he just totally stopped apologizing for these conclusions it's kind of a different different field in the beginning when he's you know like this is just my my thought process you're my ideas now he's chain smoking and going you don't know you weren't there yeah he doesn't he's obviously not asking the reader to just blindly believe him either but he's kind of asking why is it more acceptable to assume a mind is broken then ask what else might be speaking and he's not attacking science he's just attacking the certainty of science which we mentioned a bunch yes just like that uh guy in the last book the uh cellular cosmogony that's right he's tired of their certainty in their the scientism not really the science itself uh he kind of suggests that psychiatry rushed to close the book on possession not because it was disproven but because it was inconvenient uh you know too difficult to study it was too close to theology too and science doesn't like that um but it still i mean this phenomenon still happens so he's just kind of going we got to look at it you guys it's something that's happening the elephant in the room you can't medicate it away you can't say it's not happening there it is yep uh so he says that the well near the end of this section at least he he says that the living imagine the dead is distant unknowable unknowable and powerful but in his experience the dead are often just lost and don't know what the hell's going on and it's not really the danger that they haunt us it's that they confuse us for home like you said they just don't know what's going on and they think oh this is i don't know i'm just confused this looks like a good enough body to me why not it's so confusing it's so confused Blavatsky tried to like talk about this Fort Stalked about Kiel and you know we've been mocked warned about it whatever and Wickland was actually trying to treat it because none of these other idealists solved the problem really but it's like they're all looking at the same thing and going hey something's you see that you see that crack in the wall something's coming through there and it's just unsettling because it's possible that they aren't all wrong. It's just that most people just stop paying attention because it's uncomfortable and it's unexplainable. Yeah, 30 years worth of work, though, in this book. I mean, there are so many more stories. I think just the Kindle version has 266 pages, which is kind of a lot because it's not really small or it's not big print or anything. So there's a ton more stories in here that if you want, we will of course link down to in the show notes. But thanks again for that recommendation from X. We appreciate it. And that was definitely a different book for me. Like I said, I spent like two days going through this, trying to pick out some of the best stories out of there. But that's amazing. Yeah. Well done. Crazy stuff. What do we have coming up in Plus, Brandon? Man, well done. That was so interesting. So on Plus, we are going to gleefully engage in the unthinkably blasphemous and obscenely profane. We're going to offer new perspectives and then ask some very great questions. Specifically, we're going to question not only the second greatest story ever told, but possibly throw out the teeny tiny little virgin born savior baby with the water he allegedly walked on. We're here to ask if the Bible and its contents were created as a means to pacify a potentially dangerous public by offering a contentment encourager in the form of a sun god, slang and holistic parables that align perfectly with the 40-year rule of the most famous Caesars of Rome. This is called Caesar's Messiah. It's a guy named Joseph Atwell, and he claims that it was simply a parable-based book to pacify the Jews at the time and that it worked. And there are many examples of this. I'm going to do my best to do it in one, but I know it's not going to be in one. So we'll probably go ahead and start it, which is a great reason for you guys to go ahead and sign up in PLUS in the link below. So you can get that extension, get the inescapable, get all that stuff. And then also, this is definitely a monster story here. So you guys have got to hear a lot of names, a lot of history, and it's fascinating. It's going to make you look at life differently. And that's our whole goal here how controversial of you it is because he mentions the second season jesus already came went all that kind of stuff and it's um very very interesting but you guys uh this is a fascinating one it's from a dear friend named oliver crane he's a comedian the contact of the canyon organizer that we both know we've met in person and he's just a delight anyway and he tapped me on the shoulder with this thing and said hey man check this out and there's a youtube video associated with it that i'll be linking as well but this joseph atwell wrote a book the scholar and same thing he's got a decade's worth of research into this and it's fascinating man so i guess it's not a new idea of religion as a control mechanism not at all i don't think i've ever read a whole book on it so looking forward to hearing what this guy thinks it lays it out it's flavians man and i picture this whole flavian thing the caesar you know walking out like flavian flav and he's got like a sundial around his neck right because it wouldn't be a big clock and the little leaf things on his ears and probably a dube smoke back there but yes this is the whole thing is that the flavians are actually, and it mirrors it perfectly, and it's backdated so that it corresponded with what had already happened so that they knew what had happened and went ahead and wrote in the book that Jesus predicted it, and then this dude pulled it off. It's fascinating. The whole story is very detailed, and we're going to get into it in the plus extension. But again, join us for that, and it's going to spill over into another one, so go ahead and sign up, guys. You're not going to want to hear the second half of this next Friday. Just jump in on it, get in on this, get the inescapable and all the good stuff that comes with it, and we love y'all. So yes, very much looking forward to that. No better time to go sign up to Plus, not for just our dumb heads, but for Ben and Aaron's awesome heads. Because they're cooking with gas over there on Inescapable. And I'm so looking forward to every week now because I've missed MU because I can't listen to it. I'm not listening to my own show. I've missed the boys. I listen to us because we're great. And really, I do it for the audio too, like for scrutiny. But man, it's awesome. this whole organization, it feels like just this really huge legendary podcast network that was formed right at the end of 2025. And all of it lines up astrologically. I don't know if the guys are aware of that, but Mary, of course, is huge into the astrology and does said thing. And told me every step along the way, every major thing, even the reschedules, the early meet, all that kind of stuff was all timed up. So this huge legacy was meant to be created. Here we are. So go ahead and sign up, guys. We have a lot of stuff. It's a huge legacy. It's the biggest legacy. nobody's ever seen a legacy like this before massive well thanks for joining us everybody on the free feed and if you are on plus stick around for the plus show otherwise we will catch you next week have a good one see ya Welcome to your Plus extension. Thank you for being with us on Plus.