THE PARACAST NEWSLETTER
April 29, 2018
www.theparacast.com
Explore the Frightening Reality of Slenderman with Nick Redfern on The Paracast
The Paracast is heard Sundays from 3:00 AM until 6:00 AM Central Time on the GCN Radio Network and affiliates around the USA, the Boost Radio Network, the IRN Internet Radio Network, and online across the globe via download and on-demand streaming.
SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY A PREMIUM PARACAST EXPERIENCE! We have another radio show and we’d love for you listen to it. So for a low subscription fee, you will receive access to an exclusive podcast, After The Paracast, plus a higher-quality version of The Paracast free of network ads, when you sign up for The Paracast+. We also offer a special RSS feed for easy updates of the latest episodes, the Paracast+ Video Channel, episode transcripts, Special Features, Classic Episodes and there’s more to come! We also feature selected podcasts and videos from Paul Kimball’s “Other Side of Truth,” and we are now offering special access to the first two episodes of the ghost haunting show he cohosts, "Haunted." Check out our new lower rates, starting at just $1.49 per week, plus our “Lifetime” membership and special free print and eBook book offers! For more information about our premium package, please visit: https://plus.theparacast.com/.
This Week's Episode: Gene is joined by guest cohost Michael Allen in welcoming prolific paranormal author Nick Redfern back to The Paracast. Nick discusses the book, The Slenderman Mysteries: An Internet Urban Legend Comes to Life. Is it possible to invent a myth online, and have it emerge with frightening reality? Indeed, The Slenderman may be a tulpa, a thought-form that can stride out of our darkest imaginations and into reality if enough people believe in it. Nick Redfern is the author of 40 books, including Immortality of the Gods, Weapons of the Gods, Bloodline of the Gods, Monster Files, Memoirs of a Monster Hunter, The Real Men in Black, The NASA Conspiracies, Keep Out!, The Pyramids and the Pentagon, Contactees, The World's Weirdest Places, For Nobody's Eyes Only, and Close Encounters of the Fatal Kind.
Chris O’Brien’s Blog: Our Strange Planet
Nick Redfern's Blog: Nick Redfern's World of Whatever...
After The Paracast -- Available exclusively for Paracast+ subscribers on April 29: As usual with After The Paracast, you never know what to expect. On this episode, Gene is joined by guest cohosts Greg Bishop, host of "Radio Misterioso" and Michael Allen. The discussion includes secrets of recording and editing a show such as the ones Gene and Greg host, freewheeling, cutting-edge comedy, and the theory of co-creation. Can we, for example, collectively create a reality out of thin air? There’s also a discussion about debating methods, and the things that turn off Greg and turn his attention elsewhere. Gene and Michael talk about episodes that helped alter their belief systems.
Reminder: Please don't forget to visit our famous Paracast Community Forums for the latest news/views/debates on all things paranormal: The Paracast Community Forums. Check out our new YouTube channel at: The Official Paracast Channel
Creating New Realities
By Gene Steinberg
In the sci-fi film, “The Matrix,” and its two sequels, people lived in pods, and a gigantic computer system generated their realities. It was all a virtual world that could be changed at any time by adjusting the program.
The Star Trek holodeck is a place where totally realistic external virtual realities were created in every respect that you can sense. It was used as a means of recreation or perhaps as a testing facility to examine different situations and consider different ways to react.
But sometimes the illusion became dangerous, life-threatening, all to advance the plot.
The difference with the holodeck was that you didn’t have to place yourself in stasis or in some sort of body chamber. Just enter the room and you’d experience whatever reality the ship’s computers, and your imagination, could devise.
In these situations and similar ones in the sci-fi world, it was all done with computers. Outside of these virtual environments, your individual existence did not change — or did it?
Just what is reality and is everything that you have experienced throughout your life an illusion? Is there a way to change that reality individually or collectively in a way where the transition wouldn’t even be perceived?s
In other words, is there a way for you to change your reality without the need of a computer, special glasses or a helmet?
Let’s look at some intriguing possibilities.
Basking in the tremendous success of “Superman: The Movie” from 1978, Christopher Reeve chose a different path for most of his other films, such as “Somewhere in Time.” This low-key fantasy/romance was directed by Jeannot Szwarc, who is also known, for better or worse, for helming “Supergirl” with Helen Slater in the title role.
In Reeve’s film, his character, playwright Richard Collier, becomes obsessed with a photo of a stage actress from the turn of the century, Elise McKenna, as portrayed by Jane Seymour. Using a form of self-hypnosis, Collier literally wills himself back through time to meet the girl of his dreams. The illusion — or reality — appears to work well enough until he haphazardly glances at his modern-day watch.
The illusion thus shattered, he returns to the present day.
The sad conclusion was disappointing, but it raised some hard questions. Just how solid is our reality, and can it be changed by force of will?
Certainly one’s belief system will at least partly control an individual reality, the way you see the world. Different religions may have similarities, more than one might imagine, but your own image of morality, how you treat others, and how you demonstrate your respect to a supreme being might be very different. In various ways, your reality has been altered to conform to the edicts of your chosen religion.
But are opinions and religious beliefs the cause of living in different realities, or are we all living in a single universe, under the same rules?
Is it possible for people to come together and, if they believe in something strong enough, create an external event that is, for all practical purposes, as real as anything can be real?
The late psychiatrist, Dr. Carl Jung, wrote of UFOs as being a manifestation of the “collective unconscious,” a psychic projection to meet the needs of an increasingly complex world. Thus a “modern myth.”
Greg Bishop’s co-creation theory takes a more direct approach. We help create paranormal events, perhaps in concert with some external but unknown force.
Either way, is it possible for humans to create UFOs in the form of advanced extraterrestrial beings who were here to rescue us from our nuclear folly, global warming and other possibly imminent global disasters? Certainly that’s what many contactees tell us.
However, most mainstream followers of UFO lore, even though they accept the possibility that we are being visited by ET, stop short of believing that they are plucking people out of obscurity and “honoring” them from visits from those upon high.
So can we just assume that people are just making this stuff up, or did their beliefs or expectations somehow generate an external reality that, to them, is as real as anything we experience in this world? It may, of course, be possible that some of these contactees had one or more genuine paranormal experiences.
Maybe the original encounter was very much as they claim, but after they attracted followers waiting for more stories of visits with the Space Brothers, they may have decided to invent more when there was no follow-up visit.
They’ve had their 15 minutes of fame, and thus they crave more.
But is it possible that some UFO events have more direct causes, such as efforts by the governments of Earth to cover-up secret tests of new aircraft? What about efforts to use the flying saucer legend as a way to smoke out the presence of foreign spies? What about the early days of the Cold War, where we were still trying to make sense of the products of Nazi scientific experimentation?
The possibility of Earth-made UFOs was occasionally considered in those days, at least when we were not talking about the presence of alien beings, the Silence Group, and other cultural memes that persist to this very day.
What about the theories of alternate realities, other dimensions, the multiverse? Is it possible that UFOs and other strange phenomena pass into our universe from another? It’s a common sci-fi trope, but is it real? What about images of ghosts or apparitions somehow stuck in a loop and occasionally observed in places that are thought of as haunted?
What about the possibility that we sometimes perceive activities in another reality, where our counterparts, or the counterparts of our relatives, are seen doing their thing?
Can we go there? Can they come here, or are these images products of occasional crossovers among realities?
But to return to the main theory: If we can create our own realities, individually or collectively, why have we brought about such misery to this world? Or is that the product of some hidden government, agency or force that only wishes us ill? Wouldn’t it be simply wonderful if our happy thoughts could generate more happy events and fewer unhappy ones?
Copyright 1999-2018 The Paracast LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!
April 29, 2018
www.theparacast.com
Explore the Frightening Reality of Slenderman with Nick Redfern on The Paracast
The Paracast is heard Sundays from 3:00 AM until 6:00 AM Central Time on the GCN Radio Network and affiliates around the USA, the Boost Radio Network, the IRN Internet Radio Network, and online across the globe via download and on-demand streaming.
SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY A PREMIUM PARACAST EXPERIENCE! We have another radio show and we’d love for you listen to it. So for a low subscription fee, you will receive access to an exclusive podcast, After The Paracast, plus a higher-quality version of The Paracast free of network ads, when you sign up for The Paracast+. We also offer a special RSS feed for easy updates of the latest episodes, the Paracast+ Video Channel, episode transcripts, Special Features, Classic Episodes and there’s more to come! We also feature selected podcasts and videos from Paul Kimball’s “Other Side of Truth,” and we are now offering special access to the first two episodes of the ghost haunting show he cohosts, "Haunted." Check out our new lower rates, starting at just $1.49 per week, plus our “Lifetime” membership and special free print and eBook book offers! For more information about our premium package, please visit: https://plus.theparacast.com/.
This Week's Episode: Gene is joined by guest cohost Michael Allen in welcoming prolific paranormal author Nick Redfern back to The Paracast. Nick discusses the book, The Slenderman Mysteries: An Internet Urban Legend Comes to Life. Is it possible to invent a myth online, and have it emerge with frightening reality? Indeed, The Slenderman may be a tulpa, a thought-form that can stride out of our darkest imaginations and into reality if enough people believe in it. Nick Redfern is the author of 40 books, including Immortality of the Gods, Weapons of the Gods, Bloodline of the Gods, Monster Files, Memoirs of a Monster Hunter, The Real Men in Black, The NASA Conspiracies, Keep Out!, The Pyramids and the Pentagon, Contactees, The World's Weirdest Places, For Nobody's Eyes Only, and Close Encounters of the Fatal Kind.
Chris O’Brien’s Blog: Our Strange Planet
Nick Redfern's Blog: Nick Redfern's World of Whatever...
After The Paracast -- Available exclusively for Paracast+ subscribers on April 29: As usual with After The Paracast, you never know what to expect. On this episode, Gene is joined by guest cohosts Greg Bishop, host of "Radio Misterioso" and Michael Allen. The discussion includes secrets of recording and editing a show such as the ones Gene and Greg host, freewheeling, cutting-edge comedy, and the theory of co-creation. Can we, for example, collectively create a reality out of thin air? There’s also a discussion about debating methods, and the things that turn off Greg and turn his attention elsewhere. Gene and Michael talk about episodes that helped alter their belief systems.
Reminder: Please don't forget to visit our famous Paracast Community Forums for the latest news/views/debates on all things paranormal: The Paracast Community Forums. Check out our new YouTube channel at: The Official Paracast Channel
Creating New Realities
By Gene Steinberg
In the sci-fi film, “The Matrix,” and its two sequels, people lived in pods, and a gigantic computer system generated their realities. It was all a virtual world that could be changed at any time by adjusting the program.
The Star Trek holodeck is a place where totally realistic external virtual realities were created in every respect that you can sense. It was used as a means of recreation or perhaps as a testing facility to examine different situations and consider different ways to react.
But sometimes the illusion became dangerous, life-threatening, all to advance the plot.
The difference with the holodeck was that you didn’t have to place yourself in stasis or in some sort of body chamber. Just enter the room and you’d experience whatever reality the ship’s computers, and your imagination, could devise.
In these situations and similar ones in the sci-fi world, it was all done with computers. Outside of these virtual environments, your individual existence did not change — or did it?
Just what is reality and is everything that you have experienced throughout your life an illusion? Is there a way to change that reality individually or collectively in a way where the transition wouldn’t even be perceived?s
In other words, is there a way for you to change your reality without the need of a computer, special glasses or a helmet?
Let’s look at some intriguing possibilities.
Basking in the tremendous success of “Superman: The Movie” from 1978, Christopher Reeve chose a different path for most of his other films, such as “Somewhere in Time.” This low-key fantasy/romance was directed by Jeannot Szwarc, who is also known, for better or worse, for helming “Supergirl” with Helen Slater in the title role.
In Reeve’s film, his character, playwright Richard Collier, becomes obsessed with a photo of a stage actress from the turn of the century, Elise McKenna, as portrayed by Jane Seymour. Using a form of self-hypnosis, Collier literally wills himself back through time to meet the girl of his dreams. The illusion — or reality — appears to work well enough until he haphazardly glances at his modern-day watch.
The illusion thus shattered, he returns to the present day.
The sad conclusion was disappointing, but it raised some hard questions. Just how solid is our reality, and can it be changed by force of will?
Certainly one’s belief system will at least partly control an individual reality, the way you see the world. Different religions may have similarities, more than one might imagine, but your own image of morality, how you treat others, and how you demonstrate your respect to a supreme being might be very different. In various ways, your reality has been altered to conform to the edicts of your chosen religion.
But are opinions and religious beliefs the cause of living in different realities, or are we all living in a single universe, under the same rules?
Is it possible for people to come together and, if they believe in something strong enough, create an external event that is, for all practical purposes, as real as anything can be real?
The late psychiatrist, Dr. Carl Jung, wrote of UFOs as being a manifestation of the “collective unconscious,” a psychic projection to meet the needs of an increasingly complex world. Thus a “modern myth.”
Greg Bishop’s co-creation theory takes a more direct approach. We help create paranormal events, perhaps in concert with some external but unknown force.
Either way, is it possible for humans to create UFOs in the form of advanced extraterrestrial beings who were here to rescue us from our nuclear folly, global warming and other possibly imminent global disasters? Certainly that’s what many contactees tell us.
However, most mainstream followers of UFO lore, even though they accept the possibility that we are being visited by ET, stop short of believing that they are plucking people out of obscurity and “honoring” them from visits from those upon high.
So can we just assume that people are just making this stuff up, or did their beliefs or expectations somehow generate an external reality that, to them, is as real as anything we experience in this world? It may, of course, be possible that some of these contactees had one or more genuine paranormal experiences.
Maybe the original encounter was very much as they claim, but after they attracted followers waiting for more stories of visits with the Space Brothers, they may have decided to invent more when there was no follow-up visit.
They’ve had their 15 minutes of fame, and thus they crave more.
But is it possible that some UFO events have more direct causes, such as efforts by the governments of Earth to cover-up secret tests of new aircraft? What about efforts to use the flying saucer legend as a way to smoke out the presence of foreign spies? What about the early days of the Cold War, where we were still trying to make sense of the products of Nazi scientific experimentation?
The possibility of Earth-made UFOs was occasionally considered in those days, at least when we were not talking about the presence of alien beings, the Silence Group, and other cultural memes that persist to this very day.
What about the theories of alternate realities, other dimensions, the multiverse? Is it possible that UFOs and other strange phenomena pass into our universe from another? It’s a common sci-fi trope, but is it real? What about images of ghosts or apparitions somehow stuck in a loop and occasionally observed in places that are thought of as haunted?
What about the possibility that we sometimes perceive activities in another reality, where our counterparts, or the counterparts of our relatives, are seen doing their thing?
Can we go there? Can they come here, or are these images products of occasional crossovers among realities?
But to return to the main theory: If we can create our own realities, individually or collectively, why have we brought about such misery to this world? Or is that the product of some hidden government, agency or force that only wishes us ill? Wouldn’t it be simply wonderful if our happy thoughts could generate more happy events and fewer unhappy ones?
Copyright 1999-2018 The Paracast LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!