We are aliens to ourselves
UPAs, UFOs, and alien encounters
Recording thumbnail: Photo by Inga Gezalian / Unsplash
Date: 12 August 2025
Duration: 2h 15m
1:55 What are UAPs?
3:00 Why UAPs are relevant in Analytical Idealism
4:50 How personal accounts of UAPs are influenced by cultural frameworks and subjective backgrounds
6:56 Physical traces left by UAPs
8:00 The case of a French family reported by Jacques Vallée
9:00 Why only Analytical Idealism can account for these phenomena
10:50 Poll: Familiarity with the UAP topic
13:40 Can Mind-at-Large be the common substrate underlying these phenomena?
17:00 Consistency of characteristics in UAP reports
18:00 Statistical relevance of UAP descriptions under psychedelics
20:50 Repeated characteristics in UAP reports
22:22 Contradictory characteristics in UAP reports
23:00 Peculiar details that persist in UAP reports
24:18 Bernardo’s personal UAP sighting
28:00 Subjectivity and objectivity in UAP accounts
29:00 Realms of mind we don’t normally access
30:00 Archetypes as deeper than the rules of logic
32:00 The world as a dream dreamt by the Universal Mind
35:00 Two categories of UAPs: “nuts and bolts” and sightings
39:28 Jacques Vallée’s research
46:00 Poll results
48:20 The abduction phenomenon under Analytical Idealism
54:00 Your mind is not in your skull
57:30 Analytical Idealism as a framework for plausibility of these phenomena
58:34 Bernardo’s hypothesis on the abduction phenomenon
1:00:00 Hysteria and the sexual repression of women
1:02:00 We are all repressed beings
1:07:00 Fairies and aliens
1:09:00 Who is causing these encounters, and why?
1:21:00 Jung’s archetypes
1:25:00 Thoughts and feelings are formless and real
1:29:00 Evolutionary reasons for repressing desires
1:31:10 Is imagination culturally repressed?
1:34:25 Individuation, psyche, and the need for balance
1:43:00 The dancing plague
1:48:44 UAP sightings near military facilities and nuclear plants
1:52:10 Would a meteor cause the same destruction as a nuclear explosion?
1:56:15 How would Earth react to such a disaster?
1:59:30 A UAP sighting near a nuclear plant
2:02:00 Changes in mental states during a UAP sighting
2:08:00 Absence of fear during a UAP sighting
2:12:35 What’s coming up in the next session
Apologies for the later email than normal. A family bereavement has required some of my attention. Normally I like to write a comprehensive introduction highlighting some of the most exciting parts of each conversation, but this time I'll need to be brief.
Suffice it to say, it was a thought provoking and wonder provoking session, with Bernardo drawing on evidence, science and philosophy to make sense of a confounding topic, as we've come to expect.
But perhaps the most enchanting moment was when he was pressed to offer his personal intuition as to who is behind anomalous encounters such as UAP. I'm sure you'll find the answer intriguing and I would love to hear your reflections.
As mentioned last time, Bernardo Kastrup released Meaning in Absurdity in 2012 and his thinking on bizarre phenomena such as UFOs has continued to evolve, partly in response to the large quantity of new information being released. In preparation for this session, we sent out several resources, interviews and an essay from Bernardo, linked below. Then in today's session we discussed:
- How idealism doesn’t explain UAPs, but provides a better context than physicalism
- Bernardo’s take on abduction: an expression of what as a culture we repress
- How information that bypasses anatomy is more personalised
- Why the Hindu will see Krishna and the Christian will see Christ
- How the formless is real, even when clothed in our imagination
- More or less autonomous psychic entities
- Why UFO sightings are so common near nuclear and military infrastructure
- “The monkeys are crazy”
- We are losing out ability to pick out what is happening in the otherworld
- Why alien encounters are accompanied by massive and unexpected changes in cognitive state
Next session, on the 19th of August, we continue the theme, joined by special guest Jeffrey Kripal.
Background resources
Amir Giles
Amir Giles
Bernardo Kastrup
Analytic idealism
Bernardo Kastrup is the Executive Director of Essentia Foundation and Founder/CEO at AI systems company Euclyd BV. His work has set off the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy (ontology, philosophy of mind) and another in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence).
As a scientist, he has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Philips Research Laboratories (where the ‘Casimir Effect’ of Quantum Field Theory was discovered). He has also been creatively active in the high-tech industry for almost 30 years, having founded parallel processor company Silicon Hive (acquired by Intel in 2011) and worked as a technology strategist for the geopolitically significant company ASML. Most recently, he has founded AI company Euclyd BV.
Formulated in detail in many academic papers and books, his ideas have been featured in Scientific American, the magazine of The Institute of Art and Ideas, the Blog of the American Philosophical Association and Big Think, among others. His most defining book is Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A straightforward summary of the 21st-century’s only plausible metaphysics.
Explore Bernardo’s work →Go deeper
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