Daniel Brenton Interview
From The Book of THoTH (Leaves of Wisdom)
Contents |
Transcript of the Daniel Brenton Interview
Book of THoTH Podcast November 20th, 2007
Transcript by Book of THoTH member Nebula
Jeremy's introduction:
Hello, hello, hello! It's Jeremy Vaeni, your host of the Book of Thoth. Today's guest is Daniel Brenton. Daniel is co-author with David S. Michaels of a book entitled "Red Moon." And I've been reading "Red Moon," and it's fantastic. It's . . . uh, well, it's a work of "science faction" (that's fiction mixed with fact). It's a book about the possibility that the Russians actually landed on the Moon first, before the U.S. in the great Space Race. And it's a thriller, and it's very, very well written . . . and we're not going to be talking about that on this podcast! No, no, no! Daniel and I have other business!
Daniel Brenton is somebody that Book of Thoth members know fairly well because he posts here quite a bit. And by "here" I'm talking about www-dot-book-hyphen-of-hyphen-thoth-dot-com; "thoth" is spelled t-h-o-t-h. So there you are. That's where he posts a lot of stuff.
So, I just thought, eh, it'd be kinda fun, let's have a freewheeling chitchat, and we cover everything from spirituality to Jiddu Krishnamurti to ufology. So I think it's a pretty good discussion. But it's very loose, it's very fast and fancy-free, and best of all, it's intimate. We're going to get inside the mind of Daniel Brenton, the heart of Daniel Brenton, and with any bit of luck we'll have some laughs along the way.
I'm glad you could join us. And here we all are.
JV: All right! My guest today is Daniel Brenton, co-author of "Red Moon," with David S. Michaels. And if you want to learn all about their fantastic book "Red Moon" you can trot on over to my Culture of Contact podcast at blog.valiens.com and listen to them chatting with me about it; or if you want more direct knowledge, go to their web site, which is luna15.com (that's luna and the number 15 dot com).
But here on the podcast for Book of Thoth, we are going to discuss spirituality. Daniel, um, I sort of peripherally know you through the "Internets," but you've always been something of an enigma to me ---
DB: [laughs]
JV: --- because you speak about ufology, but actually your web site seems more geared toward spirituality. And now you're writing a book about, you know, real scientific "faction," which involves real facts that a schmuck like me would never bother to research [laughs]. So you've got a logical mind, you are sort of interested in UFOs, but your gig seems to be spirituality: what's the deal, who are you? Who are you, why are you here?
DB: Why am I here? Well, that's one of the questions I try to address on the site, actually, my own site, danielbrenton.com. One of the things, in fact I think the most important thing that a person can do with his life or can ask in his life or her life is "Why am I here? What is the meaning of my existence?" And for myself personally ---
JV: Can you do it in a sound bite? [laughs]
DB: Can I do it in a sound bite? Huh . . .
JV: I'm kidding!
DB: No, I can't, but I think the closest to a sound bite I could give you is this is a job you have to do yourself, because that's the only way it's meaningful.
JV: So what is it exactly that we're to do? Are you sort of a general spiritual person, or are you a religious person of any particular persuasion?
DB: Well, I guess I could give you a little bit of a run-down. There's no affiliations that I've been able to stick to. I grew up in a, well, kind of a low-key fundamentalist background, a Protestant background, a Congregationalist Church, which I guess has some flexibility as to each house of worship can sort of dictate how they want to do things, to some degree. And still, even in that framework there's these very limiting things about what your relationship with God is. I mean, it's very binary, and very binary really in a very negative way. If you don't buy the picture, you're going to hell. And they may be very nice about it, but that's really the bottom line: you don't buy it, you're going to hell. And having grown up in, well, in rural Indiana, and frankly some kind of authoritarian parents, [laughs] I guess there's no other way to put it, it was a rough childhood for me, and my parents really were not there for me emotionally and were very pushy in a lot of ways. And having grown up in that kind of environment I'm very sensitive to authority figures, so it would only make sense that a person like me would question his religious background and the things that were being taught to me there.
In my later teens I started looking at other stuff, started thinking about different ways of approaching things. I was of course attracted to science and the physics of the time; this was a while back, this was before things like string theory and so on. And I began to wonder about, well, you know, really, what is all going on here? I guess one of those defining moments, I guess we all have these little "aha!" moments in our life. One of those defining moments was, it was shortly after I had moved out of home for the first time . . . yes, I was one of those.
JV: [chuckles]
DB: But anyway, I had moved out home for the first time, and I was sitting in this apartment listening to some rock and roll or something, and it just . . . it hit me that the Universe all fit together, that it was all expressions --- in fact, the way I was thinking it was all expressions of different kinds of frequencies. It was all cycles, basically. Now, however you want to take that, it was at least my first idea that there may be some kind of underlying unity to everything, which is a theme that we see a lot in the various sciences.
As time went on I started looking at some other stuff. I think if you took me, you know, just fast-forward to the present Daniel, the things that strike me is something that in fact I found you referencing in your work. The work of Jiddu Krishnamurti really strikes me, he seems a very straightforward, very no-nonsense, "this is what it is, here we are," that sort of thing, and that really appeals to me.
Yet there's a . . . again, I've had enough odd little experiences in my life that I know there's something more, and I haven't gone . . . there haven't been so many experiences that I want to try an catalog them and put out some kind of book or something about them, but there is so much more to life than ---
JV: Well, give us a couple of them so we can ---
DB: OK, sure. Well, in fact, not long after the odd moment I was talking about a little bit ago, I had an out of body experience. I was in my, I was in this apartment, I was laying face down in bed, you know, music in the background, just, you know, I mean, a bunch of guys out on their own for the first time, that kind of thing. And, anyway, I was laying in bed, I was sort of on my way to sleep, and I was thinking about my first real girlfriend. She's off in her house, you know, miles away and all that, and I'm asking myself, you know, "What is it like to be her? What's it like to live her life?" And suddenly I was in her hallway, yet I wasn't. Yet I was. And I felt as if I was drifting up her hallway, and suddenly I was looking down at her, in her bed, and there was kind of an acknowledgment, I believe. Well, she did in fact, we found out later, she did in fact sense my presence. And the feeling I got off of her was, "Oh damn!"
[both chuckle]
JV: You asked her about it later and she said yeah, she knew you were there?
DB: Yeah, that's exactly it. She sensed another presence with us that I didn't pick up on; frankly I have no idea who or what that was.
JV: Good or bad?
DB: Um, probably neutral, there was a sense it was neutral.
JV: So when you were experiencing this, were you experiencing it as if thinking about it or were you not at all attached to your body? What was the body-to-mind feeling you had?
DB: I was not conscious of my body when this happened. I don't think I really thought much about what my form was. I know that if I wanted to reach out I probably would have reached out a hand, that sort of thing. So I think I was thinking in term of having a body, though I really didn't think much about it. As soon as I recognized that here I was doing this and really understood the immensity of what was going on, suddenly, BOOM, I was back in the bed and that was the end of it.
JV: Did you have the feeling of sort of split consciousness, were you realize that you were in your body but out of your body at the same time, or was it purely out of the body?
DB: It was purely out of the body. I think it really didn't soak in until the moment I just mentioned, where it's like, "Oh, I see what's going on. Wow, this is something!", then bang, it was over. So I don't think there was any conscious volition in this.
JV: What was the catalyst for this, anything? Was it drugs, was it mediation, were you just lying there thinking these things and then suddenly, boom?
DB: The best I can think is probably, well, I mean, she was my first *real* girlfriend, you know, there was a "real" relationship there and I was feeling obviously very close to her and really kind of blessed the whole thing was happening. I don't think I would have put it into quite those terms, but, still, it was kind of neat. All I can think of was maybe it was just kind of the emotional burst of it all.
JV: So what do you make of the relationship between thought and mind and emotion? Do you think that these are like, you know, our good pal Jiddu Krishnamurti seems to say that, you know, emotion, thought are kind of the same thing? Do you think they're different? I mean, do you place more stock in emotion as something that's not just, you know, a biological component of us?
DB: Hmmm. Well, I would suspect that these things are probably much more interwoven than most of us would care to think about. The reason I say that is, well, as I'm sure you're aware of having read as much or probably more Krishnamurti than I have, he posits that our experience is involved with time, and because of that, it's really kind of limited. I think our emotions and our thoughts are almost like versions of the same thing. Thoughts may be emotions sort of rationalized or structured. Of course, I'm just speaking for myself. I'm sure other people are wired differently.
Yes, certainly there's a connection. Hmm, I'm not entirely sure where you're going with this . . .
JV: I don't know, it just seems like there're all these different schools of thought on whether or not, you know, we should be catering to our emotion or trying to rein in it; same thing with our thoughts, you know, discipline our minds, and all this sort of stuff. Or is that not something that we should be doing? But it seems like any time we talk about emotion / thought / mind / body relationship it's always in the context of all this is subjective and therefore anything that you believe about it is equally valid. And I just want to know if maybe we can [laughs] come to a different agreement or something, I don't know, just through sort of talking about it and hashing it out.
DB: Well, obviously if you're thinking in terms of the various spiritual practices over the ages, you'll have the extreme austerities that you see in some schools. I think Buddhism might fall into that. At least some areas of Buddhism are like that, whereas there are other schools of Buddhism where monks actually marry. I suppose it depends what you want to do with it. In my way of thinking the brain has this process where there's always noise going on. For me personally, what I've done is I try not to get attached to the noise. I don't try to stifle it, shut it off somehow, I just try to keep getting reinvolved with it. But in the process of doing that you recognize that you can step back from your thoughts and see that there are other things going on.
JV: Mmm-hmm.
DB: You probably had the experience, I imagine probably most of your listeners have had the experience, where just as you're heading off to sleep, your mind is quieting up a little bit. You can see that there's stuff going on, but you can step back from it and not really get reinvolved with it.
JV: Mmm-hmm.
DB: I've noticed a couple times the process where, I mean, scientists tell us that the mind actually spends part of the time while we're asleep reorganizing the day's experiences. I think I've seen that happening, where I could see things were being structured somehow. I know it's really out there, but its' not like a logical process, it's almost like a pre-logical process, however these mechanisms are that the mind works.
JV: A "pre-logical" process . . . so would it be pre-logical or would it be trans-logical?
DB: It could be trans-logical, yes.
JV: Because I think beyond the logical it the abstract.
DB: Mmm-hmm.
JV: We're talking about mental constructs, right? So logic would be sort of the matter, if you will, of thought. [laughs] But, you know, I think it comes from greater imagination: we sort of draw from, um, well, the abstract sort of patterns that you were talking about, in a sense, to create these logical structures. So I don't know that it's "pre." Maybe it's just, uh, God, what's the word, just omnipresent, maybe. Not pre-logical but just an omnipresent "nowness."
DB: I think I follow where you're going. Or at least I think where you may be going is that it does seem like there is some kind of gestalt consciousness. Just from my experience it seems like there's stuff that we all dip into. Again, I'm sure that we've all had the experience where we think about somebody that we haven't thought of for a long time, and we'll get the phone call or we'll get the letter, and it's like oh, well, you know, I haven't talked to you in a long time. All that business.
JV: Mmm-hmm.
DB: And plus, I was just noticing this. I think you'll see that people will do similar things artistically around the same time. I don't think that's necessarily just that they're working in a particular kind of environment that suggests certain kinds of artistic, um, paradigms, or whatever, but that there are ideas or forces or structures in some kind of higher consciousness that there are those people that understand or are able to hear this stuff on one level or another, and do something with it.
JV: Mmm-hmm. How do you go from there to ufology?
DB: If you go, well, if you go to my site, danielbrenton.com, and just go to the UFOs and the Paranormal list, you'll see I've written quite a bit about UFOs. It's not the only thing I write about, but I've written about that quite a bit.
UFOs are, in my mind, I feel very strongly about this, that there is a component of the whole UFO phenomenon that may have absolutely nothing to do with other people's spaceships. In fact, I think even in some instances where it seems like it could be other people's spaceships, there's paranormal aspects that a lot of researchers, historically, anyway, haven't wanted to buy into. They'll just tune out that stuff and look at the other stuff that seems more down to Earth. "Down to Earth" with flying saucers; right!
JV: [chuckles]
DB: Nonetheless, the clearest writing I've seen on this so far, I haven't gone much past this guy, but there's a guy named, well, it was Dr Kenneth Ring. He was a clinical psychologist. He wrote a number of books about near-death experiences. He also wrote a book where he compared near-death experiences and abduction experiences, called ---
JV: Was that "The Omega Project"?
DB: That's exactly right. That's exactly the book. Remarkable material. And this line of thinking gives me a sense of, well, hope, I guess, really, that maybe we can mine something out of the experiences of people who have had abductions using the methodologies of clinical psychology in order to ascertain more of what's really going on.
JV: Mmm-hmm.
DB: But obviously you gotta have some pioneering people like Dr Ring and so on who are willing to maybe hang it out a little bit over the edge and take a look at this stuff, take it seriously and apply the tools that they have in order to learn more about this. I would love to see this happen. I'm not sure how I could support that, I'm not a clinical psychologist, I don't have a degree in anything.
JV: It seems like there are a couple of things that get muddied when we talk about things like any of this stuff: UFOs, fairy folklore, near-death experiences, and one problem might be that the human brain, or human mind I should say, is going to compartmentalize this other experience, whatever it is, fill in the blank, into a pattern. It's going to take the gestalt piece, or whole, and, you know, fit it into the piece that is their psychological mechanisms, and so it's always going to look like a similar pattern no matter what it is that we're talking about, be it near-death or UFO, whatever.
DB: Exactly, exactly. Oddly enough, I was reflecting about this a little bit ago. It seems to be there is a mechanism, that, when people have experiences that don't fit the categories, when they're done with the experience the mind has to do something with it. And so it's going to take the next, you know, the first cousin of the experience, or whatever the closest analogy the mind has to fit it into.
JV: Mmm-hmm. But there's another possibility, and it might be simultaneous, which I've sort of been toying with, I haven't really heard anyone else say, but maybe you have, um, which is that there're beings who think in terms of oneness or in terms of wholeness from the point of view of that gestalt, and, um, so anything that they do, any action that they take is going to be effective in all areas of consciousness. And so we're only going to pick up the pieces that we can comprehend, but there's a whole larger piece of movement behind it. And so it's always going to look, some piece of it is always going to look supernatural, some piece of it is always going to be relegated to the unconscious, um, you know, parts that we just can't consciously comprehend because we're divided into conscious and unconscious, and they're not.
What do you think about that? Do you think that a being that is of a whole mind, you know, of a oneness consciousness would necessarily be broken up into, you know, sort of the filters that we have, that we break things up into and therefore always look like ghosts and fairies and supernatural stuff, when it's really just, you know, one thing doing one action? Does that make sense?
DB: I follow what you're saying . . . um, I think I follow what you're saying. Well, I've been listening to interviews, actually, of you, by other people, and hearing you posit this particular approach that we human beings live in both at a conscious and an unconscious level, whereas there are being that are probably all conscious all the time.
JV: Right, right.
DB: And that could imply a number of things. Again, I'm no expert in any of this stuff by any means, but, I mean, it could imply that these beings obviously are outside of time. I think that in itself is a remarkable thing. Being able to not be caught up in time changes your paradigm immensely. It has to.
JV: Mmm-hmm.
DB: I mean, obviously we can't picture it; at least I can't picture it, being just a plain old guy that, you know, has to go pick up the mail and all that. Um, but ---
JV: Being out of time, and also ---
DB: Well, because, we're so used to cause and effect. We're so used to the sort of Newtonian way of looking at things, and it's reinforced by our culture. Whereas a more holistic approach, where things can happen that are not necessarily causally related, that's very difficult to grasp.
JV: Yeah. Yeah! And then if you just think about, I mean there are simple things that I can't believe I haven't heard ufologists say over the years, which is, you know, if all of these beings, and the one thing that they all have in common no matter what supposed species they are, is that they all seem to speak telepathically and relate psychically, and all that sort of fun stuff. And if that's ---
DB: Except the Serpo ones!
JV: [chuckles] Well, yeah, except the ones that are definitely not real!
DB: --- the Serpo ones, there was no reference to telepathy whatsoever! Which really kind of nagged to me. No, this can't be right, there's something wrong ---
JV: [laughs]
DB: But anyway . . .
JV: That was their big innovation with the Serpo documents! Yeah . . . so, well, what I'm getting at is that if that's a mindset, then their science is going to reflect that, and so they're going to create technologies and ways of doing things that seem to relate to us subjectively in a way that seems impossible. So that when you, ah, you know, are sitting on a hilltop as I did, you know, and looking for UFOs, and one show up, and suddenly you want to put your camera to it, and it suddenly winks out as if it's responding to you . . . well, if you think about that logically it makes no sense, you know, that they'd spend their hard-earned tax dollars to come and buzz some guys on a hilltop . . .
DB: [laughs]
JV: But their technology wouldn't reflect that. Their technology would reflect something that is more in tune with subjective ---
DB: I'm not sure it's necessarily even the technology.
JV: Yeah?
DB: It may . . . it may be more an extension of their own consciousness.
JV: Well, that's just it. It would be a technology --- well, I guess I'm going with technology ---
DB: Sure, sure.
JV: It would be a technology that acts as en extension of consciousness, period, you know? How do you know if *their* consciousness? And so it would be something that would, you know, we couldn't even comprehend, really! [laughs] But it would be in tune with whatever we're doing, you know, it would react to what we're doing. Because that's just the flow of their science.
DB: Right, right.
JV: But I mean that seems like such a natural thing to think, if you think about a psychic being, or if you think about a race of them. It just seems like such a natural way to go that I can't believe Bud Hawkins or any of these guys hasn't said, "Hey, yeah, this makes sense of things."
DB: Well, I agree. It seems to me, if you look at the tremendous variety ---
JV: Instead of blocking it out.
DB: Sorry?
JV: I just said, instead of blocking it out, like you were saying, that people don't even want to look at this stuff, there are alternatives to blocking it out, which is making sense of it.
DB: That, or, well, in fact, the Betty Andreasson material. I gotta give Raymond Fowler a lot of credit for looking at that stuff, and also for Betty Andreasson looking at this stuff through the regressions that they did. But looking at, not trying to categorize it, just trying to relate their perceptions of what happened. That may be the closest we can get in trying to convey something through the tools of language ---
JV: Right.
DB: ---in understanding this thing.
JV: That's a really interesting case to me, because of all the religious overtones, and it's like you want to say, well, ---
DB: Mmm-hmm.
JV: ---she's trying to, uh, she's seeing this through the lens of her religious upbringing. Except that I don't know, you know, some of that is like phoenix from the flame stuff. I mean, obviously, whatever these beings are doing, they're catering to it. It's not that she's just interpreting it, they're actually doing things that reinforce her beliefs. So that to me is interesting. . . . The end! [laughs]
DB: Yeah, I think . . . I hear you, and in addition, because she is a woman of faith . . . is she still alive? I'm sorry, I don't know . . .
JV: Yeah.
DB: Oh, OK. Um, anyway, because she's a woman of faith, she's able to look at this stuff and, I guess see an orders things that maybe other people can't. And what I mean is a sense of purpose to things, a sense of meaning in things. Whereas, you know, a lot, well, if we look, if we compare her stuff, say, with, Travis Walton, you talk to Travis, I think still today he'll say, "This just happened to me, I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, I wish it never had happened." Whereas Betty sees meaning to this. And Becky does too, her daughter. That this is part of, I guess, in a sense, their message.
JV: Mmm-hmm.
DB: Frankly, they aren't . . . of the people that go off in that kind of direction where they feel like they've received a message of sorts, they're the ones that I find the most compelling. Some people just go too far and they fall into sort of like "I met Jesus in the desert" kind of thing, like, like, well, like a [24:59 unintelligible dance if] you tried to put off on us, and so on.
JV: Mmm-hmm.
DB: But the Andreassons, there's a special place in my heart for all that 'cause there's kind of a sweetness there that I haven't seen in any of the others. I'll admit it.
JV: That's interesting. So --- so, was that your first foray into ufology from the spiritual stuff?
DB: Um . . . No, I think, I think the spirituality actually came later. I think your question really is, "How do I make that connection? What's the overlap between spirituality and such . . . and ufology and the possibility of extraterrestrials, or whatever we want to call these beings?" [sighs] I think they're dealing with . . . they, or perhaps they're even an extension of us somehow . . . but they're obviously dealing with forces that we don't understand. I think these are things that we eventually *will* understand, as a species, assuming we survive as a species, because we have to grow further. That's part of what we're about, is to evolve, is to get more in touch with our source, to find out way back to, well, forgive me for using the term "find our way back to God." I mean ---
JV: Mmm-hmm.
DB: ---you need to put some kind of word on it, whether you call it the "Universe" or "awareness" or whatever, you gotta put some word on it, so I'll just throw "God" at it because it's a handy word.
We know we all want to go home. I think in our quiet moments, whether it's, you know, due to having some significant emotional event in our lives or, you know, feeling really good about things that are happening, all of us just feel this sense of we want to get back in touch with who we really are. There is a yearning there. I think it's a universal thing. Oddly enough, I think the Andreassons may have touched pieces of this through these kinds of experiences.
Likewise, you find people like Betty Eady, who wrote about her near-death experiences, where there is, like, OK, she went to heaven for a little while and came back . . . um, so to speak, whatever you want to call that plane of existence.
JV: So what do you do with the negative reports?
DB: I think --- yeah, I'm sure you get this, maybe some of your listeners will get this . . . remember, Krishnamurti says, "Evil is cumulative." What he was saying, at least what I get of what he was saying, was that he observed that Christians had pretty much taken the devil and had deified him, putting him on almost an equal level as God, Jesus, whatever. And his point was no evil is cumulative, that it isn't something that transcends our plane.
Well, this is my take-away -- maybe Krishnamurti didn't mean it this way, probably didn't, but this is my take-away: I tend to think that what we think of as . . . well, I suppose what we experience as evil or maliciousness or whatever, is a result of us living in a dualistic environment. We have dualism here, we have good/bad, yes/no, up/down, you know, top quark/bottom quark, whatever, that everything to this level of existence is about is some kind of polarity.
I think in the perfect state, experiencing godhead, nirvana, whatever, that place, there is no division. It's all one. The concept of time isn't, you know, it might be a concept there, it has no reality anymore.
JV: Right.
DB: So the negative experiences? [sighs] What I suspect, to answer your question, they think there's probably a long path of evolution that the soul can take, and it isn't just incarnating in human experiences. Yes, I believe in reincarnation. What I think is there may be other levels, other places where we can evolve. And I suspect probably along the lines of what the Buddhists call bardos, that there are places that are kind of hell-like, that at least the impressions that we have of hell from our various religious traditions. I don't think these are permanent, in an absolute sense.
JV: Do you think they're evil?
DB: [sighs, pauses]
JV: Isn't that a weird question? [chuckles]
DB: I think it's --- in terms of, no, I guess I don't. I think it's more like an out-product of karma or perhaps the wrong kind of consciousness, not wrong, but the kind of consciousness that draws you into a space like that. I guess I'm going to have to try to explain that, aren't I? [laughs]
It seems to me that our lives tend to manifest the things that we focus our attention on. I mean, you hear that from everybody. You hear that from the law of attraction people, you know, um, that we manifest this. It wouldn't surprise me if our friends, our extraterrestrials, whatever we want to call them, are people who understand that, that they can create and we can create our lives and our experiences to such an incredible degree, we'd have no idea, we can't imagine what we can do, it's so foreign to us, it's so alien to us. If we were to take the stories of Jesus verbatim where he, um, how do you want to cross this, like, the lost gospels of Jesus; I mean, there's these books that are apocryphal books that didn't make it into the canon, where supposedly one day Jesus was walking along the beach, and he scoops up some sand and shapes it into a bird, and claps his hands and the thing turns into a bird and flies away. We're probably all capable of doing these things, if we understood our relationship with our source, like he did.
JV: Hmm. But it's interesting, because talk about Buddhism and Krishnamurti on the one hand but still can't get away from talking about God as the thing that we have to go home to, or source as the thing that we have to understand, and I don't ---
DB: Well, I don't know that it's necessarily exclusive. I think that's us.
JV: Yeah.
DB: I think that source is us.
JV: I think you're right.
DB: That the oneness is us undivided from ourselves.
JV: So --- watch me bring this full circle --- when you had the out of body experience, um, was that a sense of oneness that you had there, or did you still have a feeling of being divided from environment and being in time?
DB: Oh, I see what you're saying. Um, I felt a sense of being able to communicate with my girlfriend; there was an emotional connection. So in one sense there was one less barrier. But in terms of oneness with everything, no. No, not at all. Um, I've had experiences since then that, well, I'd kinda wonder if the source really, you know, if you can get into that place, you just --- well, you just bliss out because you are part of everything.
JV: What was your other experience?
DB: Well, the one I'm thinking of in particular, um, this was about seven years ago. I was going through a lot of very troubling things at work, and I was laying in bed, um, just like shortly after dinnertime or something, with my wife. And I was holding my wife, and I slipped into this space where I felt a tremendous kind of blue --- I have to put adjectives on it, just to convey it --- a tremendous blue-white glow. It was . . . it was conscious, it was alive, it was . . . pure . . . Um, I will use the adjective: it was holy. And the deeper I got into this presence, the more I had a sense of its own awareness, and an awareness of me. I came away with an adjective of . . . feminine . . . Um, I hate to use the word maternal, but there was a mother kind of aspect to it. Than after the experience was over I found myself thinking things like, "Well, what was this? Was this the Divine Mother that you hear, like, Paramahansa Yogananda talk about? Was this, was this the Blessed Virgin Mary? What was this? There was some kind of feminine component to this, whatever it was; a remarkable experience, I haven't . . . well, I haven't duplicated anything like that and I'm not even sure a person could duplicate something like that. I seems to me you have experiences like this, they always have to be new, somehow.
JV: Mmm-hmm.
DB: You know? So obviously there's something more. And I think --- I don't know, it almost seemed like . . . I can't say I was necessarily part of this thing, whatever it was, but it seemed like there was a kinship.
JV: Hmm!
DB: And that's about as far as I can take it.
JV: And in abductions, you know, there's the female voice as well, you know. I've heard her. [chuckles] I don't know if it's the same "her" that, you know, Whitley Strieber and others talk about.
DB: Well, Strieber talks about that too, doesn't he?
JV: Yeah.
DB: Yeah!
JV: But if certainly, I mean, he says that he's seen her. I haven't seen her --- or as far as I know, I haven't; I don't have any memory of it. But, ah, yeah, I find it interesting that, you know, here we are, back again at the melding of ufology and spirituality. And not even the spirituality that I'm familiar with, 'cause I didn't grow up believing in a, you know, Great Mother Shakti or any of that sort of stuff.
DB: Yes, exactly. In fact, I grew up as a Protestant. The Blessed Virgin Mary was outside of my experience. In fact, Catholics were bad people, in my upbringing. I mean, they really were! That's how provincial ---
JV: Well, and they are --- and they are! [laughs]
DB: --- the mindset was in the part of my family, you know.
JV: Your parents were right about that!
DB: [laughter]
JV: I've just isolated my Catholic audience! Sorry, folks! Just kidding!
DB: [laughing] He's kidding! Honest!
[both laugh]
DB: I don't know this man! [laughs] But anyway . . . [laughter]
JV: And from there, you wrote "Red Moon"!! [laughs]
DB: Well, there's a little bit of a linkage there, there's a little bit of, um . . . there is a spiritual vein in the novel. Um, Grigor Belinsky, the pilot who goes to the moon, he's married to a woman named Mirya, and then he divorces this woman (divorced before the story begins) because Mirya has religious beliefs, and that would affect him and his status in the cosmonaut program, so he needs to distance himself from this. And when we were developing the character, Dave wanted me to take a look at the religious background of the Soviet Union, and what kind of things people had to deal with if they were going to be of a religious persuasion, right? And it just sounded very harsh. The people they actually put in charge of religious denominations are atheists. It's this weird authoritarian system. OK? And when I was going through this stuff, I ran across a book --- lemme see, let me grab the title of it . . . I don't --- I didn't keep a copy of it, I found it at the library . . . let's see, Josyp Terelya , "Witness to Apparitions and Persecution in the USSR." It really kind of surprised me because this was a whole different level to religious experience in Russia. This particular person described an experience he had in Leningrad, which is now St. Petersburg, of seeing the Blessed Virgin Mary, an apparition near a church, which dozens of people witnessed --- including some KGB folk. So here I am, trying to find this good religious background for this character and I stumble across this, and I thought, "Yeah! Let's have her see something like this!" I found another saint, in fact, a St. Xenia of Smolensk, which isn't all that far away from there, that she would have seen an apparition of this particular saint. There apparently have been miracles that occurred before Xenia's death, which was in the 1800s, and both before her death and after her death, so it didn't seem like that big of stretch to have an apparition of her. So . . .
JV: Mmm-hmm.
DB: Anyway, I wanted to bring something to that, and it was kind of a happy coincidence because that presence, I think, added something to the Russian side of the story.
JV: What is it that you want out of this?
DB: What is it that I want out of . . . ?
JV: Out of all of this: out of, um, the web site, and, um, doing podcasts and partaking on forums and things like that? I mean, I ask myself that, you know? What is it that I'm actually, what is it that I actually am trying to get out of this exchange with people? What is it that you're trying to get?
DB: Well, I think . . . I think it's kind of a primal thing. I'm a writer, and a writer needs to, of course, write, and I think a writer, of course, needs to be read. And beyond that, I think if you recognize . . . there's several things to that, obviously. There's --- you need to be able to engage an audience, which, yes, I will say this, Jeremy, you are extremely good at that.
JV: [laughs]
DB: You're a very good writer.
JV: Well, not tonight! But thank you! [laughs]
DB: [laughs] Then, but the other side of that is, am I giving somebody something of value? Are they going to come away with this maybe having changed their mind about something a little bit or thought about something a little better, or maybe having their hearts touched a little bit, or . . . well, maybe, you know, soaring off into something that they never thought of before. I think it's something that I just have to do.
JV: Hmm.
DB: In fact, just recently I've been kind of struggling with this, it's like, well, what is my purpose in life and all that. And I thought like, maybe I should just stop trying to out --- over-think it, and just do it.
JV: Yeah . . . yeah!
DB: That sounds pretty zen-like, don't you think?
JV: Yeah: do it for the sake of doing it! Do the dishes to do the dishes, as Thich Nhat Hanh might say! [laughs]
DB: Oh yeah, chop wood, carry water, and all that! Right, right.
JV: Well, is there anything else that we haven't covered that you want to talk about?
DB: Well, I suspect there'll probably be other discussions in one form or another, whether it's with you or . . . I'm really pleased to have been invited to do the podcast. I like what you're doing here and also with Culture of Contact.
JV: Well, thank you.
DB: And I'm slowly discovering the whole podcast world; I didn't realize it was so extensive.
JV: Yeah, I didn't either.
DB: Yes, I will say this, I think the Paracast is an excellent podcast, I really ---
JV: No, we don't, I'm sorry, we don't talk about the competition.
[both laugh]
JV: Ix-nay on the aracast-pay!
DB: OK, fine!
JV: [laughs] No, no, they're fine people over there at the Paracast.
DB: It seems like, well, you being out there in New York, and you've got to know these guys to some degree, so it must be really quite a treat getting to know these folks.
JV: Yeah! The real treat, and I was surprised by how treat-y is was, was going to the X-Conference and meeting a whole bunch of people, um, you know, in this field, and just being able to talk about it with people on a level that I can't do in my normal life, you know?
DB: Mmm-hmm.
JV: And for all the faults of the X-Conference, it really was a fantastic sort of get-away weekend for me. And actually I think Biedny was, Dave Biedny from the Paracast, was sort of ribbing me, and, you know, astonished that he was like, "Man, this isn't a vacation! This is a serious conference!" And I'm like, "No, Dave, this is great! We're gonna go ---[laughing] --- let's go to the whirlpool, let's talk," you know, like this is like ---
DB: [laughing]
JV: This is fantastic!
DB: I missed the fact there was a conference out here just last weekend, I'd forgotten all about it. I was like, Ooh, I missed it! Oh well.
JV: Yeah, it was like summer vacation for me, it was fantastic. So I highly recommend it for anyone who's . . . uh, so, if you're like me and you live with people who just don't care about any of this stuff that is your *life*, definitely check out the conferences!
DB: Well, my wife fortunately kind of follows some of this stuff, so there isn't a big wall there, and that's really good.
JV: Have you, um, have you seen her in the, uh . . . [laughs] in the "out-of-body"?
DB: [unintelligible] Um . . . I will go there a little bit, it's, um . . . I know a psychic medium in this area, and we both had sessions with this person. And it's just remarkable, what this particular person . . . Well, I'll say it, her names' Erin Pavilina, she's, uh, she's probably kind of a . . . she's on her way to becoming another John Edward. She's great. She's very good. She's very good at what she does. And she was able to bring through stuff, both for Gail and for myself, that really changed my perspective on, um, well, my relationship from, in my case, my mother had died a little bit before that, and my relationship with my mother and the end-result issues there . . . um, some, some issues . . . my, well, that my wife had with her father, she was able to help resolve, which was, "Wow!" So, gosh, I mean, running into somebody and these things being almost kind of therapeutic is remarkable.
That's part of the background of our lives, we accept the fact that there are --- that, that consciousness continues after death, and there's a continuing interaction. I'm sure a lot of people think this; maybe they don't talk about it a lot, 'cause people'll think they're crazy, and, you know, there probably are people who would think they're crazy, but --- tough! [laughs]
JV: So when you said for in sickness and in health, till death do us part, you didn't really mean that?
DB: [laughs] Well, I mean, when death do you part? What happens then? Who knows? Whatever!
JV: [laughing] You're not parting! You're like, "Screw that, I'm not going anywhere!"
DB: Well, maybe I married her in a previous life, you know?
JV: Hmm, I hope she's not listening.
[both laughing]
JV: [stage whispering] She might not want this to be forever!
DB: [laughing]
JV: But one never knows! And what a note to leave that on! Um ---
DB: So what do I want out of all of this?
JV: Yeah!
DB: It gives me a forum, it gives me a venue to express something that . . . and, well, here, not to pat myself on the back too much, I'll turn into a hunchback, but ---
JV: [chuckles]
DB: --- it seems like people like my work.
JV: Yeah!
DB: And it's really cool to get that kind of feedback. There's this one guy, in fact, he's been commenting on my site in a couple of places, and it's like he's found my site through the Anomalist web site, 'cause I had an article posted there recently ---
JV: Mmm-hmm.
DB: --- and it seems like he's reading everything at my site and commenting here and there, and it's like, cool! That's really gratifying, 'cause there's a lot of material on my site!
JV: That's fantastic.
DB: It is, it is. And all I need to do is, you know, get a couple thousand more people like that, and [laughs] I'll be set!
JV: [laughs] You do it for the kudos, I do it for the children. Well, we all have our motives, Dan.
DB: [laughing]
JV: [laughing] Thanks for coming on the Booth of Thoth podcast! Ah, that's not a good place to leave it. But leave it we shall! Um, well, definitely ---
DB: ---don't you want to try and think of some good closure to all this? It sounds like you ---
JV: No!!
DB: --- you may have your work cut out for you . . .
JV: [laughter]
DB: . . . figure out how to close this properly!
JV: No, God, no; in fact, I don't even want to close it. I want this to be the, the opening of dialog that we have periodically, I think we should ---
DB: Well, I would ---
JV: --- check in with each other, and, uh . . .
DB: I would enjoy that. Well, tell you what ---
JV: Yeah.
DB: OK, off the record, I had an idea I was thinking about doing. Um, it's it's ---
JV: Oh, wait, should I . . . ?
DB: I'm sorry?
JV: Should I be shutting this off?
DB: Well, we can discuss it when we're done recording.
JV: [pause] Oh. OK. [pause] Well. Goodbye!
[both laugh]
JV: Good having you on, and ---
DB: And thank you for having me ---
JV: "Red Moon," everybody!
DB: --- I enjoyed this conversation quite a bit!
[laughter]
JV: All right, take care!
There you have it; Daniel Brenton, in a nutshell. What was his big secret? Well, [whispers] I'll never tell! Wait, I think I just made it rhyme.
See you next time!
Sorry.
