HS 337 - FBF – Why We Have So Many Apocalyptic Prophecies with Jonathan Zap

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It's my pleasure to welcome Jonathan Zapp to the show. Today we are going to be talking about all kinds of interesting things and I think you'll be interested. Jonathan, welcome. How are.

Very good.

Good. Tell us about your book and about what you are working on nowadays.

Okay. Well the book is called Crossing the Event Horizon, the Singularity Archetype and Human Metamorphosis and the website where you can get a free PDF or podcast or. The first part of the book is Zaporacle Z a P and the word oracle.com and that's where you can find out everything that I'm up to at the moment.

Well, I could ask you about what a lot of those things mean in the title of your book. But first of, first of all, let's start simple. What is an event horizon?

Well, an event horizon is a. Is a transition where core things change so that reality as we once experienced it is fundamentally different. So for example, on the scale of an individual Day, an event horizon is crossed when we enter the dream time. Because once we enter the dream time, there's a different physics going on. Gravity no longer pertains the way it did during the waking life. Age is irrealized. We may no longer be in the sort of body that we had. So we are actually crossing an event horizon on a daily basis.

Okay, yeah. Good way to say it. So tell us about archetypes and more specifically the singularity archetype.

Okay, well, the singularity archetype is something I started writing about for a philosophy honors paper when I was an undergraduate in 1978. And it is a. Well, all archetypes are primordial images, as Jung referred to them. They are sort of structures deep in the psyche that can be found in any culture and period. Like an example is the hero cycle. Many of your listeners have no doubt heard of the famous title Joseph Campbell book Hero With a Thousand Faces. And of course, that's numerically modest. There are so many versions of it. And even walking down the street, you would encounter people who are going through different parts of the hero cycle like the call to adventure, the refusal, the descent into darkness, the vision quest and so forth. We find these things in any culture, in any period, no matter how separated they are because they're just classic attributes of the human psyche. So the singularity archetype builds on some even more fundamental archetypes of death and rebirth, of apocalypse. And it adds some new information, basically, or some new aspects. It's a image of an event horizon that has sort of two parallel event horizons. One is that of the species reaching a quantum evolutionary change and the other is personal death. And there's a parallelism between the two. So, for example, in the novel and the movie 2001 by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke.

Huge fan of Stanley Kubrick over here, by the way.

Oh, yeah, me too. I mean, what a genius.

It's too bad he's not around because I would. I would love to see him making movies still. I mean, his stuff is just so ahead of its time. Just unbelievable. Very creative. Awesome cinematography. Just so interesting.

And so little in the way of film reaches that level. Maybe some David lynch films or some others. But in any case, there couldn't be a more powerful vision of crossing the event horizon in an evolutionary sense than 2001. But what's also amazing, though, about that book and the movie which came out in 1968 and 69, they were created together is that there are descriptions in it that completely parallel descriptions of near Death experiences. And even though the book was written six or seven years before Life After Life, Raymond Moody's 1975 classic that coined the terms near death experience and life review. So in the movie, it's clearer. In the book, David Bowman, the protagonist, goes through a tunnel, an interdimensional tunnel, that the description of which is nearly identical to that of descriptions of people passing through the tunnel of lights where they often describe going at the speed of light when they have a near death experience. He has an out of body experiences where he sees himself from remote points of view. He goes through a life review that's described in identical terms to those of the near death experience. So this archetype is kind of like a beacon that is governing our encounter with certain key event horizons, which will usually be in the form of death. Or it could be a transcendent meditative experience. Sometimes it'll come in the form of dreams. But also because there's sort of a parallel between the individual and the species. It's kind of like a fractal where the small part recapitulates the whole. So the individual life is a microcosm of the macrocosm of the life of the species, which inevitably reaches an end time or a time when there's a radical evolutionary departure. The average lifespan of a mammalian species is a million years. So it has this parallelism between the individual lifespan and the lifespan of the species. And it gives us information about what it would be like to cross that event horizon.

Interesting. There are about as many interpretations of that initial scene in the movie 2001 as there are people who have watched it. Tell us about that scene and what it means with the apes and the monolith. Most people listening have seen the movie, but they probably saw it a long, long time ago.

Right? Exactly. It's worth re watching. It's out on Blu Ray now and I'd love to talk about it. Well, we begin with a group of missing link hominids. And really they're closer to apes than humans. And I'm kind of going to merge the novel and the movie to have the maximum amount of story to talk about, because they haven't even discovered tool use. And then what happens is they cross an event horizon. A singularity appears in their world. The famous black monolith, which will be learned as an extraterrestrial object, an artifact. It's also described as a crystal. And really this monolith is exactly like an archetype, because like an archetype, it has intelligence and intentionality. It isn't just an object you look at, it's also a subject that looks at those who are looking at it. And it magnetically draws these missing links toward it. It shows them visions and create patterns, according to Clark, that will be inherited and just like an archetype would do. And then through whatever technological magic, it alters them and enhances them and creates a quantum evolutionary net. And the way we see it happen, they don't look any different. But suddenly they discover that these large bones lying around are tools and that they can use them to these pig like animals and eat better quality protein than has been available before. And then when they have another skirmish with the competing tribe of hominids that look just like they do and that they've had other skirmishes with, now that they've developed this weapons technology, they're able to defeat them. And then we see the alpha of this group and a triumphant jester take his bone club and toss it up into the air. And the camera follows the bone in its upward arc. And then in a 24th of a second, it splices out 50,000 years of evolution and this bone becomes a bone white spacecraft orbiting the Earth. And what isn't quite clear in the movie, for reasons I'll mention, is that that's actually supposed to be a nuclear doomsday satellite. And because Kubrick's previous movie, Dr. Strangelove, had been about nuclear doomsday, it was thought to be over the top if there were another such scenario. But it was really meant to show us what had evolved and what hadn't. That we had this amazing technological progress in those 50,000 years, but we were still territorial aggressors and we were still primates. And that may be why the protagonist's name is Bowman. It still suggests the primitive weapon wielding primate.

Some people. And you didn't say it this way, but I want to ask you, was Kubrick? And it's interesting, Kubrick was very into the nukes with his other movies, Fail Safe. And I can't even remember the titles of the other ones.

Failsafe was actually somebody else's, but it was very parallel. It came out at the same time as Dr. Strangelove.

Yeah. And then there's another one called something about the bomb. I can't remember the name, what it was.

Yeah, that's the. That's the subtitle of Dr. Strangelove. How I learned to like stop something and love the bomb or anything like that.

Right, right. Yeah. Okay. Okay. But on that scene, is Kubrick representing or is that Event horizon, Is it representing the mating? Many people theorize that humans got their complex brains from aliens mating with them. And before that it was all just all the organs in the body. Kidneys and the liver, they're simple filters. The lungs are basically pumps, the heart's a pump. But the brain is the one thing within us that is just completely out of context with the rest of our tools, our genetic makeup. And some people theorize that that's it. Is that the event horizon Kubrick is trying to say in the movie, or no?

Yeah, I mean, basically from the point of view of the movie, I mean, the hominids don't look any different. Presumably their liver and kidney, they just get smarter. Yeah. So as you know, on the organ level, the brain would change. Now, I'm not a neurological materialist. I don't think that consciousness is reducible to a brain. I think that position has been absolutely defeated by some of the findings from near death experience research and from some other fields. But, you know, this idea that there are these discontinuities in evolution that we can't quite account for, you know, there is a huge gap between us and even chimpanzees, even as close to us genetically as they are. And so people, you know, I think it's okay to speculate. After all, I think it was Crick and Watson who came up with a theory of panspermia where they suggested that the only origin they could think of for DNA because it didn't work till it reached such a high level of complexity, was that it had an extraterrestrial origin. So that's right from the Nobel laureate discoverers of DNA. And it's hard to tell on what level of reality it's happening. But the most consistent motif for storyline and abduction experiences is about hybrids and where people have these experiences and where they see alien human hybrids and where there is mating between aliens and humans. I don't. Not sure what level of reality to take that on. But on some level, we are hybridizing with the future. And you know, part of that is hybridizing with technology where each is.

And we're certainly doing that. I mean, there are, there, there are all kinds of things coming down the pike and who knows what's here already, frankly, in secret. But terms of implanting chips in the human body, and I was just at the vet with my dog and he's got a chip implanted in him just to identify him. But they can do a lot more than that.

And make us think better. And that's really what bionics are all about the six million dollar man from the old days, right?

Exactly. I mean, we are all, even if we don't have a pacemaker, whatever, we all really are bionic. I mean, I'm not the same person that I would be, would have been if the Internet had not been invented. I mean, there is no sharp boundary between where a human being begins and technology begins. And it's like, I think it's like what Sophocles said. No great gift enters the human sphere without a paraphrasing, you know, an equally diabolical price. So this is sort of what we should expect, is that the technology will be, you know, the greatest thing in the world, the worst thing in the world. When novelty intensifies, the outer edge of light and dark will both intensify. So this is definitely, you know, if we wanted to see where evolution is really exploding. The human form doesn't look that much different from 500 years ago. You know, a man from the Renaissance doesn't seem less intelligent than a man of today. But technology has made us so much more intelligent. You know, I can access, you know, a kid in Africa with a cell phone has access to more information than Bill Clinton did in his first term in office. That's a huge change, you know.

Right, right. I want to get back and circle back on the subject of archetypes and Joseph Campbell and all of that, but just so that the listeners kind of know where we're going, what are your thoughts about the future? There are all these prophecies about the Mayan calendar out and there's a lot of doom and gloom in the news nowadays. It's a pretty scary time in a lot of ways, especially from an economic perspective. The world's only superpower is broke. The United States is completely bankrupt in every logical sense of it. But it's overdrawn, or I should say maybe insolvent to some extent. There's a lot of fear out there. What is your vision of the future?

Well, it's kind of take it from two different points of view. From the point of view of standing on Earth. Yeah, I mean, it is a scary time. I think human existence has mostly been scary. There's always a lot at stake. There's always chaos. Certainly we have reasons to be concerned. We have all kinds of new game over scenarios that can happen with nuclear proliferation and out of control technologies. The economy is certainly creating a lot of misery and suffering. But I remember when 911 happened, and I'm from New York and I remember calling my Parents who still live in the Bronx and they weren't that freaked out. You know, these people lived through World War II, through the Great Depression. So if we just go back in time enough, you know, that the Civil War, you know, we have had many white knuckle moments throughout.

We sure have, yeah. Cuban Missile Crisis hit much more recently than that. And you know, that's definitely true because when you, when you look at it from a much broader perspective than thinking, oh, gee, things were so much better five years ago than they are today, you really see that hardship has been the history of the human race. There have been a lot of difficult times. It's kind of like that black swan idea is that we're just at one small little point in history now. And certainly things are better now than they were during the Great Depression. I mean, people look at it on such a small perspective. And so when you back up and look at the big picture, things are really pretty good in a lot of ways, aren't they?

Well, exactly. We probably have the lowest per capita war death rate that we've had in thousands of years. If you read the headlines or look at the news, it looks like the world is being torn apart by war, but actually the casualties are relatively small with a six and a half billion population.

And there's an anthropologist on Ted.com that just did a lecture showing that the chances of being killed in a war for an indigenous rainforest tribe are way higher than they were for Western civilization even during the 20th century. So we get this skewed impression. But I think the real anomaly is probably. I'm 53, I'm a baby boomer. I think that like the early 60s, for example, that was a real anomaly in that it was a time of incredible optimism where it seemed like anything was possible. I remember like going to like the 1960s, 63 World's Fair and Flushing, Queens, and seeing the General Motors Futurama. So some of us who date back to those years or even maybe during the 90s when Clinton was president, and we're starting to have the dot com explosion before that bubble burst. We can remember these times of incredible optimism, especially as Americans, and where it seemed like there was nothing limiting our growth horizon. So I think it's the contrast to that that makes our present problems look so bad.

Yeah, very good point, Very good point. So what is your vision of the future, though? Maybe talk to us a little bit about 2012. We've never done a show on that. And was something when I launched this show a few years back that we had planned to have a guest on. You addressed that, right?

Absolutely. I have a document on my website called Carnival 2012, a psychological study of the 2012 phenomenon and the 2012 to pitfalls and blind spots of esoteric research. And a lot of my work is based on my close friend and colleague John Major Jenkins, who I think has written the definitive books on the subject. The 2012 story most recently, and then more technical, but really getting into the archaeoastronomical insights, Maya cosmogenesis, 2012 and galactic alignment. And basically just a few doses of sanity because there's so much misinformation. Number one, the Mayan calendar does not end in 2012. Like all calendars, it's perpetual. It just rolls over into a new cycle. It's a very long cycle. And this is the Long Count calendar. The Maya had several calendars that we're talking about. That's the one that has this big rollover moment in 2012. Number two, no Mayan prophecy about 2012. We have not found a single specific reference to.

2012 other than Tortuguero Monument 6, which does not really contain a prophecy. It's more like. It suggests that what the Mayan felt about cycle changes in general, which we can find in a surviving document from a few hundred years ago, the Popol knew that basically it'd be a time of renewal and, you know, where a new cycle begins. And so there's absolutely nothing specific that the Mayan ever said about it. And there's nothing in their philosophy of cycle endings to suggest anything apocalyptic. I've written a lot about and thought a lot about the psychology of apocalypticism and where that comes from. And this is just the latest iteration of that.

And what do you mean by logos be held? You have a lot of interesting sort of phrases and terms. Homo gestalt. Tell us about some of these things, if you would.

Okay, sure. Well, logos be held. And that's actually a phrase I got.

That's a Freudian reference, I assume, right?

No, it's actually from Terence McKenna, and he actually got it from Philo Judeus, who was a Jewish philosopher who was a contemporary of Christ, who said that we would really have sort of hit the Omega point, you know, more or less, when the Logos, the voice of God, was beheld instead of heard. So this is a lot of application to what's going on in the lives of the listeners right now, even though it sounds pretty arcane in that there is an explosion of visual technologies and our brains are being massively rewired. If there was ever a monolith that appeared. And Jay widener wrote about 2001, and I believe he pointed out, I don't know if it's true, that the dimensions of the monolith are like the dimensions of the cinescope screen. And so really the monolith that's in front of us right now, I believe, are the visual technologies and the computer technologies and that are causing a profound shift in the hemispheric dominance of our brains from the left to the right. And no other mammal has as much hemispheric lateralization, it's called, as we do, where there is as much difference between the left and right as there is with us, according to some theories. Leonard Schlane wrote a book about this called the Alphabet versus the Goddess. The whole descent into the nightmare of history. It's like Stephen Dedalus, James Joyce character said, history is the nightmare from which I'm trying to awaken. Well, the nightmarish aspect of history seems to have begun about 6,000 years ago with the preponderance of what are called dominator societies versus partnership societies that existed up to the time of like ancient Crete, apparently. And it seemed to coincide with the adoption of written alphabets. Once you have written alphabets, the left hemisphere starts to predominate and now, like documents, become the ruling things. In the beginning was the Word. It could be the Bible, it could be the Communist Manifesto, the rule of law. But an anti image thing took over. The second of the Ten Commandments is about not having images. It's popularly interpreted as not having idol worship, but it says right in the Torah, not an image of a fish swimming in the ocean or of a bird in the sky. So all of this is profoundly changing, you know, even during our individual lifespans right now. You know, I grew up with like black and white television and that kind of thing. When my dad was born, there weren't even in New York City, there weren't even radio stations. Now I'm surrounded by video screens. Even when I'm interacting with text, there are like icons and a mouse, which is more bi. Hemispheric. So right now we are moving toward a more visual means of communication. And some of the material from the singularity archetype, the dreams that people have about it, the visions they have about it, involve this visual means of communication that I call logos wihelden. That's also sort of a telepathic network. And at least on a technological level, that's happening right now with the Internet.

Tell us more about that the telepathic network of the Internet. I mean, just is that as simple as saying people can exchange ideas, or is there more to it?

I think there is more to it. And this would even correspond a little bit to what the Maya suggested about cycle changes, that it would be a time of renewal, there would be an enlightenment. And this is, in fact happening. And the Internet is the biggest example of it. During the 1990s, I read somewhere that the value of the industrial production of the US doubled, but its physical weight. Sorry, tripled, but its physical weight halved because we were making less pig iron and hard commodities and more intellectual property in the form of zeros and ones. So it's literally getting lighter, and it's more about light, it's more about the visual. So, for example, the iconic object of the early industrial age, the iron locomotive, it's a one use object. But now what's the iconic object of today? The video. The pixelated video screen. And now whatever I think of whatever bizarre fantasy might go through my mind, sexual or otherwise, I can just type that into Google. And now immediately appearing on the screen right in front of me like a shapeshifter, are images and words and all kinds of stuff people blogging about. Whatever it is, there's nothing so bizarre, you know, I can't think of, or no kinky fetish, you know, I can't think of sexually, that I won't find it appearing right in front of me.

Right. That's an amazing shift in just the way everybody interacts with the world, with everything in their life, with their own psyche. It's scary in some ways.

Well, it's scary, but in a good way. That metamorphosis is scary, but I mean, even right now, even though this podcast, basically, this is a form of technological telepathy, we basically have two audio avatars that are being heard through earphones or speakers, remote in time, because no one's listening to us in real time since this is pre recorded. But we're creating a telepathic artifact that will then play in other people's minds in the future. You know, we just take that for granted these days, but think about how intense that is.

Yeah, it is. It's pretty amazing. No question about it. So what does this mean to us? You sound actually pretty optimistic about the future.

Well, I am optimistic about the future, but with this caveat that in a time of transformation, it's like the Chinese curse about living in interesting times. Well, I think that's there is a curse aspect to that in that they're chaotic. You don't feel like you have solid ground under your feet. But the other side that the Chinese don't emphasize enough is that it is very interesting. This is really a golden age. I mean, certainly it's the golden age of information. You know, as a writer, to be able to instantly publish my ideas and get feedback from them the same day, to be able to for free reach 24 hours a day people anywhere on the planet, you know, that is unprecedented. That is a golden age.

It's totally unprecedented. And, you know, it's not just in the sphere of Internet and blogging, but I remember when I published my first book about 11 years ago, and I went and I listed it myself on Amazon.com and in seven minutes, my book had global distribution. Whereas before the powers that be, the publishing companies, the various media outlets, they decided who got distribution. And that has really democratized the field of information, hasn't it?

Yeah. I mean, this is the greatest democratization of power ever experienced by human beings. So part of the answer is, half of it is that reality is maybe better than it looks. My friend Rob Brezhny has written a wonderful book about this. Pronoia is the opposite of paranoia. How the universe is conspiring to shower you with blessings. And he gets into some of the.

What was that word? What was the year's pronoia?

Yeah, he'd be a good person to interview, too. He's a great talker as well. Pronoia is the opposite of paranoia.

Okay, got it.

And his book is widely available, so there is all that side to it. On the other hand, the other thing that needs to be said is that during the time of transformation, transformation and metamorphosis require shocks. They require that the equilibrium be punctuated because living systems tend toward a stagnant equilibrium. Well, it can be stagnant. When we talk about the human psyche, called homeostasis, they're conservative. They try and dial in an equilibrium and stay there, just balance out. Yeah. And that's good for your body. It's good for your dog or cat. They would prefer to have the bull in the same place every day and be fed the same time every day. It's good for your body. It'd be good to have a completely consistent diet and bedtime, but it's not good for the human psyche. The human psyche is different. If we have a. An equilibrium like that, we call it stagnation because we need constant growth. Like the Dylan lyric, he who's not busy being born is busy dying. But birth is A traumatic process and some healthy tissue gets destroyed. Equilibria, you know, get disrupted. We need shocks. There may be havoc from the point of view of the earthbound ego. And that's part of the message of the Singularity archetype. The change may look apocalyptic and like Armageddon, but seen from above, from a higher vantage, it looks like a transcendent evolutionary event.

You know, it reminds me of a great quote by someone who I'm sure you've read, and that's Richard Bach, where he talks about how what the caterpillar calls the end of the world, everybody else calls a butterfly.

Exactly. And if you look, there's a document on my website called Metamorphosis. It's one of my. Also one of my Oracle cards. Another resource on my website is a 600 card Oracle people can interact with for free, I worked on for 30 years. One of the cards is called Metamorphosis. And one of the things that's pointed out is that when a caterpillar is going through that metamorphosis, these cells are created called imaginal cells, which I think is an amazing term. And they start when they first appear. The caterpillar's immune system attacks them like antibodies. It senses them as a threat. Eventually enough imaginal cells are created, may vibrate to a different frequency, and they sort of start to network together and then they start to take over. So what from the caterpillar's point of view is this is death and is a unthinkable transformation that is seen as catastrophic biologically. You know, this is also the birth of the butterfly. So this is the thing about metamorphosis. Metamorphosis only happens when one form has to die for another one to be born.

Okay, so it sounds like you're saying, because I want to. Before we conclude here, I want to see if maybe you can give the listeners a couple of action steps. And from everything you said, Jonathan, it sounds like one of them might be gain perspective. That's the first thing. Gain some perspective on the times in which we live and the future we're likely to encounter. And just understand that bad things that seem bad at the time can turn out to be obviously good. Right?

Absolutely. So one suggestion would be, well, this is self serving, but if you read my book, you'll see my thorough discussion of the psychology of apocalypticism, where it really comes from, so that to help the viewer, the reader, not fall into its clutches, and to point out when other people are starting to become apocalypticism pornographers, which is really what we see so much of culturally. And then other things. There are other suggestions like exercise your visual imagination if you want to get ahead of the curve in terms of the change that's going along. Explore things like virtual reality. Explore things like organic virtual reality where, say, for example, this is actually an ancient technique. You sit with your eyes closed and you start to create a house and an estate, a wall to state in your mind. And this is something you could do over years and build it and make it consistent. And you have an infinite budget. You know, look at pictures of great castles and borrow things from wherever you see them that look healthy. By doing that, by strengthening your visual imagination.

You are moving with the curve of evolutionary change.

Very, very good advice, Jonathan. Give out your website again, if you would. I mean, you've mentioned several tools and free PDFs and so forth that people can take advantage from your site and give that out to listeners once again, if you would.

Okay, it's just Zaporacle Z A P which is my last name and then the word Oracle O R A C L e dot com.

Excellent. And Jonathan, anything else you'd like to say?

Just in closing, I would just say keep looking toward the event horizon and don't look at it with dismay whether it comes for you collectively, for us collectively or not, we're all heading toward an event horizon today. When we go to sleep and when we pass through this lifetime into the life beyond.

Excellent. Well, Jonathan Zapp, thanks so much for joining us today. Appreciate having you on the show.

Thank you.

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