#2091 - Diana Walsh Pasulka

**Joe Rogan** (0:03)
The Joe Rogan Experience.

**Diana Walsh Pasulka** (0:06)
Shrink by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

**Diana Walsh Pasulka** (0:13)
It's a scary podcast for me, because I feel like you're, because I know a lot of the things that you've said, and I've related to them, and I've said, okay, this makes sense.

**Joe Rogan** (0:21)
Why is that scary?

**Diana Walsh Pasulka** (0:24)
Okay, so it's scary because it's not consensus reality, and because it's not consensus reality, we could talk about it over hot chocolate near a fire or something, but here we're talking about it and lots of people are going to be listening.

**Joe Rogan** (0:40)
Yes.

**Diana Walsh Pasulka** (0:41)
So that is somewhat scary.

**Joe Rogan** (0:44)
That's the hurdle that we all have to get over, and the good thing about this is it really is just us talking. Right. There are a lot of people that are going to listen, but they're just people too.

**Diana Walsh Pasulka** (0:55)
That's true, and they've probably had these experiences.

**Joe Rogan** (0:58)
Some of them have. Yeah. The experiences that are available through psychedelics, I've always wondered, I mean, the thing that's always struck me about the UFO experience, particularly the abduction experience, is that it always happens when people are asleep. It always happens at night. It either happens on the road when people are tired and it's late at night, or it happens like, why does it have to happen at night? The universe doesn't give a shit where the sun is in position to the planet. That doesn't make any sense that all these UFO abduction experiences would happen only when the sun is on the other side. That's so dumb. It makes no sense. It's literally such an egocentric, earth-centric perspective that, and not even earth-centric, hemispherical-centric, right? It depends on where the sun is in position to the earth. For that to be the only time that UFOs come, I was always like, this seems like horseshit. There's something about it that seems like horseshit, but there's also something about it that seems real. When you listen like Betty and Barney Hill, when they're talking, boy, that sounds like people talking about a real thing. Boy, that sounds like a real experience. It really does. And these people like the Whitley Stribers, these people that talk about these experiences that happen at night, we know for a fact that when you are sleeping, your brain is producing endogenous psychedelic chemicals. We have no idea why. We have no idea what the purpose of those things are.
We have no idea what the quantity is. We used to think until recently, they weren't even exactly sure, like, where was being produced. But now, through Strassman's work, and through the work of the Cottonwood Research Foundation, the people that do those DMT studies, they know that now your brain is producing this. And so, is your brain, is it producing a chemical gateway into another dimension? And is that why these people are experiencing these abduction, air quote, abduction experiences, these encounters, let's say encounters? Is that why they're happening at night? Is that why they're happening, why they're lying in bed? Because that seems to make way more sense.

**Diana Walsh Pasulka** (3:22)
Yeah, that's a great question. I can talk a little bit about this.

**Joe Rogan** (3:26)
Please.

**Diana Walsh Pasulka** (3:26)
Okay, so I think that...

**Joe Rogan** (3:28)
I think we're starting weird.

**Diana Walsh Pasulka** (3:30)
Yeah.

**Joe Rogan** (3:30)
Can we just start with, how did you get involved in this?

**Diana Walsh Pasulka** (3:34)
Okay.

**Joe Rogan** (3:34)
And please just tell people your background.

**Diana Walsh Pasulka** (3:36)
Okay, sure. So I'm a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington, and I grew up in California. And I've always been interested in these experiences, but religion. And also I grew up, I was going to graduate school during the.com boom. So I saw how technology was changing everything. Our schools were the first to adopt computers and that type of thing. So what I did was I was very interested in, I was working, you know, what your parents, you tell them you want to study religion and they're like, why not be a doctor? Right? So I was going to college, but I kept taking courses in religion and philosophy. And when I got out, I got a job doing technology and things like that. And I made all right money, but I still read about religion and philosophy. So I figured if I could get scholarships to continue, that I would. And I kept getting scholarships, and that's how I got my PhD in religion. In religious studies, by the way, we actually were not ministers or anything like that. We don't advocate for any religious tradition. We study them. And since most people in the world are religious in some way, it's a good thing to know. But how did I get into studying UFOs? So I studied Christian history, and that's what I did for a long time until I was what's called a full professor. You can't go any higher. You're a full professor, that's it. And I studied these things called ascent narratives. So ascent narratives are when people levitate in the Christian tradition, people either levitate or they see things that they call angels or demons and things like this. And I always studied them from a historical perspective.