Pinchbeck argues that Elon Musk's conduct, including the dismantling of USAID and his adoption of Gad Saad's notion of suicidal empathy, is better described by older traditions as demonic possession than by psychology. He builds the case on William Irwin Thompson's essay on the Ramayana in Coming Into Being, which holds that esoterically naive use of drugs and technology erodes the membrane between the psychic and physical planes and admits beings from the intermediate realm of Kamaloka. He cites the 2022 Nobel Prize work of Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger against naive physicalism, Peter Berger's concept of plausibility structures, and reports of malevolent entity encounters under extended-state DMT protocols.
In brief
- Following William Irwin Thompson, Pinchbeck rejects the Jungian move of treating spirits as projections of the human collective unconscious and argues that asuras, rakshasas and similar beings have independent ontological status.
- The essay claims that reports from extended-state DMT infusions and repeated high-dose exposure have shifted in valence, from entities described as teachers and guides to beings claiming dominion over humans and announcing collective ruin.
- Pinchbeck argues that if consciousness is fundamental and individual minds are differentiated alters of one field, entities met in visionary states are neither hallucinations nor simply external, but configurations with intentionality whose character depends on the developmental stage of the experiencer.
- The essay treats Musk's ketamine and psychedelic use, his Baphomet-themed profile image, and his belief that he specifically inhabits a simulation in which others are non-player characters as evidence of a psyche broken by unprotected initiation without ethical or philosophical preparation.
- Pinchbeck warns that psychedelics are being absorbed into the emerging techno-political establishment, with Musk and Peter Thiel investing in psychedelic pharmaceutical development, and could be deployed as instruments of ideological control rather than awakening.
Full text
Over the past year, I keep reflecting on certain strange facial expressions made by Elon Musk at the White House and Mar-a-Lago and at the inauguration during his brief tenure as Trump's chief buddy. The expressions were sinister, childlike, and kind of dissociated. They reminded me of the face of a small boy who enjoys tormenting and killing small animals in secret then lying about it when the remains are discovered. At that time, Musk was dismantling US aid and other federal programs that helped the poor, hungry, sick, and marginalized around the world. Programs that also were thought to enhance America's soft power. Bill Gates, surveying the wreckage of US aid after Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency had, in Musk's own boast, fed the agency, quote, into the wood chip chipper, unquote, told the Financial Times that the picture of the world's richest man killing the world's poorest children is not a pretty one.
Musk, however, was unmoved. He or had already gone on Rogan to declare that the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. He used the Canadian marketing professor Gad Saad's notion of suicidal empathy. The idea that compassion, taken too far, leads to civilizational self-destruction. So, in this video, I want to explore why I believe that what we are seeing in those clips is what older traditions would have accurately called possession. And in particular, I believe they would have seen it as demonic possession. I'm aware, I know how absurd this will sound to most people today. From inside the materialist framework that almost everyone in in tech world and science and in the mainstream academic world takes for granted demonic possession is not even seen as a possibility.
Consciousness is believed to be solely a product of the physical brain and it cannot exist outside of it. Therefore, immaterial beings like demons and spirits could not have any ontological status or reality whatsoever. Demons don't exist and they can't exist. So, Elon Musk could not be possessed by them. The case is closed. The inquiry is over before it has even begun. But, let's step back for a moment. We are in a time, after all, when the reductive materialist paradigm has been challenged and could be overturned. Increasingly, many scientists, philosophers, and system theorists are open to other ontologies and metaphysical paradigms. These include panpsychism, dual aspect monism, and analytic or monistic idealism.
As we will explore today, these alternative ontologies not only fit better with the current state of our knowledge about the deep structure of the physical world, they also open new possibilities in how we understand consciousness and allow us to consider or conceive of other forms of consciousness, whether embedded in the natural world or somehow existing in a different dimension of space and time. I've spent close to 30 years exploring these subjects. My first book, Breaking Open the Head, which came out in 2002, helped launch the modern psychedelic movement. When I started researching that book, I was a materialist and a skeptic. But, for the book, I went to Gabon to take iboga with the Bwiti people.
I visited the Amazon in Ecuador to work with the Secoya and take ayahuasca. I visited the Mazatecs in Oaxaca and took mushrooms there. I also explored many experimental research chemicals and I interviewed the legendary psychedelic chemist Sasha Shulgin and tried DMT and so on. Through these experiences, I fell into a whole range of psychic and paranormal phenomena that shocked me and ultimately convinced me there was validity to the shamanic or animistic cosmology. Indigenous cultures around the world have a thorough knowledge, a kind of complex multi-dimensional understanding of spirits and demons, elemental beings, angelic guardians, and so on. I also learned painfully that there were very good reasons for all the taboos, prohibitions, and sacrifices that these indigenous and older cultures maintain around initiation and the individual's quest for gnosis.
Back then, I think I was far ahead of the curve, but now finally others are starting to catch up. Over the last few years, the contemporary movement has moved from rejecting entity contact as meaningless superstition or hallucination to empirical investigation of these commonly reported encounters to something closer to anxiety and alarm about them. The psychedelic renaissance that started in the early 2000s began with a largely scientific and empiricist and materialist model of reality. Immersed in reductive physicalism, most of the researchers lacked a great deal of context for dealing with the psychic and supernatural eruptions that often get unleashed by intense visionary states. And in fact, we still lack for such models, which I have tried to put together in my past work.
Generally, this kind of knowledge is felt a bit like what Terence Mc Kenna called thrown away knowledge, knowledge that nobody wants that falls outside of any institutional or establishment framework, yet may actually be essential for reasons we're going to explore today. Mc Kenna also noted that it is often the phenomena that we find on the on the fringe or the margins that ultimately becomes very important. It becomes the evidence that leads to a massive shift in the underlying paradigm. So, what has changed recently in the research projects and the literature is not the frequency of entity reports, but something about their valence. With the rise of extended state DMT protocols, IV infusions that keep the subject in the visionary field for 30 minutes or an hour or even longer, as well as the normalization of repeated high-dose exposure in both research and informal settings, reports of encounters with beings who describe themselves as malevolent, who claim dominion over human beings, and who announce our collective ruin have become too frequent to just reject as meaningless noise.
We're finding that researchers who once described DMT entities as teachers, guides, or custodians of forgotten knowledge, now report encounters with beings who propound prophecies of monstrous doom. Meanwhile, the modern psychedelic renaissance coincides coincides, and I tend to think directly correlates with this rising tide of global destruction, techno-fascism, and authoritarian authoritarian systems of control. So, in this video today, I'm going to talk about my theory about how how all of this and how it relates to Elon Musk perhaps being actually literally possessed by demons. And also, I want to offer some thoughts on what we might do about it if this is the case. I know it's become a a of a cliché to point out that quantum physics refutes many of the claims of naive physicalism, yet it's still true.
The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger, whose experiments with entangled photons ruled out local realism. Our common sense assumption that objects possess definite properties independent of observation and that no influence can travel faster than light. Just now, the 2025 Nobel Prize went further to experiments demonstrating quantum tunnel tunneling in macroscopic circuits we can see and manipulate. The classical world is not a separate realm. It is a limit case of the quantum one where decoherence happens fast enough to hide what is actually going on. Our perception of a solid independent reality is an artifact of our scale. Our perceive a perceiving and measuring subject is required to collapse energetic wave wave forms into observable structure.
So, this is not a mystical claim anymore. It is established physics. Naive materialism, the view that physical reality is the only kind of reality and that consciousness is just a side effect of brain chemistry, has been refuted at the empirical level. We have not yet absorbed what that means. One thinker who really helped me develop and deepen my views about all of this is William Irwin Thompson. He passed away a few years ago. Thompson was a cultural critic and philosopher who bridged the humanities and sciences to examine the evolution of consciousness and the history of human civilizations. Thompson's ideas can only be appreciated and integrated if you've set aside the naive physicalist or materialist ontology that has dominated Western culture over the last centuries.
He wrote an essay that deeply influenced my perspective on on what's happening with Elon Musk, also in many other areas of our society, including festivals like Burning Man. The essay is titled The Alliance of the Animal and the Human and the Expulsion of the Demonic from the Physical World, a consideration of the Ramayana. You can find it in his book Coming into Being, Texts on the Evolution of Consciousness. The Ramayana is an ancient Indian epic, of course. For Thompson, it actually gives an account of what he talks about as the emanation of divinity into human form as a way of stabilizing the physical plane and making it the incarnational vehicle and domain for human beings.
He proposes that humanity at different stages of our development, first we insight, then we kind of push back against the leakage of demonic forces that come from the subtle planes into our ordinary physical reality. So, writing in the 1990s, he warned that we were entering another such period, a period in which he said esoterically naive use of drugs and technology were eroding the membrane between the psychic and the physical. So, he believed we were seeing an erosion of the boundary between the physical and the psychic planes induced by these esoteric naive esoterically naive uses of drugs and technology. And this was actually allowing a leakage of demonic forces from the subtle planes into our consensus reality. Thompson wrote, "Demons are riding piggyback on human minds and laughing in delight as scientists insist that they don't exist." He was quite a prophetic thinker.
He noted, "We are at a new catas- catastrophe bifurcation in human evolution, one in which we have to re-confront the demonic in the astral plane and learn again how to tell the difference between the spiritual and the psychic. For us materialistic Americans and Europeans, spiritual discrimination does not come easy. And we all too easily fall victim to the demonic as it becomes expressed in new age cults, psychic religions, channeling, or new age technologies and drugs." What they all have in common is a sense of glamour, galactic inflation, and a Luciferic rush. Thompson went on to suggest the spiritually repressed or unrecognized reality of our condition is unconsciously being precipitated into our world in the societal form of technology, but in the psychological mode of the demonic. If you enjoy this video, please remember to like it and subscribe to this channel.
I think it's pretty clear we're in the midst of this now with no happy or easy end in sight. Musk, of course, is one of the principal avatars of this rapid technological evolution, excelling accelerating us toward a world of advanced AIs, brain-computer interfaces, and termina- terminator-like robotics. One thing we also know about Musk is that he's a frequent ketamine user, if not an addict. And he also carries a pouch with him containing other psychedelic substances such as mushrooms and LSD. Uh but it seems that something happened to Musk during the COVID pandemic. In November 2022, he changed his Twitter profile picture to an image that showed him wearing a devil's champion Halloween costume that featured standard Baphomet imagery, including inverted crosses across his chest.
This was seen as a cult trolling, but perhaps it also reflects something else, an encouraging of literal demonic energies, which are still working on him unconsciously. Over the last decades, I realized there was a problem that the modern psychedelic movement lacked a shared cohesive framework for thinking about the supernatural and paranormal or about the non-physical entities often encountered in visionary trans states. The renaissance that began in the late 1990s had to use the prevailing scientific and empiricist frame to gain legitimacy, escape prohibition, and bring these banned compounds back into the mainstream fold. The movement prioritized understanding the physiological correlates of psychedelic experience through studying things like serotonin pathways, blood flow to the brain, default mode networks, and so on. But it suppressed serious discussion of the supernatural and paranormal aspects of many psychedelic journeys, despite yeah, a huge trove of anecdotal evidence.
Currently, our dominant frames for contemporary psychedelic use include mental health, self-optimization, and uh you know, entrepreneurial success, and just head on hedonic consumption at at festivals and so on. We tend to see a transcendent experience of unity unitary consciousness as valuable if it leads to entrepreneurial success, peace of mind, or the alleviation of neurosis. But these categories aren't neutral. They reflect our prevailing cultural biases and ideology. While Musk on one level seems to be a hyper rationalist, he has also embraced what's called the simulation hypothesis, which argues that the physical universe we experience is actually an interface with an alien supercomputer. One Musk biographer has noted that Musk doesn't believe we are living in a simulation, he believes that he is living in a simulation.
In other words, he believes he has a privileged ontological status and the rest of us are like non-playable characters or NPCs, sort of serving in his solipsistic delusion. Uh in the sacred canopy, sociologist Peter Berger coined this interesting term plausibility structure for how people today live within partial, overlapping, or even contradictory contradictory belief systems, paradigms, or worlds. Berger writes that worlds are socially constructed and socially maintained. Their continuing reality depends upon specific social processes, namely those processes that ongoingly reconstruct and maintain the particular worlds in question. This base may be called its plausibility structure. Because we don't have a monolithic state anymore that coerces allegiance to a single structure of belief, we have instead multiple worldviews, and these compete in a sort of marketplace of ideas.
Um and uh yeah, the social base that once made a single religious canopy, something taken for granted, has completely dissolved. So instead, we're we sort of swim in this world of many half-formed belief systems without a dominant plausibility structure, and this leaves individuals to construct their own private, often inconsistent, versions of reality. At the same time now in the US with the rise of Christian nationalism, which has somehow merged with this hyper rational hyper hyper rational tech tech fascism, we're seeing an effort to reinstate a kind of monological structure of belief and fealty via indoctrination and mass mind control. Recently, Trump approved legislation around iboga or ibogaine at the White House, and we're seeing psychedelics getting assimilated into this new deep state with people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel as major investors in new pharmaceutical companies focused on psychedelic drug development. Personally, I'm worried that psychedelics are going to to be deployed as part of this effort, not as tools of awakening, but as weapons of this new ideological prison that the regime is trying to impose on us.
But I wanted to sort of point out there's a post-new-age plausibility structure, and this worldview kind of oscillates from hyper-materialism to mysticism and synchronicity, and so on, to ideas like the sort of simulation hypothesis. And you find this in the, you know, a lot of people that go to Burning Man every year, which Elon Musk always goes to. He's there all the time. And this syncretic worldview often uses Jung Carl Jung's lingo and his ideas, but as William Irwin Thompson brilliantly notes, these Jungian concepts often get employed as blanket efforts to neutralize the impact of dangerous and potentially destabilizing occult confrontations. Thompson writes, "The world of psychology and science is a comfort to us because it gives us a way of denying or explaining away the ontology of evil, the ontology of the demonic.
Thanks to Jungian psychology, we can call these beings projections and feel safe and secure that everything in the universe comes for our own great human collective unconscious." But Thompson actually rejects this Jungian framing in which every form of consciousness in the universe is a projection from the human collective unconscious. He proposes instead, you know, kind of following the Ramayana and other texts, that there are creatures of parallel worlds, whether asuras or rakshasas, these are real, they're not under our control. But, Thompson notes, they do like the fact that we don't believe in them because this allows them to gloat over our heads as they take possession of us. And, you know, this also accords with my own direct experiences in many deep psychic states. But, all of this still leaves open the question of what exactly a spirit or demon is, and how could it exist in another dimension of reality?
Jung wrote of archetypes, which are kinds of spirits, as constellations of psychic energy. And the same could be said of astral beings. We can think about it this way, just as we required a developed biological substrate to exist as organic entities, you might have spirits as non-corporeal entities that require a developed mental structure, like human embodied consciousness, to make their appearance. When these conditions present themselves, these beings re-emerge, and they reconstitute themselves out of the under-differentiated fields that the esoteric traditions have always posited beneath ordinary space and time. And that the non-locality demonstrated by quantum experiments is revealed to be more than just a metaphor. I think it's also worth noting the huge variety of spirits defined in different indigenous and ancient cultures, which often have very large taxonomies cataloging within one single tradition.
In writing about the Ramayana, Thompson lists pretas, which are ghosts, yakshas, house spirits, and fertility spirits, Rakshasas, which are demons that eat animals and men, Asuras, which are kind of the equivalent, Thompson says, of titans in ancient Greek mythology, Kumbhandas, which are gnomes and earth elementals, Nagas, underwater spirits, serpent salamanders, Garudas, elemental spirits of air, Gandharvas, heavenly musicians, Apsaras, paradisal maidens of extreme beauty, like the houris of Islam, as well as devas, the gods proper, which includes like Indra, who's sort of comparable to the Olympians under Zeus. The Ramayana, in Thompson's terms, offers a rich and complex anthology where there are not only human beings, there are gods and demons galore. In this intermediate world of dream, imagination, and spiritual vision, the gods and demons are not simply, as we like to think they are, projections from the human collective unconscious. He posits an intermediate realm, Kamaloka, the desire realm, located between our human reality and the higher formless realm of Brahmaloka. Kamaloka is a world of attraction and repulsion, he writes, that keeps the wheel of karma and rebirth spinning.
Language, as we know, shapes social reality, but I think it also shapes this intermediate and sort of quantum indeterminate realm, or at least shapes how we interpret and therefore relate to it. If consciousness is fundamental, and if individual minds are differentiated alters within a single underlying mental field, then the entities met in non-ordinary states are neither hallucinations nor unambiguously external powers. They are like energetic configurations, sentient constructs, constructs with intentionality and agency within the broader field of mentation. The experience of any encounter and the meaning ascribed to it depends on the inner qualities and developmental stage of the experiencer. So, this brings us back to Elon Musk.
One big problem with being the wealthiest guy on the planet is that nobody is likely to to challenge you, and therefore your ego is just going to keep ballooning massively, getting bigger and bigger, because you don't encounter any friction. There's no limitation in any direction to prevent even your dumbest win whims from becoming reality. Uh Noah Hawley recently wrote in The Atlantic about visiting a 2008 gathering convened by Jeff Bezos and the insight he got from that. He wrote, "To be a billionaire is to live in a consequence-free dream world, where the rest of us are merely characters in a story you are writing for yourself." Musk thinks it is a great idea to send his sperm around and pay off dozens of women to have his babies. These are children who will grow up without the close, regular presence of a father, but I guess they get his amazing genes, so it's okay.
Generally, if you When you see Musk, he doesn't look particularly happy or at peace at all. If anything, he seems kind of miserable and tragic. He finds it necessary to lie about his video game skills while he retreats white supremacists and neo-fascists, giving these awful people a spotlight they should be denied. As someone at the highest level of entitlement and arrogance, Musk would be the least likely to imagine that interdimensional entities might be infesting his psyche, driving him toward cruel and barbaric acts that have a catastrophic impact on people and planet. It's been estimated that as many as 12 million people will die as a result of his sudden closing of US aid.
We're in a period that requires a level of deeper just just discernment or discrimination. Not only of the physical and material dimension of reality, but of the subtler levels, which we're learning have the power to inflect, transform, and even unleash catastrophe in the physical world. And I really do have a concern that the mass unprotected use of psychedelics, which I admit I once thought was a great idea, if that's happening without a knowledge of initiatory techniques or shared collective ethos, it may continue to cause havoc in ways we can neither predict nor contain. At this point, if it were up to me, we might step back and care our philosophical and ontological paradigm more carefully and absorb the lessons from indigenous and ancient wisdom traditions and teachings. What the older traditions required of any seeker were like patience, ethical preparation, uh discrimination, philosophical grounding, and so on.
And also the willingness and patience to let the work takes the time it takes. And we're now learning this isn't just archaic pedantry, it's the difference between a healthy initiation and a screeching breach. So, on the one hand, Musk's incredible power remains a massive problem for all of us who want to live in a democratic, egalitarian, empathic civilization instead of a techno-feudal nightmare shaped by the whims of solipsistic billionaires driven insane by their own unleashed compulsions. On the other hand, we can look at Musk as a sad cautionary figure who shows us what can happen when hubris combined with unprotected psychedelic use comes together to produce a broken psyche. A person's whose mental field is crawling with entities, who's projecting pain, confusion, and misery onto the rest of us.
Transcript of the video essay, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.