The Liminalist # 255: Weaponized Anomalies (with Dan Mitchell)

Conversation with Dan Mitchell on high-weirdnesses, family patterns, social engineerings, alien abductions, Whitley Strieber’s many confabulations, the baseline of trauma throughout paranormal encounters.

Part One: Enter the Harlequin (0 – 35 mins)

Where did Dan Mitchell go, the Stanley Kubrick effect, the end of Luminosity, a life of high weirdness, Jasun Offut, black-eyed kids, enter the Harlequin, the fascination of archetypes, invisible dimensions, deep into the occult, a developed bullshit detector, Strieber’s influence on abductees, dealing with true believers, keeping it liminal, End Times Christians, early abuse & sense of shame, researching demons in the shadows, trauma-based childhood, the quest for understanding, consulting with father, legally blind.

Part Two: Hijacked Minds (35 mins – 1 hr 7 mins)

A weird neighborhood, screen memories and dark objects, the Harlequin’s hands, a night visitation, an irrational fear of aliens, immersion in Strieber, strange people on the edges of reality, unfathomable infant memories, the secret guardian, in fear of the father, an imaginal protector, manipulated memories, Strieber’s crucial fiction, autonomous psychic fragments, a murderous transvestite, smiley-face killers, hijacked minds, New Age contagions.

Part Three: A Beautiful Mind Full of Bullshit(1 hr 7 mins – 1 hr 42 min)

Process Church, the disappearance of Kayelyn Louder, Ledger and Killing Joke, the 11th path of the harlequin, the dark side of New Age spirituality, Mother Strangled, Strieber’s lack of humility, Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows,” Strieber’s early interview, a false wholeness, a fragmented childhood, family introjections, more APFs, shared hallucinations, Ed Conroy’s Report on Communion, Strieber’s implant, a beautiful mind filled with bullshit, Jeffrey Kripal, a green light to trauma, initiation rituals, Crowley in the desert, missing people, broken by one’s own prose.

Part Four: A Procrustean Path (1 hr 42 min – end)

Strieber’s implant, the reality of entities, a cult following, reading Communion, an imagined telepathic link-up, a martyr syndrome, the spat with Pinchbeck, contact with Ed Conroy, Strieber’s powerful family, changes in The Key, policy of ignorance, South Park attacks, inflated ego reactions, the threat of disbelief, Prisoner of Infinity vs. The Super Natural, a new religion, evolutionary disembodiment, disguising escapism as transcendence, a procrustean path, opening an unwholesome portal, weaponized anomalies, hits from Raytheon, Strieber’s Catholicism, Pasulka’s American Cosmic.

More Dan-talk

Songs: “Pirates” by Entertainment for the Braindead; “Dumbo” by Amanita Dodola; “Dry Dirt” by The Bones of JR Jones; “Us Ones In Between, Live,” by Sunset Rubdown; “Changes” by Short Hand.

11 thoughts on “The Liminalist # 255: Weaponized Anomalies (with Dan Mitchell)”

  1. yes….fantastic

    left me wondering about the nature of screen memories and or “screen narratives”

    there was a point in the discussion where I thought Jung’s notion of the “psychoid” may have been helpful…..a “bridge between psyche and matter”

    Reply
  2. I would love a fleshing out of the book American Cosmic. Yes very much so.
    I read it and took it for a story and a tainted one at that but I only dabble in the ufology world and so yea I would appreciate your insights here.
    Thanks

    Reply
  3. Great interview. Fascinating to hear about Dan’s life and his post Luminosity thoughts on his writing and trauma. I felt the same about the nightmare of taking on too many conspiratorial ideas into one’s mind and steered clear of them.

    Listening to this podcast brought up a memory of the fear associated with the threat of violence from a father from when I was young, specifically to a beating I received from my father.

    There was an incident when I was young when a neighhour (a police officer) appeared at our door one night to consult with my father (a police officer) over something I said to his young son one evening (he was younger than me, joking I asked him to run around the street without his clothes). After the neighbour left me I got a fair beating by my father in front of my mother and grandmother that seemed to last hours. The whole thing was very surreal but left some of deep shame/fear/trauma that I could not understand.

    Last year I discovered that the only satanic killing ever to happen in Ireland happened in our Parish a few years earlier to that. This incredibly disturbing killing of a young boy was covered up (probably by the influence on the Catholic Church on the Gardaí and the fear of a “satanic panic”, the killing also happened across from the local church). The Gardai covered up the story without having a public investigation.

    https://www.broadsheet.ie/tag/lorcan-bale/
    https://dialogueireland.wordpress.com/2011/10/19/public-servant-and-pillar-of-the-church-guilty-of-the-nations-most-gruesome-ever-ritual-murder/

    Finding this out and speaking to my father about that murder years later gave me an insight into the fear and strangeness surrounding that event. I didn’t ask him about the beating I got but I felt he remembered it. I resented him for years over it.

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  4. Dan has done an exceptionally good job of scrubbing the internet of his Luminosity, I’ve been trying to track down some kind of comprehensive archive since this interview with no luck. I hope that someday he finds a means of releasing that material that makes him comfortable.

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  5. I really wish there was a way to read all of Dan’s old blogs. I’m ever the curious one, and a Macedonian girl I knew once recommended I read them, and she had archived a handful of pages, but by then they were gone. Seeking Dan’s writings have become a bit of a grail project for me, so hopefully he one day makes them available or I find someone with an archive so I can sate this nagging curiosity.

    Reply
    • Justin,

      I think that a lot of what you heard about those old posts may be mostly hype, some of which was started by me.   While there were some intense articles, I still feel that most of it wasn’t very good.  I do have some of my old posts, but not all of them.  It is unlikely that I would ever post them again because they are dishonest.  Not intentionally dishonest, but more like I was gradually peeling off rotting layers of my own personality. I wouldn’t want to revisit that. I highly respect writers that can read their old material and not be overly critical of it.  Honestly, I am a weird dude, with equally weird idiosyncrasies.  I once read that the painter Joe Coleman will sometimes spend hours meticulously painting a pocket watch only to paint over it with a pocket.  That sort of sums up how my mind functions.

      Reply

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