experiment Archives - See You On The Other Side

Angels feel like something for little kids and Christmas trees. It’s Della Reese performing heartwarming miracles on cheesy Sunday night television or the goofy Clarence from It’s A Wonderful Life. Or even a hearbroken Nicolas Cage staring forelornly at the ocean from City of Angels. They’re something silly, like a figurine in your Grandma’s cabinet or laying on a cloud in Heaven playing a harp. And of course the most famous painting of angels in the world doesn’t help.

Raphael’s cherubim from The Sistine Madonna aren’t even the focus of the painting, they’re just looking up at the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus, but they’re the part that everyone remembers

That’s the touchy-feely Hollywood version. But the word “angel” just comes from the Greek word for messenger which is all the angels were, translated to from the original Bible stories in Hebrew. And in the Old Testament, they’re terrifying. They are the instruments of God’s will. Which means they do things like annihilate Sodom and Gomorrah when God thinks the city is too wicked or defend the Garden of Eden with a flaming sword. They are the forces of Nature carrying out the vengeance of the Almighty, supernatural soldiers of Heaven.

But that’s just the Christian version. Angels are in almost every religion as spiritual beings who carry divine messages, which are sometimes helpful and sometimes bad news. Even Satanists have angels, but they’re atheists who use the fallen angels from Christian theology as metaphors. In fact, angels aren’t even mentioned as having wings for the most part, that’s just a creation of artists in the Middle Ages.

Author and therapist, Corin Grillo

Corin Grillo was a licensed psychotherapist struggling with depression of her own when she prayed to the angels for something that would transform her life from the pit of sadness that she was living in. Shortly after, she witnessed something in the street that she could only describe as a miracle and she began to start seeing signs of angelic influence wherever she went. That miracle in the street altered her life forever and she began to climb out of her depression and find start finding meaning and purpose in life.

Corin started introducing angel invocation into her psychotherapy sessions and seeing results with patients. Whatever was going on, it was working and it led her to develop an online forum where people can connect with each other and try to share miracles and developments in their own lives. That formed the basis of The Angel Experiment, Corin’s guidebook on a 21-day program to try to invoke the power and healing of the angels in your own life.

The Angel Experiment: A 21-Day Magical Adventure To Heal Your Life

Corin says that you don’t have to be religious to experience angelic activity in your own life, you just have to go through with the rituals and meditation. After reading the book and going on my own Angel Experiment, it’s interesting because I feel like it’s like Chaos Magick. You’re invoking entities, you’re setting your intentions, you’re journaling your feelings and thoughts looking for synchronicities that happened and gratitude in the good things in your life.

Much like Chaos Magick, or as Dr. Dean Radin talks about in Real Magic, it doesn’t really matter if you have rock solid faith or not, there’s something in the ritual that makes changes happen in your life. When you perform a ritual and set an intention and you try to invoke a supernatural being to intercede on your behalf, your subconscious goes to work. Whether it’s angels helping you or you’re praying to the Saints to ask God for a favor, or it’s one of the entities in the Lesser Key of Solomon, it’s the same thing. Supernatural or not, these prayers are the basis of faith and Corin Grillo’s Angel Experiment is as good of a place to start as any to get some meditation and positivity going every day.

In this conversation we discuss:

The miracle that started it all for her and pulled her out of her depression.
What happened when Corin started introducing angel work into her psychotherapy practice?
The importance of a “sacred space” in your home
Who are her favorite angels?
What does an angel sound like when she channels them?

Corin’s story of overcoming her melancholy and keeping fighting the good fight when she was thinking of quitting it all, is heartening whether you believe in angels or not. Her idea of everyday miracles that people can see in their own life is a way of showing gratitude for the good things that do happen. Her story plus the thought of angels as warriors (with flaming swords!) inspired this week’s track, “The Battle of Everyday”.

This is the battle of everyday
this is the war to fight the urge to end the pain
this is a call to arms to say
a hole in your head doesn’t make you Hemingway

Everyday everyday
We need more than a pill to make it go away
are you safe are you safe
Sometimes you want to disappear, sometimes you want to be erased

Tomorrow never comes
We get one moment that we can ever change
Please just don’t give up
and the better angels of our nature will fight with us one more day

This is the battle of everyday
this is the conflict of willpower versus hurt
this is the struggle where we pray
for the strength to keep ourselves out of the dirt.

Everyday everyday
where every single victory feels like it’s just in vain
are you safe are you safe
You’re not just up against the whole world, you’re fighting your own brain.

Tomorrow never comes
We get one moment that we can ever change
Please just don’t give up
and the better angels of our nature will fight for us one more day

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We saw on Facebook the other day that every Ghostbusters film has come out in the same month as a Star Trek film. Star Trek 3: The Search for Spock came out a week before the first Ghostbusters and Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier came our a week before Ghostbusters 2. Unfortunately, Star Trek 3 and 5 are known as the kinda bad ones so we don’t know what that means for Star Trek Beyond, but since it’s opening a week after the Ghostbusters reboot, well, we just had to do back-to-back episodes ourselves!

And it’s not like we’ve never talked about Star Trek before, our Leonard Nimoy tribute episode covered a good deal of our Trekker-related tendencies, but we decided to devote our first full episode to the big daddy of space exploration series and how they used psychic powers within the show. And even though Star Trek Into Darkness had some pretty weak sauce, we’re hoping that with a script written by supergeek Simon Pegg (alternate-universe Scotty, himself) Star Trek Beyond is the film we’ve been hoping for.

star trek beyond gary mitchell — Hey, it’s Sally Kellerman, one day she would grow up to be the completely unbelievable love interest for Rodney Dangerfield in Back To School!

Psychic powers are baked into the Star Trek formula, in fact, when the pilot episode of the original Star Trek was rejected by NBC and they asked for a new story, psychic powers were the plotline! The extremely evil-sounding Gary Mitchell(!) portrayed a villain who was warped by his access to God-like telepathy and mind control.

The most famous Star Trek psychic move of course is the Vulcan Mind Meld. That’s where a Vulcan touches the head of another person and they can transfer memories, emotions, and in the case of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan), even the personality and soul of the Vulcan. Spock mind melds with Kirk, McCoy, and even a silicon-based giant pizza monster called the Horta in the classic episode, “Devil In The Dark”.

spock horta pizza star trek beyond — I can feel how much you hate anchovies…

Star Trek: The Next Generation brought psychic powers to the bridge in the form of Counselor Deanna Troi, the half-human half Betazoid empath who would advise Captain Picard on what the aliens they were talking to were feeling.

counselor deanna troi star trek beyond — Glamour Shots from the future!

In the writer’s guide for Star Trek: The Next Generation they said that they wanted to keep the stories scientifically plausible and that:

2. We do not do stories about psi-forces or mysterious psychic powers

No matter how fantastic the events in a story, the explanation must be extrapolated from a generally accepted science theory. (We have accepted the telepathy of Counselor Deanna Troi because many reputable scientists have acknowledged the possibility of such abilities, but you will note that we have limited Troi to “reading” only emotions.)

When it comes to science fiction, half of the battle is keeping a consistent set of physics in the universe where technological hurdles have been leapt that we currently haven’t foggiest of how to fathom (like warp speed or time travel), so when it comes to psychic powers, Star Trek had a physical medium through which psychic powers could travel. Here’s how they said telepathy worked on an old site about Star Trek: Voyager:

Star Trek science consultant and writer André Bormanis has revealed that telepathy within the Star Trek universe works via the “psionic field.” According to Bormanis, a psionic field is the “medium” through which unspoken thoughts and feelings are communicated through space. Some humanoids can tap into this field through a kind of sense organ located in the brain (e.g. the paracortex). In the same manner that Human eyes can sense portions of the electromagnetic field, telepaths can sense portions of the psionic field.

star trek beyond telepathic pitcher plant — The giant psychic space organism that almost ate the Voyager.

This week, we’re trying out our first See You On The Other Side psi experiment. We made a little 5-minute meditation track inspired by Star Trek‘s various themes to help your mind into the Alpha state – which is the state that some people believe can enhance telepathy – so we want to see if we can help you get results.

Find a friend to listen to this YouTube video through headphones at the exact same time as you and have one person be a sender and one person be the receiver.

As the sender, pick a one-word message to send. It could be any word you like. Listen to the track and focus on that message and images behind its meaning.
The receiver will then write down a paragraph of what they felt and what their thoughts were during the five minutes.
Send the one-word message and the paragraph to us over email or Twitter the results on a future podcast. Feel free to send us an audio file too, we’d love to be able to hear your voice!

We know it’s not hard science, but we thought that Episode 101 and Star Trek Beyond was the perfect time to inaugurate some psychic research of our own!

See You On The Other Side

Tag Archives: experiment

277 – The Angel Experiment: Everyday Miracles With Corin Grillo

101 – Star Trek: Beyond The Psychic Powers Of The Final Frontier

A rock band's journey into the afterlife, UFOs, entertainment, and weird science.