Tag Archives: Luis Minero

New Music Inspired By The Podcast – American Monsters!

So this weekend our band, Sunspot, released our latest EP, American Monsters. What we’ve been doing is creating song demos for the podcast for every episode and then after a few months, we pick our three favorites and go into the studio and record them. We’ve always used the paranormal and pop culture as an influence for our music, I mean we’ve made fan videos for everything from Torchwood to Star Trek: Generations, so our love of sci-fi and the occult has always been baked right into the music. We were having a lot of the discussions that we have in the podcast already (usually in the van at 3 o’clock in the morning as we were driving through the middle of nowhere) so we thought we might as well talk about it too!

sunspot music

We called the EP American Monsters because we thought it was a really catchy name and the episode we did wth Linda Godfrey was one of our favorites. She’s one of our favorite investigators and authors into the weird (and bonus, she’s from Wisconsin too!) Since she covered plenty of American monster legends in her book, we thought we’d take the symbolism of the wild creatures that she writes about like Bigfoot and werewolves. While most of us won’t encounter bipedal canines, most of us face outrage and anger on the Internet every day.

American Monsters: An Interview with Linda Godfrey

While I’m not a fan of the phrase “political correctness” (it’s mostly just a code word in the culture war), I do believe in diversity of opinion and that unpopular opinions (even ones that offend people) have a right to be heard, not shouted down just because some people don’t like it. You don’t win the war of ideas through crushing dissent, you win by convincing people you have the best idea. That’s the essence of our “American Monsters” and it’s a track that’s very classic Midwestern Power-Pop (think Cheap Trick, we even do a sly play on  “Dream Police” in the song.)

Silver Screen Saucers: An Interview With Robbie Graham

“Seeing Is Believing” was inspired by our conversation with the author of Silver Screen SaucersRobbie Graham. It’s a synth-rock Disinformation Age conspiracy anthem about media manipulation. Of course, the song is about how the UFO mythology of the past fifty years was exactly what the CIA wanted us to believe (something even the new X-Files embraced), but it really could be about any story that we get distracted by to take our mind off something that would enrage us.

Alien disclosure would be awesome, but I don’t know if it’s as important as knowing the food pyramid we grew up with was heavily influenced by the meat and dairy lobby, that the Drug War is necessary (and hasn’t destroyed millions of lives), or that the NSA has an actual Artificial Intelligence program named after Skynet from The Terminator. More people know the domestic grosses of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice than know these things.

Have an Out of Body Experience: With Luis Minero

I’ve never had an out-of-body experience but one of these days I’m going to, dammit! Dr. Luis Minero gave some simple steps to attempt an OBE in our podcast interview and one of the things that struck me was when he said you once you reach the right state, you just “push yourself out of your body” and that seemed like a cool thing to express in a song.

Have you ever been in a situation so traumatic that you would do anything to escape but you couldn’t physically leave? Something terrifying or horrible? A lot of people say that when something like that happens, they get that detached feeling of being somewhere else, watching the thing happen to them  – that’s called “derealization” and it happens often during traumatic moments. That’s “Push”, a song about escaping those moments, forcing yourself out of your body to be able to face what you need to.

Anyway, we just thought you might like a little background on the tracks. You can download the new EP for free at http://www.sunspotuniverse.com right now.

If you’re interested in learning more about our band, Sunspot, we have won the Wisconsin Area Music Industry‘s Artist of the Year (an award won by other cheese state luminaries like Violent Femmes, Garbage, and Bon Iver) and have won also Best Rock Album from the Madison Music Awards three times. Some of the latest reviews we’ve gotten are:

“Sunspot learned to embrace its charming weirdness… the band members are making some of the best music of their career.”
– Isthmus, Madison, WI

“They sound oh so, familiar and like nothing you’ve ever heard before.”
– Power Play Magazine, UK

“A perfect piece of Pop Rock.”
– Get Ready To Rock Blog 

We’re really proud of the new music and if you enjoy it, please let your friends know about the songs as well (you can find a bunch of ways to share it on social media right here). Most of all, thanks for listening!

56 – Have an Out of Body Experience: With Luis Minero

Out of Body Experiences (OBEs) are one of the least talked about paranormal phenomena, a lot of people have so much invested into the idea of your consciousness leaving your body at the time of death, that we forget that some people claim that they can leave their body and travel while they’re alive! 

It’s been called astral projection and spirit walking as well, and it’s something we talked about in the episode with Garnet Schulhauser and his spirit guide, Albert.  There’s an excellent cinematic representation of an out of body experience with Jake Busey and Michael J. Fox in Peter Jackson’s The Frighteners (which if you haven’t seen, you should probably go check it out, because it’s a great movie.)

But it’s also part of the Kevin Bacon/Kiefer Sutherland/Julia Roberts paranormal “classic”, Flatliners. That’s a decent one to watch if you’re interested in some late 80s/early 90s nostalgia. I thought it was pretty scary in Seventh Grade too, if that makes it more enticing.

Neuropsychologists call this “leaving of the body” a Doppelgänger experience, where you feel an illusory body leave your physical sense. Scientists have used these disassociative experiences to learn more about how the human mind constructs its sense of self. People experience this state through meditation, extreme physical duress, episodes of being near death, and  hallucinogenic substances. But others claim that its nature is more mystical, that our souls and consciousness can leave our bodies and  we have conversation in this episode is with Luis Minero, who’s the head of the International Academy of Consciousness, which is an organization dedicated to investigating the mysteries of psychic phenomena and human potential.

Luis first had an out of body experience as a adolescent, he was laying down in his room and all of a sudden he felt that he was on the other side of the room. This started happening to him on a consistent basis afterwards and he became fascinated with the paranormal.

Luis details one of the ways to have an out of body experience.

  1. Get into a quiet room and put yourself in a comfortable spot where you can meditate.
  2. Focus your concentration on different points of the body (focusing your concentration = energy) and start moving that concentration from your head to your feet slowly.
  3. Increase the speed of moving the energy from top to bottom until it feels like your body is vibrating quickly.  Okay, we’d love for anyone to give this a try and see what happens. I’ve never had an out of body experience (my sister has though and we’ll have to ask her about that on a future episode) and I’m definitely going to give this a shot in my meditation exercises sometime.

If you’d like to learn more about the subject and more of Minero’s techniques, check out his book, Demystifying the Out-of-Body Experience: A Practical Manual for Exploration and Personal Evolution right here.

The song for this episode is “Push” by Sunspot.

Hot breath on my neck
I shut my eyes
turn all the way inward,
go deep inside.
and my face is wet,
how I want this to be
anyone but me
someone else’s body

to push push push away and out of here
I need to push push push away and out of here

From up on high
I can see where I lie,
Some kind of fantasy,
pushed right out of body

I went so far inside
that I lost my mind
I came out the other side
that’s where I hide.
that’s where I hide.

I’m watching myself now,
somewhere outside my brain,
free of the terror,
free of the pain.
Turn away from the scene,
I set off on my own,
into infinity,
beyond divinity.

to push push push away and out of here
I need to push push push away and out of here

From up on high
I can see where I lie,
Some kind of fantasy,
pushed right out of body

I went so far inside
that I lost my mind
I came out the other side
that’s where I hide.
that’s where I hide.