The Journey 138. Matt Vaughn: High Strangeness in Theory & Practice

Publisher R. A. “Kris” Millegan speaks with Matt Vaughn about Edgar Cayce, Aleister Crowley, the shamanistic literature read by young people in the 1960s, THE ILLUMINATUS! TRILOGY by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, the Satanic Panic of the 1980s (“a moral panic consisting of over 12,000 unsubstantiated cases of Satanic ritual abuse starting in the United States in the 1980s” – Wikipedia), and other aspects of the paranormal.

Matt is the author of the upcoming (early 2024) MY COSMIC TRIGGER: High Strangeness in Theory & Practice, about happenings so uncanny, they are deemed “utterly absurd.”

Matt, a paranormal researcher since elementary school, immersed in shamanistic spiritual practices for almost three decades, has a 20-plus-year career as a mental health professional. He’s also a podcaster, a poet, a screenwriter, a member of an avantgarde rock band, and a standup comedian who has performed extensively in both Atlanta, GA and Istanbul, Turkey. Follow him at linktr.ee/mattvaughn.

Kris: When I was in high school, I started reading about Edgar Cayce and Aleister Crowley. Edgar’s kind of mystic and Aleister’s talking about magick. My daddy was selling the Encyclopedia Britannica. And neither Cayce nor Crowley were in there. [They later appeared in online versions.]

Then comes THE ILLUMINATUS TRILOGY [by Shea and Wilson], talking about secret societies. I read that with gusto. You [on the other hand] started looking at these kinds of things in elementary school.

Matt: I had always been interested in the paranormal; ghost-hunting, bigfoot, things like that. But what really sparked my interest was the Satanic Panic … in 5^th grade. I had the Son of Sam’s biography. I’m from a small Southern town in western North Carolina. It’s very Christian, fundamentalist based. So, the Satanic Panic was a big deal and that’s what got me interested in reading about all that.

Kris: Fundamentalism lends itself to this whole black and white outlook. Once people start basing everything just on belief, [things] get very interesting. What do you think is going to happen in the world?

Matt: One of the things that’s going to be in the book is the distinction between Apocalypse and Armageddon. Apocalypse is lifting of the veil. That is a good thing. Truth is coming out. TrineDay is part of that process. Literally revealing truth.

Armageddon is holy war, which, in my humble opinion, has started, which is global nuclear war among the Abrahamic religions. It’s not officially started, but history will say that it started as of now.

We want Apocalypse, not Armageddon. So, I say we surf the synchromystic signs of high strangeness into the Apocalypse, lifting the veil, thereby avoiding Armageddon.

Kris: I’m into getting a more peaceful world here that’s more in line with what the people want. You know, my daddy told me that these secret societies were involved in everything, and he was Head of Research and Analysis for East Asia [for the CIA]. He was in Langley, in D.C, able to collect all the intelligence that all the station chiefs and all the section chiefs [submitted], and he was able to see that, so he had a very, very wide view.

How I look at history, there have been people that have joined together into secret societies that have tried to influence our history.