New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove May 17, 2022 Charles Upton’s first books of poetry were published in 1968 and 1969 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Light Books in San Francisco. He was then considered the youngest member of the “beat generation” as he was still in high school. He has subsequently written many books associated with the traditionalist school of spirituality including The Science of the Greater Jihad, System of the Antichrist, Vectors of the Counter-Initiation, Folk Metaphysics, and Alien Disclosure Deception: The Metaphysics of Social Engineering. His website is https://charles-upton.com/. Here he notes that René Guénon wrote about several types of initiation that deviate from authenticity: anti-initiation (i.e., materialism), pseudo-initiation (i.e., fantasy), and counter-initiation (i.e., potentially, if not actually, evil). He proposes that counter-initiation is the ultimate conspiracy theory – the conspiracy behind all other harmful conspiracies. He provide a number of examples, including Satanism, UFO cults, and Aztec ritual sacrifice. He argues that Sufism, when removed from its essential Islamic context – as well as other efforts to form universal religions – may be approaching counter-initiation. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of a doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” awarded by the University of California, Berkeley, 1980. He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition on the best evidence for postmortem human survival. (Recorded on April 30, 2022)