In the early twentieth century, Jesuit priest and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin predicted that humanity was evolving toward a “thinking layer” around the Earth—the noosphere—that would give rise to a new kind of human he called the “ultra-human.” A hundred years later, that vision is having an unexpected revival in Silicon Valley.
This week, Tami Simon speaks with Dr. Diana Pasulka, who writes under the name D.W. Pasulka, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and author of American Cosmic, Encounters, and the new book The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny. For years, Pasulka has studied the uncanny overlap between centuries of religious testimony—angel encounters, apparitions, mystical visions—and modern reports of UFO contact, and what that overlap might mean for how we understand both AI and our own evolution.
Join Tami and Diana to explore:
- Teilhard de Chardin’s century-old vision of the noosphere and the “ultra-human”—and why tech entrepreneurs are reviving it today
- The pattern match between medieval angel-contact accounts and modern UFO experiencer reports
- Why religious revelation has historically been far less “positive” than we assume—and what that says about today’s abduction literature
- The difference between relating to AI as a tool versus as a companion—and the “chemical relationship” Pasulka sees forming between young people and AI
- Why one NASA historian believes truly advanced extraterrestrial intelligence might be permanently incommensurable with our own
- Pasulka’s own time horizon for mainstream public acceptance of extraterrestrial life
- Why she argues that the possibility of UFOs being real may be the best thing to happen to religion in two hundred years
Whether you come to this conversation as a skeptic, a believer, or simply someone trying to make sense of how AI is reshaping our inner lives, Pasulka offers a provocative lens on what we might be evolving into—and what we stand to lose along the way.
Listen now and step into the edge of our own evolution. →
This conversation offers genuine transmission, not just concepts about awakening, but the palpable presence of realized teachers exploring the growing edge of spiritual understanding together, and originally aired on Sounds True One.
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