Welcome to Destiny. Now here's your host, Cliff Dunning. Hey, how are you. This is Cliff. Come on in and let's talk. Got a good one for you this week. A new book has been circulating the internet. It's called The Occult Elvis, The Mystical and Magical Life of the King, by Miguel Connor.
This is our program today, and you know, we always talk about tools for transformation, being able to access the higher levels of consciousness, of physicality, of spirituality through practices, practices like meditation, different kinds of yogic practices, taichi, you know, biohacking the body. You know what I get. I mean, we cover so many different subjects every single week that
it's all about enhancements. It's all about enhancements. And would you believe that the King, the King of rock and roll, Elvis Presley, was into this stuff. He was a meditator, he was into yoga, he was in the martial arts, he was a black belt in karate and even got into some situations where he had to use his martial arts to protect himself and protect those people around him. We're talking all about that today. But what I thought
was interesting is I had no clue. And this is one of the reasons that this book called Elvis is doing so well and there's so much great interest in it. First of all, you know this here's a phenomenal, phenomenally talented singer musician, and you know, his life ended so tragically, he died at forty two. But what was he doing other than creating music and singing and doing live concerts. He was very very much interested in metaphysics, in the occult,
in spirituality. And it's so funny. I was with a friend the other day and we were looking at this spoken we were like, Oh, there's no way this is all, you know, fabrication. But when you look at the life that he'd led, it was very much into the other levels of consciousness and the other aspects of transformation, of
moving beyond the mundane physicality of everyday reality. And he read people like Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner and Ananda Yogananda, and he also was very much involved in spiritual growth. So it's a fascinating topic we're bringing up today, which brings me back to what we're doing here on the program. Every single week we are talking about some form of consciousness, physical enhancement. We had somebody talking about sleep. We've had people talking, I mean really since Destiny has been around
since twenty twenty one. Every single week we have somebody who is presenting information on the ancients, our ancestors, how they lived, how they worked, and how they were very much different than we are today. I think that one of the big issues that I have today is we're too much relying on technology, and you have to wonder what's artificial's going to lend itself to. Is it going to be a database that we can call on to
provide us collective information on a topic. I'm waiting for it to really break out and give us details that are original, original thoughts, original information where a collection of data is consumed and then original thinking comes out. This may be what a lot of the fears about is that when that happens, the intelligence, the brain, the artificial intelligence is sentient, it's conscious, it's able to process. Now we've had Matthew James Bailey, we have him every year
talking about artificial intelligence two point zero. He basically says that this is not a something to worry about because consciousness does not necessarily mean that they are divine soul, which is where we get a lot of our information from our many lifetimes that we live. But you have to wonder will there be a time when the data comes through uniquely. I'm still waiting for that. I mean, it's fun to use artificial intelligence. It is a wonderful tool,
but how far will it go? We just don't know. Can we use it as a transformational tool. Some people are writing with it. I was writing with it for a while. I didn't find it that exceptional, but maybe I need to go back and review it. So, but today's program is on Elvis Presley, a part that we just didn't understand about him, his occult nature, his metaphysical nature, his spiritual nature, and some of the truly unique things that he did while he was alive. His interests are varied,
and I think you're gonna like this program. So today's program is the occult Elvis and my guest is Miguel Connor. Hey. Spring is just around the corner where there's going to be getting better and better as we continue on into the year, and this means it's time to think about getting away on a vacation. Earth Ancients has the best tours you could ever imagine and we are talking about Turkey in summer June twenty second through July second. This
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There's a new book out on the internet. It's kind of catching fire. It's called The Occult Elvis, The Mystical and Magical Life of the King, and we have the author today to talk about this book. I found it interesting just because it's a huge departure from the man we know as the King of rock and roll, and I had fun looking at this material. But I'll tell you what we've come across today is a real, real interesting look at Elvis Presley Mike. My guest today is
Miguel Connor. He is a writer, voice over artist, and host of the popular podcast Eon Bite Gnostic Radio. His other books include Voices of Gnostissism, Stargazer, Heretic, and The Executioner's Daughter. And I'm looking forward to chatting with him on this book. Miguil, Welcome to Destiny. Great to see you.
Yeah, thanks for having me on. As I say, this ain't your grandmother's Elvis different?
Where did you come across this material, my friend, because you know, we think of Presley as this you know, rock and roll icon referred by so many different musicians today and other creative people. And you know, I'm I'm a person who's into metaphysics, and I understand that call. We interview a lot of people on the occult on this on this channel. But where did you dig this stuff up? Where did you find this stuff?
It's hidden in plain sight, it's not it's uh, it's all over the place. I mean, we both know the tabloid Elvis. Remember the days you'd go to the grocery store and Elvis was dropped off by some aliens. And Elvis is alive in Argentina. He was, He was conspiracy theory before conspiracy theory was cool. Always always a pioneer, that Elvis. But no, this is all found in very lauded places, from very established biographies, from historians, books that
have sold millions of copies. This information is found in Family and Friends. You can find this in Priscilla's book. In fact, the movie that came out by Sophia Koppola about a year ago has ten minutes of Elvis being a complete mystic guru. And you find it in bodyguards, friends, good articles in the Guardian, and all these things about Elvis. Also I made sure happen when there were eyewitnesses around him.
It wasn't like he was alone and said something. And there was always people seeing his supernatural abilities, as occult interests, his meditation practices, and again it's all there for the taking. But I felt called to grab all these stories and experiences and put him together. And the rabbit hole was very deep because the more I looked, the more I found, the more and the more I saw, and it was an incredible experience.
Did you find We'll talk about some of the people that influenced him, but did you find passages of associates or friends who were actually spiritual in nature who he kind of cultivated different unique friendships he did.
I mean from an early start, Elvis was a very sensitive and curious boy. He liked to ask questions about Jesus and God even when he made it. And when he was in the army, he started he turned to believing in incarnation, started reading books like Khalil gil Brings the Prophet because it brought him spiritual relief from the death of his mother, or tried aroma therapy. So he was always very open minded. And even in his background as a Pentecostal Christian, the idea of an altered state
of mind and healing with your hands was there. I mean, it was nothing alien to Elvis. And he talks about how he had the ability to ask to travel as a kid and a teenage and the ability to hear voices and gain premonitions, and he got this from his mother, and his mother always told him, don't tell anybody. This is not going to fly well at Tupelo, Mississippi in the nineteen forties or fifties, right, so keep it down.
In fact, he used to wash his mouth with soap if he started talking about the voices in his head. So he was already the framework was there for Elvis to be open. And once he got famous, and he felt betrayed by his own religion because when he came out he caused a firestorm. I mean, he was the most popular person on earth, but he was also the most dangerous person on earth because he was upending the establishment, the status quo. Frank Sinatra hated him and said it's
a flash in the pan. Billy Graham, the famous evangelical luminary denounced him publicly. His own pastor turned on him and said he was possessed by the devil. He was burned, and so by being curious, by being burned, he it was almost effortless for in the early sixties for Elvis to go into a broader spirituality. And that's when he met Larry Geller, who would become his spiritual teacher. He met Diamatta, who was the successor of Yogananda, and with
these two individuals, he was off to the races. He was reading Manly p Hall, Freemasonry, gnostic texts, Kabbala, Taoism, Buddhism. I mean, he really had the mind of a scholar. And even again, biographers and family members said that he had a very sharp mind. He could absorb things. When he would go on tour or movie theater or at the movie studio, he always had a higher group of workers carrying two hundred books on the occult. This was
very serious people. His spirituality was just as important as his music career. So that's yeah, and yeah, those two Damat and Larry Giller we the big ones, and the rest was just books and practice.
Talk about his mother, Gladys because she was extremely important and influential in his life. Will you give us an overview about her? Of course, when she died it was devastating for Elvis. But was she involved in any groups or did she trigger this interest in his wanting to know more about spiritual, metaphysical, occult subjects.
No, I would say no. Again, the Pentecostalism was right there. She recognized that they had these gifts some lineage I call it witch shaman, whatever you want to call it, gifted people that they had extra sensory abilities. But she kept it touched. But for the most part, she was very much into the Pentecostal tradition and that kind of created Elvis because she had a premonition when she was pregnant something bad was going to happen. So she was
going to church all day. And this is ours in a Pentecostal church, it's Dan saying it's going into an altered state of mind. It's ours. And Elvis was part of He was a twin and his other twin was Jesse. So in his mother's belly, he's hearing guitar music and jumping around, and I mean, and people forget that in those days, other Christians hated Pentecostalism because they used to say,
it's just mixing up Jesus and sex. And whenever you would be gripped by the Holy Spirit and you would start go on the isle and go, it was called rock and rolling, So we know where this started. So that was a huge influence on Elvis, going to church even as a kid and seeing all this weird Jesus sex stuff. But tragically when he was born, before he was born, Jesse, his twin came out and came out
still born. They had to have this birth at the house that were so poor, dirt poor, couldn't afford a hospital. And then thirty five minutes later Elvis came out. And of course that was a huge impact on Elvis because it's called a twinless survivor. You're growing. You come out of the world with the survivor's guilt. You wondered what happened. Part of you is always missing you. It's a it's a very hard condition. Others have suffered that called like Liberachi,
Philip K. Dick and you are. You become a very spiritual person. You're looking for the bigger questions in life. You want to know why this happened, what is my destiny? But twinless survivors tend to be workaholics, self destructive, prone to addiction, can't make connections because it's it's a very powerful state. And Jesse became sort of as guiding light as Damon or high yourself. You would appear in dreams,
premonitions and all that. But back to Gladys. She went to the hospital after that, and she was told she would never have children, so she became a very possessive person. And that's what you call enmeshment or lethal enmeshment, and that was a form of abuse. She was physically abusive to Elvis. But in Meshmann basically doesn't allow the child to grow and create ego boundaries, and the child becomes
like this proxy husband, the king, you know what I mean. Ye, But their egos don't form and they live in this extreme world of being the king and being this childish, immature toddler. So that right there really affected Elvis. It was very oedipal, you know, to say the truth. And when she died, of course, Elvis felt like another part of him and died, and it was very hard on him. And all these things sort of led them to be
who Elvis was. As I say in the book, it's almost like Elvis had no choice but to be Elvis from the very moment he was born.
Talk about his brother Jesse. I had no clue that Elvis was a twin. And you write about Elvis considering Jesse kind of a psychic twin, where, in other words, he would come through. And I don't know if you read passages where Elvis was saying I have a premonition that Jesse was telling me this, or before I went on stage Jesse said this. How affected was he with this influence from his dead twin brother.
Yeah, Elvis never really really gave hard details. I mean, there are other predictions he made that I give him the book, But it was almost like his conscious it led him to make the right decision. He would have dreams like he would be in concert and Jesse would be next to him, and that was right before he got famous. Or he'd have dreams where he was in a funeral and he'd see Jesse and that was during a time of turmoil. So things like that. But it
was a good feeling. And I mean, when you look at Elvis his career, you've got ad meant, you know, luck and talent ain't enough to the stratosphere of the heights that he went. It's almost like he knew what decisions to make and where to lean on artistically and so forth.
Would you say Elvis was psychic.
Yeah, he definitely portrayed psychic abilities, and again this is well documented. He could, you'd say, read the room. He knew what people were going to say before they said it. He knew exactly what mood they were going to be in. Yeah, it's almost like he was connected. He really did believe in telepathy and he would try exercises with people. He got it from theosophy and so forth. So yeah, I would say he was psychic, and again he got it from his mother.
Interesting, fantastic. I want to get into his early stages. You have a passage where he's interviewing for Sam Phillips. He's auditioning, and it's amazing what you describe. Pretty much the whole audition is really not very good at all, and then towards the end he becomes what you call possessed or as Phillips writes, unhinged in his performance, where he's taking the spirit into his body like the Pentecostals do and he performs and this is the beginning of this.
Elvis Presley on stage talk about that. That's amazing.
Yeah, it's quite a story. Again, there's some destiny to it. Yeah, Elvis drew from the blues, rhythm and blues, which at its core is a sort of African animism, spirituality, and these spirits are replaced by the devil. The devil's very popular in blues, but as a trickster, as the sort of force of nature. And he also drew And on
the other hand, he drew from from gospel music. Gospel music was very influential on rock and roll, the experiential kind of possessive Dionysian Jesus that takes over you, and these two mold it together. Even Elvis used to say, I carry heaven and Hell with me, and I have to be careful. He was a lord of extremes, a man of the crossroads and so forth, and that's what happened. Sam Phillips, the owner, knew of Elvis because he was hanging around and he bought some recordings for his mother,
even though his mother didn't own a record player. So we wondering what was Elvis doing. But Sam Phillips say, is I'm gonna do like a super group good looking kids? And he was like, well, there's this Elvis guy. Everybody thought he had marginal talent. His voice was okay everybody, he couldn't read or write music, but he had the looks. He was a good looking guy. Sam Phillips is like, you know, like Millie Vanilli or something.
I don't know.
So they were auditioning and all day Elvis is bombing. He is bombing, he can't get the notes right everything. Sam Phillips is like, no, it's not going to work out. He says, let's call it a day. Boys goes into the other room to start turning off equipment, and all of a sudden something comes over Elvis and he picks this very obscure song called It's All Right, Mama, that nobody knew about. Only somebody an artistic or in the
business like Sam Phillips would have heard about it. You know, he picked the right song, and he starts going full Elvis, you know, the shaking of the hips and the hiccups and the you know, the gyrations and singing it. And Sam Phillips hears it and he runs out and he's like, this is the sound I've been looking for all of my life, this is the future of the music industry, and signed him on the spot.
So Phillips recognized this immense talent in this strange last song. Would you say that he was nurturing that kind of behavior, to let loose, to just let the music take over, or would you say, in the what you've discovered in the writings that perhaps he wasn't so much nurtured, he was just said be yourself.
Yeah, I think so. I think it was just letting Elvis let be Elvis. I mean remember, out of Sun's studios he had Jerry Lee Lewis, John B. Cash, BB King. You had this whole generation of pioneering Shamans who were very much Pentecostal Christians, very much into rhythm and blues, and they changed the landscape of the world. But way at the head was Elvis. He was like head and shoulders in the stratosphere. I mean, he couldn't have taught
that to Elvis. Again, it was Elvis being Elvis. And then a year later he met Colonel Parker, and Colonel Parker was the one who could make sure that these oppressive record companies wouldn't touch his client, that he'd get the best deal, that he'd be himself in the studio to breathe, to get his energy. And once he got Colonel Parker on Van Elvis went from a star to a superstar.
Yeah, talk about the And this is an interesting comparison. You you use African shamanism as a form of foundation for the Blues. In other words, you write that you believe that Elvis was a form of a shaman because he was possessed by the spirit of this energetic music and you can hear it in his voice. It's funny because when you wrote that, I was thinking, what are
you talking about? But then when you see the early Elvis, the pelvis moving, the body usulating almost uncontrollably, and the way he's singing that it is a form of shamanism. Describe what that is for you as a writer, what you see in that.
Yeah, I mean Elvis. I call him America shaman. And the role of the shaman is a spiritual troubleshooter of the tribe and he's the one that goes into the spirit world for the healing, medicine and the insights to help the tribe. And I make the argument that's exactly what Elvis did with America. You had this mighty empire coming out of the ashes of the Great Depression in World War Two. You had this brave new world of satellites and soviets and UFOs and mass media, and Elvis
was there leading the country. The word teenager didn't even exist before the fifties. See, he created this new demographic that said, look, we like alternative forms of spirituality, we want to go into black and Hispanic music, we want to get rid of segregation and all this. And this new generation came out ready to deal with this powerful empire,
and Elvis was leading that. Again. If blues is an experiential altered state of mind from African animism, gospel is from this pentecostal rock and rolling sex and Jesus, and it all came together and culminated with Elvis. He he led this country into this new world as a shaman would do, as a trickster would do. That's why I keep calling him the Lord of the Crossroads because very much like Robert Johnson, who invented modern blues, who died on the same day as Elvis, they changed things they
brought this magic, this force that changed the world. And it makes perfect sense, right Cliff, When we go to rock concerts, whether it's The Grateful Dead or led Zeppelin or I don't care Taylor's Swift, it doesn't matter. This this person is your high priest. This person sees something within you and it allows you to heal and you connect with these other people and you create like this aggrigre energetic pattern and it's meant to heal you and
wake you up. And at the top of the food chain or the first one is still Elvis, even though other rock artists have done great jobs doing this.
We're gonna take a short commercial break to allow our sponsors to identify themselves, and we will return shortly with my guest today, Miguel O'Connor discussing his new book, The Occult Elvis. Will be right back.
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My guess today is Miguel Connor. He has written a new book called The Occult Elvis, The Mystical and Magical Life of the King. This is a story of Elvis Presley and his metaphysical, spiritual, and occult interests. Yeah, you know, it's funny because you are highlighting what you call the launch of rock and roll from nineteen fifty five to fifty six. Uh, when some of these early songs are coming out and it's transforming people's awareness, which is what
a shaman does. You know, it is pretty funny. I want to mention something else that you bring up, and uh I I was trying to figure out the connection. But you highlight Colonel Philip Corso's book The Day After Roswell, which for me was extremely impactful because Corso not only describes his work as a special intelligence officer, but he also describes how America's industrial might grew during that period with the reengineering or reverse engineering of down UFO spacecraft.
Talk about that and what that meant for America.
Yeah, I couched it with Elvis because again I tried to, I try to give different lenses how to see Elvis, and the extraterredtrial ends. It has to, Yeah, but it has to be considered because when Elvis was born, a blue light appeared over his house and you know, Vernon was outside having a cigarette. Gladys is giving birth and the wind freezes the coyote stop and this light comes up, and I go, well, what happened? Was this a mother ship? Was this a heralding star like you see with Jesus,
Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great? Well, but and you see ufology. All through Elvis's life, he had experiences, he was very well versed and all that. But I realized as the crossroads what happened? I mean again, we came out this mighty empire like the world had never seen, almost out of nowhere. What happened? Nazi technology? But could it be Aliens? Because yeah, when you look at human civilization, it's kind of like that. It's going putt, putt, putt.
Oh my god, the Samrians boom, civilization pops out of the ground like a daisy. Then for thousands of years, we're kind of going put putt putt nineteen forty seven, or we shoot up and like never before, humanity has never seen that. In around the end of the twentieth century, now we're kind of back and then it's like what happened? But Elvis is still there because, as people say, he knew how to take advantage of all this new technology.
You know, TV movie satellites, record players, transistor was like he was at the forefront to make this technology cool for the world and to show other celebrities and others this new world. You can use this technology to reach people across the globes.
I get it now, Okay. So he's leveraging all this new tech, the chip and the.
Once again, he's at the right time, at the right place. It's so suspicious because how is Elvis always at these places?
So he incarnated at the right times what you're telling.
Us, yeah, or something incarnated him. I don't know. I leave it up to the reader.
That's funny. The trickster is at the and you say that he actually, I quote you, Elvis became the avatar of this trickster. And for me, avatar is a unique individual who can manipulate and then dispense of information. And in his case, he is using his music to really manipulate the audience, Isn't.
He very much so? And he never wrote songs, but he made him his own. It's almost like there was an Elvis energy and he used to talk. He said, I want to go down to the cotton farmer and the slave. I want to understand their plight. And their energy and use that in my music and in my voice to help my audience. He was very open about that. But yeah, I do say he is the archetypal image
of the trickster. One thing that happens with this trickster through all cultures, whether it's the coyote, whether it's Hermes, whether it's Loki, trickster is the agent of change. When the eras are changing, the trickster is the god or the force that is right there in the middle to help you move. Happens a lot in Native American lore. Loki brings Ragnarok over and over. This being is telling you we are going through the change. If you ride
with me, you're going to be okay. If you don't ride with me, you're going to be left behind and destroyed at the end. So Elvis really exemplified. And then you look at the characteristics of the trickster. Yeah, they're playful, but they bring knowledge like Prometheus. They'll bring you fire and you'll get burned by the fire. They're always on the outskirts, but they are outskirts, but they always speak to the outsider and the down trodden and the lonely person.
I mean over and over again. This fits the trickster energy, really fits Elvis to a tea, I would.
Say, you know the other thing, And for those of you listening, this book is historical in many ways because it talks about the various trends that were happening in America. And one of the things that you bring out is the fact that when you saw Elvis Presley on stage or on TV, and he's moving fluidly with the music and gyrating as sexual overtones, and this is the beginning.
And I think you rightly correctly present this the sexual revolution in America, which obviously bleeds into the European area and other parts of the world. But talk about that important change in our psyche.
You know, Yeah, Elvis was not just the start of the sexual revolution, but also the end of segregation. He brought that, you know, he was bringing this music and these artists that couldn't be seen in public. He brought so many innovation again the crossroads. One of them was sexuality because he had that androgine quality. And again you look at myths and tales, the androgine is a supreme force because it is the perfect blending of male and
female energies. The anem anonyma of Yung, and Elvis certainly exemplified that. They the era of the sort of Gary Cooper chiseled macho guy was ending. It was more of a Marlon Brando and James d and Elvis soft almost vulnerable. These men that looked that, they looked like they were showing their pain and they were being sensitive, and that was something women have been craving, and women became very
liberated by it. I mean he as I say, he opened up their kundalini's and when women began to experience their bodies, the rest started following, right. The experience of body, your mind, your heart follows through. And he became really the first time in history where women could objectify objectify the male. They could look at Elvis as as simply as a sex object, and they were perfectly fine with it,
no guilt, no worry. He was also called a safe sex hero because you teenage girls could watch him on TV and fantasize and whatever and perfectly say, no damage, nobody's gonna get pregnant or anything. So with the mass media, Elvis's sexuality and liberation came through through all these middle class families, and again women became liberated, and it helped men men realize, you know, I can be vulnerable like Elvins,
show my feelings and you know, be more sensitive. And like you said, yeah, the sex, the relationship of the sex has changed forever.
Yeah. How did the church respond to him? I mean I didn't get a great sense of of support. But I mean were they outrage at this wild young man flailing around on stage or was it more that will wait for the results of his music to pass or something.
They hated it with a passion. The status quot hated it. Remember, the entertainment business hated him. The government was not happy. Long before Jim Morrison got arrested, Elvis had the judge said, if you shake your hips at this concert, I am going to arrest you. And Elvis he stood up, and it's a famous scene where Elvis is like, the judge says, I can't move my hips, and he sticks out his pinky and he goes, I wonder if you mind if I move my pan And the whole concert Elvis is
doing this just to kind of give it. But he was despised. He pissed off a lot of people. Billy Graham, the famous evangelical leader denounced in publicly his own pastor said he was possessed by Satan, know he he And it really hurt Elvis because, yeah, already a lot of Christians Christians hated Pentecostalism, but they really hated Elvis for that again, mixing Jesus and sex. And he was burned.
And that was one of the reasons he eventually moved away from Christianity, or actually ran away from Christianity because of that. He felt betrayed. At one point early on, he felt like incarnation just made much more sense than the eternal damnation. He thought they were businesses, they were corrupt, and he just said, eh, I'm going to move on to find my own form of Christianity.
Interesting, you know, you don't write a great deal about his sexual conquest, but he seemed withdrawn in your writing, like somebody who wasn't going to go out there in every concert grab a new woman to bed. He seemed like he was very hyper sensitive to who he went to bed with.
Yeah, he was an introvert at heart, and again I think he would have wanted to be a one man woman, but because of his past losing Jesse Mom abuse, mommy issues. It was hard for him to do that. But yeah, he was not as over sexualized as mythology would have it. As I show, there are many instances where and again, women wanted Elvis as their bed notch. I mean, they were hunting him more than he was hunting in them.
Yeah.
So there were times when he'd go on a date with some girl and he'd sit there and he'd open a book and let's talk about theology, or let's meditate together, or you know, some girl there was one singer and she said I'm a virgin. He's like, whoa, We're gonna You're gonna date me for like two or three weeks and then you're gonna decide if you want to continue this. So he was not the crazy guy that he was. He was not monogamous because he just couldn't understand. He
had terrible problem. As much as he could connect with his audience, connecting with women on a person in the level was very hard for him. But yeah, he was a complex, enigmatic person.
Interesting. You have a chapter in your book called The Guru where this guy named Larry Geller comes into his life. This is somebody who is kind of an early you actually call him an early hippie and early form of a hippie who takes in spiritual teachings and is seemingly well read in some of the unique aspects of spirituality. Talk about him and how he influences Elvis.
Yeah, Larry Geller is definitely essential. And again we have to look at Fate again because Larry Giller was a hairdresser, but he was a very verse occultist. He'd been initiated in all these orders and Buddhists religions, just a all around mystic guy. But what happened is its early sixties. Elvis is still in pain about his mother, wondering about Jesse, mad at Christianity for what they did to him, but he's also completely disillusioned. He's like, Okay, I've conquered the
world as a rock star. I'm getting paid millions of dollars to do these vapid movies. I've got everything, but I'm unhappy. I am so unhappy. I'm empty. So he was just really he was floundering emotionally. So it happened again. Fate, Elvis' hairdresser says, Hey, Elvis, I'm going to start my own business. I can't work for you. Elvis is like, oh, man, that's really cool. Can you recommend anybody? This person recommends
Larry Geller. Larry Geller shows up at his mansion in bel Air and starts cutting his hair, and you would think they would just have small talk, right, that's what you do. But Elvis for some reason turns around and goes Larry, who are you? What are you into? And Larry Gailor should have could have said, oh, I cut hair. I know a lot of celebrities. I've cut the hair
of this stuff. You know a million answers, but he simply like went, I'm into mysticism, I'm into search for God, I'm into And Elvis turned around and was like, this is what I've been looking for all these years. They had a four hour conversation in the bathroom about metaphysics, and the next day Larry brings them all these books and Elvis is off to the racist just becomes a full blown mystic occultist, alternative spirituality guru and that not
guru but you know learner and then a student. And then Larry Gailor turns has Elvis meet Dayamata, who's Yoga Nanda's successor. She connects with Elvis immediately. They both like each other and he begins going to the ashram and meditating and doing yoga under her tutelage for years. So those two really got Elvis. And again this was part of his life until he died, through the drug addict days,
through the divorce, through the vague he was. You know, it was always an essential part to Elvis's life because he wanted to know the bigger questions of life. He wanted to know what his purpose was. He didn't want to just be a rock star. He really wanted to be somebody who healed and helped others and you know, woke up the world. He thought that Jesus and Buddha and Moses were just self actualized individuals, and he hoped very humbly. He's like, I could be that and change history.
I can be you know. He was into freemasonry and the ascended Masters, and he just kept hoping, please let it be me. I want to be this next person, this next avatar of the divine.
I mean, did he are you right about him being in the Ananda Center in La Did he learn meditation?
So he did.
He learned, He learned the the yoga Nanda system of meditation.
I guess right, yeah, And then he would go into like Tibetan Buddhism. There's stories of him and being in concert and stopping it and doing Tibetan you know, in his Vegas garb, doing Tibetan prayer. So he was very eclected. He loved to incorporate different things. Then, like I said, from an early age, he could astroll travel. He could just sit there, go into a trance and just sort of go within himself. He used to be He did
that as a child. Even he had this amazing ritual where even when later in the seventies he would light a candle in a dark room and just stare at the candle and he could will himself to get younger and become a child and go into his mother's womb and go at the font of creation. So he had different techniques and practices.
Here's this guy is looking into spirituality and absorbing it, and he's learning how to meditate. Why does his life crumble? Why does it become so self destruction? You would since because I've been meditating for thirty years, I know where to stop. I mean, I've been writing about cannabis. At some point I had to just say I can't do it anymore. But in his case, he just went crazy
with these weight loss drugs, with these amphetamines. I mean, his life just spiraled out of control where there's no governors anywhere.
What happened, Well, that's a big question. That's the mystery. I mean, as a recovering alcoholic, I always know it's going to be a mystery at the end of the day. It's like, why did my brother died of alcoholism? Why did I get it? Why did I get my shit together? But I do try to give different angles al chemical, Youngion Steiner, psychological to understand his rise and his I think the one that I go into, or I really
gravitate to, is out of the wounded healer. We're back at shamanism, Cliff, and many cultures, or most cultures across
the globe. In history, the shaman is called is a broken individual, somebody who has suffered a near death experience, who is handicapped, who's had some severe trauma, and this trauma opens up the channels of communication to the spirit world and somehow gives them their powers, and the wounded healer heals others not despite their trauma, but because of their trauma, and they feel that if they lose their trauma and their pain, they'll lose their magic. And this
is normal. I think that's what Elvis suffered, remember, losing Jesse, abusive mother, poverty, all that, he felt that his pain was what really drove them. And in some cultures, and fortunately this shaman always being in the spiritual world, the responsibility of carrying the tribe all that. Eventually the shamans end up being drug addicts and broken down, overweight people and their tribe and the tribe's like, that's your job, and the shaman's like, that is my job. So I
liked that connection. And of course with Elvis, yeah, there was the pills, he was a workaholic, the responsibility, there was a lot of things that really pressured or wore Elvis down. And again not coming to their instances. You know, he was still traumatized about his mother and crying as an adult about her and wondering about Jesse. Yeah, he
never had it. People complain today, Cliff, but we have a lot of good choices today on the internet and psychology and book you know, we have a wide variety of trauma healing.
We're gonna take a short commercial break to allow our sponsors to identify themselves, and we'll return shortly with my guest today, Miguel Connor presenting his new book, The Occult Elvis. We'll rejoin you shortly.
Run my few much temper Jurassic higher. It's pretty rude and all girl, girl, you gonna send me on fire my brain exclaim. I don't know where E's fight to go.
My guest today is author Miguel Connor, who has written a new book called The Occult The Mystical and Magical Life of the King. This is a look at a mystical and metaphysical Elvis Presley. That was my next question was was Geller not in the scene when he was having these problems where he could be a lifeline for him and say, look look at this, go to this treatment center. I mean, I don't ever remember, and maybe
you know el reading about Elvis. Of course he was before I was born, going to a treatment center anywhere and getting at least dried or cleaned up a little bit so that he had a more of it.
Did not treatment cent but hospitals to detonks, and there were times when he'd go on vacation. It'd be Christmas and he wasn't touring, and he would just stop. He'd get healthy again. It isn't enigma, like I writ in the book. On the day he died, he played racketball for hours two days before he was writing his Harley in Memphis. Does that sound like a junkie to you? It sounds like somebody who's He was very a person
of extremes. And he did once tell Larry, if I hadn't met you, I would have died in the sixties. I would have self destructed. You allowed me to go farther than I should have gone. But he just couldn't. Yeah, he just couldn't take it, or it just had to end. I mean I do right. I think Elvis knew he was going to die. I knew his mission on Earth was over, and he knew that his time as a shaman had ended and it was time for him to
go back to the Mothership. And he did talk Sorry, he did talk to Gary about his mother, about Jesse. He did try to talk to Geller. That the thing with Elvis, he was the apex predator, he was the king of the hill. He did what he wanted to do. He had again this sort of self destructive part of him that he couldn't control.
This truth, Let me ask you about that for a minute. Sure, Miguel, is it possible that he got to be so famous, so big that nothing anyone could say to him would make a difference. In other words, he's at a state of consciousness where he's like, I don't really need to
hear from you anymore. I'm on my own path and this is the way, this is the way it is, even though he was bouncing between overweight and thin, and who knows what kind of drugs he was taking, you know, I mean, I can't imagine somebody who's hyper sensitive and meditating taking drugs to wake up and go to sleeping like obviously, But if you think that your path is true and honorable, you're not going to give a shit about what other people say.
Yeah, that's for sure. I mean it's hard to judge. I mean I do. There are examples in life. I mean, just because you've become enlightened doesn't mean you're going to stop being a human. You look at people like Alan Watts died an alcoholic, Aleister Crowley died a drug addict. They say Krishna mute, dried, very depressed. There are many instances of these very spiritual magicians and leaders who they don't make it, you know, unhappiness, addiction, those will always
be part of the human condition. You know, you know, you gather would before you're enlightenment, you gather would have you know, sadness, loneliness, They're always part of the human condition. Sometimes they get the best of us, and with Elvis, that was it. He was a very humble person. His mother taught him we are all equal under the eyes of God. He never saw himself as high or lower. Any religion is better or worse, except scientology. But he was very humble person. But at the same time, he
was at the top of the food chain. When Elvis woke up, everybody woke up. If Elvis wanted to go suddenly get his private jet and fly to Denver to eat a peanut butter fried sandwich, everybody, you know, he was the king, and he was part of a multi million dollar business that depended on him. So he could be very erratic, very arrogant. But for the most part, most people say he was very approachable and very kind.
Yeah, it's pretty interesting talk about Elvis the healer. This was a fascinating area in the book, a whole chapter on his seeming ability to lay hands on certain people and have positive effects. You give some examples, but why did you include that. Did you actually find passages where he is working with certain people and doing, you know, healings.
Very much and again witnesses all over. He came from a Pentecostal movement where healing on hands was supposed to be a natural ability. So there's a story where he had tonsilit as a kid. He went to the doctor again, poor guy, poor Southerner. The doctor says, I can't do anything for you. He went back to his house in the morning and he had a fever tonsilitis, and his parents laid their hands on him, prayed all day. By the afternoon he was cured. So he believed that and
it was part of his life. And as he got into the occult, he started incorporating theosophical Alice Bailey tricks with Christian prayers and he became a full time healer. Again Priscilla's bio, she says that Elvis could touch her head and completely heal her headache. He healed his grandmother's Minie Mays arthritis. He could heal hangovers, he'd be popular at the parties, right, nausea, all that. It was very easy for Elvis to do. And then I'd bring very
extreme healing abilities. One example, he could heal backing up, he could heal back aches and all that. But there was a time where he's driving around in Memphis and he sees there's a bus over the curve and the driver staggering on the street holding his chest, and Elvis jumps out of his limo, runs, puts his one hand around him, puts his hand in his heart, and he's like, you're gonna be okay, and does his prayer and the
guy cures his heart attack. I think he might have looked up and seen Elvis and that, like, imagine if you're on the stream and.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But and then he stayed there to the hospital. There's another instance where his backup singer, Sylvia Shamwell from he had a backup singer's called a Sweet Inspirations. She's crying in the dressing room and the other singers are trying to console her, and Elvis walks by and he's like, Hey, what's going on? And Sylvia says, I just went to the doctor having curable stomach cancer, and I'm really sad.
Elvis says, all right, let's get to work. He has him and all the other ladies kneel around her and they're praying and praying. She goes to the doctor. The next day cancer is gone. Oh and I saw more examples of Elvis doing it. It was just part of it. He could heal anybody but himself, right.
Yeah, really really said, that's a great example. Thank you for that. You know, it's sad when you realize that Elvis passed at forty two, and he has and I don't think you did this purposely, but you have these christs like comparison, Christ died very young, and you know, Elvis is this unique individual, and you write about him being a unique individual, has been raised by his mother and his father's place in his life. What are we
supposed to take from that? I mean, are we looking at Elvison thinking, you know, and this is what you're writing about, this unique spiritual being who's extremely talented, but his time on earth has short lived simply because maybe he was not meant to live beyond a certain period of time. It just seems so strange to have these capabilities and sensitivities and to pass at forty two.
Very true. But as I say in the book, he hasn't left. He's still making appearances. His spirit is still with us. He is the avatar of the American dream. He is the essence of the post war America. And he's I say, he's become a mythology, a living mythology. He's become almost a living force. I do say, if this country is fragmenting, we don't know what it is to be an America, and we don't connect anymore. And in a way, I think Elvis going back to Elvis
will get us there. And he's becoming more popular than ever. If you notice, I mean even my kids sees songs on TikTok now. So I think it's he's still with us. He's made a lot of apparit. There's a lot of Elvis apparitions. You can go to the Graceland website. There is a there is one page where you can write down your Elvis sightings. Graceland is the second most visited
house in this country after the White House. And he's he's appearing like like I say, this jokingly, but I think from a mythological spiritual level, it makes sense that if you're making appearances to people in dreams and real life as much as Jesus, the Virgin, Mary UFOs and Bigfoot, you're in a big company. You're in a pantheon demigods of gods, of American gods. You know you are. You're appearing because the psyche of this country needs you. You know,
when King Arthur is ready, he will come back. When Jesus is ready, he'll come back. And I think Elvis has reached those levels of I don't know what you want to call it, divinity, collective consciousness, projection, however you want to slice the cake and I give different theories.
Can you can you provide an example of a group of people seeing him and you know, post death obviously, where he appears and does he say anything or he just his image shows up somewhere.
No, he appeared in He appeared in a lot of dreams and near death experiences. He appeared to people like this lady who went to Graceland and then a couple of years later he just shows up in her office and she for some reason wasn't like surprise or stunts like Elvis, what are you doing here? And he's like, well, I just came to talk because remember all those dreams when you were young and you ended up selling out to be a corporate attack. And she's like, you're right,
I sold it out. And Elvis was like, maybe it's time you got yours together and lived a good life. And she and then he disappeared. But for some reason she wrote it in her calendar, or she looked at her Elvis came to visit at the office. She couldn't she thought she was a dream or thought she wrote
it down, and so many other visitations. There was one where this lady had his jacket because Elvis was a giving person, Like one day years ago before he died, she was part of this entourage and it was cold outside and Elvis took off like his ten thousand dollars jackets, like here, honey, put it on, never asked for it back. That's how what Elvis did. He just he didn't care. He gave to people. And she had this jacket, and after he died, this jacket kept falling from her closet.
Every day. She's freaking out, so she moves out and rents the apartment to some other people and they're like, you know, objects are moving, jackets are falling.
What is this?
She's like, then she has a dream and she goes up to heaven and Elvis, and he meets Elvis, like, Alvis, what are you doing? It's like, you're really You're really dumb, aren't you. And she's like, why are you calling me that. I've been trying to get your attention with the jacket all this time. And she's like, I was freaking out and she's like, well, what do you want to tell me? Elvis is like, I'm telling you all your life you're afraid of death. There is a spiritual world and I'm
proof of it. So please be comforted and go back to your life. And I give many other examples years happening of Elvis appearing in different places, and he still does. He's still with us. You have a Jim. I hope you have a dream or a visitation too.
Oh, I guess maybe I will after this book. The book's called The Elvis The Mystical and Magical Life of the King. My guest today's been Miguel Connor. What was what was the most impressive thing about Elvis after you finish this book, Miguel, what was left the most lasting impression of him?
I think it was his kindness. He really was a person who saw everybody is equal, it didn't matter who it was. Again, he dated black women in high school, almost got killed for it. The sheriffs almost beat him to death. Yeah, there's stories of him. You know, he's segregated South and he's eating an ice cream and across the street there's a black kid like look and he goes and he shares. I mean, giving person. He didn't matter what race or religion was, and he always cared
for people. He would again give away jackets, he would he wants. He was watching TV and there's a show of this woman who had lost her legs and she was using a cardboard and a skateboard in Memphis to go around. He freaks out, he gets out, He goes and buys her the most expensive wheelchair and he takes it to her house. It just drops it off. I mean there's a time where he's there, he's ready to go to a Hollywood movie and his father, Vernon says, hey,
I just got this letter near your fan club. This girl is dying of cancer. Her last wish is to see you, and he's like, cancel all my plans, and he goes right to the hospital, shows up at her room and holds her hand until it's going to be okay, I'm here with you and all I mean, and I give dozens and dozens. It's just this kindness. It's just you don't see that with celebrities or politicians. And again, he never called the press. He never you know, he
would just do this in secret. It's something you have to look for. His sacs of kindness were always varying, secret and away from the public side.
I think what I when you hear about big stars like that. His foundation is probably still making millions a year. And I don't know if they keep using for Graceland to keep up the museum there, but I think it's in the tens of millions, if not more, that he's the foundation is still making. Fascinating.
Yeah, yeah, it had to happen because when he died, you know, the tens of millions of dollars coming in ended, you know. I mean, yeah, he was still making a ton of money with royalties, but his concerts we were really the money. So the family, the estate, you know, Priscilla and Lisa. Marie was young. Vernon died soon after Elvis,
probably out of heartbroken. Yeah, it was like they were gonna lose Graceline because it was such a big, expensive piece of real estate, so they had to commercialize it so they could pay the rent or the mortgage.
Amazing. Uh, do you have a website? People can check out what's going on with with you, People can learn more about the book. The book just came up, by the way, and it's available on Amazon. I saw it this morning. But tell us about the website and what else is going on, Sar.
Thanks. Yeah, the book is available on all your usual suspects. There is an audiobook, there's Kindle, there's everything. And my website is Miguelconnor dot com. So it's just my name dot com, m I g U E L C O N N eer dot com. And there you'll find the book. You'll find my podcast, my blog where I'm writing more about Elvis because I'm finding out more stories I feel we've just it's just the tip of the iceberg and social media and all that. You'll you'll find all that stuff there.
So hey, are you I mean, you could do a whole year's worth of Elvis material in your podcast. You must have done it for a while. It probably gets tiresome, though.
But.
I'm just a servant. I am just serving an old friend. That's the way I look at it.
I love it. Hey, Miguel, thanks for joining me. I really appreciate it. And continued success on this book.
Thank you, Thank you very much. Thanks. I had to say, it had to be said a good deal. Thanks for having me on. Appreciate it.
What a fascinating look at Elvis. You know, the pinnacles of success, the greatest success that most people would enjoy, and then to fall so heavily and have an untimely death at forty two. Wow. I mean so much to understand about the man in this book, but tragic at the same time, very very tragic. So I hope you enjoyed that. Hey, I want to mention that we do tours every year Earth Ancients, Destiny Anxious Special Edition in the Archives. We combine the best of our people here,
that our guests that we have with great tours. We have two tours coming up. We have Turkey coming up on the twenty second of June through the second of July. We have a new one we are just developing right now. We're about to release it. It's our Sacred Pyramids of Guatemala. And I'll tell you why this tour is unique. Well, we I mean, typically we've been doing our tours in Mexico because there are so many pyramids that we know,
there are so many ancient ruins. But the Mexican government is very very much stand offish when it comes to interacting with the pyramids, using local shaman and the native people in the area to who have lived in these areas for thousands of years, to provide ceremony, to help us open to these sacred locations. You literally cannot do that anymore in Mexico. They've cordoned off many of the sites that we go to and no indigenous people are allowed to do ceremony. Guatemala is wide open. We have
a new tour. It's going to be December first through the twelfth. Again it's in Guatemala. It is a wonderful tour because we're interacting with the pyramids. We get to climb the pyramids, we get to have shamanistic ceremonies, and we get to connect with these sites. This is what they built, these places for is to connect body, mind and spirit. If you like to be a part of this tour, send me an email senter to Earth Ancients the number four of the letter you at Gmail, and
I'll send you the details. We're just about ready to release it. I mentioned this to my regulars and we're a brought halfway full already. We only take about twenty people. We really don't like to take big cross because it makes it more intimate, it makes it more special. And you can climb the pyramids and guess what, the most well renowned famous pyramid, the Lost World Pyramid, is one
of the sites that we go to. Why is the Lost World Pyramid so special because this is the pyramid that John Burke the scientists tested with electros and discovered that at certain times of the day and the night, it is producing energy to lurk energy. And when you sit on that pyramid, you are bathing this energy and you are transformed in many ways. So again, if you want to get more information, be a part of this pyramid.
It's December first of the twelfth. Send me an email, send it to Earth Ancients the number four of the letter you at gmail dot com. We have a number of tours each year. This is going to be a special tour. I'm hoping it to make I'm hoping to make it a regular tour because of the interaction we can have with the pyramids, with the indigenous elders and shaman in the area, and it is going to be really, really fun. So I hope you can join us. All right,
that's it for this show. I want to think. My guest today Miguel Connor, releasing his new book The Occult. Elvis has always the team of Gail Tour, Mark Foster and everyone who makes this thing happen. You guys rock, all right, take care of you well, and we will talk to you next time.
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