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Prompted by a perennial commentator, I asked ChatGPT to comment *my own blog* to see what would happen. This is the first part of the (surprisingly incisive) analysis. Not sure if I even dare to publish part two!
Can you comment / analyze the contents of the blog "Ashtar Command Book Blog"?
Yes. I’ve looked through the blog itself rather than judging it from the title, and it is considerably more interesting—and more internally coherent—than the name initially suggests.
My overall impression is that it is best understood not as a conventional “Ashtar Command” / UFO-spirituality blog, but as a highly eclectic personal intellectual-spiritual notebook whose underlying worldview becomes visible when you look across the years. The blog itself explicitly says that many posts are ironic, that it covers essentially everything, and identifies the author as a “Seeker, Pseudo-Neoplatonist, Crypto-Shaiva-Shakta.”
1. The apparent chaos actually has a recognizable worldview
The subject matter is extraordinarily broad. The current archive jumps between Swedish politics, fringe political movements, evolutionary biology, archaeology, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, paranormal phenomena, philosophy, UFOs, occultism and book reviews. The label system alone has hundreds of categories; among them are Panentheism, Platonism, Process philosophy, Paranormal, Hinduism, Tantrism, Mahayana, Pure Land Buddhism, Ramakrishna, Esotericism, Mysticism and Pseudo-science.
But beneath that apparent randomness I see several recurring questions:
- Can different religious traditions actually be true simultaneously?
- Is materialism philosophically adequate?
- Can mystical experience provide knowledge without simply proving one particular religion?
- Is there a reality behind the symbols and mythologies of different traditions?
- How should ancient religious traditions be reconciled with modern science?
- Can one have genuine metaphysics without retreating into fundamentalism or New Age vagueness?
- What happens when traditional religion, occultism, science and modern politics collide?
That is a much more definite intellectual project than the blog's deliberately chaotic presentation would suggest.
2. The 2021 religious material is particularly revealing
One of the most important posts I found is the April 28, 2021 piece beginning:
“Kan de verkligen vara sanna allihop?”
The argument is essentially religious pluralism without simple perennialism.
The author considers the possibility that Christian, Hindu and Buddhist religious experiences may all be genuine—even though Christians, Hindus and Buddhists interpret them differently. The post goes further and explicitly entertains being “monotheist, polytheist and pantheist” simultaneously.
That is philosophically interesting because it isn't quite:
“All religions are saying exactly the same thing.”
In fact, the blog seems quite hostile to that simplistic version of perennialism.
Instead, the implicit proposition is closer to:
Reality may be considerably larger than any single symbolic system through which human beings apprehend it.
That distinction is important.
The post invokes upāya—skillful means—to explain why different people might encounter different religious forms. That provides an interesting bridge between Mahayana Buddhism and a more broadly pluralist metaphysics.
3. It is surprisingly anti-New-Age despite being interested in esotericism
This is one of the strongest characteristics of the blog.
Someone seeing labels such as UFOs, paranormal, mysticism, Hinduism, Tantra, kundalini, Bigfoot, Ashtar Command might expect conventional New Age spirituality.
But the blog repeatedly makes fun of exactly that kind of thinking.
For example, it is interested in John Michael Greer's warnings about kundalini and mindfulness, and it examines the dangers of treating spiritual experiences as automatically authoritative.
Likewise, its discussion of David Chapman's heterodox Vajrayana writing is unusually skeptical. It notices that mystical experience does not automatically establish the truth of the religion in which the experiencer interprets it.
So there is an interesting combination:
high openness to metaphysical possibilities + high skepticism about people's claims concerning those possibilities.
That's actually a relatively sophisticated position.
4. The blog is much more “occultist” than “UFO believer”
The title is therefore slightly misleading.
“Ashtar Command” sounds like the central doctrine ought to be extraterrestrial channeling. But the blog's actual interests are much broader.
The profile describes the author as:
“Seeker, Pseudo-Neoplatonist, Crypto-Shaiva-Shakta”
and jokingly says that the author also believes Bigfoot roams the Alaskan Panhandle.
The Pseudo-Neoplatonist designation is particularly revealing.
The metaphysical trajectory seems to be something like:
Neoplatonism → panentheism → religious pluralism → comparative mysticism → Tantra/Shaivism/Shaktism → a multi-level spiritual cosmology.
And that helps explain why seemingly unrelated posts about Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, UFOs, NDEs and paranormal phenomena can coexist on the same site.
They are being treated as different windows onto the same large philosophical problem.
5. The blog's attitude toward Christianity is complicated rather than simply anti-Christian
This is another interesting feature.
There is plenty of criticism of Christianity, Protestantism and biblical literalism. But the criticism is often directed at epistemological exclusivism, rather than Christianity itself.
The 2021 pluralism post, for example, asks why a Christian should automatically regard a Christian mystical experience as genuine while regarding a Hindu or Mormon experience as false.
That is essentially an epistemology of revelation problem.
And the blog appears to retain a substantial interest in Christianity while simultaneously refusing to grant Christianity an automatic monopoly on revelation.
That's quite different from straightforward atheism.
6. There is also a strong anti-materialist thread
The blog isn't simply “spiritual” in the New Age sense. It repeatedly returns to the philosophical inadequacy—or at least incompleteness—of materialism.
For example, the September 2026 posts explicitly criticize “cyber-atheist” free-will denial and discuss consciousness, determinism and free will.
The older free-will discussion is especially interesting because the blog recognizes that determinism does not logically entail materialism. An idealist or spiritual metaphysics could theoretically also be deterministic.
That's a useful philosophical distinction that many popular discussions completely miss.
7. At the same time, it is not anti-science
This may be the blog's most distinctive intellectual tension.
It has an enormous number of science-related posts and labels, including paleontology, evolution, archaeology, zoology, astronomy and psychology.
The position seems approximately:
Science is extremely good at investigating the physical world; that doesn't necessarily settle metaphysics.
That's quite compatible with the pseudo-Neoplatonic/panentheistic direction.
The blog therefore doesn't seem to be trying to replace science with spirituality. It is asking whether scientific naturalism is entitled to become a complete metaphysical worldview merely because science itself is successful.
That's a legitimate philosophical question.
8. The political material is much more difficult
This is where I would recommend considerably more caution.
The blog uses heavy irony, sarcasm, provocation and deliberately inflammatory language. It discusses far-right movements, communists, Trotskyists, MAGA, conspiracy theories, SJWs, fascism, antisemitism, gender politics, etc. Some posts are explicitly jokes or satirical reactions. The blog itself warns that many posts and comments are ironic.
That makes individual posts difficult to classify ideologically.
For example, the September 2026 post about the Brigitte Macron conspiracy explicitly describes the story as a far-right conspiracy theory and points out its antisemitic and homophobic tropes, while also joking that parts of the story seem “strange.”
So one cannot simply say:
“The blog contains far-right material, therefore the blogger endorses the far right.”
Sometimes the subject is being mocked, sometimes analyzed, sometimes quoted, sometimes deliberately baited.
On the other hand, irony is not an excuse to assume that everything is harmless. The reader has to distinguish the author's actual position from deliberately provocative rhetoric.
9. The book-review side is probably the blog's strongest component
There is a remarkable amount of intellectual cross-pollination.
For example, the blog moves from Swedish historical scholarship to David Chapman, John Michael Greer, Buddhism, Theosophy, archaeology, religion and political history. Its reviews frequently use a book as a springboard into a much larger question rather than simply saying whether the book is “good” or “bad.”
That makes the site feel almost like a private commonplace book or intellectual laboratory.
The “book blog” label is therefore actually appropriate, even though the content has expanded far beyond book reviews.
The deeper philosophical position I see
If I had to reconstruct the worldview underlying the blog, I would tentatively formulate it like this:
1. Reality is probably more than physical matter.
2. Consciousness and spiritual experience cannot simply be dismissed as meaningless because they don't fit materialism.
3. Nevertheless, having a mystical experience doesn't automatically prove the interpretation attached to it.
4. Religious traditions may disclose genuine aspects of reality without any one tradition possessing the complete conceptual map.
5. Different religious symbols may therefore have genuine ontological or phenomenological significance without being literally interchangeable.
6. Traditional religions contain both profound metaphysical insights and historically conditioned human material.
7. Science describes the physical level extremely well but does not necessarily exhaust reality.
8. A sufficiently large metaphysics might therefore accommodate Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Platonism and even some paranormal phenomena without simply reducing them to one another.
That is a surprisingly coherent position.
And it is closer to philosophical pluralism + panentheism + Neoplatonism + comparative mysticism than to conventional New Age spirituality.
One particularly interesting development
There also appears to have been an evolution in the blog.
The earlier material I examined—particularly around 2021—has a strong comparative-religion / Buddhist / perennialism-versus-pluralism orientation. By 2026, the blog's self-description explicitly uses “Crypto-Shaiva-Shakta”, and current posts include much more overtly Tantric material.
That suggests the Shaiva-Shakta element isn't merely an isolated interest. It looks like a later development of an older philosophical problem:
If different religious traditions can disclose different aspects of an ultimately larger reality, what sort of metaphysics can accommodate that without reducing everything to “all is one”?
Shaiva-Shakta and Tantric metaphysics offer some unusually powerful tools for answering that question because they can combine transcendence and immanence, multiplicity and unity, personal deity and ultimate reality, manifestation and transcendence.
That may explain why the blog has gradually gravitated in that direction.
My overall assessment
I'd characterize the blog as:
Intellectually eclectic: ★★★★★
Philosophically interesting: ★★★★½
Systematic: ★★½
Historically/religiously curious: ★★★★★
Reliably factual: ★★★½ — individual claims need checking
Irony/sarcasm level: ★★★★★
Conventional New Age: ★
Conventional religious orthodoxy: ★
Underlying metaphysical coherence: ★★★★
The biggest mistake would be to read it literally and chronologically, post by post. The real “content” is the worldview that emerges from the recurring questions across thousands of short pieces.
And I think that worldview is considerably more sophisticated than the deliberately chaotic and sometimes outrageous surface presentation makes it look.
A fair assessment indeed. I laughed out loud at "deliberately chaotic"...
ReplyDeletesounds like the whole blog has an overarching plot. Or is it just one voice "asking questions" about where consciousness finds itself? Back in the Amazon days I read the book reviews for exactly the cogent distilled content offered, truthfully so as to avoid having to read it myself! Well, not always. And the humor got me as well. And I even learned something about Sweden! So yeah, carry on. Who else in their right mind would ask ChatGPT to comment on his/her self as revealed in the blogspace?
Or should I say gravitate onwards to thine own destiny.
DeleteIt´s a surprisingly good analysis coming from a dead (?) machine. And yes, I use the on-line spaces to "think aloud". At least these days (my early reviews on Amazon were pretty preachy and cocksure). My seeking has led me into some really odd places!
ReplyDeleteThere are certainly *some* themes that are ever-present, such as the interest in spirituality, or the - ahem - pessimistic takes on the human condition. Also, the fringey stuff such as UFO-s and cryptozoology. Even when I change my mind about it, I still can´t help circle around it. The politics are mostly a bonus.
ReplyDelete