Monday, January 30, 2012

What was I doing on the night of December 26, 1985?

While listening to a recent "Coast" where Whitley Strieber was the guest host, he mentioned that that night (December 27, 2011) was one day after his dramatic encounter with the "Visitors," in 1985, as described in "Communion." I'd never paid any attention to the date of December 26, 1985 before, but I was curious. What was *I* experiencing on the nights of December 26-27, 1985? Anything? Nothing? Was I having a Tombstone pizza and a beer, as was my custom back in my high-carb youth? Or was something else going on?

Fortunately, I kept records, and I didn't realize until today that I had two experiences that have relevance to the me of 2012.

For the morning of December 27, 1985, my wife noted in her dream journal that I had had a vivid UFO abduction nightmare with a lot of "moaning and screaming" which kept her awake all night. She wrote that I told her, simply, that I had been "dreaming of a UFO abduction."

On the night prior to my abduction nightmare, on December 26, 1985, I recorded a detailed dream from the perspective of a future incarnation in the twenty-first century, remembering my life in the twentieth. It's a very "Sethian" dream and includes some striking references to ideas in "Seth Speaks." Problem is, it was recorded before I had even read "Seth Speaks"--or any other Seth material, for that matter.

So, on two consecutive nights in December of 1985, I dreamed of a future incarnation of myself, "remembering" my then-twentieth century self, and the next night I vividly experienced a UFO abduction "dream" at precisely the same time that a famous author was undergoing one--which I would read about months later.

This, to me, seems to be an appropriate platform upon which to inquire about the nature of how we experience time and physical reality, and how this might inform the number of omens of an environmental catastrophe that seems both real and imminent.

Among the most valuable ideas that I have gained from my Seth studies, which my account above illustrates, is that while we physically experience time as a fixed sequence of moments, the true nature of time is associative. We perceive a "past" and a "future," but these perceptions are an illusion... And this is not a mere theoretical or academic illusion, but one that has implications upon our everyday lives. I have also learned that the non-physical is just as "real" as the physical--and that non-physical experiences can have the same vivid impact on us as physical ones.

How this all fits in with the dire warnings of environmental catastrophe is something that I'd like to explore in future posts.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Reassessment of The Key

In recent weeks I've been dipping back into Whitley Strieber's "The Key" for a number of different reasons. Like the Seth material, it seems to have meaning on several different levels, and re-reading imparts different nuances to it. As an example of "unofficial" information (what Seth described as information received by means other than the traditional human methods of discovery and transmission), I think it's worth analyzing. And when I get time (impossible for me to predict when), I'd like to write more on it.

The work seems to be a combination of veridical information about the greater, non-physical world, mixed with elements of Whitley Strieber's peculiar cosmology. To an extent, this mix is a characteristic of all "unofficial" (channeled, inspired, intuited or otherwise) works. The better material has more veridical elements; the poorer works have small grains of truth but seem to have meaning only to the channeler; while the truly bad stuff (I'm thinking primarily of the self-selected doom prophets and UFO contactees) seems largely untethered from consensus reality.

I'm beginning to think that this mix is a defining characteristic of all unofficial works... Here, physically incarnated, we can generally agree on what is real and not real (unless one is participating in a Republican Presidential debate); and if there's any confusion, we have devised a scientific method, which the vast majority of us accept as a valid means of defining reality, to clear up any misunderstanding.

However, physical laws and causality are not preeminent outside of the physical. The scientific method does not work in the astral realm, nor do physical laws govern the non-physical (or, more precisely, what we currently accept as non-physical). I believe that there will always be a strong element of bias in any non-official information; discerning what is undistorted, valid information, is the challenge.

I'm finding some strikingly specific correspondences between "The Key" and the Seth material. Some of them are fairly obscure and arcane. This is interesting to me because I seriously doubt that Strieber has read much of the Seth material. (In fact, I'm reasonably sure that the vast majority of people who pick up "Seth Speaks" immediately throw it down.) So when I see some obscure correspondence here, I notice it.

On the other hand, I see elements of "The Key" that I find nowhere else, or in writings that I question. Almost, anyway. For example, Strieber has a peculiar notion of what is defined as a "soul," and I am not sure that his definition of "soul" is the same that is in most metaphysical texts. In Strieber's cosmology, the soul is essentially a physical construction that can be destroyed; it can be obliterated in a nuclear explosion; it can be executed; it can be electrically imprisoned, eternally; it can be harvested and used in "intelligent machines."

The only other place that I find this belief is in certain fringe UFOlogical circles. So I wonder... Is this a distortion or fundament misperception? Or is this a belief that is emerging among those obsessed with UFOs? Or, is this a belief that is implanted by whatever intelligence is behind some of the more malignant UFO presences?

Is this belief, therefore, "wrong"? I'm not entirely sure. I have run across some obscure references in other unofficial works that seem to describe realities where souls are actually enslaved--but these cases are specifically identified as originating in distinctly non-human (alien) realities... specifically, in Michael Newton's description of "hybrid" souls.

So, as much as I would like to dismiss these references as "wrong," I really can't. It may be that what we have come to define as a "soul"--as a unit of consciousness that incarnates physically as a human--describes something that operates only in our particular part of the universe. Intelligent constructions outside our greater nonphysical reality may obey laws that seem truly alien to us.

And, I hasten to add, ought to remain alien.

Monday, January 16, 2012

Had a strange dream this morning

I dreamed that someone had detonated a nuclear weapon over a city in Florida--Jacksonville, I think. The weapon had been made by an American--not by a foreign terrorist. And the event was not reported in the American press; I had to learn about it from foreign news services, primarily the BBC.

So what would inspire such a dream? Well, I have been listening lately to some gloom-and-doom podcasts lately. One recent "Coast" astrologer (who claims near-perfect accuracy) believes that Israel will strike Iran near the end of this year.

I have had many dreams like this during times of world stress; in the Reagan years, I dreamed that the US had gone to war with the Soviet Union. During the last Iraq war, I dreamed that Bush had invaded Iran. (He certainly was planning to at the time of the dream, but he was prevented from doing so.) So this dream seems to fall into this category. I am hoping for some creative intervention into the current crisis with Iran, though
Zbigniew Brzezinski warns of a possible "October Surprise" from the Middle East.

There seems to be a deeper meaning in the dream, however. Right after 9/11, many Americans were convinced that a nuclear terrorist attack on an American city was imminent. Pundits, prognosticators, and politicians manipulated the American public with this fear, and it was one of the main justifications for the invasion on Iraq. Now, however, we have moved on to new fears, specifically, to a fear of a nuclear incident involving Israel, Pakistan, or Iran--way over there, in other words.

The dream seems to be saying, bluntly, that the United States is still in danger--not from the stereotypical "terrorist"--but from an American. And when the event happens, the American media will suppress information on it. We will have to learn about it from outside the US. As Kafkaesque as this seems, it is not so strange as to be impossible.

Monday, January 9, 2012

Currently reading..

Dr. Dianne Morrissey's "You Can See The Light" is actually quite good; I'm about half-way through it. (A used copy can be obtained for pennies at the usual places.) It is not a long and complicated book, but her information (particularly relating to OOBEs) is consistent with my experiences and readings.

Books describing, collating, and pontificating on the meanings of NDEs have become a New Age cottage industry. Some are better than others... The better ones simply present the experience and tend to be somewhat reductionist. The Near Death Experience is ineffable at best; then, the part that is remembered has to be somehow translated into the experiencer's vocabulary, along with the usual religious overlay. So, the more reductionist, the better.

What is novel about Dr. Morrissey's approach is that she links the NDE with common out-of-body experiences, and she argues that everyone can experience many of the features common to NDEs in the out-of-body state. I think she's right. Her descriptions of the various stages of OOBEs are both specific and extremely accurate (based on my personal experience).

As I've been reading Dr. Morrissey's accounts, I can't help but compare them to Dannion Brinkley's, whose NDE was similar to Dr. Morrissey's. His description of his NDE accounts has been challenged; and it doesn't help that he made a number of predictions of our near future (derived from his NDE visions) that have largely fallen flat. My first impression is that Dr. Morrissey's accounts are everything that Brinkley's isn't, on several levels; and this is a good thing.

Thursday, January 5, 2012

More thoughts on paranormalism

I've been doing my usual omnivorous research and reading, and today I dropped by a conspiracy site I was unfamiliar with (Godlike Productions), which seemed identical to other paranormal forums that I've seen. I was led there while checking on some info on Chris High, who is associated with George Ure and their proprietary web bot (which, for some reason, has always reminded me of that Bible Code book). I was motivated to check on Chris High while checking out a special interview on Unknowncountry with "futurist" John Petersen of the Arlington Institute, which I know little about. A few skeptical subscribers called Mr. Petersen out for relying heavily on the Chris High web bot program, as well as a presumed association with a certain Drunvalo Melchizedek--who I was unfamiliar with but also got to know a bit, and whose Wikipedia entry includes an illustration of the "Flower Of Life"--which I think that Colin Andrews mentioned as being illustrated in one of the first "real" crop circles.

The more I read--and it should be apparent that I'm behind the curve on a lot of people in the paranormal field--the less interested I became, because, as I've insisted, I'm not really into the paranormal field as a whole. I see it as a sociological phenomenon, a self-referencing set of beliefs that are poorly thought-out and, overall, are characterized by bad research and a number of logical fallacies.

I do think, however, that while the paranormal movement is mostly fluff, it has arisen in response to a core set of truly anomalous phenomena. And I've stumbled on a few of these phenomena, most of which are largely ignored by paranormalists.

While tracking down references to the Southern Television broadcast incident, I stumbled upon a site that listed the top fifty Fortean anomalies of the past century, and found a couple of interesting ones.

Two examples that intrigued me... The case of Yuliya Vorobyeva, a Ukrainian who was struck by lightning in 1978, after which she discovered that she was able to see inside physical objects--a skill that she used to diagnose diseases in people. The story may well be apocryphal--before the Ukraine became part of Dick Cheney's "New Europe," it was affiliated by another empire in '78, the one with an Iron Curtain--so there's no way to know if it's true. And I couldn't find any documentation on it. But the story intrigued me because there seems to be an association between near-fatal electrical shocks, and the development of heightened sensory awareness. In fact, I'm reading a book on this very subject: the stereotypically entitled "You Can See The Light," by Dianne Morrisey, who had an NDE after being electrocuted (possibly my greatest fear, right after airplane crashes).

The other case that I found was the so-called "Moberly–Jourdain incident," about two French ladies who were transported to the 1700s while visiting Versailles in 1901. A couple of researchers have deconstructed the account and argue that it has a prosaic explanation, but I was intrigued enough to track down an edition of their original account.

So, this is why I bother with the broader paranormal field--it causes me to discover cases that, to me, might be truly anomalous.

As for the rest of the paranormal... Most paranormal evangelists do nothing more than string together a bunch of poorly documented, poorly sourced anecdotal accounts, and then proceed to instruct us on their "meaning," arguing that by do doing, they will "advance" our understanding of the overall phenomena. This approach, I think, has failed and will always fail, largely because true paranormal events seem intrinsically incongruent with our most fundament expectations of how reality should work. We will never be able to find meaning (much less, explanation) for events that have no reference to what we believe to be "true." Hence, paranormal events will appear to be deceptive, illogical, and, ultimately, meaningless.

The Moberly–Jourdain incident--if it's "true," or is what it purports to be--might give some insight into the nature of time, which is probably the focus of any interest that I might have in the paranormal.

Monday, January 2, 2012

The Southern Television broadcast interruption hoax

Thank you, Kandinsky, for your link to "Southern Television broadcast interruption hoax." I thought it was fascinating, so I decided to do a full entry on it--as an object lesson on how to do proper research.

I read all of the references in the Wikipedia article (that I could get to) on it. Based on the transcript alone, it certainly *sounds* like a hoax... because any hoaxer would want the message to seem plausible on one level, while including an element of whimsy or absurdity so that we can be in on the joke.

About half of the references to the transmission label it as a definite hoax, while the others argue that while the transmission appears to be a hoax, the perpetrators were never identified or caught. (I can't get to what appears to be the most detailed account, from "The Daily Collegian.") Of course, if I were a prankster of this sort, I would try not to get caught, though I might have bragged about it anonymously years later.

This is one of those events that probably someone should have devoted more work on at the time.

Now, any careful researcher (as Collins should have been) can include the transmission in his books or DVDs, and even claim that it's ET in origin, but he would have to warn his audience that the transmission has been labeled as a hoax, and point them to the references, so that they can draw their own conclusions. In my opinion, it's misleading to present such evidence as genuine, allowing his audience to believe that it is indeed an ET broadcast, when in fact it has been given a cursory investigation and is alleged to be a hoax. At best it's a mystery, or "unexplained."

This event seems to be one of those litmus tests designed to expose a person's ideological orientation. The non-believers in Ashtar (the majority of the educated population) will immediately believe that this was a silly prank. Those who want to believe in ET will label this as a mysterious event that suggests that ET is out there.

What do I believe? Well, I seriously doubt that it's ET. A commenter on one of Collins's boards pointed out that the message is remarkably similar to the stuff in Andrija Puharich's book on Uri Geller (which I read at the time)... and this lends the broadcast credibility. I think it's the opposite. I think that even Geller himself implicitly disavowed Puharich's book. Talk of "Ashtar" was very much in the air in the mid-70s. Ruth Montgomery wrote a number of accounts about Ashtar during the time, and these channelings helped form the basis for the "axis shift" predictions that came later. I think that the broadcast has to be viewed in this cultural context. Because the perpetrators (be they ET or college kids) were never caught, I am leaning toward the possibility that the broadcast was one of those weird, Fortean mysteries which may never be explained, but its association with the UFO cult beliefs of the '70s tends to discredit it.

Sunday, January 1, 2012

Colin Andrews on Coast

I have always ignored the whole crop circle scene, but Colin Andrews recently gave a solid overview (even defense) of the phenomenon. I've heard him on other shows, and he's always impressed me as a reliable researcher. As always, I give more weight to the field researchers (as opposed to the armchair dabblers, like me). He had the lucky break of being financed for a couple of years by closet paranormalist Laurance Rockefeller, who, before he passed away, tried to do the impossible--pin down the UFO phenomenon. In other words, Andrews did real scientific research on crop circles, which awaits replication (although this may have already been performed by the MOD).

I'd really like to get his DVD "Conscious Circles," mostly to hear his fortuitous recording of a strange interruption of a 1977 BBC broadcast by an anomalous "voice," supposedly heard by "millions"; I'm almost sure that I read about this at the time in "Fate" magazine. If I have any feeble talent, it's in hearing. I have wasted the bulk of my life listening to (not to mention, downloading, buying, or recording) things, and I think I can hear aspects of audio that most may overlook.

Andrews discussed several intriguing anomalies that seem to be not only truly strange, but properly vetted.

Andrews argues that the crop circle phenomenon is associated with an effort by "someone" to advance human consciousness. (I hope he is right.) He alluded to the persistent theme of much New Age, paranormal, as well as indigenous philosophy--the cataclysms that are predicted to occur in this century.

I've argued that such predictions have historically proven to be wrong. Still, they persist, and they continue to surface in a number of personal visions and premonitions. As someone who has followed these predictions for 30-plus years, I think it's interesting that they have always proved to be both incorrect and persistent.

So, as I was listening to Andrews, I began to wonder if these predictions (as well as mass unconscious forebodings) of earth cataclysms were part of the same attempts by "someone" to change human consciousness.

The earth cataclysms seen by many may well occur; or, they may not, if the race takes a certain path. Implicit in such visions is the requirement that we, collectively, change our ways, swiftly. It reminds me very much of the apocalyptic prophesies that Jehovah pronounced on the children of Israel. Those predictions were designed to modify behavior (as well as replenish the coffers of the priestly caste).

The phenomenon of prophesy may be a core aspect of our collective memory as well as a historical tool to tweak human consciousness. In our heavily materialistic age, we believe that we are victims of a material reality that we barely control. But what if our material experience is a function of our consciousness? What if the the human collective consciousness not only influences, but determines, the future?

In such a model, tweaking human consciousness becomes supremely important. Predicting disasters that subsequently do not materialize may be a tool needed to modify our collective consciousness.

Andrews also alluded briefly to the fact that Earth's population will soon reach seven billion. I immediately wondered if there might be some invisible trigger: When Earth's population passes a certain limit, a change of consciousness would be triggered. Quite possible.