UFO MEME
Lost In Translation by Iona Miller, 1995
Archive: http://zero-point.tripod.com/UFOs/UFO1.html
The UFO Phenomenon as an Informational Virus
by Iona Miller, Certified Hypnotherapist
(American Council of Hypnotist Examiners, #HT 187-206)
©March, 1995
Updated 3/2000: A report on the nature of consciousness, perception, memory, dreams, hypnosis, process-oriented therapy, paranoia, false memory syndrome, neuropsychology, geological anomalies, and the UFO-ET phenomenon. Despite the true essence of any alien manifestation, this notion functions as an informational virus which is a psychosocial reality. This mini-course in the complexity of interrelated issues impacting the nature of perception is meant to help sort out those phenomena, while deepening understanding of ourselves and our relationship to the universe.
Site: http://ufomeme.iwarp.com/index.html
Archive: http://zero-point.tripod.com/UFOs/UFO1.html
The UFO Phenomenon as an Informational Virus
by Iona Miller, Certified Hypnotherapist
(American Council of Hypnotist Examiners, #HT 187-206)
©March, 1995
Updated 3/2000: A report on the nature of consciousness, perception, memory, dreams, hypnosis, process-oriented therapy, paranoia, false memory syndrome, neuropsychology, geological anomalies, and the UFO-ET phenomenon. Despite the true essence of any alien manifestation, this notion functions as an informational virus which is a psychosocial reality. This mini-course in the complexity of interrelated issues impacting the nature of perception is meant to help sort out those phenomena, while deepening understanding of ourselves and our relationship to the universe.
Site: http://ufomeme.iwarp.com/index.html
Mothership, Iona Miller, (c)2007, All Rights Reserved
Stephen Blonder Book Foreword, 7-29-07, 2030 words:
Oracle of the Phoenix
FOREWORD
Iona Miller, 7/2007
"There are no unnatural or supernatural phenomena, only very large gaps in our knowledge of what is natural... We should strive to fill those gaps of ignorance."
--Astronaut, Edgar Mitchell
Can we find radical, empirical confirmation of Mystery? Perhaps not, but we can still seek integration, contemporize our metaphors and liberate knowledge from the branding of religions and corporations.
Sometimes we are forced by circumstances to simply stand in the Mystery, in awe and wonder. Events beyond our control can lead to sudden, profound changes in our being. Sometimes we struggle to articulate our response. Emotions underlie our unique autobiographical experience.
We are compelled to share our stories through a meaningful narrative to validate ourselves and express the reality of the psyche. Healing meaning embodied in our personal tales speaks from the soul of the resilience of human spirit. Restoring order to life necessitates reworking understandings of the self and the world, redefining the disruptions and life itself.
To heal originally meant to make whole. Entering our interior story takes the same courage as starting a novel. Perhaps we do not create our stories; rather our stories create us! Creative narratives flow from our challenging experiences as both healing fictions and historicities. Broadly, poetics means an expression of the movement of the human spirit. It details chaotic change, which profoundly moves our psyches as well as our bodies. Psyche connects us with the larger process and purpose of life.
People choose how to plot their autobiographical narratives, which unify the chronological and nonchronological. This interweaving of non-linear narrative time is not reducible to linear time, and the beginning and end are often confounded with significance and explanations. We weave convoluted tales of stories within stories, shaping memory and events.
Narratives are a way to articulate and resolve core issues, or universal problems and paradoxically a way to either avoid or heal biographical discontinuities. In storytelling, we organize, display and work through our experiences. Narratives can be a potent force mediating disruptions. Experience is reframed and reshaped in the narrative process.
Symptoms belong to the embodied soul. The metaphorical reality of the psyche is more than mere fiction but less than literal. Metaphors are more than symbolic ways of speaking. Metaphors facilitate thought by providing an experiential framework in which newly acquired, abstract concepts may be assimilated. They are ways of perceiving, feeling and existing.
Through this imaginal reality we find soul, meaning, and significance in our suffering. In story we develop creative ways of interpreting disruption and draw together disparate aspects of the disruption into a cohesive whole.
There are many allusions surrounding the metaphor that "life is a journey." It implies that purposes are destinations, means are routes, difficulties are obstacles, achievements or catastrophes can be landmarks, and choices are crossroads. Our "healing" stories all have a common plot: a disruption to life is followed by efforts to restore life to 'normal.' There are many journeys, yet just one road.
Disrupted Lives
Our stories spontaneously become bigger than our puny selves when destiny pulls the strings in this process. Our perspective can enlarge instantly, even violently, as the personal is engulfed by the universal. Our struggles to deal with that embody those of collective mankind. Chaotic twists and turns mold our lives. The 'journey' is a core guiding metaphor for our multifarious experiences. It is a poetic journey of self-discovery.
The spiritual path is a deeply experiential journey to wrest one’s consciousness from the purely collective, to own one’s particular bit of history. The rupture that leads to the adventure can come from within or without oneself. It means surrender to the Great Unknown, which overwhelms the ego and rational comprehension. It repeats the classic theme of archetypal death of the old rigid self or ego and rebirth as a transformed individual with a more inclusive consciousness.
This is a story of integration, of making a work of art of one’s fate, of not only finding but also creating the Self, the holy sense of Wholeness. The Qabalistic worldview is the backbone of this book on the Phoenix Lights. It is a dynamic system, a Whole that differentiates itself into parts, which then integrate back into nested resonant wholes.
Synchronous Sightings
In this report, the perception of UFO sighting events is indisputable. It was a communal experience, covering several states, with multiple sources of video coverage. Only its interpretation is in question. It wasn’t a waking dream, magnetic disturbance, or temporal lobe seizure. Video cameras don’t have hallucinations. You can see for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGxOfCB22Mk
Whether military flares, earthlight plasmas, classified technology, or ultraterrestrial visitors, the glowing unidentified objects stir the imagination. If aliens haven’t invaded our air space, they surely have invaded our cultural consciousness.
Yet, Steven Blonder’s response remains unique among all those who saw this event. Some will meet such an experience with skepticism, or fear, denial, and suppression. Others will answer the call to adventure by plunging more deeply into themselves to find universal answers within. A sighting and its repercussions can cascade into even more soul-searching.
At first it may seem strange to link UFOs -- in this case anomalous vortices of light at some distance -- with the ancient metaphysical initiatory current of Kabbalah and other Hermetic arts, such as astrology or alchemy. But the spheres of the main Kabbalistic glyph, the Tree of Life, are described precisely as vortices of light.
Kabbalah deals specifically with the esoteric nature of Light as it becomes “frozen” in matter. Further, there is precedent for linking UFOs and Kabbalistic tradition. The Bible recounts the visions of Ezekiel and Enoch, who describe flying vehicles of light. The Vedas also describe such phenomena.
Light itself is the universal symbol of Spirit. When it appears as a visitation from the heavens, it trails Mystery in its wake. When we learn to use Light as a massless vehicle for our consciousness, we embody that Mystery, closing the gap between sacred and profane. In the wave mechanics of metaphysics, every intention, decision and action resonates, reflects and echoes throughout the whole of creation.
Kabbalah Worldview
Kabbalah is a spiritual technology for becoming more fully human, for decoding the mysteries of the hidden environment that bring depth and meaning to our existence. It answers the Grail Quest question: “What do these things mean?” It is a psychosensory gnosis that imparts participatory wisdom. Its secrets cannot be told because they are a unique experiential fusion of physical, emotional, mental and spiritual dimensions.
Kabbalah informs us about nature and our nature. Inner space has as many or more dimensions than outer space. The Kabbalah teaches us the art of living well instead of living better. The secret is in the power and the power is in the secret. It helps us rip through the veils of personal and cultural illusion to glimpse the eternal essence of Being. The Tree of Life is a spiritual circuit diagram or mindmap to connecting with primordial Source. It shares much in common with the symbolism of the eastern chakra system.
Mythopoesis means literally, "myth-making," the natural expression of the visionary wisdom inborn to the human species. It is a creative act of story telling or narration, by which human beings "track" their experience and orient themselves to the cosmos at large. The mystic Void becomes the womb of creation.
Nature rejects the naiveté of absolute truth. Realities are all human constructions. The task becomes one of “catching ourselves in the act” of creating our own “reality” from the flow of events. Human truth is always an engagement of mind with experience. Metahistory is a guiding narrative for human potential, rather than an interpretation of events. The cross-cultural metastory of the human species is an overarching view of past, present, and future. It opens a path toward participation in a story that leads beyond history, a mythos to guide the species.
Meaning & Mystery
The UFO as a metahistorical phenomenon is the mandala, the major mystery symbol of our times. In Kabbalah, we invite the vision. In UFO sightings, the vision imposes itself on us. When they appear, they instantly create a counter-environment, an altered stat
They impel us into a different reality whether we are ready for it or not. They stop us in our tracks, compelling and commanding our attention, bringing us to the omnipresent Zero Point of Being, beyond ordinary time. We move instantly beyond narcissistic self-absorption and beliefs into the mystic through direct experience.
Especially when they appear as communal experience, UFOs have inherent meaning. They are psychotronic, resonating with and awakening deeper layers of the psyche. In an incandescent moment, we stand enraptured in shock and awe before the truth that defies belief, in aesthetic and conceptual arrest. Some people require something extraordinary to rip them from the fabric of conventionality. Others suspected or intuited as much all along.
The membrane between the natural and the supernatural ruptures. Change happens at the creative edge of order and chaos, the Known and the Unknown. One brilliant flash can lead to utter chaos or luminous enlightenment. In rapture, we are seized up into the heavenly realm. The phenomenology of the UFO can be accepted as anything from a threat of change, to a healing fiction, to a symbolic Pied Piper of our own futures.
The UFO experience forces us to make a quantum leap. They challenge our concepts of our existential and physical nature. Truth is stranger than fiction and more than a metaphor. Ultimately, it is our sense organs, which help us interpret the world and our experience through our perceptions. They help us make a distinction between what is "real" and "unreal." But when our senses are confounded, the seeds of transformation have been planted.
Whether you believe in them or not, the UFO is metaphysically significant. The emotional part of the brain, (the right, spatial hemisphere), cannot analytically distinguish a symbol from a symbolic representation.What we see in UFOs reflects what is within ourselves from the shadowy and sinister, to the violently irrational, to the most universal. It can be seen as alien or sacred, or a fusion of both.
We are modified unpredictably by this cosmic feedback. In imagination -- nonordinary or virtual reality – real/unreal becomes a moot point. Fantasy, in fact, animates both our inner and outer worlds, and creates meaning. The on-going imaginative process of the psyche is the Ground of Being. Does it matter in the end what the “explanation” is if the phenomenon excites, feeds, and transforms the soul?
Change is Stability
The tension between continuity and change is not simply an ancient philosophical conundrum. It is also at the root of the most pressing questions of our time. Scientific theories in physics and cosmology; in biology and evolution; in psychology, neuroscience, and studies of consciousness and personal identity are all informed by questions of change and continuity.
Uncertainty is the zeitgeist of our day. We are anxious and unsure. We face global warming, economic and environmental deterioration, emerging infections and incurable viruses, pandemics, bioterrorism, wars, urban violence, soil and water depletion, rampant population growth, genetically-engineered food and organisms, hazardous waste, and profound doubts about our earth's ability to continue to sustain life.
Much of Earth's life is already going extinct, and we wonder about our own and our grandchildren's futures, health, and well-being. Many of us feel the impact as loss of our cherished dreams of a better future, the utopian ideals of our youth.
Despite all our knowledge we have not been able to control or dominate our environment successfully. Knowledge is not wisdom, or even understanding. Still, we have no choice but to be optimistic because it makes a difference to our souls. There is a deeper current in life and it is embodied in Mystery-- the unpredictable, the unknown, and perhaps unknowable.
Continuity is an illusion. Disruption to life is the real constant in human experience. The only continuity that has staying power is that of the body, and even that is vulnerable. But this fact is too unsettling for us to live with consciously. It becomes the motivator of faith.
Iona Miller, 7/2007
Oracle of the Phoenix
FOREWORD
Iona Miller, 7/2007
"There are no unnatural or supernatural phenomena, only very large gaps in our knowledge of what is natural... We should strive to fill those gaps of ignorance."
--Astronaut, Edgar Mitchell
Can we find radical, empirical confirmation of Mystery? Perhaps not, but we can still seek integration, contemporize our metaphors and liberate knowledge from the branding of religions and corporations.
Sometimes we are forced by circumstances to simply stand in the Mystery, in awe and wonder. Events beyond our control can lead to sudden, profound changes in our being. Sometimes we struggle to articulate our response. Emotions underlie our unique autobiographical experience.
We are compelled to share our stories through a meaningful narrative to validate ourselves and express the reality of the psyche. Healing meaning embodied in our personal tales speaks from the soul of the resilience of human spirit. Restoring order to life necessitates reworking understandings of the self and the world, redefining the disruptions and life itself.
To heal originally meant to make whole. Entering our interior story takes the same courage as starting a novel. Perhaps we do not create our stories; rather our stories create us! Creative narratives flow from our challenging experiences as both healing fictions and historicities. Broadly, poetics means an expression of the movement of the human spirit. It details chaotic change, which profoundly moves our psyches as well as our bodies. Psyche connects us with the larger process and purpose of life.
People choose how to plot their autobiographical narratives, which unify the chronological and nonchronological. This interweaving of non-linear narrative time is not reducible to linear time, and the beginning and end are often confounded with significance and explanations. We weave convoluted tales of stories within stories, shaping memory and events.
Narratives are a way to articulate and resolve core issues, or universal problems and paradoxically a way to either avoid or heal biographical discontinuities. In storytelling, we organize, display and work through our experiences. Narratives can be a potent force mediating disruptions. Experience is reframed and reshaped in the narrative process.
Symptoms belong to the embodied soul. The metaphorical reality of the psyche is more than mere fiction but less than literal. Metaphors are more than symbolic ways of speaking. Metaphors facilitate thought by providing an experiential framework in which newly acquired, abstract concepts may be assimilated. They are ways of perceiving, feeling and existing.
Through this imaginal reality we find soul, meaning, and significance in our suffering. In story we develop creative ways of interpreting disruption and draw together disparate aspects of the disruption into a cohesive whole.
There are many allusions surrounding the metaphor that "life is a journey." It implies that purposes are destinations, means are routes, difficulties are obstacles, achievements or catastrophes can be landmarks, and choices are crossroads. Our "healing" stories all have a common plot: a disruption to life is followed by efforts to restore life to 'normal.' There are many journeys, yet just one road.
Disrupted Lives
Our stories spontaneously become bigger than our puny selves when destiny pulls the strings in this process. Our perspective can enlarge instantly, even violently, as the personal is engulfed by the universal. Our struggles to deal with that embody those of collective mankind. Chaotic twists and turns mold our lives. The 'journey' is a core guiding metaphor for our multifarious experiences. It is a poetic journey of self-discovery.
The spiritual path is a deeply experiential journey to wrest one’s consciousness from the purely collective, to own one’s particular bit of history. The rupture that leads to the adventure can come from within or without oneself. It means surrender to the Great Unknown, which overwhelms the ego and rational comprehension. It repeats the classic theme of archetypal death of the old rigid self or ego and rebirth as a transformed individual with a more inclusive consciousness.
This is a story of integration, of making a work of art of one’s fate, of not only finding but also creating the Self, the holy sense of Wholeness. The Qabalistic worldview is the backbone of this book on the Phoenix Lights. It is a dynamic system, a Whole that differentiates itself into parts, which then integrate back into nested resonant wholes.
Synchronous Sightings
In this report, the perception of UFO sighting events is indisputable. It was a communal experience, covering several states, with multiple sources of video coverage. Only its interpretation is in question. It wasn’t a waking dream, magnetic disturbance, or temporal lobe seizure. Video cameras don’t have hallucinations. You can see for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGxOfCB22Mk
Whether military flares, earthlight plasmas, classified technology, or ultraterrestrial visitors, the glowing unidentified objects stir the imagination. If aliens haven’t invaded our air space, they surely have invaded our cultural consciousness.
Yet, Steven Blonder’s response remains unique among all those who saw this event. Some will meet such an experience with skepticism, or fear, denial, and suppression. Others will answer the call to adventure by plunging more deeply into themselves to find universal answers within. A sighting and its repercussions can cascade into even more soul-searching.
At first it may seem strange to link UFOs -- in this case anomalous vortices of light at some distance -- with the ancient metaphysical initiatory current of Kabbalah and other Hermetic arts, such as astrology or alchemy. But the spheres of the main Kabbalistic glyph, the Tree of Life, are described precisely as vortices of light.
Kabbalah deals specifically with the esoteric nature of Light as it becomes “frozen” in matter. Further, there is precedent for linking UFOs and Kabbalistic tradition. The Bible recounts the visions of Ezekiel and Enoch, who describe flying vehicles of light. The Vedas also describe such phenomena.
Light itself is the universal symbol of Spirit. When it appears as a visitation from the heavens, it trails Mystery in its wake. When we learn to use Light as a massless vehicle for our consciousness, we embody that Mystery, closing the gap between sacred and profane. In the wave mechanics of metaphysics, every intention, decision and action resonates, reflects and echoes throughout the whole of creation.
Kabbalah Worldview
Kabbalah is a spiritual technology for becoming more fully human, for decoding the mysteries of the hidden environment that bring depth and meaning to our existence. It answers the Grail Quest question: “What do these things mean?” It is a psychosensory gnosis that imparts participatory wisdom. Its secrets cannot be told because they are a unique experiential fusion of physical, emotional, mental and spiritual dimensions.
Kabbalah informs us about nature and our nature. Inner space has as many or more dimensions than outer space. The Kabbalah teaches us the art of living well instead of living better. The secret is in the power and the power is in the secret. It helps us rip through the veils of personal and cultural illusion to glimpse the eternal essence of Being. The Tree of Life is a spiritual circuit diagram or mindmap to connecting with primordial Source. It shares much in common with the symbolism of the eastern chakra system.
Mythopoesis means literally, "myth-making," the natural expression of the visionary wisdom inborn to the human species. It is a creative act of story telling or narration, by which human beings "track" their experience and orient themselves to the cosmos at large. The mystic Void becomes the womb of creation.
Nature rejects the naiveté of absolute truth. Realities are all human constructions. The task becomes one of “catching ourselves in the act” of creating our own “reality” from the flow of events. Human truth is always an engagement of mind with experience. Metahistory is a guiding narrative for human potential, rather than an interpretation of events. The cross-cultural metastory of the human species is an overarching view of past, present, and future. It opens a path toward participation in a story that leads beyond history, a mythos to guide the species.
Meaning & Mystery
The UFO as a metahistorical phenomenon is the mandala, the major mystery symbol of our times. In Kabbalah, we invite the vision. In UFO sightings, the vision imposes itself on us. When they appear, they instantly create a counter-environment, an altered stat
They impel us into a different reality whether we are ready for it or not. They stop us in our tracks, compelling and commanding our attention, bringing us to the omnipresent Zero Point of Being, beyond ordinary time. We move instantly beyond narcissistic self-absorption and beliefs into the mystic through direct experience.
Especially when they appear as communal experience, UFOs have inherent meaning. They are psychotronic, resonating with and awakening deeper layers of the psyche. In an incandescent moment, we stand enraptured in shock and awe before the truth that defies belief, in aesthetic and conceptual arrest. Some people require something extraordinary to rip them from the fabric of conventionality. Others suspected or intuited as much all along.
The membrane between the natural and the supernatural ruptures. Change happens at the creative edge of order and chaos, the Known and the Unknown. One brilliant flash can lead to utter chaos or luminous enlightenment. In rapture, we are seized up into the heavenly realm. The phenomenology of the UFO can be accepted as anything from a threat of change, to a healing fiction, to a symbolic Pied Piper of our own futures.
The UFO experience forces us to make a quantum leap. They challenge our concepts of our existential and physical nature. Truth is stranger than fiction and more than a metaphor. Ultimately, it is our sense organs, which help us interpret the world and our experience through our perceptions. They help us make a distinction between what is "real" and "unreal." But when our senses are confounded, the seeds of transformation have been planted.
Whether you believe in them or not, the UFO is metaphysically significant. The emotional part of the brain, (the right, spatial hemisphere), cannot analytically distinguish a symbol from a symbolic representation.What we see in UFOs reflects what is within ourselves from the shadowy and sinister, to the violently irrational, to the most universal. It can be seen as alien or sacred, or a fusion of both.
We are modified unpredictably by this cosmic feedback. In imagination -- nonordinary or virtual reality – real/unreal becomes a moot point. Fantasy, in fact, animates both our inner and outer worlds, and creates meaning. The on-going imaginative process of the psyche is the Ground of Being. Does it matter in the end what the “explanation” is if the phenomenon excites, feeds, and transforms the soul?
Change is Stability
The tension between continuity and change is not simply an ancient philosophical conundrum. It is also at the root of the most pressing questions of our time. Scientific theories in physics and cosmology; in biology and evolution; in psychology, neuroscience, and studies of consciousness and personal identity are all informed by questions of change and continuity.
Uncertainty is the zeitgeist of our day. We are anxious and unsure. We face global warming, economic and environmental deterioration, emerging infections and incurable viruses, pandemics, bioterrorism, wars, urban violence, soil and water depletion, rampant population growth, genetically-engineered food and organisms, hazardous waste, and profound doubts about our earth's ability to continue to sustain life.
Much of Earth's life is already going extinct, and we wonder about our own and our grandchildren's futures, health, and well-being. Many of us feel the impact as loss of our cherished dreams of a better future, the utopian ideals of our youth.
Despite all our knowledge we have not been able to control or dominate our environment successfully. Knowledge is not wisdom, or even understanding. Still, we have no choice but to be optimistic because it makes a difference to our souls. There is a deeper current in life and it is embodied in Mystery-- the unpredictable, the unknown, and perhaps unknowable.
Continuity is an illusion. Disruption to life is the real constant in human experience. The only continuity that has staying power is that of the body, and even that is vulnerable. But this fact is too unsettling for us to live with consciously. It becomes the motivator of faith.
Iona Miller, 7/2007
http://ufomeme.iwarp.com/index.html
This is the report no one wants to read. For those skeptical of the UFO phenomenon, it is far too permissive of the possibility of a different reality than that dictated by the official reality of scientific reductionism. For the True Believers, it won't go far enough to serve anyone's confirmatory search.
While admitting the possibility that some people may experience UFO-ET contact, this report speculates that it is a contagious notion which has invaded the collective imagination, and many individual psyches. Therefore, it is useful in evaluating the whole scenario to take a look at both sides of the argument.
1). UFO-ET phenomenon emerge from faulty cognitive processing, folklore and pseudoscience, or 2). " They're here." As of this writing (4-95), Disney has begun the promotion of a new experiential novelty, which will blur the distinction between fantasy and reality even further. "Tomorrowland" is set to offer a virtual reality experience of alien abduction open to all comers. It seems as if this "psychic implant" might have emotional repercussions which are as yet unknown, and color or condition future "contactee" reports. As if we have not been permeated enough with visual and auditory images of this experience, we can now partake of it recreationally, in the theoretically "safe," multisensory, full-immersion environment. As entire generations partake of this imaginative experience and it becomes embedded in their consciousness, it can condition any subsequent dreams and experiences, real or imagined.
Disney's presentation is based on the premise that "they are here," and the government is suppressing this fact from public knowledge. We can only speculate on why one of the most powerful forces in Hollywood would make a choice to take such a political stand in regard to this phenomenon. The paranoid might ask "What if it is some kind of sick desensitization project? And what about that short, humanoid "mouse" with the big cranium and slight body?" Are you ready for "Hybrid Mickey?"
MEMES [2000 update]. Since this book was originally written there has been an increase in interest and literature about the notion of social contagions, as originally described by psychologist Carl Jung. The books out now include Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society, by Aaron Lynch, The Meme Machine by Susan J. Blackmore, The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, and Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme, Richard Brodie.
These books don't specifically analyze UFO phenomena, but some of these authors, such as Blackmore, have discussed it elsewhere. So have the scientists who support CSICOP and its organ The Skeptical Inquirer. This literature attempts to show a predictable expansion-contraction pattern to the social spread of ideas. A meme is a self-propagating idea, a unit of cultural imitation that, much like a biological or computer virus, effectively programs its own retransmission. They spread through motivating their "host population," novel configurations of old ideas, and by proselytizers.
Popular beliefs spread like contagions--cognitive viruses. But where do the original notions originate? Does it come from our cultural paranoia about invasions ingrained from the cold war? Does it come from a quasi-religious yearning for contact with something greater than ourselves? Neurologist Michael Persinger has put forth a "Temporal Lobe seizure" theory based on his electromagnetic experiments with subjects at Laurentian University in Toronto, Canada. See his hard-to-find, expensive, but excellent book, The Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs. He also has investigated the relationship between UFO sightings and fluctuations in the local conditions of the earth's magnetic fields and their relationship to luminous bodies generated by tectonic forces, called Earth Lights or free-floating plasmas.
The hallmark of postmodern philosophy has been disbelief or skepticism of all "metanarratives," or translations of reality. Postmodernism has even turned its profound skepticism on such important humanist concepts as "objective truth" and reason.
Yet, for a deconstructionist postmodern society, individually we are still riddled with superstition and gullibility, and open to manipulation through our belief systems as any politician, philosopher, clergy, or salesperson will attest. Further, most people are painfully naive when it comes to even the simplest scientific understanding. Most of us don't have a clue about the fundamental nature of physical reality or our own psychological nature, and our ability to be fooled by our senses and mind. Physical and psychological aspects of consciousness are studied in the interdisciplinary cognitive sciences, which include philosophy, psychology, linguistics, anthropology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence.
The new science of consciousness is emerging from an interface with the new postquantum physics. A maverick tack in mind science research is the quest for sentience in other dimensions, meaning we have begun using our own minds in a multidimensional way. Perhaps psychology is more complicated than physics because inner space has more dimensions than outer space. A major accomplishment of cognitive science has been the clear demonstration of the validity of positing a level of mental representation; a set of constructs can be invoked or the explanation of cognitive phenomena, ranging from visual perception to story comprehension. These representational assumptions and concepts are now taken for granted and permeate the cognitive sciences. Many vocabularies and conceptual frameworks have been used to characterize the representational level, including scripts, schemas, symbols, frames, images, mental models, etc.
Terms used to describe the operations carried our upon these mental entities include transformations, conjunctions, deletions, reversals, and so on. There may be several varieties of representations, perhaps on a continuum from implicit to explicit, or from hard-wired to flexibly programmed. Nature rejects the naivete that seeks absolute truth. We are beginning to realize, individually and culturally, that "realities" are all human constructions. The task becomes one of "catching ourselves in the act" of creating our own "reality" from the flow of events. Human truth is always an engagement of mind with experience.
The challenge of the therapist in these times of chaotic change is to validate the concept that we don't have to fear the collapse of what we think we are. We can embrace this disruptive chaos, trusting that it is an emergent self-organizing process. We don't need to fear the collapse of our personalistic belief system (the "box" we live in), nor our belief in absolute truth. Metaphor--what an experience is like--is the structure producing coherent, ordered experiences.
"How we know what we know" is encoded within our own unique epistemological metaphors, which describe what our personal experience is like. Narration, or storytelling puts the general human condition into the particulars of experience. The metaphors are usually those of physical experience. We construct a reality based on our belief system about what is "out there" and "in here" and live within that framework, unless something or someone unpredictably disrupts that image. Though we share some firmly held notions about reality, there is no Archimedian point from which we can compare our views of the world to the world itself. We cannot step out of our culturally limited perspective to see how things really are in themselves.
A strong desire to engage in the "quest for uncertainty" complements our anxiety that perhaps there is no absolute, objective ground to reality. The warrant of Truth is ever-elusive when we deconstruct the foundational justifications of our convenient notions about the way the world works. It is easy to confuse what is actually the creation of beliefs with the "discovery of Truth," a common goal of science and theology. The scientific model of reason and universal rationality is evolving toward fuzzy logic, a new model of perception of reality.
"Fuzzy philosophy" is a relativistic perspective of conceptual modeling. Fuzzy philosophy is based on acceptance of degrees of truth, the "grayness" (truth values) of most propositions. Paradox and polarization are the results of a consciousness conditioned to think in terms of opposites, black and white thinking. Rather than approaching UFO-ET phenomena as real-unreal, or true-untrue, we can reframe these experiences in terms of the meaning of the transformational relationships. In this analogy, the prevelance of "the Grays" seems to point in the direction of this new paradigm. Surety and fact meld into psychic reality. To "fuzzy consciousness" nothing is absolute. It frees us from having to choose one polarity over another. It helps us accommodate conflicting concepts, keeping us open to examining the "evidence" from both sides.
Thus, we can "believe" to a limited degree without unconditional surrender of our critical faculties, and still continue to question skeptically, and evaluate each event on its own merits. As we will see in this report with its critique of both sides of the argument, the facts usually are partially true or false. Even the best scientific experiment only proves or disproves a particular notion. No study can explain away all of the particulars of the UFO-ET scenario, though debunkers try to dismiss them in toto. To the extent science has measured facts and interpreted them in all or nothing terms, it has failed to describe experiential reality.
"Truth" doesn't always match the facts. Logic and chaos, like any pair of opposites, meet and merge at the boundary. This boundary domain is the creative "edge of chaos," "the twilight zone," "the crack between the worlds," where the two meet and progressively meld into one another. The surety of fact melds into psychic reality. In this mode, there is a suspension of the tension between the opposites of the logical and natural mind. Beyond the paradox of yoked opposites lies the realm of relative "truth."
The "Fuzzy Principle" is described and experienced as vagueness, "shades of gray." There are an infinite number of gray values on the continuum, which spin out an infinite number of fractal solutions. Fuzzy thinking can help us revision our perspective on the relationship of mankind and the Other -- the interrelationships of man and transpersonal forces, including God and nature, life and death, and extraterrestrial entities. It is part of our adaptive evolution, provoking a quantum leap in our consciousness by challenging us with chaotic perturbations at the foundational level. In terms of the UFO-ET phenomenon, fuzzy logic defines tthe degree of containment within that discrete mode of reality, which presents us with universal physical and sociological consequences. What any ultimate consequences of this phenomenon might be are open to speculation.
Whitley Streiber, whose autobiographical novel and movie COMMUNION, probably did the most to popularize the notion of alien encounter and abduction has come to conclude that, "This is not unconscious debris, but something above what we call consciousness. The human mind seems to exist in some way on a hyperphysical and hyperdimensional level, perhaps even a hypercognitive level.""What is happening is that the barriers between this hypercognition and normal cognition are falling, and we're finding that there is a physical evolution of humankind that exists at this hyperphysical and hypercognitive level."
"What I'm looking forward to, is seeing the nature of human experience change as our consciousness rises toward this hyperconsciousness, and we begin to understand this higher level of physical being...this is essentially a vast, immensely subtle, immensely complicated theatrics of hyperconsciousness trying to penetrate our level of reality. It is like someone knocking at the door, something trying to get us to move up, to wake up and to come up in scale." Further he states, "When the authorities try to impose themselves on the experience, all they do is narrow it to their belief system. In other words, it gets filtered through what they expect. It can't be like that. It's got to be between the individual and whatever this is, so that it gets narrowed through everybody's experience, without the need for anybody telling anyone what to do." He echoes the sentiment of others when he speculates that over the next one- or two-hundred years that "society is going to completely recast itself as a reflection of hypercognititve thought. What that will mean, I have no idea."
TABLE OF CONTENTS FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION
PART I: Abstract
Millennial Fever
The Nature of Perception
Alien Stock Is Up
An Infectious Idea
No Exit
Penetrating Dreamtime PART II
A Classical Example
Inner and Outer Space
Self Deception
Pseudomemories
PTSD and Anxiety Disorders
Intruders
Amorphous What?
Mutant Message: UFO-ET Dreams
Waking Dreams
Save the Humans PART III
The Skeptical Inquiry
Temporal Lobe Seizures and Earth Lights
Virtual Reality Check
Process Oriented Therapy
REFERENCES
While admitting the possibility that some people may experience UFO-ET contact, this report speculates that it is a contagious notion which has invaded the collective imagination, and many individual psyches. Therefore, it is useful in evaluating the whole scenario to take a look at both sides of the argument.
1). UFO-ET phenomenon emerge from faulty cognitive processing, folklore and pseudoscience, or 2). " They're here." As of this writing (4-95), Disney has begun the promotion of a new experiential novelty, which will blur the distinction between fantasy and reality even further. "Tomorrowland" is set to offer a virtual reality experience of alien abduction open to all comers. It seems as if this "psychic implant" might have emotional repercussions which are as yet unknown, and color or condition future "contactee" reports. As if we have not been permeated enough with visual and auditory images of this experience, we can now partake of it recreationally, in the theoretically "safe," multisensory, full-immersion environment. As entire generations partake of this imaginative experience and it becomes embedded in their consciousness, it can condition any subsequent dreams and experiences, real or imagined.
Disney's presentation is based on the premise that "they are here," and the government is suppressing this fact from public knowledge. We can only speculate on why one of the most powerful forces in Hollywood would make a choice to take such a political stand in regard to this phenomenon. The paranoid might ask "What if it is some kind of sick desensitization project? And what about that short, humanoid "mouse" with the big cranium and slight body?" Are you ready for "Hybrid Mickey?"
MEMES [2000 update]. Since this book was originally written there has been an increase in interest and literature about the notion of social contagions, as originally described by psychologist Carl Jung. The books out now include Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society, by Aaron Lynch, The Meme Machine by Susan J. Blackmore, The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, and Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme, Richard Brodie.
These books don't specifically analyze UFO phenomena, but some of these authors, such as Blackmore, have discussed it elsewhere. So have the scientists who support CSICOP and its organ The Skeptical Inquirer. This literature attempts to show a predictable expansion-contraction pattern to the social spread of ideas. A meme is a self-propagating idea, a unit of cultural imitation that, much like a biological or computer virus, effectively programs its own retransmission. They spread through motivating their "host population," novel configurations of old ideas, and by proselytizers.
Popular beliefs spread like contagions--cognitive viruses. But where do the original notions originate? Does it come from our cultural paranoia about invasions ingrained from the cold war? Does it come from a quasi-religious yearning for contact with something greater than ourselves? Neurologist Michael Persinger has put forth a "Temporal Lobe seizure" theory based on his electromagnetic experiments with subjects at Laurentian University in Toronto, Canada. See his hard-to-find, expensive, but excellent book, The Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs. He also has investigated the relationship between UFO sightings and fluctuations in the local conditions of the earth's magnetic fields and their relationship to luminous bodies generated by tectonic forces, called Earth Lights or free-floating plasmas.
The hallmark of postmodern philosophy has been disbelief or skepticism of all "metanarratives," or translations of reality. Postmodernism has even turned its profound skepticism on such important humanist concepts as "objective truth" and reason.
Yet, for a deconstructionist postmodern society, individually we are still riddled with superstition and gullibility, and open to manipulation through our belief systems as any politician, philosopher, clergy, or salesperson will attest. Further, most people are painfully naive when it comes to even the simplest scientific understanding. Most of us don't have a clue about the fundamental nature of physical reality or our own psychological nature, and our ability to be fooled by our senses and mind. Physical and psychological aspects of consciousness are studied in the interdisciplinary cognitive sciences, which include philosophy, psychology, linguistics, anthropology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence.
The new science of consciousness is emerging from an interface with the new postquantum physics. A maverick tack in mind science research is the quest for sentience in other dimensions, meaning we have begun using our own minds in a multidimensional way. Perhaps psychology is more complicated than physics because inner space has more dimensions than outer space. A major accomplishment of cognitive science has been the clear demonstration of the validity of positing a level of mental representation; a set of constructs can be invoked or the explanation of cognitive phenomena, ranging from visual perception to story comprehension. These representational assumptions and concepts are now taken for granted and permeate the cognitive sciences. Many vocabularies and conceptual frameworks have been used to characterize the representational level, including scripts, schemas, symbols, frames, images, mental models, etc.
Terms used to describe the operations carried our upon these mental entities include transformations, conjunctions, deletions, reversals, and so on. There may be several varieties of representations, perhaps on a continuum from implicit to explicit, or from hard-wired to flexibly programmed. Nature rejects the naivete that seeks absolute truth. We are beginning to realize, individually and culturally, that "realities" are all human constructions. The task becomes one of "catching ourselves in the act" of creating our own "reality" from the flow of events. Human truth is always an engagement of mind with experience.
The challenge of the therapist in these times of chaotic change is to validate the concept that we don't have to fear the collapse of what we think we are. We can embrace this disruptive chaos, trusting that it is an emergent self-organizing process. We don't need to fear the collapse of our personalistic belief system (the "box" we live in), nor our belief in absolute truth. Metaphor--what an experience is like--is the structure producing coherent, ordered experiences.
"How we know what we know" is encoded within our own unique epistemological metaphors, which describe what our personal experience is like. Narration, or storytelling puts the general human condition into the particulars of experience. The metaphors are usually those of physical experience. We construct a reality based on our belief system about what is "out there" and "in here" and live within that framework, unless something or someone unpredictably disrupts that image. Though we share some firmly held notions about reality, there is no Archimedian point from which we can compare our views of the world to the world itself. We cannot step out of our culturally limited perspective to see how things really are in themselves.
A strong desire to engage in the "quest for uncertainty" complements our anxiety that perhaps there is no absolute, objective ground to reality. The warrant of Truth is ever-elusive when we deconstruct the foundational justifications of our convenient notions about the way the world works. It is easy to confuse what is actually the creation of beliefs with the "discovery of Truth," a common goal of science and theology. The scientific model of reason and universal rationality is evolving toward fuzzy logic, a new model of perception of reality.
"Fuzzy philosophy" is a relativistic perspective of conceptual modeling. Fuzzy philosophy is based on acceptance of degrees of truth, the "grayness" (truth values) of most propositions. Paradox and polarization are the results of a consciousness conditioned to think in terms of opposites, black and white thinking. Rather than approaching UFO-ET phenomena as real-unreal, or true-untrue, we can reframe these experiences in terms of the meaning of the transformational relationships. In this analogy, the prevelance of "the Grays" seems to point in the direction of this new paradigm. Surety and fact meld into psychic reality. To "fuzzy consciousness" nothing is absolute. It frees us from having to choose one polarity over another. It helps us accommodate conflicting concepts, keeping us open to examining the "evidence" from both sides.
Thus, we can "believe" to a limited degree without unconditional surrender of our critical faculties, and still continue to question skeptically, and evaluate each event on its own merits. As we will see in this report with its critique of both sides of the argument, the facts usually are partially true or false. Even the best scientific experiment only proves or disproves a particular notion. No study can explain away all of the particulars of the UFO-ET scenario, though debunkers try to dismiss them in toto. To the extent science has measured facts and interpreted them in all or nothing terms, it has failed to describe experiential reality.
"Truth" doesn't always match the facts. Logic and chaos, like any pair of opposites, meet and merge at the boundary. This boundary domain is the creative "edge of chaos," "the twilight zone," "the crack between the worlds," where the two meet and progressively meld into one another. The surety of fact melds into psychic reality. In this mode, there is a suspension of the tension between the opposites of the logical and natural mind. Beyond the paradox of yoked opposites lies the realm of relative "truth."
The "Fuzzy Principle" is described and experienced as vagueness, "shades of gray." There are an infinite number of gray values on the continuum, which spin out an infinite number of fractal solutions. Fuzzy thinking can help us revision our perspective on the relationship of mankind and the Other -- the interrelationships of man and transpersonal forces, including God and nature, life and death, and extraterrestrial entities. It is part of our adaptive evolution, provoking a quantum leap in our consciousness by challenging us with chaotic perturbations at the foundational level. In terms of the UFO-ET phenomenon, fuzzy logic defines tthe degree of containment within that discrete mode of reality, which presents us with universal physical and sociological consequences. What any ultimate consequences of this phenomenon might be are open to speculation.
Whitley Streiber, whose autobiographical novel and movie COMMUNION, probably did the most to popularize the notion of alien encounter and abduction has come to conclude that, "This is not unconscious debris, but something above what we call consciousness. The human mind seems to exist in some way on a hyperphysical and hyperdimensional level, perhaps even a hypercognitive level.""What is happening is that the barriers between this hypercognition and normal cognition are falling, and we're finding that there is a physical evolution of humankind that exists at this hyperphysical and hypercognitive level."
"What I'm looking forward to, is seeing the nature of human experience change as our consciousness rises toward this hyperconsciousness, and we begin to understand this higher level of physical being...this is essentially a vast, immensely subtle, immensely complicated theatrics of hyperconsciousness trying to penetrate our level of reality. It is like someone knocking at the door, something trying to get us to move up, to wake up and to come up in scale." Further he states, "When the authorities try to impose themselves on the experience, all they do is narrow it to their belief system. In other words, it gets filtered through what they expect. It can't be like that. It's got to be between the individual and whatever this is, so that it gets narrowed through everybody's experience, without the need for anybody telling anyone what to do." He echoes the sentiment of others when he speculates that over the next one- or two-hundred years that "society is going to completely recast itself as a reflection of hypercognititve thought. What that will mean, I have no idea."
TABLE OF CONTENTS FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION
PART I: Abstract
Millennial Fever
The Nature of Perception
Alien Stock Is Up
An Infectious Idea
No Exit
Penetrating Dreamtime PART II
A Classical Example
Inner and Outer Space
Self Deception
Pseudomemories
PTSD and Anxiety Disorders
Intruders
Amorphous What?
Mutant Message: UFO-ET Dreams
Waking Dreams
Save the Humans PART III
The Skeptical Inquiry
Temporal Lobe Seizures and Earth Lights
Virtual Reality Check
Process Oriented Therapy
REFERENCES
