Bright Lights in the Sky

 No, this is not the actual image (I didn't have a camera at the time)

I know some people who have read my books will have heard this story before. But it has never appeared on this blog, so I re-tell it here. Marcus

Some people ask me how I got interested in knowledge that might be considered "alternative" in some circles. Here is a little story about an extraordinary experience that certainly helped me along my way! So here goes my story, and one hundred per cent true.

In 1996 I was living in Coffs Harbour, New South Wales, Australia, a small coastal town. One day I was walking along the street downtown, and I saw a sign which read: "Psychic readings, $10". I had never had a psychic reading up till that time, and curiosity got the better of me. So I went inside and met a woman named Lesley who gave me a "reading." The reading itself was nothing particularly special. But what followed certainly was.

To cut a long story short, I ended up going to one of Lesley's talk/meditation evenings a few weeks later. At the end of the talk she told everyone present that she had had lots of dreams about UFOs the previous night.

"Whenever I have these dreams there are lots of UFO sightings around," she said. "So if you go out tonight you may see something. I feel that about two in the morning would be the right time."

Now, being the gullible fool that I am, I decided to take up the offer. I went to bed at about 11 p.m., but set my alarm for 1.45.

When the alarm rang, I managed to drag myself out of bed. I stumbled around my house for 15 minutes, and then headed outside at 2.00 a.m. sharp.

My eyes almost popped out of my head when I swung the door open and looked up at the sky. For flying right in front of me in the clear night sky was something I had never seen before. I can only describe it as a large ball of luminous white light, about a third the size of a full moon. The thing was probably a few hundred metres in the air, and was floating eastwards at about 90 degrees above the horizon. There was absolutely no sound, and it seemed to be gliding on air. I can only describe it as eerily unearthly. I ran out onto the road, and watched it disappear over the neighbours' houses. In total it was in view about 30 seconds.

The Intuitive Review: Romanek's "Messages"

Stan Romanek has written a book called Messages: The World's Most Documented Alien Abduction Story. It makes for a fascinating story. Romanek tells of more paranormal experiences than you'd find at Madam Blavatsky's family reunion on the other side. Romanek sees 'grey' aliens on numerous occasions, witnesses UFOs, and is chased by them while driving along country roads. He is also apparently abducted by aliens, and has several experiences of awakening in strange places with bloody noses, or dressed in other people's clothes. Romanek then finds the ubiquitous alien implant  near his hip, and extracts it. He even scribbles equations related to string theory in his sleep, despite the fact that he has only a primary school level of math ability.

Then there are numerous instances of his being tagged by mysterious people. They appear to be government operatives.

There are some aspects of the story which make at least some of it seem plausible. He does supply images of aliens, UFOs and so on. And the level of detail in the story is impressive. Each incident is embellished with fairly mundane real world happenings which make them seem credible. Romanek is at pains to state that he doesn't really understand what is happening to him, and has no definitive explanation for it all. He believes that at least some of his experiences may be set ups by (presumably) government agents to make him lose credibility. He is as confused as the rest of us!

If nothing else, the book makes for a rollicking good tale. In fact I couldn't help but thinking it would make a great movie.

One supporting fact is that there appear to be witnesses for some of the events described by Romanek, although it has to be admitted that most are Romanek's relatives and friends. But not all. In the intro by co-author and paranormal researcher J. Allan Danelek, Danelek tells how he and many others witnessed UFOs at a Romanek public talk. During a break in proceedings, Danelek and others wandered outside, and witnessed "a number of tiny and rapidly moving lights spinning in a tight clockwise spiral" a few hundred feet overhead. Danelek writes that his skepticism about Raomanek's claims became less pronounced after the event.

Further, Danelek and several other credible individuals write testaments Romanek's honesty and sanity in the book, so that is certainly reassuring for the reader.

Yet in the end I have to go with my gut feeling that something is not right about this entire affair. My intuitive reading of Romanek is that there is a strong drive for attention within his psyche. There is an imperative within his psyche expressing a desire to become famous, and I intuit a notable motivation for money also. I sense elements of childhood abuse within his psyche, and this can often be a trigger for a certain psychological distortions in later life.

Related to this last point is that a recurring communication given to Ramanek by the aliens and other sources is that he is "special". The desire to be special is a normal agenda of the human ego. It tends to be associated with relatively lower levels of spiritual maturity, not higher levels, where the ego tends to be sublimated, even as the 'spirit' expands'. How Romanek is 'special' is not clarified, except on one occasion where one alleged intercepted government memo testifies that his "capacity for abstraction is off the map." As I have written many times, abstraction (as a cognitive process) does not grant one the capacity to perceive the intuitive realms of mind and cosmos. Abstraction is actually a left-brained, dissociative process that may actually retard intuitive perception if it becomes unbalanced. Of course perhaps the way the memo writer used the word "abstraction" was intended to convey a different meaning.

Another factor that concerns me is that the psychic energy around Romanek appears to me to be quite 'dark'. Some of the paranormal apparitions which he describes are consistent with projections of psychic energy from other people or discarnate entities. I have a lot of experience with such things, as some of the energy I have had to deal with in my life has been dark in nature. At one point Romanek describes seeing dark shadows lurking around his house. In fact this is how the psyche will often 'depict' dark energy, especially when we are relaxed or falling asleep. Such perception is most easily seen with the peripheral vision, rather than straight on. Note that this dark energy is not necessarily a 'ghost', but most often comes from the shadow psyche of other living people whom we are emotionally bonded to. The 'apparition' may also be the actual astral body of the person who is doing the projecting. Note that the energy is projected unconsciously. It is 'dark' in the sense that the energy often has malevolent intentions - control, power, shame, sexual projections and so on. So the effect is often 'cold' or frightening. A lot of reported 'hauntings' are actually conscious projections from living people, and have nothing to do with the place where the 'haunting' is occurring. In such cases moving house won't change a thing, as we are connected to our 'demons' non-locally. My sense is that there is a lot of this kind of energy about Stan Romanek.

It is difficult to give a positive assessment of Messages. It is certainly not a book I would take at face value, nor would I simply blindly trust what Romanek writes. There is a strong level of deception occurring here, and it seems to be a combination of both deliberate and self-deception. Yet there may be filaments of fact behind at least some incidents. Yet in the end, I can only get a very low truth reading of the book, no more than fifteen per cent at most.

Marcus

Intuitive Review of Strieber's "The Key" (2): Are the Aliens Here? And Why?

In my last post I gave my intuitive overview of how Whitley Strieber’s psyche has influenced the knowledge presented in his book The Key. Now I am going to turn to some of the specific knowledge claims in the book. When I decided to do this review of The Key, I thought I’d write just a thousand words or so. Well, it turns out that there are so many fascinating ideas and concepts in the book, that this little project has become much bigger. I did plan to write about the specific truth claims in the book in a single post, but I am now breaking it up into several posts. Nobody reads blog posts over a thousand words, so that’s why I am doing this. I know that some of Whitley Strieber’s fans will read at least some of these posts, as Whitley has kindly placed a link on his own site leading to my previous post. 

There are lots of ideas in The Key that I am not going to write about, and mostly those are the things that I don’t have direct experience with, nor sufficient knowledge of. In this post I am going to deal with a single passage from the book which is rich with important information. In the posts that follow, I will probably discuss several ideas at a time. Now let’s take a look at the relevant passage.

At one point in his encounter with The Master of the Key, Whitley Strieber is told that:

The body of man is being altered so that the barrier that presently prevents you from knowing one another‘s thoughts will fall. You are being put under pressure in order to increase the speed of your evolution. An attempt is being made to induce an evolutionary leap. Only desperation will do this. There will come a time when your planet is dying and you are dying, and you will see these aliens all around you. But they will not help you, no matter how hard you beg… Their inaction, however, is their help… they do it out of compassion, for without it you will not succeed in the mission of this age, which is to open the elemental body to ecstasy. Mankind, over the next two thousand years, is destined either to go extinct or ascend. The elemental body will become transparent to the radiant body, which will shine with the light of God. (37% on Kindle version)

I find this passage to be a fascinating one, and I have some reasons to think that part or all of it may be true. Before you read on, do consider that there may be multiple "alien" and etheric influences on humanity at this time in our history, and I make no claims to know about all of them.

Firstly, I have little doubt that there are “alien” influences upon the human collective mind at this time. I have had my own close encounter of the second kind (sightings) with UFOs, as I have written elsewhere, when I witnessed two completely different kinds of UFOs within an hour of each other on a single night, on the East coast of Australia in 1993. Perhaps the most amazing part of that story was that a clairvoyant friend of mine had told me to go out at 2.00 am that night because there would be UFOs about – and she was right! The first UFO was a large ball of glowing white light, while the second was a formation of read circles which flew right over my head, in a “V” formation. This experience was what really kicked off my interest in exploring the frontiers of human intelligence.

I have also had numerous experiences with what appear to be “alien” forms of life in the etheric realms. I have written about a few of these here and there on my blog, and in my book Extraordinary Mind.

Perhaps the most notable experience occurred during sleep, when I was taken out of my body in late 1999, while living in Taiwan. Not long after going to bed I found myself being extracted from my body on what appeared to be some kind of energetic beam (which I wrote about here). This was somewhat unsettling to say the least, but I used my intuition to sense whether the event was benign or hostile. I sensed that it was OK, so I let go and allowed things to take their natural course. I was then transported into a “room” where I found myself lying down on a table, with about five figures standing over me, performing some kind of procedure on my body. In this etheric state, they looked to be Asian men, but I don’t think this was their literal form. I think this is just the way my psyche represented them. I asked them what they were doing, and I was told that they were reversing the polarity of the atoms in my body. I relaxed and lost all awareness, to awaken later in my bed.

At the time I was going through a type of rebirthing process, and my sense was that these “alien” intelligences were assisting me. However I cannot say whether they were spiritual beings (as in spirit guides) or beings from another dimension or planet. But I chose to trust them on that occasion, based on pure gut feeling. If I had not trusted them, I would have pulled away from the experience. Also during this time I became aware one night that someone, or something was operating on my brain as I slept. Again, my intuitive sense that I was being helped to adjust to a new vibration of reality, or literally helping me to develop my intuitive abilities. Of course some skeptics might suggest that I should ask for my money back, given what I now write in my books and on this blog.

Perhaps these are the same beings who Whitley Strieber has experienced meeting in his abduction experiences. I don’t know.

What I have written seems to contradict The Master’s claim that we will not be helped by them, but I suspect we are referring to different contexts. The Master’s take on being helped is perfectly consistent with my understanding of the way Spirit works (and there is good reason to lump all these encounters under the term “Spirit”, although this is something that is open to questioning). Generally, they will not intervene in specific events, except on special occasions. They are more likely to lead you into a challenging situation than to then try to rescue you from it. It’s a bit like the mother bird pushing the newborn out of the nest. Its fly or die. I understand perfectly the confusion and anger at this seeming cold indifference, but I also understand that it is for the highest good of our spiritual evolution. We can seek spiritual guidance through prayer and meditation, and will often be given information. But rarely will we be told precisely what we should do or how to do it. We are given hints, and we have to develop our innate intelligence and wisdom well enough to find solutions to the problems we have created.

The final part of the passage above, where it talks about the coming “transparency of the elemental body”, also makes sense to me. Presently humanity walks in darkness, blind to its radiant self. We turn away from ourselves and create “the shadow”, by hiding from our light. We lie to ourselves and deceive ourselves almost completely. The way to become “transparent” is to turn ourselves inside out, to expose ourselves completely to the light, to the truth. It is guilt and shame, and the trapped pain of the emotional body that prevent this opening. At another level, societal and cultural mass delusion, along with government and organisational cover ups, work against the opening to truth. Most people are too busy fiddling with gadgets and making money to look within, or listen to Spirit.

There is a bit of an irony here, isn’t there? When Whitley Strieber transcribed the passage above he didn’t think there’d be a guy peering into his soul a few years later and writing it up on his blog as if he was indeed transparent!

Yet the truth is that most of us are not ready to be transparent. It is too much for the ego to handle all in one go. How would you feel if you walked into a room and everybody there could see right into your soul and know everything about you? I have been there and done that. There are people on this Earth that can see straight into the soul, and they taught me how to do the same. You might think that this would be cool, but let me tell you the reality of what happens when you are surrounded by people like this. The ego becomes terrified, because it is placed under pressure to reveal itself fully. But the real problem is that transparency exposes pain. Once the delusions of the ego fall, one is left without a game to play to attempt to avoid feeling one’s trapped emotional trauma. A great deal of the thinking that we do in life is actually an attempt by the ego to control pain, and stop it from rising through the body. Once the games are exposed, the ego tends to panic. Because the pain is simply too much to deal with in one go, the ego attempts to create dramas with others as distractions – blame and guilt trips, control and power games – to avoid feeling. This effectively creates chaos in the energy field of the individual, and it stirs up enormous amounts of dark energy. Chaos reigns.

So, we have to take baby steps towards the light. I can say this with absolute authority because I have probably done more work with the human shadow than all but a handful of people on the planet. I can tell you that it is demanding work which requires great courage and commitment. If spiritual and “alien” forces were to make themselves known today and bring forth the transparency that the Light of God necessitates, we would self destruct. I suspect that this is why the work they do is slow and subtle. Nonetheless, the Master of the Key suggests that we are being given the hurry up. We cannot afford to get lost in distractions.

In my next post (click here) I will look at several other claims from Whitley Strieber’s The Key, including life after death, the nature of God, and the relationship between light and darkness. 

Marcus

An Alien Mind

Recently there have been quite a few stories circulating about UFOs. Personally, I have a very open mind about the phenomenon of UFOs, and in large part this is based upon my own experience in witnessing unidentified flying objects in Australia about 17 years ago.(you can read it on page 46 of my book Extraordinary Mind: the first 50 pages can be downloaded here – click on the “download file at page centre, to the right of my photo).

Some particularly interesting footage has come out of South America, which seems to be a UFO hotspot.

However something sent to me by 22C+ member Karl Jacobs (http://www.karljacobs.com) yesterday caught my attention. This coming weekend tmore han 100 of the world's leaders in business, politics, education, sports, entertainment, the environment and technology will be meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The subject matter: unusual ways to spark innovation, and subjects discussed will include UFOs and life in outer space. 

Nuclear physicist and UFO researcher Stanton Friedman expressed his thoughts about the conference.

"I think because they recognize that if you want to look for innovation, look for somebody who's way ahead of you… Even if UFOs and aliens weren't real, just thinking about it is a big thing, enlarging the scope of our thinking to include a larger part of the galactic neighborhood instead of the planet."     

The conference is being organised by the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority, whose goal is to bring together business leaders, politicians and intellectuals with a common interest in how competitiveness can be used to find solutions to global challenges.

Stanton Friedman added that he's:

"..convinced, after my work for major corporations as a nuclear physicist, that technological progress comes from doing things differently in an unpredictable way. The future is not an extrapolation of the past."

Astrophysicist/computer scientist Jacques Vallee will also be a key member attending the conference.  He is interested in discussing how UFO patterns can add to our knowledge of physics. He says: "Reviewing the UFO evidence requires us to examine our assumptions about how things work."

Personally, I believe that questioning our assumptions is the key to understanding things at a deeper level. It is the presuppositions which lie behind our thinking, including the assumptions within the models that we use to construct our thought processes, which hold us back from seeing things anew. I have long argued that the reason why consciousnesses is so poorly understood in modern science is because there is an implicit assumption that consciousness is a product of the brain, and is limited by the local infrastructure of the brain. My experience leads me to conclude that consciousness is merely mediated by the brain, and not limited by it.   

Notable is the following statement by astrophysicist/computer scientist Jacques Vallee, who will be a key panel member:

"I'm convinced there's a phenomenon there, that there is a technology… And I'm not kidding myself that we're going to discover a new form of propulsion tomorrow, just by looking at UFO patterns….These things are real and they do something we don't understand, but if we're clever in watching and understanding the patterns, maybe we can learn something about physics that we didn't know before."          

Vellee is correct. We do not need the hardware of alien technology to expand our thinking. As Einstein once famously noted, once a mind is expanded by a new idea, it never returns to its original size.

For many years Vallee has attempted to get UFO research taken seriously. He has faced a lot of resistance, but he believes that things have changed greatly. He now believes that UFOlogy “is a respectable subject."

 "Certainly, internationally, what I've found is that people who are informed and are aware of the phenomenon are much more willing to support people doing serious research on it."  

In my opinion, this is a central issue in the retention of an unbalanced mechanistic paradigm in mainstream science, especially biology. Many people are uninformed of domains of knowledge which lie beyond their worldviews, and are thus resistant to conceptions which lie beyond their maps of reality.

Regardless of whatever personal beliefs we have about UFOs or other domains of knowledge which might be considered anomalous in western cultures, one very useful way to put such domains to good use is to use them as a “provocation”. This is precisely what lateral thinking guru Edward de Bono recommends . He correctly points out that the mind is a self-organising system. The mind tends to slot ideas into pre-existing categories, and in doing so often fails to acknowledge anomalous data or identify patterns that do in fact exist.

In an upcoming volume of the Open Information Science Journal, I have used de Bono’s idea of provocation to encourage academics to explore my idea of Integrated Inquiry, which is a way of employing Integrated Intelligence during research. Using seemingly outlandish ideas as a provocation takes some of the heat out of their use, and those exploring such ideas do not have to necessarily profess a “belief” in them. Thiis takes a the pressure off the academic ego.   

Still, the existence of strange ideas does not guarantee innovative thinking, and one reason for this is that the ways of knowing employed often remain unchanged. As a perfect example, take one of the contributors in the comments section on the web page where the conference is outlined. The comment highlights a tremendous irony. On a web page devoted to innovative thinking, one poster “callendoudna” dismisses the possibility of the existence of interplanetary travel in the following way.

Hit a light pole at 5 miles an hour and you need to replace the fender. Hit it at 50 mph and you need to replace the car. You're the Captain of the SSSS Titanic (Solar System Star Ship Titanic) on Humanity's maiden voyage to the nearest star. You are cruising at 10% of the speed of light when the SSSSTitanic strikes a pebble the size of a pea and having a mass of 13 grams (half an ounce). Assuming only 10% of this 13 grams is converted to distructive energy the resulting blast would equal the atomic bomb that wiped out Hiroshima. So we're not going to travel to other stars anytime soon and they're not going to be in a big hurry to get here. Realistically you need to consider things like O'Neil Cylinders and Space Arks that travel no more than 1% of the speed of light and will take centuries to make the trip. 

The comment points to the limitations of analysis as a way of knowing. Analysis tends to be  rather uncreative, and certainly unimaginative. Analysis can be so focused upon breaking down arguments and facts that it misses the big picture - including questioning the background assumptions. Callendoudna’s logical argument reminds me of the sentiment’s expressed by a certain physicist (whose name escapes me) just before the turn of the twentieth century. He dismissed the possibility that a person could ever travel round the world in 24 hours or less. His reasoning? According to the laws of physics, no boat could ever cut through water at the speed required. Just a few years later the Wright brothers made the first airborne flight, and the rest is history.

What unexamined assumptions  have we made about space travel, UFOs and alien life?


It's worth pondering.

Marcus

Flying Things

If you have been wondering why things have been a bit quiet around here lately, it's because I have been rather busy. Today I'm off to Europe for a one month holiday. There's a 14 hour plane trip, which I'm not really looking forward to, but the destination will make it worthwhile! I'll be in France for a few days, then Portugal, and maybe Spain after that. I'll be posting the odd thing here during that time, but not as much as usual.

Just to keep you thinking, here's a little more on the UFO incident, over Hangzhou, China. It's an interesting case. It doesn't really make sense for the military to come out and say it's a military operation. Since when have the Chinese military cared about what the public thinks? And why do this stuff over a major city? If its an experimental craft, it would make more sense to do it over a less populated area.

However I have to say it looks like a manmade vehicle to me, at least the one seen flying across the sky with a trail behind it. Compared to the UFOs I saw in Australia in the 1990s, it looks rather clumsy. The ball of light I saw had a much more etheric look and feeling to it, and looked to be  moving without propulsion. 

Here's a YouTube video of the China UFO story.

Marcus

  

UFO Over China

One of the more interesting UFO sightings in China. This photo was taken in Hangzhou, near Shanghai, according to the China Daily. Officials said the event has a military connection., and will make an announcement later. Rumour has it that officials pumped several tonnes of swamp gas into the sky to reassure disturbed onlookers.

Certainly it looks to be a very physical object. I have to say though, that the object looks rather terrestrial compared to what I saw in my own UFO sightings several years ago.

SHANGHAI - An unidentified flying object (UFO) disrupted air traffic over Zhejiang's provincial capital Hangzhou late on Wednesday, the municipal government said on Thursday.

Xiaoshan Airport was closed after the UFO was detected at around 9 pm, and some flights were rerouted to airports in the cities of Ningbo and Wuxi , said an airport spokesman, who declined to be named. The airport had resumed operations, and more details will be released after an investigation, he said. A source with knowledge of the matter, however, told China Daily on Thursday that authorities had learned what the UFO was after an investigation. But it was not the proper time to publicly disclose the information because there was a military connection, he said, adding that an official explanation is expected to be given on Friday.

For more details: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-07/09/content_10084698.htm

Marcus

The aliens (part 2)

In yesterday’s blog post I described the basis of the Seti programme (search for extra-terrestrial intelligence), and outlined some of Seti chair Paul Davies’ ideas related to the programme and the idea of initial contact with alien life. Today I am going to go a little deeper and say why I believe that Davies is most likely wrong on several accounts. Most importantly, I’m going to outline the significance of this for the future of science and the future of possible human-alien interaction. Many of my critiques are founded upon my first-person exploration of the human mind, and working with other extraordinary individuals who have spent time doing the same. This gives me a rather different slant on the problem of human/alien interaction than Davies. All argument is only as valid as the soundness of the presuppositions upon which it is founded. In Davies case, there are certain givens which (by definition) he assumes to be true, but which are not.

Professor Davies argues that mathematics will be the only common language that we will have with the first alien civilisation we contact. His error is that there are cognitive processes which transcend language.

What would you say to ET? (and how?)

When the aliens contact us, what should the first communication to them be? This was the subject of an interesting article in The South China Morning Posts’ Post Magazine, today. The article consisted of an interview by the writer Jon Ronson, with famous physicist Paul Davies. Besides being a scientist and academic, Davies is the fairly famous author of many best-selling books, including The Mind of God. He also just happens to be chair of Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), which uses radio telescopes to scan the cosmos for signals from other worlds with intelligent life. Seti was instigated by Frank Drake some 50 years ago. Drake calculated what he thought to be the number of intelligent civilisations there are in the galaxy, given all the variables that might contribute to the development as life as we know it. He came up with an answer of 10 000. That’s an awful lot of ETs getting around up there.

Like most mainstream scientists, Davies dismisses popular UFO culture, and ridicules reports of cattle mutilations and alien abductions. He says that if there are aliens out there, it is statistically very unlikely that they are just a few years ahead of us in terms of technology. It’s an interesting point.

One of the ways we know that UFO witnesses are lying or delusional, Davies says, is that the descriptions of the aliens and their craft are so unimaginative. Here is where Davies shows some lack of understanding himself.