Dec. 21 - 2013 - the Post-Apocalypsness (Looking Back on the Apocalypse via The Weeklings)

It's a year today since the world was supposed to end, and I at least haven't forgotten. There may be a slew of 2012 documentaries we'll never see again, whole episodes of ANCIENT ALIENS lost to time, but hey, I have mix tapes, one to prepare for the end, and one to reconcile when we know the end's not coming. And here's my heartbreaking look back which will hopefully reflect the triumph of inertia and sameness over the fiery end, and hopefully provide some laughs, via The Weeklings:

"IT’S BEEN ALMOST a year since the end of the Mayan long-count calendar, the beginning of a new 394-year cycle (or baktun). And, the imagined apocalypse never came. I hesitate even to admit it now, but I’d psyched myself up for something big: a super volcano, a massive polar shift, alien invasion, the rapture, governmental disclosure on the alien presence, a mystical universal enlightenment, anything…. I was half-joking to myself about it but half-serious too. I didn’t stockpile weapons or duct tape, still I stopped making dentist and doctor appointments with the excuse that I didn’t expect to remain in my earthly form. I expected to endure in a higher vibration of soul density, lighter, like pure spirit energy. Part of this may come from having been a New Age music and book critic for the past fifteen years, a job that’s given me access to a vast array of “healing” music and lectures, guided meditations, subliminal relaxation, didgeridoos, chakra aligning tones, Tibetan singing bowls, yogic chants, healing harps, and lots and lots of wooden flute music as well as books on topics ranging from shamanism to veganism. I’d done some yoga, but before I got that gig I was never much of a New Age guy. Still I’ve always been a writer, so delivering the spiritually awakening vibe in my writing became a full-time challenge, and I began to talk myself into the bliss. And, I talked myself into the baktun-ending-2012 thing.

When the dreaded date of December 21, 2012 came, and nothing happened, my family teased me. I tried to bluff my way out of the sting of shame, “Ah,” I said, “I knew it all the time.” (CONTINUED)

And here's a special treat for Spotify users, my "Apocalypse Prep" mix which I created to help me release the past and prepare for judgment.

APOCALYPSE PREP:



And the invariable disappointment "life goes on" we're all trapped in a Reptillian/Archon-devised soul farm maze/prison and can only escape by becoming enlightened at which time, ironically, we're so holy we decide to stay here to help others along into the pure white godhead of non-reincarnative oneness so we never really get out of here, it seems. Next time I'm up there at the gate to paradise I'm not going to decide to come back but of course the me who gets up there is never the sme" mix:

DISILLUSION BY DAWN

Cthulhu Mythos Memes: The Lovecraftian Tentacles of the Elder Gods weave many web strands

"The Temple of Nug and Yeb by Drhoz

H.P. Lovecraft was more than a great science fiction writer, he was a revolutionary at the inclusive mythos, wherein other writers used his menagerie of ancient multi-tentacled gods ever trying to leak out of their alternate dimension prisons and reduce the world to a smoldering ruin. Lovecraft's towns (Arkham, for example), his intrepid scholars and mysterious ancient books (like the Necronomicon, a ficcionne [1] despite what some circles say) appeared in the work of a whole flock of other authors, originally from within his pen pal circle of Weird Tales writers, such as Robert E. Howard and August Derleth. In a sense, this was Cthulhu was the first meme. In the age of the interwoven web, the Cthulu mythos meme has been leading newer and newer generations of artists into the chain.

Here are some Cthulhu-shoes:

David J. Roger has a vast blog of links to and art on the subject, in addition to his own work and ongoing interactive gaming.

Shaun Gentry is a genius "dimensional illustrator" with some extraordinarily detailed stuff, such as the above "Steampunk Clockwork Cthulu"

NOTES:
1.By ficcione I refer to the work of Luis Borges who often wrote about mysterious manuscripts, elaborate lotteries, bizarre literary experiments, creating a kind of fiction hall of post-structural metatextual mirrors effect, fiction about fictional fiction.

Hand Gun Heroin/e

Better Blast the World Back to Black and White

2013 

Mixed media collage 

Prodigy: Alexandra Nechita, "The Petite Picasso"

A brilliant child prodigy whose work was a sort of girly Picasso / Chagall style life-affirming calendar-ready form of figurative neo-cubism, Alexandra Nechita has grown into a hottie, but the question is, has her gift vanished?

I believe prodigies are proof of reincarnation, but as believers know, the 'previous' self tends to disappear slowly under the waves of the new by seven or eight years-old. Has Nechita managed to hold onto her vision? We all, even Picasso, wind up imitating ourselves after awhile. Whatever gracious spirit inhabited our brush, it sooner or later departs, and we hope we've retained enough of its secrets to carry on in whatever limited capacity.

The odd thing is to learn on her website that she is now an art school graduate. What off earth could they teach her?  How did her less successful teachers cope with a prodigy? Imagine a high school music teacher trying to instruct Mozart in a class of average little Austrian shlubs!

I first stumbled on her work at a Soho art gallery on West Broadway, the name of which escapes me. Blew my mind, man.

If you decide to check out her work, maybe you can decide for yourself, what is the mystery of artistic prodigies. Surely there is something more than than just 'a gift' at work. If anything is proof of the divine, of talents and skills passed on from one life to another, maybe Alexandra is it. Could she be either Chagall or Picasso reincarnated?

I say yes...




I worry even based on this 2008 lithograph, (left) that she is starting to lose that prodigy gift, due in some small part to maturity, the invariably inescapable narrowing of the scope of perception that comes with the loss of childhood, and the no doubt counterproductive 'instruction' of her chosen art school. But I'm maybe wrong, I don't wish her anything but the best yet at the same time I want my theory borne out!

That said, you look over at this thing on the left and while interesting, its coloring scheme and loose curves reminds me too much of a new age self help book cover. Of course she's a working artist and it probably is. Her prints do well and she gets good gigs. Maybe that's the compromise. She's tired of the "petite Picasso" label, but how do you escape that? She needs to go deep. That's my prescription. Get out and go to a rave, go to Burning Man.... you know what I mean. Tune in, drop out - go to Brazil and do ayuhusca, don't go to art school and unlearn your innate gifts. I've seen so many great artists go from brilliant work to stick figures thanks to theory getting in their brains.

the cover and poster art for the Lumerians will blow your Mine!

Their music has its moments and their art and light show stuff blows my mind! 

Here's to the Lumerians!

Keeping Roswell's Plain Sight Secret: Phillip Corso and his Magic Box.

I've been reading Phillip Corso's book the Day after Roswell, detailing his dissemination of Roswell artifacts into the industrial complex of America through covert channels in the 40s-80s. Tricky stuff. Is any of it true? And if any of it is, wow. And I'm 90% sure at least some of it IS true. Thank god for that 10%...

Aside from being almost an official government declassification (uniquely void of photographic or other evidence, and with enough elements conveniently obscured in his credentials to cast the doubt that allays panic) it's comforting look at the alien presence as a threat which was more or less neutralized with the implementation of the SDI under Reagan. AND MORE THAN THAT even, Corso presents a very coherent and believable set of rationale for keeping the crashed saucer a secret from the public, because the Russkies had such good spies that all liberal ideas like unilateral disarmament and sharing of scientific secrets were suspect. Reading this book, I no longer trusted Marxism professors here at the college where I work! Maybe they're embedded dissension-spreading agents left over from the Cold War!

Anyway I thought I would sum it up for those who haven't read it, listing some believable reasons why the UFO crash was hushed up:

1. Military Rivalry: Not only was this recovered material hidden from the public, it was hidden even from other departments in the government, military, FBI and especially the CIA, which would have insisted on sole access and/or sharing intel with Russia. Each agency involved in the initial recovery scrounged= a few pieces of the puzzle but no dept. wanted to admit to having any pieces lest they be requisitioned to hand them over, pooled in some government lottery where they'd likely disappear (as it was common knowledge the White House was peppered with KGB spies). Some would argue, with covert Russian backing, the artifacts belonged to the whole world, but in the wrong hands they could shift the balance of power. Shades of Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, where Indy's agenda to reunite the magic skull with its alien body isn't for personal gain but to keep power away from the Russians!

2. Orson Welles' Martian broadcast, which caused a national panic in 1939, sending a clear message to the government that if a single half hour of fake news (the second hour of the program was a more conventional drama) could do so much damage, then the real deal, with news spreading for months and weeks, could topple the country - and the Russians would be waiting for just such a topple, even instigating it, in a way. (there's a theory that the Russians were behind the craft for just such a topple).

3. High-Level Russian Spies in the CIA and Congress: The high levels of secrecy were still in place after we successfully kept the development of the atomic bomb a secret from nearly everyone for a number of years (and detonated the first one just two years prior to Roswell). The Russians' alarming quickness with developing their own A bomb after WW2 signaled that a vast amount of spying could go on at the highest levels of our government. We had the scientists and the money, they had the spies. Turned out spies was all you needed!

Conclusion:
 Roswell can be understood then as if a new brand of A-bomb had been dropped unexploded onto the desert of Roswell in say 1936; the agency who wound up with  the technology could rule the world, so it became imperative to keep it away from the Russians, which meant keeping it from the CIA, and even congress; only an inner elite of corporate and military advisors were in the loop, the few who could be trusted. In denying it to the public they denied it to the CIA and Congress,  preventing panic and Russian theft. Within the bowels of the Pentagon there was such paranoia that no one wanted anyone else involved with anything, not one ear more than necessary, and those who were involved were never given enough details to form a picture.

Thinking this through it's easy how the American military resolve could be weakened through commie indoctrination on college campuses. Who knows how many Marxist professors in this country are sleeper agents, left here during the cold war to spread the word and steal secrets? Maybe the whole anti-Vietnam peace movement was a result of secret commie attempts to undermine our place as the western democracy's biggest gun in Asia. Maybe I sound paranoid, but where I work is lousy with Marxist media theorists. But hey. Wanna know why we beat communism? Freedom of speech! Put that in your media and smoke it, Dr. Roswell! The main difference is, in capitalism at least some people get cool stuff. In Russia everyone lives like the poor do here, all glum and self-righteous and shivering by radiators sputtering heat over moldy floorboards; at least that's what we see in movies.

Open Letter to Joe Rogan: Bigfoot is Real but isn't Here

Dear Joe Rogan:

I just watched your debut episode of your QUESTIONS EVERYTHING, and after also seeing your hosting the DMT documentary (which I contributed to via Kickstarter), I wanted to suggest you apply the one to other, namely the blurry line between the dimensions, which non-corporeal beings can notice as easily as dogs can discern smells and follow trails we can't. Old 'Man' Sasquatch can follow these ley lines in and out of our 3-D space/time as easily as we can find our way to a bus station.

Naturally you have a show so you have to go by the 'book' - but the books hasn't led anywhere on the Bigfoot question in eight hundred years. Maybe you should look a little farther out and/or inwards (there's no difference between the two, which you should know if you've 'been to the mountaintop' --and if you haven't, why were you hosting a DMT documentary?)  Your Question Everything show even had one really unique witness's idea, which you never followed up on: the crazy looking Sasquatch-esque child psychologist who was searching in the hot spot woods behind his house with his trail cams and recorders for years to no effect, then one night gave up and left all his recording devices behind and went out alone and unarmed with an open mind and within a half an hour had his encounter.

Mired in the conventional thinking tar pit as you are (on this show at least), Joe, I guess it wouldn't occur to you that most of our terrestrial ancestors along the ape-human-alien DNA hybrid lines can read minds, communicate telepathically, and leap forward and backwards along time lines of events as easily as we can pick up where we left off in a cheap novel. We've got skills they don't, but being able to surf the time-space continuum isn't one of them. We have the grey matter for it, but the DNA code that would help us access it has been artificially disconnected at the dawn of our creation, the equivalent of raising flamingos with clipped wings so they can't fly away. Why was our ability to 'fly' away disconnected? Because our predecessor, the Sasquatch, ruined it for us, like an older brother who crashed the car we would have inherited had he not been drunk driving, so now dad wont even let us learn to drive.

Sasquatch tried to usurp his creators, you see. He tried to escape alien control, to revolt agains them. The aliens (i.e 'the watchers' or the Annunaki) didn't like that, so arranged a big flood to wipe the pens clean to try again (this was later telephone game-warped over the centuries into the tale of Hercules cleaning the Augean stables, and then of course Noah). Some bigfeet (?) survived, especially the ones at high altitudes who missed the waters (ala those in the Himalayas, the Rockies) and gradually reverted to a kind of semi-savagery, though I guess that's a relative term, and we should hardly be the ones to judge.

Even today, UFOs and sasquatches are often seen together in the same way cops follow escaped prisoners.

Just because it's clearly fake doesn't mean it's not true!

You also could have traced this all back to the Pacific Northwest Native American tribes, who consider these beings ancient power animals, naguals, spirit beings, ancient ones; or the myths of the Green Man in England and Ireland; or the Wild Man in Jungian archetypal myth. In Greek mythology they were called titans, in other sources cyclops, giants; some had names: Gilgamesh, Goliath.  Maybe not all of them were able to traverse in and out of our physical plane as easily as others, but they've been evolving for far longer than we have, and at the same time devolving slowly backwards into more and more ape-like features and behavior.

The lack of evidence of skeletons is a tell-tale sign that they don't often die in this plane, or maybe ever in the way we understand it. An occasional footprint is all they leave behind, or a figure photographed in the distance (far enough away their magnetic field doesn't disrupt the camera).  Squatches don't give birth so much as double up on themselves, ghosting their own ghost image, Such beings are able to, like the aliens, like demons, like all other paranormal entities, be able to move in and around our linear time, to wink in and out of not just our material plane, but our vision, our time frame, our frequencies of perception. You can't call them ghosts for they 'ghost' the way ariel reception used to double the image during very cloudy days, or radio stations sometimes leak across their point on the dial over into other channels. When we see a sasquatch we're really seeing just a more fleshed-out interactive version of a ghost, a footprint rather than the foot.

Though they are an echo across time, they are as real--and maybe even more so--as we are, for they understand they are an echo, and we suffer under the delusion that--being made of 'matter'--we're solid. Physicists will tell us matter is merely thick bands of energy resonating at a slower rate than our eyes can perceive, giving our eyes--themselves composed of vibrating bands of energy---the illusion of 'solidity.' Our brains can't perceive the wavelength of ourselves, anymore than a man who's spent his life floating on a raft can understand motionlessness. A plant seems to our eyes, for example, to be permanent - until time lapse photography shows its sleep cycles, flower closing against the cold and opening in the sunlight, sped up fast enough it seems to be breathing. Who is to say which rate of speed is 'correct' for earlier races, ancestors, aliens? Do we seems fast as blurs to the 'normal breathing' plants?

your eyes deceive you if you see stillness.

Supposedly (in the Bible), "God" was displeased with what he had created, the original Nephilim/Squatches-- so 'He' destroyed them all, saving a few choice bits of the side stuff in an ark packed with the few 'new generation' already around. We, the second batch, had our 'junk DNA' disconnected at the dawn of our creation; our maker didn't want us escaping into other realities --tuning in other stations--and making trouble. The new 'humans' would be rather slow and small compared to their ancestors. They needed less resources and weren't as worried about detection by vengeful watchers. Today, knowing if they were discovered they'd be killed, tortured in the name of science, either by humans or by those beings who wanted the entire race gone. To get back to that crashed car metaphor, the Sasquatch motto would be: don't tell our snitch of a kid brother we still use that car, or he'll want to drive and/or tell dad it's not actually crashed after all.

To encapsulate: Bigfoot is our un-psionically circumcised older brother, the one who got away with all sorts of shit we're still paying for. Most of them were wiped out in the great floods of Sumerian legend; those who lived high in the mountains -- Everest, Ranier, etc.--survived, because the water line of the great floods never reached them. These survivors knew their creators, the Annunaki, had launched the flood, to sift the sandbox (or Augean stables) clean, as it were, so an easier to manage breed could take the field -- one smaller, less hairy, less smelly, and above all, less able to access the higher cortices of the brain, unable to do the things the creators could do. This half-and-half mixture of ape and god is still going strong, alas slowly choking its own Mother Earth to death as it waits to move off-world like a plague.

treetop silhouette or 'smudge' tool?

As for these ancient ones, the titans, the Paul Bunyans and the Goliaths and the Harry and the Hendersons... some of them also respawned down in the swamps, like the Alan Moore version of Swamp Thing. Are psychedelic mushrooms and mold their greeting card message to us, their attempt to lead us over the barbed wire fences of our tampered DNA and into the green fields of the eternal?

As incomplete as this answer may be, it still makes more logical sense than all the sightings being the result of either hoaxes, misidentification or genuine anthropoids staying hidden all these centuries. We don't want to dismiss it, to let go of the question, which is why I always cringe when DNA tests are done on collected hair and scat samples. I already know the answer to what it will be. If it's anything but bear or human you'll never hear about it, anyway. And since it's one or the other, man what a bummer to get that answer back. A pox on DNA testing! We need the bigfoot myth, the way the trapped in the suburbs little brother needs the campfire tales of his older MIA brother's wild adventures, the Cool-Hand Luke, the Jon Voight in Runaway Train. 

The 'real' answer to this riddle lives in the kind of right brain intuitive info that can never be verified, at least while science keeps it's head in the sand as far as the legitimacy of out-of-body astral travel. So it will remain in the realm of art ("where science fears to tread, art staggereth"). Still, it makes more sense than the linear 3D space time mammal explanation, which can't account for the lack of bones, scarcity of photos, etc. It also explains the presence of UFOs near bigfoot hot spots. The greys are always trying to nab these hold-outs from the period immediately preceding the dawn of Adam. Some 'good' aliens probably help them on the sly, conservationists, like Native American reservation lawyers, or some of the species might be turned against the rest, i.e. 'squatch narcs ("heard you guys still have an interdimensional car stashed somewhere, maybe I can bum a ride?")

It would be a mistake to presume this is nonsense just because we can't perceive any of it in our modern science or with our 'sober' senses. If you bring a trained hunting dog into the woods you don't presume it's crazy for following a smell trail you can't smell. Yet you don't give the Bigfoot spirit credit for being able spot trail cams a mile away, presuming in your idiot wisdom they must be dumb if they're hairy and live in the woods. But maybe to them, man, your footprints and smell are obvious and your little gadgets offend their eye, like a toddler presuming you won't guess who drew on your wall in crayons in big lines three feet up from the floor - since you didn't catch them in the act.

Sure they sometimes scare us away and go rummaging around and throwing rocks, chasing us down hills, but so do the IRA, or the Palestinians, or any other disenfranchised and oppressed group being encroached on.

When Patterson got his footage it was suspect enough, due to his shady status, that he knew it might not be believed. On the other hand he was desperate, and praying hard for an appearance, because otherwise he would be ruined financially, so the forest granted him his footage. If you look at that bigfoot in that film it seems to be saying, 'Okay? Did you get your picture, you crybaby? Now leave us alone!'

After all, they don't want us to stop looking for them... when we're able to find them at last, we'll be ready for the next game of hide and seek, the next evolutionary step; they want us to use the experience of looking for them as an educational experience, not to find an ape carcass to dump on the front hood of science's pickup truck to confirm we're number one fuck yeah etc. (there's at least two hick hunter shows where a bunch of armed yahoos run around the forest ready to blast anything that spooks them even slightly). Look what JAWS did for sharks? Nearly wiped them out. Bigfoot hunters would pack the woods with shotguns and empties if it ever became 'official.' But to use the mystery of their unknowable but undeniable 'existence' to open science to questions it doesn't yet admit it needs to ask, let alone answer.

Sure I sound crazy - but doesn't the idea that a living 3D 500 pound being who can nimbly prance through the forest, leaving only one or two footprints a year, being attached to our permanence matrix existing without any concrete physical evidence for thousands of years measure up as crazier? Again, presuming you've done the DMT, you should know. If you haven't, why were you hosting that DMT documentary?

Our linear-time / circular space-bound perception of reality is but a single radio station on a vast FM dial, and that dial just one of an infinite number. There are more frequencies than planets in the universe, which themselves connect to these ancient bands (as in Saturn's rings). Us looking at Mars and saying there's no city there is like a bored cable TV flipper bemoaning no HBO shows are showing up on his UHF antenna. He could find them all by paying for premium cable, 2,000 other cable choices are available with a little bravery or a credit card. But he won't. He's too cheap to pay for cable, so goes on denying HBO even exists!

Again, you should have caught that in the DMT-verse, Joe - the unified or zero point field --the giant deflated beach ball, where all spots in space and time exist in the same here and now simultaneously. If you take that ball and inflate it near a black hole, the image of its deflation still exists with the inflated overlaid, each movement creates a million potentialities. That's just physics, Joe. I don't make the rules.

The dreaded bush silhouette of Creaky Point

We can see it all--at once--if we know how to change the channel, or tune in the antenna, or our neighborhood is wired for cable. Bigfoot is like a ghost image, but image here also means sound, footprints, smell too, broken trees, everything a 'real' 3-D ape would be; we're talking a different kind of projection. Picture the nuclear scientist who uses those rubber gloves that reach into a radio-active box to handle plutonium; the bigfoot footprint, the roars, the ghostly EVPs are like those rubber gloves, our 3-D space time continuum is the inside of the box. This 'image' of the being behind the glass occasionally leaks over from its radio station to ours via bad weather or fevers or drugs or trances -- but it can't be fit into our paradigm. But we're meant to 'keep looking' - to keep trying to tune into these mystery stations, even if we only get the picture for a second during the right configuration of clouds.

Empirical science and its insistence on hard evidence is nice and all, but it's merely the rules of one board game in a limitless playroom shelf. We need to realize that Trivial Pursuit doesn't have the same rules as Monopoly. That doesn't mean Trivial Pursuit is unplayable but science takes Trivial Pursuit out of the box, sees there's no Park Place or hotels to buy and so deems it defective. But the instructions to all the games are printed in hieroglyphs on the back of each of our brain box lids - DMT sharpens our vision so we can read them. so READ THEM, Joe, read them!

Sorry for the huge onslaught of metaphors...

Yours,
Erich Kuersten

PS Postscript - Just saw your aliens thing... oh Joe, don't you understand you're not the first one who ever said 'show me the saucer, the alien' or I don't believe you? You're like the Habeas corpus of the paranormal... there's no show in that, Joe. You're the last snotty naysayer to the dance. A show about a guy who's not sure he should be doing a show is not a show. You best give the producers back their money and take some imagination pills. Clearly you didn't take any DMT before doing that documentary. Don't lie, Joe!

PPS Postcript (June 2020) - I just saw a rerun of a 70s childhood favorite, The Bionic Woman. In it, Jamie Summers (Lindsay Wagner) runs into a group of time-traveling aliens who travel with in and out of our timeline at will with a Sasquatch as their servant, mentally controlled by an evil splinter sect headed by an impressively bearded John Saxon! I know I saw this as a child as I remember being freaked out by idea of an evil Sasquatch, but the details of the timeline skipping were over my head. But were they over the head of my unconscious mind? And did my unconscious conjure up a spirit animal to essentially retell the episode to me when I asked during my deep dish trip to the mountaintop? OR was the same 'truth' told to the writer/s of the episode? 

Demon Sheets: Sleep Paralysis Theories

Sleep paralysis. What is it?

When we can't move, lying in bed, can't lift our head or move or arms or speak to scream, and we sense some malevolent presence in the room, just out of sight, looming over us, that's sleep paralysis. Doctors say it's a naturally occurring symptom of deep REM sleep, our body is temporarily paralyzed to stop us from acting out in our dreams,  or whatever. Sometimes that paralysis hits when we're not quite entirely asleep or awake yet. We're conscious, 'awake' but our nervous system is already paralyzed to prepare for dreaming. The reverse of this of course being sleep walking, where the nervous system is active, motor-functions enacting dream signals, but mind fully unconscious.

BUT that doesn't explain the creepy monster/s looming over us in sleep paralysis. It doesn't seem to make 100% sense either; and when two people dream the same sight in the same room (one waking up to see the monster looming over their partner who is having the dream at that exact same moment) or receiving wounds from the creature (demonic scratches, alien punctures, or other), then the psychological underpinnings of the phenomenon fall short. Doctors can make a convincing guess how/why it occurs but never an explanation of why this apparition in the room? Is it 'the very painting of our fear'? Or something truly external? Are these dream witches always with us? Are they the parasites of our sleeping chi?

My own SP experiences are rare but each one seems profound. As I've written in earlier posts, I've seen a demonic creature in the room even after I had awaken from my nightmare, and was shouting at it to go away before it faded, laughing silently at me all the while, into a moonlight reflection. And I've been lifted out of my bed, ass first, up along the ceiling and out the window, accelerating up and up faster and faster into the sky until shooting up back into my body in the bed, as if a second, identical bed was way up in the sky. In each of these instances I wound up awaking and leaping out of bed as if from an electrical jolt.

You can dismiss these as hallucinations, waking nightmares. I won't argue with that. But you know what else are hallucinations and waking nightmares?

EVERYTHING ELSE!!!

All that we see, hear, and touch is a nervous system illusion, a translation: matter is perceived erroneously as solid (it's just vibrating energy) and permanent (like everything in the universe, it's always in the process of disintegrating); faces are perceived as unchanging from breath to breath (they're constantly shedding skin cells and absorbing passing dirt); linear time and 3-D space are perceived as a constant (a necessary illusion for the functioning within it - i.e. you can't be on the look-out for food and bears when you're overwhelmed by the totality of the cosmos).

This is all 'shared hallucination' or collective consciousness, distinctive to humans of our current era, the way our senses process stimuli (vs. say, a dog's enhanced smell or insect's pheromone telepathy) and the way we've been trained to process, identify, and order the information we decode from these stimuli. If we look at all these pictures of sleep paralysis demons, from different artists, different centuries, how can we dismiss them as less real than normal waking perceptions? Are these hags a kind of fourth dimensional species of kundalini energy parasite or vampire? Or is it that our fear of not being able to raise our head conjures them, 'the very painting of our fear' to quote Shakespeare.

Say a man looks at a picture of the ocean. It's just pixels of color on a flat surface, and from those pixels he sees the ocean. If he's really really tired or possessed of vivid imagination (this happens to me a lot) he might actually smell salt air or hear a distant rush of waves, he might even see the waves move in the picture - even knowing they're not and he's just tired doesn't help - he literally sees the waves move. A dog looking at the same photo wouldn't see anything of interest: he would sniff it and judge it as inedible and inactive and then move on. BUT if we fold that photo into a paper airplane and throw it for him to fetch, he sees it as prey, a quarry to chase). By the same token, we walk our dog past a tree on the sidewalk and our mind says "tree - yeah yeah, keep walking" - we just perceive the tree and maybe stale dog urine if there's no wind that day. Our dog 'sees' the dogs who have been there from their urine scents, the way we see the ocean in that picture. Dogs' urine is like a bulletin board message: who is in heat? who ix marking territory? who's new in town? Are these dogs hallucinating just because we can't discern these things?

Scientists tend to forget the way our sensorially-decoded paradigm is limited to human perception of self and their myopia makes them paranoid, like fundamentalist Christians seeing blasphemers in the cobwebs of their attics. If a Christian has sleep paralysis, the being looming above him would be perceived as Satan; if he had being reading David Icke, the being would be a reptilian alien; a gnostic scholar would see an archon; a UFO scholar would see a flock of greys come for an abduction.

Maybe.

The thing is, though, most humans, even non-scientists or philosophers, agree the stimuli we all perceive differently (according to our nature in this world) are 'the same' in each case.  We might see the book as a novel, a dog might see it as wood pulp and a child might see it as having no pictures, but it's still the same object. Dismissing the bedroom invader as 'mere hallucination' conjured from the semi-asleep state by our panic over being unable to move (i.e. in dreams your fear of monsters creates them) is the easy way to get around the uncanny fear it generates. Whether it's real or not, it's still the same object.

Personally, I believe that there IS a rational psychological interpretation as valid as any esoteric one for nearly any paranormal phenomena but that neither is invalidated by that. We must instead look at our need for myth, for a zone between the psychological and the paranormal, a Schrodinger's Cat approach to these things being both real and an illusion at the same time, and yet neither.

BUT it doesn't explain anything, neither from a mythic / collective unconscious standpoint, or a physical, mental, or supernatural one, which in this case I mean as a reinterpretation of the supernatural as human experience that involves a sudden surge of DMT or third eye awakening. In other words, science can describe how DNA might unpack a seed so that it becomes a tree through photosynthesis, soil and water, but it can't explain why, or where it all comes from to begin with. They have no idea which came first, the chicken or the egg, or why it bothered to come at all and from where, except to theorize the egg came first from something other than a chicken, say, an archaeopteryx and before that, a pterodactyl, a slow evolution over millions of years - MAYBE. They don't know why sleep paralysis occurs in the way it does, only how it occurs, the mind waking up before the body does. Why do we sense this evil presence in the room? We usually sense the presence before we realize we can't move, so which came first? Does the demon wait for the right situation to pounce? Do they milk our psychic fear like a farmer slapping the cow's udder?

It's inadequate to dismiss these apparitions as half-awake nightmares. We still don't quite know how third eye dreams / imaginings work. We can analyze the cones and rods of the eye, the pupil, the optical fluids, but what we sense in nightmares has no correlation to anything we can measure. How we 'see' dreams with our eyes closed is open to interpretation.

One of the common names for the being who comes for you in sleep paralysis is called--in old legends--the 'old hag' and sleep paralysis is then  'old hag syndrome'  So is this creature always female?

I've felt in the past that these beings are aliens from alternate dimensions testing our individual frequencies to see if we're suitable harvesting candidates for abduction and psychic harvesting, i.e. when we sleep our psychic energy might be up for grabs, the psychic equivalent of stealing your neighbor's WiFi.

If you're an easy mark they may abduct you wholesale, either physically or psionically.  No UFO over your house is needed, just a good strong wireless router. they steal your astral brain and return it by dawn, usually. But there is no clear line between the astral and physical body according to my theory, therefore the physical being might be moved as well, particularly if, say, the astral body is wedged into the physical form (i.e. you don't have WiFi so they steal your whole modem).

I think if you can fight them off successfully, wake up from the sleep paralysis through sheer act of will, then they move on -- you're not worth it. You're the one that got away. More power to ya. Plenty of fish in the sea.

Another theory is that there are always demons, ever-present just outside our worldly perceptions. I got the feeling from that demon that stayed in my room (see link in 3rd paragraph) that he wasn't from some other place on our planet, but was always around, waiting for a chance to do harm in the tangible world, visible only occasionally to psychics, schizophrenics, and people burning up from fever.

Another theory is that they are homunculus time travelers from a Possible Earth's future wherein increased gravity has made us squat and a little transparent. What are time travelers if not ghosts? From the past or future they loom up, still dealing from the bottom of the old wounds deck, still clanging their spurs in Jacob Marleyian vengeance, their ætheric tendrils reaching deep into the future to spook later generations, the "living" equivalent of historical memoirs, or old time cinematic images and photos.

I also like the idea that demons can be called into this world either accidentally via Ouija boards, or intentionally via snot-nosed punks trying to anger their parents and impress their bad influence peers. If these summoning amateurs don't know they have to dismiss the demons when they're done, send them back to Hell, then the demons get to stay forever or until some angel, exorcist or psychic kicks them out. The spirit world conjured by the Rosicrucian mystics, for example, was left masterless when the Jesuits slaughtered them; the dark shadow demons conjured and then never sent back have been surly and hacking their way through underbrush of Protestantism to find the worthy Catholics and reincarnations of Catholics to torture in kind, for they are not grateful to be without the only humans who understood them, and modern society still sneers and ostracizes--the civilized man's version of burning at the stake--anyone who admits to seeing or hearing these beings. Even the peasants and uneducated who wouldn't be unseated by a radical new paradigm dutifully throw their rocks of scorn in an unconscious effort to please their conservative masters! The uneducated shun the educated man who won't talk down to them. They mistrust the man who won't take advantage of their ignorance to rob them in clouds of sanctified incense or finger-pointing. Throwing rocks at a problem is easier than 'hearing' it out like open-minded beings insist. This means that so much of the God's work has to be hidden from 'the faithful' for whom no miracle not centuries old can occur, lest its vessel be burnt at the stake.

I'm off topic.

POSTSCRIPT:
 I received this from my friend Sean Kelly (author of various books on saints and strange humors), they are snippets about sleep monsters from his "unfinish-able fairy dictionary":

Alps: They are rarely described, since they work in the dark and can shape-shift, but they are invariably said to wear a hat. An Alp is typically male, its prey usually a sleeping female. Alp attacks are called Alpdrücke, or Alpdrücken. The creature sits astride the sleeper’s chest and becomes increasingly heavy, until the crushing weight awakens the terrified victim. An Alp will drink blood from the nipples of men and children, but prefers the milk of women. If you say to an Alp that is pressing upon you, "Come tomorrow, and I will lend you something!" he will immediately vanish and come the next day in the form of a human wishing to borrow something. They can also be repelled with horse heads. The word, in High German, is etymologically related to Elf. The entity itself is known by many names: Crusher, Drude, Hag, Mara, Mare, Mart, Mallt y Nos, Night-Fiend, Night-Elve, Night Hag, Night-Mare, Polunocnica, Trud, Waalridder, etc.

Mare, Mahrt, Märt, Martes: The female Alp, who rides on sleeping men at night, pressing against them until they can no longer breath. The mare in the English word ‘nightmare’ is mara, the Anglo-Saxon term for that female preternatural entity that sits on sleepers' chests. (A bad dream is called a martröð in Icelandic, mareridt in Danish and mareritt in Norwegian.) In Poland, the sleep-disturbing märt is a girl with a misshapen foot. Martes is a type of French fee, dark complexioned and hairy, with pendulous breasts. The approaching being sounds like the gnawing of a mouse or the quiet creeping of a cat. The mårt can be captured by grasping it with an inherited glove or by closing up all of the room's openings as soon as the sleeping person begins to groan. A mårt-ride can be prevented by crossing one's arms and legs before falling asleep. See Murraue.

Murraue: Similar to the Alp or Mare, but she creeps up a sleeping person's body from below. First you feel her weight on your feet, next on your stomach, and finally on your chest, until you cannot move a muscle. However, if you think that you know who she is, call her by name and she will vanish. In certain parts of Germany, a person born on Sunday, whose eyebrows grow together, is called a murraue.

Polunocnica: The Russian “Lady of Midnight” is a fierce Hag who lives in a swamp and torments sleeping children with nightmares. (She is the sister of the Poludnitsa.)

Trud: Another name for Alp. The female form is trude. There are witches who can send one to those they hate merely by their thoughts. He comes out of their eyebrows, looks like a small white butterfly, and sits on the breast of a sleeping person. If you say to one that is pressing upon you, "Trud, come tomorrow, and I will lend you something!" then he will immediately retreat and come the next day in the form of a human, in order to borrow something. 

Waalridder: A name by which the nightmare-causing Alp is known in the Netherlands.

--
So keep your horseheads and inherited glove handy, and remember to tell the demons "come tomorrow and I will lend you something" - apparently it always works.

Von Braun and the 33 degree Masons of the Moon

When Nazi rocket scientist-cum-NASA director Werner Von Braun meets Walt Disney, we get a 33 degree Freemasonic / Nazi collaboration  that even without the bizarre moments of the below educational short NASA-Disney film (see here) is enough to blow your mind. In it, characters travel to the dark side of the moon and see a rectangular ruin of an ancient moon base, but none of the astronauts, nor Von Braun, nor the narrator comment on it. They use flares to illuminate as they pass over the dark side, and a high level of radiation at the 33 degree line prompts a quick flare on what looks like a base carved into the surface dust (the radar indicates "an unusual formation") and looks like an outline of the Kubrickian monolith. BUT as they look down in awe, nothing else is said and the scene fades to black without another word.

Gott in Himmel! They predict (or already know) there is a base there, and that once evidence of past civilizations are found on the surface, the whole affair will become totally secret. For now they can show but not tell. Soon as it's visited, not even that. Words fail us and disclosure is beyond us, as remote a chance as Von Braun and Disney being already on Mars by 1957 (their next film).

Bug Ambassadors, ignored at the dance

When Stephen Colbert riffed on astrophysicist and friend of the show Neil deGrasse Tyson the other night, it was concerning a recent interview wherein Neil quipped something like: if aliens were watching our planet for signs of intelligence, they might be still looking. Nyuk Nyuk. They might view us as lowly as we view the worm, he said, which we don't try to communicate with, but step on. Therefore aliens should be feared.

Ah, but, reasons the grand vizier Colbert: that worm you stepped on was an alien ambassador! You just started a war! No wonder you're so paranoid.

This is so similar to my own analogy of America sending bug ambassadors to Mars that I had to dredge it back up.

For your agape bewonderment:
(portions originally from Manifestation and Materializaton - UFO Drag Queen :: Delirium  - Lulu Publishing, 2012)

Here's some things science admits are real:

1. A perception of solid matter as unmoving density or permanence or stillness is an illusion. The nature of the cosmos as always in flux. Nothing ever stands still, ever.

2. The universe is vast enough that it's likely we're not alone.

3. The telegraph vine and the cell phones exist. AND recently we've been able to 'print' crude 3-D objects.

4. IF aliens were contacted or discovered, via SETI, it would likely be kept from the general public, if possible.

5. We are limited by our own perceptions of time, space, and distance (relative to our own earthbound perspective) in judging how far away stars and planets are from each other.

6. The earth is old enough and the universe older even than that, relative to our own recorded time, that some highly advanced version of ourselves, a few million years more technologically advanced than us, could easily have come and gone a dozen times already before we even got here.

7. As Arthur C. Clarke wrote, "any highly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

However, put all of them together and it equals this formula: aliens can beam themselves anywhere in any dimension, backwards in time, and across the universe, like a fax. Even we can do that, shamen in the rainforest can, Zen Buddhists can. Maybe.

During WW2 there were some remote Pacific islands (such as Tanna and Vanatu) where the natives had never seen a white man, or an airplane, or a car. Such technology made us gods, especially as crates full of weird goodies would drop out of our birds in parachutes, and land all over the island, sometimes right into their tribal council ceremonial fires. Would these tribes have scientists there to decry our planes as mass hallucinations? Or priests to decry our planes as devil manifestations? Probably not. Both tend to bow to inarguable power, to incorporate what they can't discredit or destroy. So when the war ends and the Marines pull out, the witch doctors make ceremonial fires to lure the magic silver birds back to them. Maybe some marines promised to return, like MacArthur, just as the visitants did with the Maya, Inca, and Hopi peoples.

But if in a few thousand years the Marines don't return, perhaps the future generation (no longer witch but medical) doctors will examine the tradition of making ritual airplanes from straw, and drawing parachutes that look like saucers (or weather balloons!) on cave walls, and regard it all as superstitious nonsense. There's no such thing as white people or cans of things called "peaches." By then any still existing wreckage left behind will be buried, perhaps, and only the drawings and passed-down memory will survive. Since there hasn't been a non-tribal person there for so many generations, anyone who says there ever was is now considered a kook, an ostracized by conventional wisdom.

Then, maybe on some other island, the Japanese came instead of the Americans, and enslaved and brutalized the indigenous population (they took rather than gave). It's just possible that island would breed future scientists like deGrassi and Hawking, for whom visitants are automatically hostile BECAUSE they are more advanced. When the Japanese left they left a stain in the collective soul of that island, so that they hate and fear the return. They make human sacrifices to keep the Japanese Gods appeased so they don't descend once more. Eventually they don't return long enough that the sacrifice stops, and it's regarded as a dark blot on the island's history - when their ancestors were fearful savages who killed in fear of the dark, and some made-up blood god called "Jappa Nisee"

Evidence of both types of alien incursion--beneficial and destructive-- is all around us, but broach the topic and watch mainstream archaeology fall into panicked joking, dismissively ready to hoot at any ancient historian who dares break from tradition.  But it's not hard to recognize desperation in their denial. Their scientific laws are bound up in the limited known, made to fit the where and the how but not the why or from whence... anyone who looks at science's half-finished puzzle and suggests a few pieces may be missing is laughed out of the room.

In each case the need to suppress 'magical thinking' is a means to an end - the mainstream belittles the unknown if it has any 'fantastic' element the same way a Mayan witch doctor might belittle a visiting Catholic missionary, or the Catholic in turn might burn the astronomer who first declares the earth revolves around the sun; now the astronomers burn through ridicule the neo-pagan astrologer-psychic who declares the Mayans were right all along.

 I say this, because I learned to recognize this hostile ridicule in myself when it used to flare up during therapy, and having my writing edited. If what my editor/s or shrink said stung me like a slap, I knew they must be right. And thus when fiction provokes a negative enough response, it is the truth. On the other hand, the great pyramid at Giza was built with slaves and imported logs over several centuries and that's it! End of discussion! Never you mind how 100 ton slabs of rock were carried hundreds of miles and lifted so high in the air in the Temple statuary, and when we move them we have to cut them into slices and move them piece by piece, reassembling them above the flood zone or wherever (which is why some statues have all these lines so they look they're made of bricks.

The idea that generations of slaves over centuries could create something that cohesive, something we wouldn't be able to do today no matter how many machines we used, is the true absurdity. The vehemence with which mainstream science resists alternate interpretations just because they sound flakey borders on the pathological.

You kids did this all yourselves?

I compare this with children being kept in the dark about the falseness of Santa Clause. Imagine parents so determined to keep the Santa myth alive that even when the kids are 35 years old the parents defame and destroy anyone who suggests Santa is a myth.

It's not alien presences, unknown visitors, that are comforting childhood myths, of course, but the opposite: the cozy delusion that we are the Robinson Crusoe of the universe instead of a relatively self-destructive crazy spinster cousin on the edge of town that never gets invited to the dance, not even asked to serve drinks. When they come see us, the visitors come as evolutionary biologists, not suitors. It's insulting. We should try to clean ourselves up a little more. Frankly though, I think they secretly like us. We're the girl they don't take out in public, admit they don't even know, but then they sneak into our window at three in the morning and roofie us. And here we are, their illegitimate children.

For us the equivalent might mean if we found weird, small bugs on Mars and so sent earth bug ambassadors in little ships with tiny proclamations and gifts for the space bug president --this is what the bug skeptics would need to see to believe in space visitors. If we just scooped some bugs up and brought them aboard our human space craft for analysis, took them home, or tagged and released them, then the space bug skeptics back on the Martian surface would still dismiss the existence of alien life for lack of evidence; after all, their space bug SETI program has been sending out sophisticated insect calls with the power to reach several feet outside the atmosphere, so where are the bug ambassadors?

Pzzzzzt!?


 ------------

Where indeed? Thanks.

YO! I TOTALLY DIDN'T WRITE THIS LAST BIT, IT JUST APPEARED! CRYPTIC!! THANKS BUGGY!

The Ushers of Shonberg

 If you've ever seen an early Roger Corman Poe film The House of Usher (1961), you've got to remember the wild, tripped out painting of old Usher ancestors. So fucking weird and great you just know that if Poe saw them he'd say "Damn, that's exactly the stuff I imagined Roderick Usher painting in my short story." In those exact words. Then he'd want to buy one, but be broke, so try to steal one while on an absinthe binge. Naturally it would be the one atop. Same one I'd want.

Check out Burt Shonberg's web site and, if you're like me, realize that yes, sometimes it would be great to have a lot of money, because then you'd be able to buy art like this.

The Perseus Mirror-Shield Refaction

Do I believe in God or am I an atheist? Exactly. What about aliens, real or imaginary? Totally, bro.

Well the answer is the same for all these things: look past duality, past the dichotomy of truth and fiction. The either/or is a trap set up by science and religion! Atheists all tend to be rebelling against some anthropomorphic conception of God instilled in them by a parent or Sunday School Teacher. Spiritual types like me rebel against those conceptions too, but we've experienced the pink light euphoria of spiritual awakening, a tapping into universal love and egoless consciousness. If you don't believe in that, you're not an atheist, just jealous. I didn't say ooh god reached out and delivered me, I just said I felt a pink light euphoria. If you got all uppity about needing to deny that experience is something I never even said it was, is that really atheism?

What does it say about atheists that they need to announce to the world they don't believe in God? Why bother? Do I go around announcing to the world know I don't watch football and that anyone who does is an idiot? Well, I do announce that, but only when visiting my family for Thanksgiving. It's tradition!

What does it say about skeptics that they go out of their way to ridicule their fellow man's beliefs or deny his experiences?

Are children really small... or just far away?

What proof, really, aside from a few specimens, do we have that the coelacanth still exists?

Why would I bother to dispute it, now that we found one?

Myth addresses all this. It is a direct tunnel down into our collective unconscious, where logic and linear space-time cease to exist and the cold gorgon truth of life is displayed in the only way we can perceive it, via Perseus mirror refraction of semi-fictionalization, which allows logic and the cold clarity of 'conscience' to let go of the burden of keeping chaos outside the door, and its anxiety falls away like a sawed-off strait-jacket.

For most of us, Americans especially, that's a scary thought. We want to know for sure: real or fake? Dream or 'waking reality'? Truth or illusion, as if the lines between them were fixed and immovable, and by knowing these lines we could know whether or not to be scared 'for real.' But fear dies in certainty; myth allows a freedom from having to 'know', from worrying whether religious, skeptic, or science zealots will shoot us withering glances if we step outside their intolerant dogma.

We who love myth know, however, that something is lost when science explains away the world. Once the monster is dragged into the light, the magic is over. The scientists label and name and relegate what was once a spectacular monster into an "irrawaddy dolphin." Can you imagine seeing this beast pop up around you while fishing in Lake Champlain or Loch Ness? You'd plotz! But if you had a bilogist with you, you wouldn't have time, once he named it - 'irawaddy dolphin' you'd just snap a pic (below) throw it a fish, pet its snout and bid it adieu.

That's why a part of me secretly hopes we never find out the truth about Bigfoot. Imagine the dismal depression if he's caught and is just a big ape and scientists say "aww we knew it all the time, and now we can study, name, capture, torture it with medical experiments, kill it, and then stuff it for the Natural History museum."

And of course, until then, until scientists can dissect his carcass to thus prove he's real, anyone who dares dream Bigfoot exists must be ridiculed!

That's why I really responded to the film THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. It understood myth and how to use it to create a buzz. I knew in advance when I saw it that the 'found videotape' angle was just a hoax, but it was a hoax in service of our being scared and thus it increased enjoyment of the film. Just thinking the 'found tapes' might be real, feeling it in my gut, made the film a dozen times scarier, to the point I designed a whole website around it, Frightened Male Monthly during the week when I was too freaked out to sleep - and this was in midtown Manhattan! I can only imagine living in the woods. The filmmakers enhanced the myth still further in not showing the witch, ever. by If the film ever started explaining things (why is the guy facing the wall?), it would no longer be as scary. So we never see her, it, whatever it she is... and that's why it maintains such power. The film is about how the power of the video camera ultimately cannot protect us, that the image destroys when it captures. But that which is beyond the image, myth, is even stronger than truth and illusion combined.

If you think you know the difference between myth and reality then let me ask you this: which part of your consciousness do you think this with? Can you point to the spot in your brain, and be sure that's where you are? Is there a single point inside your skull where you feel your 'self' looking out from? No, you're operating under an illusory pretense of wholeness. Half your body's functions aren't even in your conscious control (such as pain) and even mental are subject to things like self-sabotage, Freudian slips, and uncontrollable outbursts of temper.

But nonetheless, the 'you' that thinks you know the difference between reality and myth isn't even a reality. The fiction is that there is a single 'you' making decisions. It's what gets you through the day. None of it was invented with you. Your body has this shit down to a science after so many billions of years.

"You" are a higher-level organism on a single spinning rock spinning around a sun that's roaring through space and slowly preparing to freeze to death. You're unable to 'exist' for more than 16 or so hours at a stretch before you fall asleep and 'go' somewhere else. When your eyes are closed, all is dark; when your ears are plugged, all is quiet. Yet neither of these are true. You insist we have to measure the amount of time an alien would need to travel from point (a) to point (b) in the galaxy, and that in doing so we'll have an objective 'real' distance, but this measurement is based on your primitive conception of time/space and the universe, one totally anthropomorphized to fit your limited world view! You presume an alien can only be 'real' if you can sense it with at least three of your five senses, and it must be seen only in your waking life, both eyes open,, but even then you still need it verified by the TV before it's really real, even if you trust the witnesses and see the evidence firsthand.

My great great great great great great great great aunt on trial, Mary Easty of Salem

Most of our ideas about the universe are limited to what we can take in through our five senses. Even if we can 'imagine' and project and dream and analyze, it all must be translated back again to sensory data to form hypotheses about how the world works, which we can then test. This is science. But just as spirituality hardens into religion, which hardens into dogma which hardens into intolerance, and intolerance into persecution of new ideas that challenge hardened dogma, so too theorems and research harden into 'laws' which harden into the 'known,' which harden into intolerance and persecution of ideas that threaten the boundaries of this 'known.'

On the other hand, fiction skates away free from the need for scientific rigor, yet at the same time might contain just as much truth as the initial proposals that resulted in scientific 'fact.'  Nonetheless it remains free to travel far beyond fact, unbound by the dirty, tedious slog that is 'consensus.' If your fiction should 'come true' as it did for Phillip K. Dick, Edgar Caycee and William Gibson, then you are a prophet, if not, a madman; if both, an author.

Thus the motto of this blog, "where science fears to tread, art staggereth."

One of the big things that science doesn't ever fully admit or understand (outside the most radical psycho-pharmacological paradigms) is the way the mind can heal the body - and the way placebos actually work; that sometimes cancer just disappears overnight after the patient has a mystical encounter; or how pregnancies vanish without a trace. There's enough evidence for all of this to make science uncomfortable, so it scoffs, and huddles closer around the lamp of learning.

It's the same with Bigfoot: science doesn't dare condone belief in psychic phenomena, not just because there's no 'concrete' evidence that they can dissect (no body)--that normally wouldn't stop them from at least entertaining the idea--but because aliens and Bigfoot are too associated with crackpots, with myth and tall tales, fish stories. People sneer and ridicule those who believe or have seen something, because if not they, in turn, will be ridiculed. If they're not, and more come to fear and believe, it might make it real, like the placebo.

But part of this 'anti-myth' involves a mistrust of myth as a way to contextualize rather than label. Science seeks to explain where myth seeks to confound. It's no coincidence then that 'reality' never feels as true as myth, and fiction can seem merely trivial unless it incorporates mythic reality.

Beyond being fact or fiction, myth finds larger truths hidden in the unknowable realms of our deepest consciousness which has no clear boundary, no inside/outside. The collective unconscious has no clear barrier between in and out, which is why shamen can enter other people's dreams, and why indigenous tribes are smart enough to pay attention to each others' dreams and recognize signs and omens. When exploring the myths that captivate us, we can find a blueprint all laid out for our future, a guide to growth. When we ignore myth, we stagnate.

Here's one of my gurus, Joseph Campbell:



Whether they exist or not, the aliens smartly keep their existence a secret... sources from the insider table are pretty consistent in their reporting that being in the company of these aliens truly takes its toll on a human being's sanity. Like kids curious about where babies come from, it's okay for us to want to know, but better for our curiosity not to find out, at least not too early. We've been dealt a solid, perhaps, by those humans who 'play parent' and keep it enough of a secret to cast doubt over the alien presence, even while revealing most of the info through disinformation. As long as there's a grain of salt to help it go down, we can swallow just about anything. So it's not like the truth isn't out there, it's just heavily salted.

It's the equivalent of taking a psychedelic drug for the very first time. If you've never done them, you shouldn't chime in on the matter - yet the people who want them illegal generally never have. The terrified ego of the uninitiated 'straight' trembles at the thought of losing control in the land of "acid" - their superego paints the experience in broad comic strokes, to mask the fear. The ego knows it will essentially cease to exist, or at least be seriously undermined, once this process of illumination is undergone. Naturally this spooked ego will do anything it can to stay cohered, from damning the drug outright, to persecuting those who have tried it, the same way science majors sneer at crazy psychics. It is the classifying of drugs like the naturally growing mushroom or hemp plant in the same league as schedule one narcotics like heroin that shows just how close we are to the same mentality that led the Puritans to hang witches. Ridicule, dismissal, contempt prior to investigation, and outright hostility and violence says more about the person condemning than it does about the issue.

To a lesser degree, ridicule achieves this too (the idiot dick who 'fucks with' the mind of a tripper - 'ooooh you high yet, "man", whoa--- you're going through a tunnel," etc. - but the more the uninitiated try to laugh it off, the more a savvy Jungian will know they're afraid of losing what little illusion of control over self already have. Any Coast Guard, SEAL, or rescue diver knows this all too well. The thrashing, panicked downer will often try to drown their rescuer to stay above the waves for one more second, rather than letting go so the rescuer can lift them into the light forever.

For the dry academes who cannot 'let go and be lifted,' there is SETI to dismiss the crop circle as "mere chicanery," wondering why if aliens can beam crop circle patterns from on high they don't just call us on the phone! That "why don't they just land at the White House" rationalization is fine for the doubters, but we who have come to believe the evidence should realize that argument is ridiculous. (The aliens tried to land at the White House once, and we shot at them - see here). It's like saying dreams can't be important since they're hard to remember.

Science must know this pain too because arguers against Darwin cite things like "why haven't giraffes learned to talk by now?" never imagining that language might not be an evolutionary trait, speech the be all and end all, that language might be actually a drawback, a recessive gene, a virus or that evolution takes place over millions of years, not a few hundred months. In reality Giraffes evolve in ways far more relevant for their purposes: you can be damn sure their necks weren't always that long, they got longer and longer as the trees around them grew higher to escape their nibbling, and to get the leaves smaller necks could not reach - that's evolution.

But on its end, science is pretty bad, too, refusing to believe in things beyond what it can measure through its observations and mathematical abstraction, even while conceding their senses are limited, their abstractions based on the faulty limited POV of their perception.

Dogs, for example, have a vastly superior sense of smell to humans. Is the dog just faking to get attention? If we can't sniff out a trail, or measure with any accuracy the millionth part per parsec of smell or whatever then surely the trail doesn't exist! In other words, if we can't see the ghost, it's not there, so there's no such thing and anyone who says otherwise is a fake. Sometimes dogs and cats can see ghosts too. Maybe 99.99% of we humans can't, but we're sure the ghost still doesn't exist, even if the smell-trail does. We have to admit, the dogs found that missing shoe all right.

In order to grasp this fundamental problem, you must have some distance from your ego, via therapy, meditation, a spiritual practice, a heavy drug trip, mental illness, lack of sleep, medication, or just proximity to childhood. In more evolved countries like India this egocidal regiment is more pronounced, but their civilization is vastly older.

Imagine if you encountered reality and dreams at the same time, spilled over onto each other. You never needed to sleep because you were always asleep and always awake at the same time. You would be a schizophrenic, or Jesus, or an alien-human hybrid, or an acidhead. When we say "total consciousness" this is what we mean. People call this 'hallucinating' --but really, isn't the universe as we perceive it one big hallucination? Now that we have a telescope in space we can see more of the universe, but a) 'more' of the universe already existed before we could see it with the telescope and b) our eyes see the stars as little white dots, but that's not how they really look to someone with their eyes closed, or to someone right in front of one. So why are stars really 'dots' (answer: they're not, at least they're not to an astro-physicist, or an uneducated fundamentalist Christian).

We know from science that the perception of matter as 'permanent' is an illusion. Everything is either growing or decomposing. Nothing stands still --stillness is a myth. Vibration is the only constant. We know that plants grow and breathe too slowly for our eyes to register as movement, but with time-lapse they become alien life forms, blooming out for sunshine, recoiling into themselves at night, opening for the rain, and if seen fast and long enough all this would look like breathing. Voices must fall within our frequency range to be heard, but if they were sped up fast enough they wouldn't sound like anything but a mosquito hum, slowed down enough nothing but a low drone. And yet we believe automatically the ego's decree that all that is known we know.

I once took a shaman class at the Open Center and the lady who taught it got us all ready for journeying by walking around the circle (about 30 of us) to blow a tiny little burning sage bit and teensy pile of American Spirit tobacco into our faces... the equivalent of a sample spray of perfume at Macy's, to prepare us for power animal meeting and journeying. This is what happens when the ego co-opts the tools of the unconscious; it strips it of all mystery and therefore of all magic and power. The Open Center wouldn't allow the room to fill up with sage and tobacco smoke, or to light candles, so with neon blazing overhead, and the faintest wisp of sage in our nostrils, the only power animal I, at least, could find, was the dog of get me the fuck outta here.

The concept of mystery I'm getting towards is more than just a "weakness for superstition" that rationalist psychiatry would tell you. The limited positivist scientific viewpoint of reality is something that works to shrink the aperture, like the specially treated glasses that prevent a parent from seeing that their child is gay or alcoholic. Empiricism, Descartes, it all boils down to the measurable and other consciousness-based balderdash.

Why is acupuncture and other eastern medicine so downgraded by mainstream western science? Because it exposes academic grandiosity and egotism by operating on a completely different set of symbols, verifying a fundamental belief difference in how to look at the body that calls the certainty of western medicine into question. The AMA acts defensive like it has something to hide. The "measurable" results of eastern medicine don't factor in with western minds. The east sees the body in terms of energy flows, wind directions, organs as archetypes... their mythos is intact. The west slays, drains, and bleaches out the mythos. In the west one can study about the bible or Greek mythology but it must always be with the understanding that this stuff is not "real." 

The "literalization" of the bible's prime myths- Adam and Eve, Noah, etc. is what gets the Christians and the liberals fighting. Muslims too, for what the west doesn't quite get -- except amongst the urban tribal scene perhaps -- is the power of belief in supernatural forces. Just "believing" in anything gives power and meaning to one's life as shaped by that thing. The good parent or spouse knows that "effort" is needed to keep the family dynamic positive, to act 'as if' for the sake of the children, rather than lamenting and expressing worry in front of them. Each moment of a parent's life a child sees affects that child profoundly, this is myth in action - the parent is a living myth, a god, a role model one way or the other. The same way one meditates to help steer the compass towards a positive side after years of negativity, so too do we need miracles every day in the form of people "reawakening" out of old routines and self-centered grouchiness and into love and comprehension and compassion, in order to find the new living myths that fit our new older childhoods - from dad to Jim Morrison to Joseph Campbell to Krishna.

True compassion is very different from the maudlin co-dependence we see played across screens and headlines every day. There is a much ignored factor of compassion: that of death, of dying gracefully and with dignity - early, late, whenever. The western mind obsesses about time, about its short life, health, fitness, procreation; the superego ingeniously doles out dopamine only in "remembering" the happiness of past events. I'm really simplifying Lacan here, who speaks of the ego ideal and the objet petit a as a "trap of desire" -- where the desired object instantly loses value and meaning once it's attained -- a concept we can use to grapple with the truth about the existence of aliens and flying saucers.

Another good metaphor would be the situation where the wife is 100% sure her husband is cheating on her, but he won't admit it. The man is supposed to lie and the woman is supposed to KNOW he's lying but accept the lie. The thing is, will the woman be able to make decisions based on her knowledge of the truth irrespective of her husband's lie, or will she get all wrapped up in trying to get the "gory details" out of him? The spurned lover always has this masochistic obsession with the little details: "Tell me exactly what he did and where and for how long!" The UFOlogists and their skeptic remorae have this same masochistic obsession with the government --they want to hear from "the authority" that it was lying, to know what it was covering up. They can't just accept what's right there in front of them until they hear this from the big other.

Right there is the explanation of why this cover-up needed to happen and still does.

Authority, in its infinite wile, of course has never been really lying - the information is out there, just clouded in disinformation. Part of the job of authority is to spare us the terror of seeing it show genuine worry. For anyone ready to start to grapple with the existential HUGENESS of this issue though, the facts are there, as much as the government probably knows. Just as a child will pry at parental secrets but certainly not whine and stamp and demand the "real" answer (knowing unconsciously perhaps that the whole story all at once would be too much for them to bear) so too we pry at Area 51 for verification about the heavy dark secret, but we might think deep in our frightened hearts that what we don't know may be good for us. After all, when a president tells us the economy is doing bad but it's getting better, we know he's lying, but now we're mad at his lie not terrified of the truth. If we went on TV and started crying and raving that all was lost, that we were all doomed, then--and only then--would he be abusing his power.

Speculation is the shallow end of the deep, vast pool of the unknown truth. We indeed might panic, might stampede over the cliff were the whole vast, depressing truth be known without any recourse for the shelter of speculation. Is a sheep a happier sheep for knowing "the truth" about its slaughter house destiny?

From a Lacanian point of view, you can read the reason WHY all the US military agreed back in the atomic age to keep this stuff a secret in the dogmatically myopic letter from SETI, written in response to recent UFO and crop circle claims. Essentially, it's the same "if they're so smart, why don't they write us in English and come over and let us measure them," sort of thing that we hear from almost anyone dumb enough to believe What We Know So Far is the Be-All/End-All. These are the same people who jailed Galileo and Timothy Leary. They've made the mistake of identifying with their own frightened egos. Rather than being amorphous and open to the unknown they close up like turtles. These are the people who never remember their dreams, or else don't put any stock in them, and as a result, they end up in a car accident or some other last ditch attempt by the unconscious to get a word in edgewise. These are the people who teach our children and--unfortunately--these are our children. God knows I was like that for a long time. It takes a lot of weird experience in life--an experience that often results in low grades (because you're out tripping rather than studying)--to realize how little of the world you know. That's what a 19 year-old stoner brat and a 69 year-old professor have in common, neither will admit there's anything they don't already know, so there's nothing they can teach each other. Like two halves of a broken brain, they refuse to acknowledge the validity of each other's opinion. My joke about it in AA used to be, "Okay, I didn't before, but NOW I know everything...." and I'd learn something more.... "okay, NOW I know everything."

Last memory: on a family trip to some magical spot in Arizona, Sedona, visiting my bro over Xmas. Sedona is a slightly Woodstock-style town with nice vistas and allegedly nurturing magnetic vortices. It was a two-hour drive from Phoenix and by the time we got into the small town we were hungry. All along main street, i.e. the road through town, were quaint-looking diners, full of local landscape art, and no doubt quite charming, but then--at the end of the road and slightly up a hill, hidden behind some tall trees--was a Burger King. "Why this looks like just the place," noted my dad. I was too hungry to do my usual act of complaining and wanting to stop at the regular locally owned real-food diners. So we ate there, felt sick, walked around for a 20 minutes, got woozy and drove home.

SETI is like my dad in this instance, going on a wild adventure only to wave its mathematic myopathy around as if it’s the last word in evolution. "If these are good restaurants," would be my SETI dad in Sedona equivalent, how come they don't have franchises!" If there are vortexes, he said, woozy from three burgers, how come I didn't feel them (in my five minute walk)?

 Don't believe me that this us? Just watch an alien show on 'Science' channel! They 'investigate' stuff that's been debunked years ago, never even considered seriously by anyone in the real alien conspiracy world, and then proudly and snidely debunk it at the last minute, over and over again. If that's not picking the Burger King, I don't know what is.