"Your eyes can deceive you, don't trust them." - Obi Wan Kenobi
Some folks may groan, but I consider myself a true skeptic. Like S. Holmes, I don't 100% believe nor disbelieve anything. I also adhere to the writings of Patrick Harpur, that sometimes the tools of fakery reveal great truths. Just as artists use paint to convey masterpieces, occult forces use charlatan's trickery as a gateway into this world. Similar to how science fiction may inspire scientists towards new technology, charlatanism and hoaxers straddle the line between truth and illusion. Instead of worrying or hoping scientific speculative fiction comes true, myth--that state between fiction and truth--allows a vicarious predictive imagination. We 'know' it's probably not true, but as long as there's a kernel of possibility still unpopped, we can dig our psychic claws deep into wondering how we'd react, what we'd feel, if the evidence became so strong as to be undeniable.
EXAMPLE 1:
If this is hard to cognate, remember being a kid whose parents tell him Santa Clause is coming, etc. Especially as you reach, say, third grade, the Santa myth is harder and harder to believe, BUT - as long as every effort is made to pass it off as truth, we can 'go along' and enjoy the benefits (fear, presents), without the worry (the need to reciprocate gift giving, i.e. to match our parents' presents or say thanks, etc).
EXAMPLE 2F:
The title of this post is a quote from Whitley Streiber when he was shown the controversial "Victor" footage and asked if the alien being interrogated looked like the ones who have been abducting him. Note he couldn't answer for sure, even though he's been face-to-face with them. Each time, naturally, his memory was 'wiped' so he can recall it as if a dream, not 'photographically.'
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| Ex. 4s: Rock or Man? (Mars) depends on whom you ask |
I'm a Pisces, a twin sign, fish pulling in different directions, hence I don't believe in astrology even though I know it's true. That may sound like a paradox fit to blow the gasket of a Star Trek android, but other twin signs have no problem with it. And when I hear that advanced atomic physicists are beginning to make connections between the smallest human emotion and the vastest star -- the fractal butterfly effect at last cohering into mathematical equation -- I wonder if science will catch up to astrology within my lifetime or at least FINALLY admit there's more to it than just mumbo-jumbo.... maybe.
Example 4A: I've been friends with a few super intelligent paranoiacs and narcissists in AA, charmers who believe crazed ex-boyfriends or girlfriends are stalking them and leaving cryptic messages in the bottom rows of seemingly random SPAM emails. Sometimes all the stalking perceived drops away by adjusting their meds, but other times --who knows? At any rate, I love to listen to their crazy tales of strangers stalking them through microphones in their molar fillings, and/or breaking into their apartments just to move a few boxes from one end of their closet to the other. Because... in the end... maybe they're right. They can be very convincing, these paranoiacs, and listening to them my blood gets cold, like it used to when at summer camp in Maryland hearing tales of the Goat Man around the fire. It doesn't matter if they're crazy or not, that chill of the possibility is what myth, what campfires, are all about.
Example 67X
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| cropped pic of dead alien often seen on various sites passed off as authentic Roswell photo from 1947 |
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| Expanded |
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| uncropped 'bigger' picture - Roswell museum |
Hoaxers
... are a bane to the existence of legitimate researchers in fields like ghosts, UFOs, demonology, and occult conspiracy. And yet their real crime is only in getting caught in their lie, and even then only if they fleece some suckers out of money, or if anyone believed them in the first place to the point their excitement at the lie's possible truth was killed by the news of the fakery.Maybe I'm lucky in that having done so much acid in the past and hallucinated so very damn much (decades ago I'll grant you, but I did a lot of it over a 13 year period) I don't believe anything I see. If my years as a psychedelic warrior have taught me anything, it's not to trust my own senses. Descartes didn't either and though he clearly never dropped acid he may have done other things (ergot in a mystery ceremony?) and he correctly pinpointed the pineal gland as the seat of the soul. He too knew not to trust his senses, for in demanding we take our sense perceptions as gospel truth, our senses doth get cocky. The third eye never makes such claims. It's the eye we see through in dreams and creative visualizations.
Seeing it doesn't make it real; not seeing doesn't make it false. Anyone who 'only believes what they see' is delusional, though those who stick to that concept, i.e. reductive or eliminative materialists, are clearly begging someone to hook them up with a tab of acid so they can finally get a higher vantage point on what's going on in their brains. Honey, I tell them, your brain is like a cheating spouse, you don't know nearly as much about what's going on with it as you think you do.
But I still hate finding out some engaging mystery that beguiled me was just a trick, either of a prankster, attention-seeker, profiteer, or just misidentification of weather phenomena. I feel a knee-jerk anger when something that was blowing my mind is dashed against the rocks of scientific grounding, snarky prank laughter, or contemptuous "Myth-Buster"-ing.
Take for example the high strangeness of Saturn controlling the Earth via the Moon, as told by the amazing paranoid theorist David Icke. I love this guy, but his latest book is so crazy I had to quickly shelf it and wait for a time when my mind was more stable. The deeper into the rabbit hole he goes, the crazier he sounds, but it's the kind of crazy that makes my head vibrate in uncomfortable ways, the imprisoning frequencies of Saturn punishing me with a remote controlled dog collar zap to make me put the book down, the way I might walk to the other side of the street to avoid a maniac shouting about lizard people stealing our souls.
Luckily, as a Pisces, I can believe he's right AND he's crazy at the same time, and vice versa. If I don't, the world will seem unendurably depressing, and I'd lose my few threads of remaining sanity--so it's not that I don't believe him, to an extent, it's just that I can't believe him at this time, for my own self-interest.
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| Eliminativists argue that modern belief in the existence of mental phenomena is analogous to the ancient belief in obsolete theories such as the geocentric model of the universe - Wiki |
Without this water, this anthropomorphic pareidolia, a Rodin sculpture is just polished stone -- if we see a nude woman in it, well, we're idiots who can't tell a real woman from a rock.
In other words, dreams aren't less 'valid' than 3-D waking life reality. Nothing is 'just' a hallucination. If it was, god help us, we'd be trapped even in our fantasies, totally trapped, in other words, and life would be unlivable.
Don't Touch that Dial!
Imagine consciousness and 3D space time as a radio we got for Xmas on our first birthday. We've had it all our lives, we can tune in the one local station 'Hot 97 FM.' At night we sometimes tune in weird stuff to the right and left of the dial. But we don't even know we can switch to AM and find a whole other spectrum. Some stations can take lifetimes to tune in, or can be found almost immediately on reception, only to be lost when we turn back to Hot 97 and then try to find them later. At the far end of one direction, we can tune into channels full of light and angels; god, loved ones who've departed, heaven. In the other direction, darkness and demons, in between, a million permutations. We 'can' tune these things in, but we worry we'll never got Hot 97 back if we adjust even a centimeter.
But are those other radio stations real as the average person defines real? How do we know if we never try to turn the dial? If we never try, the only possibility of us ever seeing these other channels is when we either die (or have an NDE) or suffer from a high grade fever (or are psychic, schizophrenic, or suffer a head injury). But to deny their possibility is like saying no other radio station can exist because it's not 97 FM, and hence it does not play all the hits / all the time.
We know the appearance of solid matter is itself an illusion. This is scientific fact: matter is just energy on a very slow vibration. If we moved the dial so that we saw even ancient rock as vibrating energy, wouldn't that in fact be 'truer'?
BUT --if everything supernatural and paranoid should--hypothetically--turn out to be false, then hoaxers (and mis-identifiers) are the true saviors of our temporal realm. Without urban legends, high strangeness and unexplainable monsters, the world would be a much more boring place.
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| DECASIA (film decay, not the ocean floor) |
Maybe outside of our temporal realm 'life and death' as a duality is transcended into a kind of continual in-between state of non/existence. Our life span is short, artificially instilled by our Tyrell-ish Anunaki god to weed out the problems with the previous model (i.e. bigfoot is our ancestor with abilities intact that are artificially blocked in our DNA to keep us from escaping across time and space as he does -- the main two things they gave us Bigfoot lacks - abstract higher education cognizance (language) and third eye fantasy; what we lose: immortality, ease of channel surfing.
I believe our government did the right thing burying the Roswell event in 1947. We'd just been in a war. We needed the rest. We still do. I believe they haven't really hid anything from us, just cloaked it in enough disinformation and doubt that those who want to believe it was a balloon can go back to sleep, and those who want to seek the truth can find it, more or less.
It's like if you're five years-old and always pestering mom about where babies come from, or rather, as I would phrase it: if I came from your stomach, mom, how come I have dad's features? That was my question since I had dark hair like my dad and my mom was blonde. My mom fielded the questions the best she could while I bounced on their king size bed and she got ready for whatever Mad Men-era bridge party that night. She never lied, never talked about a stork, but just fed me tiny pieces of nonsexual info, and let my curiosity, and kids in school, fill in the blanks.
When another kid told us the gross mechanics involved, of course, it was so horrifying to imagine (that's where you pee out of!!) we accused him of lying, or getting the facts wrong.... until gradually we accepted it with our changing hormones... and health class.
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| "It took me sooo long / to find out / but I found out" |
Okay, so one day the parents thought the kid was still in kindergarten but he sneaks out and comes home and finds his parents stark naked in the living room, going at it hot and heavy. Busted! The parents don't say "well now you know, now you figured out the secret of why you have your fathers' eyes, welcome to adulthood son." No, they quickly yell at the kid to wait outside, run upstairs, get dressed, come down telling you to forget what you saw.
Gladly.
We need to find out about this stuff in pieces, some kid with a dogeared Playboy here, confusing scuttlebut on the playground there. If you stumble on the truth, deny, cajole, diffuse. Your brain will be only too happy to oblige.
In other words your parents probably don't want to keep you in the dark about sex forever, but they don't want to be the ones to tell you, at least not until later. And that is correct of them. They are your authority, your arbiter of the real. Until they confirm or deny what you heard in school, you can relax in the idea the kids MIGHT be wrong; you can imagine or puzzle out the mystery of procreation with your friends at your own organic speed. If it's too much to imagine, or accept, you can deny it. as their version is unconfirmed, and unsubstantiated by evidence. But you can't deny your parents.
Eventually you won't need the parents to confirm or deny, but no one can tell you when that will be, that's the whole point. When you don't need their confirmation to believe it's real, you're ready. 'Disclosure' is always 'about' to happen, but it never can, by it's very definition. We each have to make our own paradigm shift on an individual-by-individual level.
MYTHBUSTERS ARE A HOAX!
In this sense I've always felt the Mythbusters were doing a great deal of harm to the world. In venting their own juvenile destructive desires on our most precious illusions they rob us of our freedom to perceive life as it it really is, dangerous and full of unknown quantities. Clearly, there's a need for UFOs whether they're 'real' in your definition of the term or not. If you have cable you can find a paranormal show of one stripe or another nearly any time of day. The only bad ones are the ones with some smarmy so-called skeptic folded into the investigative group by bet-hedging producers. This is usually a white college-educated male who acts like his believing witness testimony is the most important thing in the world. He's hostile to anyone who saw anything as if his weak-minded child bought the Brooklyn Bridge and he's trying to get a refund. See my Zealot of Doubt: why skeptics are the new cranks.
That's fine by me. I just won't watch your show, but know one thing, Mythbusters and UFO research team 'skeptic'-- you are not a TRUE skeptic. Atheists are not skeptics, nor are smarmy hipsters who think their science degrees mean they can't even address the ideas of ghosts and aliens without snarky laughter and derisive eye rolls. That's not skepticism, that's condemnation based on one's own false impressions, mainly created by snap judgments of 'the type of people who believe that rot.' They're just parroting whatever will get their paper a gold star. Can anyone get a master's degree unless they parrot the party line? No, and as a result there are far more true skeptics in the UFO community than outside it. The naysayers are so rigid in their conception of reality that it threatens to shatter with the slightest stress. A true skeptic is open to all possibilities and that means never committing to one organization, theory, sponsor, guru, religion, or point of view, regardless of sensorial evidence.
In admitting eyes and ears are deceiving we don't close doors to perception, we open them.
In short, I don't care if you made your ghost story up, so long as it feels real to me, so I get the shivers, the pleasant spine tingle that makes me check the door locks and grab onto the cat for support. As a man who considers the art of telling ghost stories a sacred rite, I know it's always twice as scary when they feel true. No ghost story is scary if the teller prefaces it with: "I just made this all up, so don't believe it." It's always "this totally happened to a friend of mine's aunt and uncle..." or "in these woods, I heard this happened." And you can't lock the door at a camp site.
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| Washington could not tell a lie... and he says he met a Nordic alien in the woods at Valley Forge |
Don't worry, we'll keep fogging the line between the real, the potentially real, and the maybe --it's all we ever had. If we just remain open to every possibility we widen the band of our station until all is revealed as it really is -- potential energy manifestation, expression, rotation, revolution, collapse, and super Nova, and then back around again. All the stations playing at once may sound like a staticky mess, but hey - lo! There I AM.
