Last year I suggested, based on a collection of weird anecdotal evidence and proniac ravings that Uma Thurman was the daughter of a fantastic Nordic alien hybrid, and thus 1/12 or so alien hybrid herself. Uma's mom is also a famous beauty --Nena von Schlebrügge --a fashion model / psychic inspiration, whose husband prior to Buddhist scholar and Dali Lama close pal Robert Thurman was 60s acid guru Timothy Leary. Anecdotal proniac investigation sometimes pays off, and a whole interrelated network of Buddhism, psychedelics, UFOs, 1930s Germanic Himalayan expeditions, Tibetan scientific post-death investigations, ESP, and Charles Mingus emerges. Sweet!
First, examine this D.A. Pennebaker short film chronicling the wedding of Leary and Schlebrügge, "You're Nobody til Somebody Loves You" that includes some "lonely piano" music by jazz great Charles Mingus (which in itself confirms my feeling listening to "Black Saint and the Sinner Lady," that Mingus is Duke Ellington on an acid trip muppet melt-down). Writes Pennebaker:
"This movie is something of a mystery. Timothy Leary was getting married
to a model named Nena Von Schlebrugge up in Millbrook, New York at the
Hitchcock house, where Leary had been carrying on his hallucinogenic
revelries for the past year or so after leaving Harvard. It was rumored
that this was going to be the wedding of the season, the wedding of Mr.
And Mrs. Swing as Cab Calloway put it. " - D.A. Pennebaker (PH Films)
Now you might think offhand that Timothy Leary (who Nena married in 1964) and Thurman (who Nena married in 1967) have nothing in common, but they actually do -- they have one thing especially in common, The Tibetan Book of the Dead!
From Leary's "The Psychedelic Experience" - avail. online at Erowid:
The Tibetan Book of the Dead is ostensibly a book describing the experiences
to be expected at the moment of death, during an intermediate phase lasting
forty-nine (seven times seven) days, and during rebirth into another bodily
frame. This however is merely the exoteric framework which the Tibetan
Buddhists used to cloak their mystical teachings. The language and
symbolism of death rituals of Bonism, the traditional pre-Buddhist Tibetan
religion, were skillfully blended with Buddhist conceptions. The esoteric
meaning, as it has been interpreted in this manual, is that it is death of the ego and
rebirth that is described, not of the body. Lama Govinda indicates this
clearly in his introduction when he writes: "It is a book for the living as
well as the dying." The book's esoteric meaning is often concealed beneath
many layers of symbolism. It was not intended for general reading. It was
designed to be understood only by one who was to be initiated personally by
a guru into the Buddhist mystical doctrines, into the pre-mortem-death-
rebirth experience. These doctrines have been kept a closely guarded secret
for many centuries, for fear that naive or careless application would do
harm. In translating such an esoteric text, therefore, there are two steps:
one, the rendering of the original text into English; and two, the practical
interpretation of the text for its uses. In publishing this practical
interpretation for use in the psychedelic drug session, we are in a sense
breaking with the tradition of secrecy and thus contravening the teachings
of the lama-gurus.
Leary's adaptation of the TBOTD stresses ego death rather than real death, and makes the esoteric accessible (though the Buddhist scholars may have been right to worry about careless application, i.e. Altamont, Manson, etc).
Meanwhile, Uma's father, Robert Thurman, has his own Book of the Dead translation, more from an academic angle. And here's where it gets really weird: Leary was introduced to Von Schlebrugge by Salvador Dali; Thurman is a personal friend of the Dali Lama. Get the 'Dali' connection?
Here's what Robert has to say about his relation to Buddhism:
"I’m not a real guru, I’m an academic professor. I may be what they call a kalyanamitra,
a spiritual friend of some of these people, offering advice now and
then if I’m asked. But I don’t try to take up the role of serious guru.
In fact, part of choosing the professor’s or the academic’s life pattern
has to do precisely with avoiding getting into the guru game with
people. If I had stayed a monk, I would have had to have disciples,
which gets you involved in the complications of being a guru, having
people develop various kinds of transference toward you and dependencies
on you, and I didn’t think that was healthy for them or for me. I was
helped in the decision, of course, by my wife Nena, who always insisted
on maintaining that I not get deluded about there being anything
exceptional about me! She’s been a great spiritual friend of mine, and
had the foresight to encourage me to pursue more mainstream academic
pursuits. We’re on a pilgrimage together as much as possible." - Thurman in interview for HiLowBrow
Now we go to Nena's own mom, Uma's maternal grandmother, who posed for the below statue:
It's cool, but for our purposes the below left one is much more interesting:
(L) Skogsrå - Axel Ebbe, 1913 / 1930. Axel Ebbes konsthall, Trelleborg, Sweden.
"The girl to the right is Uma Thurman’s grandmother Birgit Holmquist,
married Von Schleebrügge. The sculpture was originally made in 1913, but
the artist changed the girl’s face in 1930 and used Uma Thurman’s
grandmother Birgit as his model. Birgit later married a German baron in
Berlin, but left Germany for Mexico during the war. Uma’s mother
Nena Schlebrügge was born in Mexico City, and became a model like her
mother, not for art but for fashion. Birgit returned to Germany in
later years; she wanted to be buried in her hometown Trelleborg, so
that’s where she rests now.
"A “skogsrå” (“rå” is pronounced “raw” and means watcher, “skogs”
means “connected to/from to the forest”. Watcher of the forest, in other
words) is both a beautiful wood nymph and an ugly hag at the same time.
She lures people into the forest with her beautiful looks, and when
they are too deep in to find their way back, she turns her back at them
and then she looks just like a tree trunk. The charmed one is lost, deep
in the forest. The skogsrå or huldra is mainly a trickster, not so much a
demon. She can have sex with humans if she wants to, and if she does,
they become silent and withdrawn afterwards, because then she has their
soul. The skogsrå is also the ruler of all the animals in the forest. "(Source: The curator of the museum Axel Ebbes konsthall and genealogists Bo Lindwall & Gert Påhlsson.)
Surely we can link the creature represented by this statue to both common reports of alien abductions (just using the parlance of their time, long before the events of 1947), and the TBOTD since the description of the huldra matches descriptions of certain kinds of ghost-demons along the way to reincarnation (through the Sidpa Bardo) that come on like beautiful, inviting women writhing in sexual invitation, and when you get close enough to their sexual heat, they ensnare you and become ancient crones, then devouring fiends, rending your soul and/or ensnaring you into the matrix for prompt reincarnation.
On the psychedelic plane, seeing writhing sexual figures in flames or in the passing shadows on the wall is common, and perhaps represents a less immersive version of this lesson, this parable for age and death, the way the invitation to life is always in the process of corrupting itself. Von Schlebrügge is perhaps the princess of this process, at least in a symbolic capacity, and one can perhaps divulge from this that she is an immortal with a soul stretching back to her aeons as Isis herself.
Nena Von Schlebrugge (Uma's mom)
The "Good" Swastika
In the 1930s, German anthropologists were searching all over the Himalayas and India, looking for relics and magical boxes and links of Aryan - Tibetan - Indian ancestry (as evidenced in their corruption of the Buddhist image of the swastika, lower left):
(Uma) Thurman's maternal grandfather was Colonel Baron Friedrich Karl Johannes von Schlebrügge, a German military officer who had become one of the senior Nazi spies in the Americas but who was also jailed by the Nazis for protecting Jewish friends -Wiki:
But I go into more detail on this aspect of the story over in the Acidemic Journal of Film and Media #7: The Nordics issue (check out the expanded Uma Thurman is from Venus story here) I only want to touch on it for the sake of common-thread weaving. We can't ignore facets of the story just because of the evil that resulted. There is still much conspiratorial dot connecting to be done on the relationship of the Vinyanas in the Mahabarrata to the Hannebu UFO aircraft made in Germany under the guidance of mystic Maria Osric. The link above will delve more into it, but even more shall be revealed still...
One can't connect it all without the weird, hard-to-believe encounters with friendly Nordics by George Adamski and Billy Meier. True or hoax, we learn from them and other sources that the Nordics are very tall, as are Uma and Nena.
And here's a fascinating video on Nordics and The Pleiadians youtube made by gorgeous mystic Gigi Young, who looks not a little bit like Nena Von Schlebrugge! Coincidence? She seems to know more than a little about the Nordics and, like Nena, she went from fashion into eastern spiritual realms. Her genetic resemblance to the goddesses above is surely no coincidence
Well, by now the interconnectedness of these links has left me slightly exhausted. I'd like to close by saying I mean no disrespect to anyone I've mentioned. I'm a big fan of Robert Thurman's work in making Tibetan Buddhism both understandable and academically valid in the west. And I adore Uma, and can tell from her photos and choices in husbands that her mom Nena is a hell of a beautiful, deep, deep lady. So... take all I've said with a grain of sand... but know that that grain contains the universe in its entirety in microcosm... Let yourself ponder the weird ways in which the higher levels of consciousness breed beauty with wisdom to the benefit of us all, and realize too, to be beautiful and prosperous is the first step is to become altruistic instead of egocentric. Let go of your morbid self interest, your confusion of plain and 'normal' as good, and as John Lennon said "relax and float downstream... it is not dying." Hell no, JL, it is beginning...
even if all that's beginning is the ending.
There's some speculation that Goebbels substituted fashion models photos for these witch pictures, to up the Aryan mystique in the popular consciousness. But what's the point of believing in that? It lets all the wind out... I bet the one who came up with that theory is unattractive. Forgive the plain, for they don't understand how Nordic beauty and Vril energy is the same. But Nena does!
In meditation--seduction, transcendence, tripping or just hanging loose--set and setting are everything, and that includes what's going on between your ears, as my old AA sponsor used to say. So benefit from my experience: let the cosmic sea of self propel you forward past the moldy fabric of reality's curtain and into the space spore-infused mystic, past time, past space, past/present. These ten additions to any armchair adventurer's arsenal may save your sanity one day, or help you lose it forever, and about goddamn time! Psychonauts, prepare to shucker loose!
I should also mention the 'set' part of set and setting - the right friends. Avoid dumbfuck townies like the plague - they love to hang out with finely-tuned artists like you and me and do dumb shit like "whooo whooo woooo! what do you see, Erich?" Fuck them. Pick a small group with the care of a dog groomer.
1. "The Drone Zone" on Soma FM -- Ambient drones and ethereal calm, nonstop on web radio.
So many web radio stations make you listen to endless pledge breaks and dorky voiced station announcements. There's still some of that on Soma, but not a lot... not enough to break the spell. In the enlightened, or oceanic state, you must surrender the channel changer, Once you've been elevated, karmic law dictates you should float them a donation and get a Soma FM T-shirt, like I did. My picture's on their web site, exhaling!
2. Light-Sound Mind Machines - Sure you can go deep via years of disciplined meditation, but if you don't have the time to tune in, quit work and join an ashram, try getting one of these groovy machines. Using synchronized light and sound they're basically auto-hypnosis tools, and man oh man. Many of them can be synced up with music to enhance the experience. I've broken through on several occasions via light sound machine connect to Charles Mingus' "Black Saint and the Sinner Lady" and Coltrane's "A Love Supreme." With the help of the light pulses, I felt my inner voice 'become' Coltrane's sax or the muted trumpet in Mingus' album. One of the things it told me in it's 'waa-waa' voice was "Erich, you're truly insane now, if you hear my voice, you're totally crazy" and all the other instruments seemed to be laughing at me! I wasn't fazed though... if you believe the hype I'm already legally insane around 10 time over.
3. Mermaid Magick Incense. Sage in the form of smudge sticks can be found at an herb store, Indian specialty shop, or new age bookshop near you... but for the deep weird mixed smells, it's worth seeking out some handmade stuff and I know no better source than the amazing and reasonably priced Mermaid Magik Incense shop. I dig the Earth Church and Dream Snake sticks and can personally vouch for the effectiveness.
My idea is, when starting out, choose one type of scent and only use it during your practices, your deep mystic journeys. That way, after a few experiences you'll associate the smell with the other world and it will be easier and easier to make the 'jump.' Since its handmade and unique to the Mermaid site you wont need to worry you'll smell it on the street or in yoga class and go insane on the spot.
4. Decor/Lighting - Don't leave newspapers, magazines, or anything too mainstream, anything with contemporary associations, lying around. If you have books around, make sure they're aesthetically unique, i.e. ancient looking tomes with exotic gilded edges. Keep most non-aesthetic food out of sight, especially meats and eggs, chip bags, etc. However, fruit looks very good in an altered state, so a bowl of ripe fruit is not only okay, it's recommended, as are plants, flowers (as long as they're not dying), etc.
The idea in this case is not to escape reality so much as remove 'triggers' for pre-set emotions and feelings. Use candles for light, no neon! Colored low wattage bulbs are okay, but the more shadows the better. Cover white walls with exotic tapestries. Keep weird art books handy on the coffee table.
5. Time - Hide the clocks! The idea is to create a sense of timeless space, and spaceless time, and any signifier of how you live the bulk of your life harnessed to the revolving orb isn't helpful. Even if you just put a tapestry or colorful bandana over the digital face of your clock radio you're on the right track. Keep time via the breath... meditate with the breath... your breathing is all you need. It's like a life vest that inhales and exhales and is always afloat, tick tock, whoosh!
6. Visual Media - Movies are a good way to wind down from a mystical experience, but not really that "positive" beforehand. Keep the TV off, way off.
But if you're having trouble coming down, may I recommend some Betty Boop cartoons? Disney's too creepy, WB to spastic and violent, but Betty is just right.
7. Cell phones off! - Don't kid yourself, they 'know' when you're being bad or good, as the aliens use cell phones to keep an eye on you. Imagine a giant grid of small pulsing lights at alien central: a sudden flash of 4th dimensional wall-breaching in a lotus-positioned voyager will light up like their switch boards like an Xmas tree. As they move in around you, the sounds of the house settling start to shift violently and weird noises outside--sirens, dogs, wind-- will speak to you, the way alien voices can interject themselves in everything from the falling of water to the stepping of jackboots.
8. Tobacco - Don't be a wuss! Tobacco is powerful medicine, and keeps any Native American spirits who may be present at a respectful distance. Know this: all plant spirits live even in the dead matter of their substance - their DNA writhes through you - every inhale of a plant's dried essence is a marriage. Let your mind be a garden, full of divine sage, mighty morphin' power tobacco, and crazy jester tetra-hydra cannibinol. Side effects may include: hastened death, prolonged respiratory illness, and yellowed teeth, but do you really want to live forever and hold America back with your knee-jerk atomic age fears, the way the elderly voting bloc are holding us back today?
9. Krishna Das - If things get too weird, turn to the music of Krishna Dass, who's moody mellow baritone voice will rock you back into harmony. (I especially love his "Mountain Chalisa" off Flow of Grace) Part of accessing the inner daemonic realms involves getting through the daemonic TSA checkpoint... these demonic security guards don't just make you take off your coat and shoes... your memories, beliefs, and body have to be ripped away and shredded before your very eyes while you struggle to act cool. If you so much as sniffle in protest or fear they'll rip you up and kick you back down to the 3-D plane... so... love the demons who rip you to shreds.
Accept your own mortality and the transience of all things. Do this and you'll be floating through the metal detector and onto paradise before you know it. The voice of Krishna Das is the closest thing yet to a life vest in this instance, floating you beyond their thorny reach. One listen to that baritone mix of manly sorrow and unearthly joy and you feel safe, loved, and safely entrained to the immortal AUM.
10. Water - Drink a lot of it, and tea! I'm shooting off this figure off the top of my head (or other), but I'd bet a good 70% of mind-expansion-related mishaps (i.e. the kids who wind up shivering in the corner or taken to the chill-out tent) occur because of dehydration.
So... this post isn't meant to condone any form of substance ingestion, nor is it one of those dopey tirades against it. Don't trust the pundits on either side of the issue. No one path fits all. Research and make your own informed opinions. If it calls to you, go for it...if it doesn't, don't, and in either case, don't let peer pressure influence you against your better judgment. This shit's not for everyone. If you don't feel 'the call' don't answer the phone.
Most importantly, don't let some gooey mediator creep between you and the direct and personal realization of transcendental spiritual experience! Many will try if you let them - search for a guru and one appears - takes your worldly goods and disappears. Follow the inner voice that leads you to the light, and be careful it's not a trickster in disguise.
Using all the above steps, and after enough meditation on the AUM - you just might feel the electric hand of God on your shoulder. Isn't that better than some smelly bible at a smelly old church, with a smelly old priest droning on andzzzzz?
Remember, just be yourself, your real self --not the self the dorks who tell you to be yourself think your self is. You were only ever water and air - a cloud that thought it was separate from the sky. In the end, you will rain or evaporate - but you do not die when disappeared. Where do you go? Exactly - you ARE the sky and the sea, like me. When you remember that fully, the sun blazes through your dark purple center and evaporates your ego until all that's left is a recording of "Masie" and, behind that, a cosmic message you long forgot (that's a 2001 reference).
But though you may court insanity, try to be physically safe! Only venture outside when you're already in the 'zone' so you know you can handle crossing the street and make sure you're with other people who can watch out for you- you'll be as liable to wander into traffic as a six month-old puppy.
And believe me when I say this: you cannot fly. xoxoxo
---- guest writer Dr. Morphius "Twillie" Twilite, the X / 2009
Ever since seeing that Sumerian sculpture of the Annunaki, I've been remembering very bizarre experiences I've had over the years. Now a recent photo from David Eckhart (below left) hits me between the eyes so I must report in full my experiences, for posterity:
The fist occurred around 1982, when I was 15: Always kind of a weird, shy but creative kid, I was really into comic books, one of my favorites was Elfquest. Anyway, I had a very vivid dream set on Mars or similar red planet: a vast empty, lunar-style landscape with a dark red sky. The only feature on the landscape was a set of jungle gym-style monkey bars where I was hanging out with a bunch of Elfquest elves. I hated my school, had no friends, but these elves! I felt like I belonged with them, a really strong feeling of love and connection that struck me deeply; I'd never felt that kind of loyalty/love before.
Then, walking slowly towards us from across the vast plain was the silhouette of a single figure, which I knew was Death, or a demon, at any rate the 'end' of my new friends-- and I wanted to protect them, so I told them to stay by the bars, and I walked forward to meet this being as it approached us.
I was scared but had courage via my love for the elves. However, the closer I approached this figure, the more nervous static energy seemed to envelop me, like a wasp buzzing inside and outside my head. Finally, I was maybe five feet away from the being: he was wearing a sweartshit and sweatpants, with the hood up, and had on a cheap rubber Halloween skull mask, with red pin points of light in the center of the big black eye-holes.
Again, filled with new courage, I walked up and looked closely into the red of the being's eyes, knowing that if I could stare this being down, I'd save my friends. Again, I felt this extreme buzzing in my head, like radio static that was really an infinite number of mathematical equations and computations coming at me via telekinetic transference, kind of like a morse code or something... it was abstract but I understood it somehow and it was inflating me with strange, burning energy. I remember in the dream thinking, "I'm merging with all alien insectoid intelligence!" The energy in my head and body swelled and swelled the longer I looked into the being's red glowing eyes. The deeper I looked the more the message became pure empty mathematics.
It would have been just a dream, except the energy buzz was so strong it woke me from my bed, and not just like from a vivid dream or nightmare but like from something real! I literally jumped out of bed and bounced around the room like I had just gotten off an intense rollercoaster. I was full of crazy electric energy and still anxious to protect the elves. Every nerve and hair on my body was full at attention. I could still feel the presence of this being slowly fading away, not just in my head but all around. I didn't, however, see any evidence of a being in the room or outside -- no ships or lights or anything -- that I recall.
For the next few months I was obsessed with getting back to that dream, the sense of love and connection I felt with the elves, etc., so I read through my Elfquests maniacally, every night, to try and get the dream back. I was possessed! I never really thought of the being, though, but he would return! Not the elves... although I found their human incarnation in 1987, in gorgeous Connecticut hippies who took me in as one of their own.
Flash forward to November 1992, and I was back from college and travels and travails and was living at home in my old bedroom. I was very sick--a huge terrible fever-- and woke up one early evening around 6 PM (it was dark already, being the winter) from around 23 solid hours of writhing in fever delirium, I was in the grips of sleep paralysis and finally jumped out of it, to see this huge demon looming over me in me room, I recognized it immediately as the same one from the elf dream so many years before, though the skull mask was off and it was laughing at me, like amused I was trying to struggle out of my sleep paralysis and escape.
I was freaked out and all my hairs stood on end again and with all my might I jumped up and stood on the bed, so I could be taller than the being, and shouted at it to go away. I kept screaming: leave! go! Go AWAY! GO AWAY! It smiled wider--laughing at me (but not making a sound)--and gradually faded to moonlight reflections on my bookshelf. I remember being in total awe of how perfectly every detail of the being's face, fangs, eyes, scales, all fit perfectly into the reflections of light from the streetlight and moon out my window on my book spines.
I've seen demonic hallucinations here and there in between and after these two experiences, but never were they allowed to get "that far" before I'd pull away my attention. I instinctively realized the best way to deal with these beings is to ignore them when they're still at the "shadow" stage or to confront them, but to not stare and recoil in horror or fascination at the same time, because they feed on fear energy to manifest themselves into your consciousness. You see them, therefore they can define themselves as a corporeal body in 3D space time... the longer you stare, the more vividly they materialize.
It's mind-boggling to watch a demonic figure form itself from, say, the patterns of a fire in a fireplace on the side of leather couch, or a painting on a wall or what have you. Scientists dismiss this stuff because they have a name for it: "hallucinations." But if you follow real science to the end of the quantum physics rainbow, then you know: if you see it, it exists, because you're seeing it, and just seeing the thing gives it power to manifest. Maybe science is trying to protect us by saying "Look away!" or to belittle these visions as inconsequential remnants of an archaic cortex on fire with fever or drug withdrawal. When one thinks of the Catholic exorcist strategy of ignoring telekinetic displays from possessed patients or houses, of refusing to be shocked or scared or acknowledge anything's out of the ordinary, this is perhaps a clue of how science uses skepticism as a way of protecting us from being invaded. If we look at these things too long with too much fear, who knows how corporeal they may become?
Now this last dream/hallucination I had a few months ago, wherein I was walking home from some late dinner to a motor-court/motel in a parched, lonely, lunar-style desert and maybe 20 feet away from the walkway was that same demon figure standing perfectly still, framed against the expanse of desert mountains behind him in the distance, glowing in the lights over the motel walkway.
This time I was neither young, nor sick, so I was able to approach the being from a detached observer state. Again he had a unique mix of being perfectly still and totally in movement, not breathing exactly but seeming to feed off the energy drawn from my dream reality; like a waterfall, where all the water flows towards this points where it disappears over the falls-- the reptoid was like the falls and everything around me was the water on the high part of the river, about to fall....flowing towards him. He seemed to "not belong" in my dream, like something inserted from another dimension, a 5th dimensional giant tweezer end coming down on a 2-d glass slide.
Another analogy is the obelisk in the movie 2001. The presence of the reptoid standing still and grinning but not moving, reminded me a lot of the strange trans-dimensional presence of the black obelisk in that film.This time I wasn't afraid like I was when I had the fever. In a way, I knew I was safe since it had visited me over the years before, there was obviously some reason for these visits, and that's why I remember them so clearly as opposed to the rest of my dreams and visions, which fade away fast.
The uncanny similarity of these beings in my dreams to the reptilians in Sumerian sculpture and to Tibetan demons has fascinated me ever since, especially as I knew nothing of reptilian conspiracy theory or Tibetan or Sumerian legends until the third experience.
Around five years ago I had done a lecture on THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH at the Rubin Museum and so was on their mailing list. They sent me an invite to some opening for a Tibetan demon exhibition and It was like being mugged or attacked and then seeing your assailant years later on television and going "that's the guy!!"The nose is maybe more doglike, but the weird hypnotic eyes, the overall look of animal mirth, that's dead on, and the animal teeth... that's the demon!
I also used to suffer from sleep paralysis, and once around 1991, I was taking an afternoon nap and experienced the paralysis and felt myself lifted, ass-up onto the ceiling where I was rolled on out the window (my friend's apt in Manhattan) and up up up to the sky faster and faster, like my underwear had been hooked on an invisible fishing wire. I summoned all my psychic energy to escape, woke up and like before jumped out of bed with a fright, the hairs standing on end all over my arms and legs, and a feeling that "this was more than a dream." But there was no one to tell it to. These subjective experiences are hard to translate, and most people don't want to hear it.
I wonder on some level if sleep paralysis isn't a kind of litmus test wherein the weak ones who can't fight it are taken, or not taken, but that somehow sleep/dream unconscious energy opens or can occasionally open a powerful interdimensional gateway and perhaps sleep paralysis ties in somehow.
Weird aspects of sleep paralysis include that I can be sleeping right next to someone when it strikes, but though I'm struggling and yelling to wake up, they don't even notice, even if they're awake. Could this be similar to the alien abduction strangeness, where people disappear through the ceiling or the wall with their spouse sleeping next to them, never noticing? When I went downstairs to see my mom after that aforementioned fever dream, she said she'd heard nothing at all from upstairs, though I had been screaming at the top of my lungs for her help for perhaps a whole 30 or 40 seconds, or so it felt - I had no dream-within-a-dream second wake up, I had run downstairs right after I woke up and the demon had so slowly and laughingly vanished! How clear it was and how perfectly it disappeared into the reflections of light on the spines of books on my shelf. I can still see it perfectly and feel those eyes peering into my soul, and the mocking laughter as I shouted it back into the shadows, completely amazed as the definitions of the thing fit like a perfect painting back into the bookshelf in the moonlight.
Anyway, so there it all is. i have no obsessive anxiety about being abducted--as in trauma of repressed memories--and don't think I really have been, but I do feel I've been "visited" - though for now the reptoid / daemons seem content to watch, and occasionally hook me, lift me out of the water, and throw me back, so to speak, too small, under the galactic legal limit. And who's to say dreams aren't just as valid a reality as this one? It's totally possible to get to the third-eye open state where you see the exact same things with your eyes closed or open, for example. It happened to me once for about 6 minutes. Terrifyingly cool! Another story for another time!
PS - I mention these dreams not to claim I'm a special conduit or hybrid, but to share weird experiences. While I agree that, yes, fevers lead to hallucinations, I also wonder if science isn't missing a fascinating opportunity to study the bedrock of reality and perception by delving more into the nature of hallucinations and visions rather than just dismissing them as "not real." In the paraphrased words of Aldous Huxley, if the doors of perception were truly and completely cleansed we'd see a lot of beings from a lot of higher dimensional beings interacting with us in ways so perfectly intertwined its beyond our 'conscious mind' comprehension. A tea kettle for example, might turn out to be somebody's space helmet. Your sudden need to move it off the stove coincides perfectly with his stepping out of the rocket onto the moon. If you keep lots of demon representations around you room--figurative statues, African tribal masks-- maybe you can make it so easy for them to appear that they can't, like you somehow, as they say, "blew up their spot."
After all, humans are very complicated machines and we existed long before western science. And, while I respect western science, I don't respect some of its more dogmatic adherents' closed-minded, know-it-all bullying. Since science only believes in things it can measure and experience directly, it shuts out 80% of "the real"... i.e. right brain associative non-linear Dionysian abstract thinking (daemonville) vs. left brain logocentric positivism and empirical deduction (grayville). Western science has convinced itself it has the whole picture, even as it admits it still knows so little, and regularly reverses its theorems and deductions, as with Pluto and the Brontosaurus. A scientist will admit that the human eye is very fallible and can see what it wants to see, and shuts out a lot of avail. information to suit itself, but then turns around and refuses to believe in anything it can't see. Very hypocritical!
The contempt these scientists show for ancient astronaut theory, UFOlogy, witness testimony, crop circles, demonology, astrology, etc. as being beneath "serious academic consideration" is all fear-based: guilt by association with the "lunatic fringe" and the idea that no one wants to be the messenger of news so bad no one can handle hearing it. For if the government/scientific complex admits there's aliens, they also have to admit they're powerless against them, and that defeats the whole purpose of a government/scientific complex.
Actually, paranormal researchers have to be twice as careful as regular "experts" because the skeptics are very quick on the trigger. That is, until they're forced by consistent results, or one or two brave researchers (like Rick Strassman or Terence McKenna) to reconsider, as in the way acupuncture and eastern medicine has slowly and reluctantly been admitted into hospitals and insurance coverage. Western medicine is pissed off that they don't know how acupuncture works, but they can no longer deny that it does.
Scientists shouldn't be scared if people "want to believe" in something science wants, by inclination, to disprove. Rather, western science should take a hard look in the mirror at itself before it judges the rest of us as flakes and crackpots. At least we admit we don't know what's going on, and we stay open to new evidence and ideas. We respect science as all-important in our development -- but it's not the whole picture. Trying to actually launch our physical bodies into space seems way too literal compared to exploring "astral body travel" which may be how many of these beings operate. Scientists are still saying space travel between our galaxies is so unlikely thanks to the huge distances, but they don't even consider the whole idea of distance might itself be a hallucination.
We ignore the unknowable at our peril: the Bud Hopkins or Whitley Streiber of today might be the Galileo or Copernicus of tomorrow. Scientists need to ask themselves if they want to go down in history as pawns of a hostile power elite, firmly against any form of change, or as cutting edge researchers for whom any phenomenon is interesting, even science fiction or schizophrenic ranting! And what about paranoid-sounding but nonetheless uncanny frisson-inspiring bits of writing like this?
Hey man, we--right, left, up, down-- need each other. Without the speculations of the sci fi fringe, science would calcify and become as repressive and dogmatic as that haven of ritual child-torture, the Vatican. Without science to fight against and try to convince, the fringe would be forced to realize the catastrophic consequences of believing all of this stuff much too fast. Maybe Bush was a shape-shifting reptoid, but that doesn't mean we could have stopped him even if the whole world had known!
It's like being a lion in a zoo. We may be tough, but the humans have tranq darts and bigger brains, and if they're nice enough to give us a big cage and decorate it to disguise the bars, we can at least think we're free and not get depressed, so why try to bite them? Why force them to reveal the iron bars that hold us, since we can never escape, except through complete transformation of our energies, wherein we become no longer human at all, but soul light energy, which they work so hard to keep us from attaining since once we get to that level, we're out of their hands? By cosmic law they can only puff their gills and wave their claws, ask their dogs to nip our heels, to keep us in line, and then if we still don't obey, forget about us? Once we get past them, they forget we were there and turn back to the rest of the herd. After all, one of two escapees is fine, that' part of the deal. They know they can make mind-opening drugs illegal but they can't stop us from taking them if we should find them... they just make it more difficult, so only the determined and deserved can cop a hit, Darwin-style. They let us tell the truth, so long as its cloaked in the natty garb of delusional ranting (like this post). Like Hamlet, we must act crazy if we want to tell the truth without being forcibly silenced or discredited.
Thus for the truth to be true by definition it must dribble from the mouths of babes, lest our fellow cattle be spooked into a stampede. If some of us want to quietly evolve off of the ranch on our own, the daemons wont use direct force to stop us - by order of cosmic law - only trickery. All they ask if we do make it past them: don't spook the rest of the herd. They've invested heavily in breeding programs to yield a maximum head count. So don't worry about them - all now living will become enlightened (another cosmic message I received); just get your heart lighter than a feather before you get sucked into the scythe swipe thresher at the end of the net of time along with the rest of Noah's rejects! In the words of Sam Spade: See you at the inquest, maybe.
If you ever want to really understand why shadowy government agencies continue to hide the existence of alien life visiting earth, watch CLOSE ENCOUNTERS (1977) again, and really study the behavior of Roy (Richard Dreyfuss), the immature "everyman" who makes mountains out of his mashed potatoes and frightens his family half to death with his lunatic ravings about UFOs. He's the guy we're supposed to identify with, one of the "chosen" invited to the party. And yet he's unable to accept the "truth" of the aliens until he's right there seeing them and touching them, even then he's more a wide-eyed kid at Disneyland than an adult trying to grasp this vast importance of this cosmic event. By making himself a mere patron on a UFO ride, Roy once infantalizes himself as a glorified spectator, a fan.
By contrast, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS regularly switches to the "insiders" led by Claude Lacombe (Francois Truffaut). While Roy seeks answers from an authority figure, someone to tell him what he already knows to be true, Lacombe knows the truth and hides it from the Roys of the world, who "can't handle" it. In other words, Claude assumes the role of leader, parent, role model, Roy that of the child, citizen, follower. Roy demands the government explain and assure. The Lacombes of the world can only pretend to be hiding more than they know, as a favor to the panicked who can then presume the government really does know what's going on, and so all must be well. It's a classic distraction move, allaying all fear by switching the focus from "are they going to attack us" to "tell me what they are!"
There is a scene early in the film wherein a group of air traffic controllers are gathered around a radio listening to flying saucer reports from one of their planes. They ask him if he wants to report a UFO: "No. I wouldn't know what to report," the shaken but professional pilot answers.
By the terrified citizen standard, not reporting the incident that pilot is "hiding" from possible peer ridicule, but the reasons are actually more muddled: If this unseen pilot had chosen to make a report he may be ostracized, not for "believing" in aliens but for reporting the encounter, for clinging to the lie of "real" authority, expecting that someone higher up will have an explanation for him. In other words, these men in the military are forced to grasp the notion of the ungraspable real, the other, the "stain" in Lacanian terminology. By choosing to not allow the UFO into their consensual reality in this way, the pilot and those gathered maintain their positions within the symbolic order. They know there are UFOs, and they know there is no explanation for them; but they can "handle" the truth, and the way they handle it is by realizing and accepting that there is no possible rational explanation and not letting it get them too rattled. There's still a job to do. Roy can't go to work or function in society once the 'truth' overtakes him, that's why he's not ready for it.
This split between these "grown ups" and "adult children" is further borne out in a scene in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS where panicked citizens meet with government officials in a press conference. The government officials basically acknowledge that the citizens saw something that no one has an answer for. If the townsfolk were to really "hear" this news, they would just sit there, pale and shaken, but they clamor. These citizens cannot recognize that the symbolic authority of the adult government has been removed by the presence of this advanced alien intelligence. The explanation they are looking for does not exist; but this is simply not good enough for them, so they throw a mass temper tantrum, which is in itself a sign they are not ready for the truth.
Another popular consciousness movie touchstone might be examined here to see how a person can move from one level to the other. (Roy never does, even when going off into space he remains dependent, merely "joining the children.") That movie is David Lynch's BLUE VELVET (1986). In this movie, Kyle Mclachlan plays Jeffrey, a young would-be detective out to solve the mystery of a severed ear he finds in the nearby park from his childhood home. He winds up embroiled in a scandal that includes a crooked cop; yet Jeffrey is also dating the daughter (Laura Dern) of the local police chief. He's already presented the chief with evidence against the crooked cop so when Jeffrey walks into the chief's home after dinner to pick up Audrey for a date, and finds the crooked cop in the living room with the chief, he's fairly startled - is the Dern's dad crooked also?
This is a key moment in Jeffrey's evolution as a male, and this psychic growth is something that's present in all of Lynch's films: Jeffrey doesn't panic, but rather greets the crooked cop with a smile and a handshake, as if he knows nothing of the matter. The chief is impressed and later when Jeffrey denies he knows who the cop is to Laura Dern, the chief says, "Good boy, Jeffrey." -- an acknowledgment of Jeffrey's newfound complicity within the social order. Jeffrey proves he can keep a secret, in this case the most important secret of all being the complete lack of 'truth' or solidity at the center of the social order, and this is the secret all true adults must guard. The 'dumb' citizens seldom realize that they need their politicians to lie - need to not believe in their leaders, so as to always presume there's more, rather than less, going on 'upstairs.'
We have a similar thing going on today in the world as we approach 2012: global warming, water and oil shortages; inflation, over-population, whatever you want to obsess on. We know something's up, but at the same time as long as the president doesn't come on national TV and proclaim any of this as officially doomsday, evacuate in a calm, orderly manner, say goodbye to your ass, etc., we're going to be all right. This is the trap we find ourselves in as we enter the age of total digital reality.
The infantilization of the masses by the ruling elite--both in film and in real life-- is no joke, and anyone with any authority knows that a large part of their job is simply to "embody" the "one who knows." By acting contemptuous and dismissive towards the citizenry's concerns at the aforementioned press conference scene in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, the government agents allow the citizenry to continue to live in the illusion that somewhere along the chain of command there is someone who has the situation well in hand.
Now to bring this to our own current situation, which is the slow--presumably permitted--leak in information about the existence of aliens that's coming through on the internet, which manages to disperse information so rapidly that the shadowy government insiders would be hard pressed to stop it even if they wanted to, but one gets the impression they don't want it to. Rather, they want to continue to release the information with just enough disinformation to let them keep control. As long as there's debate about whether it's factual, we won't panic. People have an option not to believe if it scares them.
Again we turn to cinema for our example-- the censorship codes enforced by Joseph Breen from 1934 through to the early 1960s. The idea in these films wasn't that no one was allowed to have sex, but that there were simultaneously two different interpretations available: one that was "above board" and nonsexual (for the church matrons and children) and one sexual.... the did they or didn't they have sex during the 3 1/2 second dissolve from Rick and Ilsa kissing, to the watch tower at the Casablanca airport, for example as discussed by Richard Maltby and Slavoj Zizek:
To put it in the Lacanian terms: during the infamous 3 1/2 second, Ilsa and Rick did not do it for the big Other, the order of public appearance, but they did do it for our dirty fantasmatic imagination - this is the structure of inherent transgression at its purest, i.e. Hollywood needs BOTH levels in order to function.
As Zizek points out, this two-sided reading is not only present but essential for control to exist. By a similar token, it is safe for us to believe in aliens because the government does deny their existence. Once the president comes out and tells the actual truth, civilization as we know it will instantaneously collapse, the way the Soviet Union instantaneously collapsed - when all the people decide, en masse, to abandon an ideology, this change is inevitable. Thus any social order must involve a sort of mass hypnotism to function. The truth is, even the movie itself doesn't know what happened in that 3 1/2 seconds, but in implying something went on, it creates room for pleasure to emerge, the pleasure of feeling protected from the truth.
The lesson to glean from all this is that we all need to learn to be adults, to fix ourselves first, so we can be ready for the changes that are coming. The question is, are you free? And if you are free, why are you waiting for some "authority figure" to tell you what you already know? You know if aliens are real or not, and if you don't there's no one who can tell you but yourself. There is so much information being released now, so many sworn testimonies from NASA and military officials that by any standard you could name, the alien question is on the table. Do you still need some sort of "official" statement? Or have you let the truth in -- to the point where you are in despair at the fact that evil runs our country, that we're soul food for the reptoids? That only love and an expanded soul can free you from the bondage of self?
To really begin to believe in the alien conspiracy is to invite a complete collapse of values into your psyche; there are myriad "truths" to believe in, but one of the more obvious ones is that most humans are alien-ape hybrids. One of the most depressing is that we are a "soul farm" and gray-reptoid aliens eat our pain and suffering as snacks before they devour our souls. (which explains the fearsome appearance of Tibetan Demonology), and this is the reason why overpopulation runs amok, and that governments doesn't want us experimenting with drugs that will show the man behind the curtain, why they want to burn and destroy anyone who shows the way clear of bondage. It may be depressing, may not even be true, but it's one of the more acceptable all-encompassing answers to life's mysteries (the alien gene splice is, then, Darwin's missing link). No wonder we'd prefer to think what the TV tells us as we chew our morning cud.... "All is well... all is well..all is a disaster so keep watching, but it's nothing we can't fix, eventually." And that if we're worried about global warming, we can avert the crisis by buying seventh generation paper towels on our next half-hour SUV-drive to Wal-Mart.
The challenge is not to wonder what in that preceding morass of horrible truth and CIA disinformation is real or not, but to realize that if even one shred of it is true, just how vast and incredible its implications are. If you're not completely freaked out by the idea of alien life on this planet then you're not thinking about it clearly. You're thinking about it in the same abstract way you might think about death if you're not enlightened. You're still on the fence, wondering if its all true, still denying your own death, your own mortality, still clinging to possessions and temporal space like a kid grabbing his mom's ankles to prevent his having to go to school. You may believe in Jesus, but aren't sure if he rose from the dead, maybe believe in Santa Clause but not the Easter Bunny, and maybe you don't really believe in anything 100% and that's probably the smartest tactic, but it leaves you awfully numb.
In Sogyal Rinpoche's THE TIBETAN BOOK OF LIVING AND DYING he tells of giving a lecture about impermanence and afterwards having a jaded, seen-it-all new student proclaim: "All this seems obvious, tell me something new."
To which Rinpoche replies:
"Have you actually realized the truth of impermanence? Have you so integrated it with your every thought, breath and movement that your life has been transformed? Ask yourself these two questions: Do I remember at every moment I am dying and that everyone and everything else is, and so treat all beings at all times with compassion? Has my understanding of death and impermanence becomes so keen and so urgent that I am devoting every second to the purpose of enlightenment? If you can answer yes to both of these then you have really understood impermanence." (p. 27)
to the concept of alien life on this planet. Have you truly grasped the implications of "the truth" of alien existence? Have you overcome the egoic blinders that make you run to snap judgments and ridicule, the same defense mechanisms so overworked to keep you from thinking about death? If so, wouldn't you be spending, as Rinpoche describes "every second to the purpose of enlightenment?"
The mechanisms that keep you from thinking about death all the time are important for your functionality and sanity, but when you listen to them exclusively, life loses its scent of danger and excitement, and the dour wardens of your inner asylum start slowly taking away privileges. They only let go of your throat when they hit the wall of cancer or a gun in the face or death row... or psychedelics or meditation or exhaustion obliterates them temporarily. Is it any wonder that mind-expanding drugs are illegal and meditation such a hard habit to integrate into your life?
Or even more understandable--and chilling-- is it any wonder that even those convinced of the alien presence prefer to focus on issues of disclosure and evidence gathering, rather than actually altering their world view to the point of nervous breakdown? For once you "let it in," the truth about aliens cements so many missing connections, answers so many questions, that you find yourself on a whole other level of consciousness. Now that you believe in greys, anti-gravity propulsion, inter-dimensional doorways and reptoids, you can begin to deal with issues like the Pleiadians, angels, God, reincarnation, and the light to dark ratio of your own immortal soul. "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain," the man behind the curtain shouts. But he's doing you a favor; the man behind the curtain is you.
(L) Skogsrå - Axel Ebbe, 1913 / 1930. Axel Ebbes konsthall, Trelleborg, Sweden.
