The meeting was proposed to us by Judith Scutch-Whitson, who was formerly a board member with the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and who is continually steering interesting and intriguing people our way.
Many of us have known John Mack for a number of years, but we haven't ever had the opportunity to convene a small group like this here at the Institute to talk with him about his work.
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So we were excited when we learned from Judy that John was going to be here in the Bay Area this week, and are pleased that you all are able to join us and to talk with him about some of the core issues and questions in his work and where his work might be going.
We've assumed that all of you are familiar with his work, so John is not going to give the beginner's introduction to abduction phenomena, but rather focus instead upon what he sees as the core questions at the heart of this research these days, and then say a little about where the work is going.
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He also has about a 25-minute videotape that we'll watch, which features interviews with a medicine man in Africa and others that have been interviewed as part of the international research project he's overseeing.
After that, we would like to open the room up and just foster a general conversation and encourage your questions and observations about this phenomena.
But before we do any of that... At the start, I want to apologize to a couple of people that have already seen this tape within the last 24 hours, who I promised I wouldn't show it again to, but it's a different moment, so those of you that have seen it are just going to have to bear with it.
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A lot of people in this room... this is an extraordinary group of people, and this is a wonderful opportunity for me to have a conversation and explore ideas.
One person I could acknowledge, many of you, one person I want to acknowledge who's here is Jacques Vallée, who probably is... I'm in some awe of Jacques. I mean, he's probably the foremost person in the ufology field in the world.
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I mean, one of the... I wish I had the answer.
And, you know, the... the... a, if not the true pioneer in this field.
So I... makes me a little bit uneasy to be talking in this subject with Jacques present, but I'm also delighted that you came, Jacques. I want to do this as a series of questions, not as a talk, really, because I want to have a conversation and have the advantage of each of you that are committed to the exploration of ontological, epistemological questions, the nature of consciousness.
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These are the matters that interest me in this field, and I'd like to deepen our question, as Jacques said.
I mean, Jacques said he doesn't have the answer, and I think the deeper you go into this, the less you have the answer, and that may be as it is to be.
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There's a tradition of that going back to the book of Job in our culture.
It's only when Job admits he knows nothing in relation to God that positive things begin to happen again in his life.
So I wrote down a few questions that I wanted to think with you about, and Tom's use of the preposition with, I think, is just right.
First question is, what is the nature, what is behind, what is the root of the individual and cultural resistance to accepting A, the alien abduction phenomenon in some form as a reality, and B, the whole reality of UFOs themselves?
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I mean, there is a great amount of documentation.
What's it about? What does it stir in people?
What makes it polarize people?
Why have so many careers been destroyed over this?
I mean, as Jacques knows this as well, and others of you who have worked on this, Keith, you draw upon yourself when you say there's something powerful, meaningful, important here.
Some people may like your work, but you will also draw a flood of attack.
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There's a whole organization, PSYCOP now, which seems to have principally as its purpose to drive out of universities people who work on paranormal phenomena in general, and this phenomenon in particular.
I mean, after I lectured there in June, their newsletters afterwards were, Did we win? Did we lose? Did we flatten him?
Will that work go on? Will it be stopped?
This passionate distress around this subject.
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Sometimes one of the arguments is, well, this is just a western, high-tech, aerospace-related set of fantasies and delusions.
And with that in mind, my colleague and friend Dominique Kalmanopoulos and I have been going around the world, not every place by any means, but to Brazil, where I know you've done studies, and to Southern Africa, to South Africa, to Zimbabwe, where we've interviewed Native American shamans.
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And it appears that this phenomenon occurs in many cultures, western and non-western. It takes slightly different form, but it's very interesting that the people who have had the experience are able to distinguish what this man I'm going to show you, this South African medicine man, calls the Mandindas, or the star people to the Native Americans from their ancestors.
And these mischievous characters have certain powers of their own, which are not just any old spirits.
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Now, they may be more open to visitors from another dimension than the western mind is open.
In that sense, they may be more... I mean, for example, this man didn't require any hypnosis or altered state.
The memory of the experience was vivid and powerful for him consciously all his life.
So, one of the ways of dealing with the resistance is to see how does this phenomenon show up around the world.
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But what threat does this represent to us?
The second question I wanted to ask is... Let's say that we succeed, we being people that are interested in this and related phenomena.
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Let's say Pierre and his public education program and others of us that work in this area are able to get across that something real is going on here, that it may not be that UFOs are exactly silvery metallic plane, you know, sort of craft in the literal physical sense, but they have a reality to them, they can be documented, they do have effects, they do cause burned earth, they have a tremendous energy connected with them, that people who have had abduction experiences in fact have had some kind of experience which enters into their physical reality.
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And that this becomes accepted generally around the world.
What would it mean if it's known to be real?
The third question is... and this is one that... we're not going to be able to answer any of these questions except to explore them more deeply.
But the third question is... What is the intelligence that's at work here?
Let's say you could sit down with an alien doctor and his crew and get them into a room and you say, now look, what's going on here?
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What do you guys really want?
What is this about?
And now obviously we can't do that, so we have to infer from the effects what the experience of the abductees is, what's communicated to them telepathically about the environment, whatever this hybrid program that seems to be a regular feature of it.
But what's going on here?
What's not so much the purpose of it, but looking into ourselves, looking into related phenomena, looking into the current situation in the world today, what's going on here?
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What does this intelligence seem to portend?
What seems to be behind it?
What is its meaning in not so much the impact, because that's my fourth question, but what are its characteristics, I guess, that would be the word.
And then the last question is the question of meaning.
What is its impact for us?
What does it say about us?
What do we learn about ourselves, about our own consciousness, our psychology, our identity, if it becomes established that there is some entities exist here, that we are, as the cliche goes, not alone.
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You know, it's a very different thing, and this comes up very often.
People will say to me, well, you know, it's obvious with the vastness of the universe and all the galaxies and that there must be other life out there.
Even the most conservative person is willing to theoretically argue that.
It's a very different thing when somebody comes along and says, yeah, but they're here, you know, and they come in this very odd form and they have pear-shaped heads and big black eyes or they come in as luminous beings or reptilian beings and they do these traumatic things and they take people and they affect their bodies and their minds.
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Now, wait a minute. Prove that. I'm not so sure.
You know, it's one thing to contemplate some kind of intelligence in the cosmos or some sort of spirits or beings or even entities in the abstract, but when they cross over from the spirit world where they ought to stay and show up in our own... You know, it's a sort of... what is it?
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NIMBY? Not in my backyard.
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This is a sort of cosmic version of NIMBY. You know, they shouldn't move in quite this way.
That seems to... So, what does it mean?
If this and presumably many other potential life forms do exist in ways that get through to our reality, what does this mean for our consciousness, our sense of ourselves?
Does it expand us? Does it threaten us?
Do we open to another dimension of ourselves in relation to other intelligences?
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What would it mean for us?
So, these are the questions I would pose.
Now, I want to use the film to get into some of these questions more deeply because the film is very concrete.
And it's a crude, rough cut, 25 minutes, which has two parts to it.
It has seven or eight minutes of footage which is not broadcast quality, but it's clear, of a South African medicine man by the name of Kredo Mutwa. Now, Kredo is a medicine man, a sangoma as they call it, a witch doctor, a term that they themselves use.
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And he's probably the spiritual leader in many ways of the Zulu people throughout South Africa, a revered figure who's written books about the fate of his people.
He's 73 now. He's been through every type of racial violence and nearly lost his life on several occasions.
He's a profound thinker. He's a sculptor.
His sculptures include metallic figures that look very much like the alien beings that are commonly seen in this country.
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I got to know Kredo because we were on the same TV program together called Agenda, which is a kind of public television news magazine out of Johannesburg. I arrived with Dominique on a Tuesday night, and within hours I was in the studio and told that we were going to be interviewed about what we were doing there and the abduction work with Kredo on a televised satellite hookup from Botswana in Mafeking, where his village was.
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And Kredo talked about these beings being known to his people for hundreds of years, these Mandindas. And when he heard me speaking about this as a Westerner who took it seriously and talked about the psychological and potentially spiritual meaning of it, he asked to see me.
And so this was not part of the plan of the trip, and we went to see him in his village, where there were a number of his family around in this little hut.
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And he sits there like a kind of almost Buddha-like huge figure with a robe on tied together here.
And he talked to us, as he said, for the first time about his abduction experiences, which consisted of a lifelong relationship with the Mandindas. And the most prominent of those experiences was an event that occurred in 1958 when he was 37 years old.
And he was in the bush and suddenly, on a mining job, suddenly he finds himself in another environment, an enclosure.
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In that enclosure there's a terrible smell, which is worse actually than I've heard from most abductees in this country, although a musty, dank smell is very commonly reported. This is worse.
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There's a number of beings around that he describes as having large black goggle eyes.
He's put on a table. He's helpless, ashamed, because he is so helpless.
He's a very strong, vigorous man, and he kept... There's a quality in this communication that you'll hear, which is important to sense that he's... Here's this man, a leader of his people, who at the same time is describing what was for him a shameful experience in which he was helpless, but at the same time, as he talked with me later, he communicated with great power the information that these beings had given him about the fate of the earth and about what was happening to his people in Africa and throughout the world.
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But for him to talk about this as frankly as he did was, I think, an act of generosity on his part.
Native peoples, when I ask them, why are you telling me this?
They say, well, because they will say it's sacred, but they'll say it's important that the world stop arguing about this.
This is important. These beings are trying to tell us something.
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And you must stop arguing about whether they exist or not and take this message back, Dr. Mack. But it's also therapeutic for him because he's been holding this for, I don't know, it started in his childhood, but this particular experience had occurred 37 years earlier and he never talked about it.
So he was expressing with great power that he was put on this table, this alien female came along, he was totally helpless, terrified.
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She mounted him. It was sexually shameful because he was out of control.
And it was deeply troubling to him, but as I say, at the same time, this information came through in this telepathic way from her and from the other beings.
Another abduction experience occurred in the 1970s. He'd been terribly stabbed in a riot in Soweto, was nearly fatally wounded with knife wounds and was taken to Natal, a neighboring province, another province in South Africa. And there was visited, he says, by the female again who took off his bandage.
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Some kind of healing process occurred. According to his doctors, they were astounded that this healing resulted in this terrible wound, seemingly miraculously clearing up in just a few days.
And he was preserved and went back to his life.
The other part of the film are three sections of interviews with three 11-year-old girls.
And this is related to, I think, one of the most important events in UFO history, which occurred on September 16, 1994, last year.
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What occurred was after two days of sightings of objects in the sky and flashing lights recorded by the BBC reporter there, station chief in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. At 10 o'clock on the morning, Friday morning, at this school where these children were, 20 minutes outside of Harare, the older children who were monitoring the younger children noticed that the younger children were wandering outside the school perimeter.
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They were going further out of the schoolyard than they should have gone.
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So the older children followed the younger children to bring them back.
And the younger children pointed in the field and said to the older children, look, and the older children saw this large UFO hovering above the ground and several smaller craft there and two or more alien beings there.
And the children became very excited, all of them, 60 or more children saw this, the ones who were out there.
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As happens so often, and Jacques and others may comment on this, there's always this irony of data.
The adults were in a meeting, the children came rushing in excitedly, frightened about what this mysterious thing that they had seen.
They told the adults, excitedly, no adult went out to see this.
And by the time the break was over and it was time to go out, there was nothing there to be seen.
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And this trickster-like play of information just runs constantly through this field.
Maybe Peter Storer could comment on if you have some familiarity with that elusiveness of data.
Because these kids, at first they didn't believe them and many of the parents didn't believe the kids, but as the consistency of the stories came up over and over and over again, this very hard-nosed headmaster came to the conclusion those children saw something that was not of this world.
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That was his phrase. And even the teachers who were even more skeptical, we met with all the teachers in the room and we went around the room to hear what they thought and they said, I know those kids, this happened, they saw it.
The teachers were shocked and appalled, but it was kind of like a single event just shattering their worldview because they were geared not to believe this and yet there was just no other explanation.
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Now what you'll see is interviews with three 11-year-old girls, two white girls, one black girl.
This is a private school. It's not like a crude school in the bush or something.
These are very educated kids. It's in the English colonial system left over from that.
A couple of the kids, not these, I would say to them, just to play the devil's advocate, I would say, look, let's say that adults would say that one of you made this story up as a kind of prank and you told your friends and you sort of all thought it would be a great trick to play on everybody that you saw this.
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And the kids would hear me and they'd think about it and they'd say, well, yes, I suppose, but no, here's what I saw.
And they would say their own firsthand experience, which in a way illustrates one of the difficulties in this.
We don't really, I mean, what I learn about this, I learn clinically.
There may be physical findings, there may be corroborative marks on people's bodies, there may be independent observation that somebody is missing, and I have that in several cases.
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But what I'm forced to, and in a sense that's my strong suit, is to make a clinical judgment based on the relationship that I establish with, maybe you can comment on, you know, because this is what you do in psychiatry.
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And the physical evidence, which is what people tend to concentrate on, and perhaps appropriately, is in my work secondary to the knowledge that is obtained from between two psyches, if you will.
And then I have to make a judgment based on my, you know, is this psychosis and how do we decide that?
Is this some other form of trauma displaced onto UFOs or whatever?
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And I have, as everyone who knows my work, I've come to the conclusion, having gone at this from every possible angle I know how, I've not been able to come up with any alternative explanation.
It is what it is, apparently, whatever that means, whatever the source of this may be.
But again, as you hear these children, then you can make up your own mind whether you think they're putting you on or that they actually saw or experienced what they experienced.
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So we'll show the film, and then I try to frame some questions for approaching the discussion.
And I'd be glad to talk substantively about aspects of my work that I have not talked about, if it's not familiar to you, but within the framework of these basic questions.
Are there any people who are experts in semantics or semiotics or any of that kind of thing here?
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Because the short answer is, yeah, it's real.
It's a little bit like Daniel Brinkley when he talks about near-death experiences.
He's got the Daniel Brinkley short course and the Daniel Brinkley long course.
He was struck by lightning. He said the long course is you can read his book and listen to his lecture.
The short course is stick your finger when it's wet in an electric socket.
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The short answer is it's real.
But then in the things you're saying requires a very complex ontological discussion of real.
You started to define reality by things you can touch and feel in this physical dimension.
No, but you can't reduce it to that.
That's the problem, though. You see, the problem we're having is that maybe we're trying to reduce it.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong. I'm asking you what do you feel at this moment.
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If you had to cut it in a court of law and say it's as real as this person sitting next to me or it's not as real as this person is, how would you answer a question like that?
Now you're talking about how real in terms of gradations of reality.
As you yourself know and other people who are students of Eastern philosophy and religion, in those cultures this physical material reality is less real than other... Don't shake that off because that's a legitimate ontological position.
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I would not argue that the stronger reality is that which the sensory motor apparatus can countenance.
So this is real in both senses. You can say this is more real because it's both real in the physical sense and it's real because it's an entry from another dimension.
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But you're really asking me to answer the question that I wanted to pose.
I'm continuously having to deal with questions of reality.
It manifests in this reality. Real physical people have burns. They have physical lesions on their bodies.
It's real in our physical universe.
Yes. Is it of this physical universe? Are those hybrids real in the physical universe in the same way?
Maybe not. Maybe there it's a projection of some kind of holographic images. I don't know.
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Kratomutla talks about... you had mentioned smells.
I mean he's talking about powerful smells, terrible smells, vivid.
I mean he would say, you know, he's already... I mean he would say stop arguing about this.
It's real. Let's get on with it, you know.
But, you know, I'm not saying that, but I'm saying, you know, perhaps we need to expand our definitions of real.
But I'd like to hear some other thoughts on that.
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Because that's one of the questions I did ask, is the question of... Well, that would be, you know, the resistance idea.
In other words, we don't want to accept it.
The first question is, what is the resistance to accepting this as real and moving on?
Yeah, Peter. Yeah, I'll comment on that.
I think one answer has been given by the people on the TV, that they are scared.
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I think that mankind can justifiably be scared when they find that they are not supreme, that they are not alone, that they are vulnerable, can't protect themselves.
That's what they feel.
I also think that scientists, in particular, are very greatly threatened.
Because, you know, if there are other worlds, there are other civilizations, scientists should be the first to know about it, not the last to know about it.
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If they are the last to know about it, then they aren't doing their job.
Not only will they... I mean, they will lose face.
So I think the phenomenon is a threat to society as a whole, and to scientists in particular.
Okay. Other thoughts on this point?
Another point?
Other thoughts on this point before we... Yeah, I recall reading the letters of Freud to his fiancée before he became famous.
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And he had almost a heroic picture of what he thought a scientist would be.
And he saw himself as coming out of this dark, religious, wishful thinking, and people whose data is distorted by their minds.
And it was almost a heroic effort to be objective, and to not let oneself fall back into that religious grasp.
And I think that's one of the things that scientists fear about this, that it's a kind of retreat back to that kind of thinking which we've outgrown.
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Do you feel that way yourself?
I feel that danger in myself, that I would retreat to what I consider a less reliable way of thinking than science.
Mm-hmm. Okay. Andrew?
Would you consider the testimony if you had four people from a family who were, you know, Irish, Catholic, conservative, Republican, really well-adjusted, eucolic type of family, and they all had this experience at the same time, and they all turned out to be everything from federal judges to self-made multimillionaires.
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If they came in front of you and said, this is real, would that make it more real for you?
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You're asking me? I don't have a problem with this being real.
My problem is the ontological question of what do we mean by real, how do we decide what's real, what I call the politics of ontology, which is who determines in a culture what's real, or the methods by which we discover what's real.
I mean, I also have a phrase I've used recently because I guess this kind of goes out of some of the heat of my battles, which I call ontological totalitarianism.
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That means where not only does a certain limited number of people decide, but then they aggressively impose their view of reality upon the rest of us.
And I found, I guess because I've been the object of it, that I've had to invent a term for it in a certain sense.
Were there traces at the site? What was the site like?
We went out afterwards there and there were traces and there was a place where the leaves and the grass seemed to be burned, but it was several days later and then we saw other places that it wasn't really clear cut like some of the burned areas that I've seen.
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Dwayne?
I'm intrigued by the notion from both the African American and the schoolgirls that there seemed to be a lack of love there.
And one of my sort of operating assumptions about the nature of reality out of the perennial wisdom is that love is there at the foundation of the universe.
And I'm concerned that here are these advanced beings that apparently are loveless.
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And is this a theme that's come up at all in your inquiry?
Well, there's no statement you can make about the abduction phenomenon that you can't find a contradictory statement.
For instance, the beings treat us coldly, lovelessly, they look upon us as specimens, they have no caring for us.
And others, I've never felt such an intense bond as I have with these beings, I've never felt so intensely loved.
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They look at me, as one woman said, 50 times stronger than any bond or connection I have with any earth person.
Then I could say a lot more about the context in which these different experiences occur.
But if in fact, and I'm going way ahead of what you could call data here, but if in fact there is some joining or connecting of another race, species, from another dimension, whatever, wherever it comes, with us, the nature of that relationship is filled with paradox, complexity, differences.
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To make analogies always about the way we have relationships here, when you're dealing with species across some kind of ontological divide, the forms and the paradoxes are just extraordinary, and that's one of them.
She says they lack love. Well, you can't generalize, because Liesl says they don't have love, that there's no love.
I mean, it's her experience, and a lot of other people who have had encounters will say that.
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It seems to me, in any kind of perception, it's always a combination of what the perceiver brings and what's there.
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And as I understand it, these experiences are reported, some positive, some more negative, they seem to be of different sorts.
And I'm wondering if there's any data that connects personality characteristics of the perceiver with the reported experience, with the nature of the reported experience, whether it's positive or negative, loving or non-loving. To back up a little bit, before you get to that question, there are many studies of the personality characteristics of abductees, none of which has to date yielded any consistent pattern.
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That is, they're more fantasy-prone? No. They're more gullible? No. Some of them seem to be more psychic, but that seems to be a product of it, just like people who have near-death experiences end up having a certain kind of expansion of consciousness, a certain capability for precognition and psychic abilities, but there's no evidence that they had that before they had their near-death experiences.
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So, as far as I have... there's no formal study of your question, but I strongly subscribe to it from my own... and this is, again, this would have to be called anecdotal experience. By the way, anecdotal is a funny word.
You know, it's so many words that we kind of have value attachments to, good and bad, I found I had to completely rethink and deconstruct.
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Take the term anecdotal when it's used by my critics, okay? What they mean by anecdotal is, it's something you learn from another human being.
That's what they mean. It's a story. You talk to somebody, they told you something happened to them, that's anecdotal.
As opposed to what? You had the experience yourself? No, that would be anecdotal too. That would be your anecdote.
But no, it would have to do with a separateness between, I think, the observer and the observed, so that you would do a formal study in which you had someone, you know, that you could measure something.
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But a narrative, all narratives... Anyway, so this is anecdotal. I think that that's profoundly so.
If you take abduction... well, the MIT conference proceedings just came out. We call it the MIT conference.
MIT did not sponsor this conference. It was held at MIT, but it's known as the MIT conference.
And Eddie Bullard did a survey of abduction researchers afterwards, which is like a huge, meticulous study, which is typical of what Bullard does.
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It's extremely good. Very limited sample of, I think there are 13 investigators. I did not fill it out. I couldn't do it. I was too busy.
I was just swamped at that point. And he gets, you know, remarkable consistency among the investigators in terms of the way the beings look and the missing time and the different qualities and features.
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It's remarkably consistent, considering that you're dealing with something which is so potentially subject to distortion and variability. Having said that, however, when it comes to what I think your question implies, which is, does the quality and evolution of the experience vary according to who's doing the work? There, absolutely.
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And I want to hear you talk about this, not in terms of this, but just in psychiatry generally.
Because, for example, people who are not trained in transpersonal psychology or are not particularly oriented spiritually in this or are not particularly accustomed, as psychiatrists are supposed to be able to do, to be with somebody through the most horrendous, disturbing terror and anxiety and feel obliged to be too sympathetic or too, you know, you poor thing or, you know, whatever, rather than holding the space and carrying the person through the experience.
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When people that are not trained clinically, they tend, and this is often true of the pioneers that have come at this from some other discipline because the mental health profession has avoided it, but they tend to do kind of old-fashioned trauma work.
Oh, you poor thing, these terrible aliens with the big black eyes and they're doing these rape-like things and it's awful and they're taking your eggs and your sperm and, you know, whisking you away without your permission. And so those people end up with an experience which is, they're cold, thoughtless, negative, they don't care about us.
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When people like, what is it, Yvonne Smith in California, and I think I would be in this category or kind of more in the, sort of looking at this in a kind of larger consciousness dimension and stay with people through the experience, the experience seems to transform the aliens who are traumatic and thoughtless and cruel in their early sessions become perceived in a more reciprocal relationship. They seem to, they come to feel they're part of some life-giving process.
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And this doesn't seem to be just a Stockholm effect, you know, the Stockholm effect where the people who are hijacked in a plane that was heading for Stockholm, I don't know, wherever it was going to go and they come to, out of terror they identify with the aggressors and out of survival instinct they come to love their captors in the hijacking.
I don't think it's like that because it has qualities of that, but there's a freer choosing of the relationship than that.
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They're not captives, they're not victims in the same sense. They can actually enter into some kind of more give-and-take reciprocal information conversational telepathic relationship with the beings and it does emerge and it goes on over a lifetime you discover as you go deeper into the consciousness that often the relationship between the human and the alien has gone on since childhood.
The doctor figure becomes almost like a spirit guide in their recollection, a protector, someone they've known their whole life that they feel deeply bonded to.
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But to get that kind of material you have to go through a kind of dark night of the soul of terror for several sessions before the experience begins to shift and transform.
Well, there's a couple of things that I think are worth noting. One is just in the mundane realm, certain aspects of states are more or less mutually exclusive.
(0:40:26)
And so if you're afraid, it's very difficult to perceive just mundane kindness, let alone love, human love, and then perhaps a more transcendent version of what we might call love.
I would like to make a few comments being blind to an interview like this and not having met anybody that's experienced anything like this about these interviews.
And that is, they're quite compelling data in that the content is egotistonic. There's no evidence of any kind of dissociative phenomena.
(0:40:59)
There's no apparent secondary gain. And there doesn't seem to be anything in it for this gentleman to be telling you the story.
And from a psychiatric point of view, he's not being led. And it's quite convincing.
And the same thing I would say is true of the girls. And I would say that the amount of discrepancy there is between their accounts is to be expected regardless of what they were recounting.
(0:41:29)
And so for what it's worth, as a psychiatrist, I'd say that this is very compelling evidence that something is going on.
So I just add my two bits to that one.
Well, maybe with that, pick that up. I mean, you don't have to do this, but just as an exercise, that was my question number two.
If we can assume it's going on, it's real, we've moved on from the argument that you raised, is it real or not.
(0:42:02)
But let's say in some way it is real. It's entering our world. Then what? So what? I mean, I don't mean so what, but, you know, so what?
Then what does that mean for us?
Well, the first obvious implication would be we don't understand it. It's beyond our control. Physics can't explain it. Help, help, help. We're on a sinking ship.
We're going to be doomed because we can't grapple with this tremendous problem. Therefore, we'll put our heads into the sand and it'll go away.
(0:42:34)
And that's an obvious knee-jerk reaction to this, which I think we've had numerous experiences and when anything new comes up that we can't deal with.
You don't want to stop there, do you?
No, no, no.
The next thing is that maybe this is something really new, new and old at the same time.
New in the sense that we now, for some reason, are equipped with some relatively new ideas about science and nature, which seem to open up the door to multiple reality possibilities creeping in.
(0:43:11)
For the first time maybe in our history, through quantum physics, relativity, new ideas about even connections between mind and consciousness from Jungian psychology.
New information about two-pointal imagery from people who have studied ancient Buddhists and modern Buddhist practice.
And that we're beginning, you know, this is an opportunity for us to deal with this phenomenon. It's really a rare opportunity.
There's a third thought that's more frightening to me, though. And that is that there's real evil in the universe.
(0:43:47)
And that maybe for the first time we're being slapped in the face to wake up to the fact that this is what God has been telling us all along.
(0:43:55)
And we've been blindly going ahead and saying, oh no, evil is what we make of the world. There's no such thing as a real evil force that can grab our souls and all these old ideas.
So, I mean, there's three really pretty strong areas here. And I'm not sure I can argue effectively against any of those areas.
Good. Okay. Anyone else want to pick that up? We've established it. It's David, right?
(0:44:17)
David. David says, look, this is real. I mean, this is, you can't, this is powerful. He's a psychiatrist. You know, psychiatrists really decide for us what's real anyway.
This is real. Now what? Okay. What is that? Any other? Fred started this. Andrew, you want to pick that up?
Just as far as, there's a lot of people who are in positions of considerable power and wealth and such who not only have nothing to gain by this, but have a considerable amount to lose for their credibility in their, you know, industries or whatever would go down the tubes if people discover that they've had an experience with UFOs. So, there's kind of a counter-motivation to it. So I would agree with what you're saying.
(0:45:04)
Well, I think he's assuming we've gone past that point. In other words, that these people can't knock it down anymore.
That they've had to face it. You're sort of implying an answer to that, but they can't knock it down anymore.
The psychiatrists have declared this is not psychiatric and it's real. What would that be? How would that impact those people you're talking about?
(0:45:28)
I think that they would determine what would be the overriding message, I believe, from these beings is completely benevolent.
And if they wanted to be benevolent, they could easily do that a long time ago.
But being benevolent, they want the people who they've contacted to be as effective as they possibly can be to help create a solution for the environmental problems.
And that may not be by coming out and saying you're an FFT. I've always thought that if that scenario comes true that Carl Sagan would say that he was telling us all along and that that would actually be convincing.
(0:46:08)
He would actually convince the arbiters of reality that he had in effect been saying this all along with his novels and so forth.
And that actually the debunkers would probably be able to claim that they had been predicting this in some sense.
And they would be the interpreters of it.
And that's what I think would... I mean, if you want to speculate, that in some way would assimilate it and explain it to us and present it to us.
(0:46:37)
There are many semantic traps in this whole business.
And I think one of them comes from confusing different levels.
I think it's useful to think of at least three levels of the phenomenon.
One is the physical, something landed, something went crazy, something interfered with the environment in some way.
(0:47:01)
Including light, microwaves, weather.
And there is a second level, which is what you're showing us, which is a psychological, psychophysiological level.
People have marks, people have burns, they felt heat, they had sexual experience, they had images in their brains or thoughts in their minds.
And that calls for a different set of tools or a different set of semantics.
And then the question you're asking now is the social question.
(0:47:32)
What does it mean? And at that level, it really doesn't matter whether or not there are finance sources around.
I mean, if you can get enough people to believe that there are, which is something that an industrialist or a group of people could do, whether or not there are real tools, then you're going to get certain impacts.
Last year, 53 people committed suicide in Switzerland and Canada, members of the cult of the solar temple.
(0:48:01)
Something that has not been mentioned in the American press is that the top level of initiation of the cult was meeting extraterrestrials.
The leaders of the group had bought machines producing holograms that created that experience.
And clearly to these people, who were not lower level people, these were people from a fairly high strata, social strata, this was real.
This was real enough that they went through the whole experience.
(0:48:32)
Has this been written up? I mean, can we get a hold of it?
It has been written up in a French magazine that did a special investigation of it, but I don't think the Swiss police is talking too much about that aspect of it.
They found, if you remember, they blew up the houses, some of the detonators did not work, and in the ritual chamber of one of the houses they found the hologram sheet.
(0:48:55)
They cost about a hundred thousand dollars.
So that addresses the question of reality.
What is real and where can technology today create the impression of reality?
We are developing virtual realities here.
This relates to the question, I mean, if in fact, whatever this intelligence is, that's my third question, but let's say it has the capacity to grade or monitor or titrate or dose the intensity with which it is confronting us with its existence, say.
(0:49:30)
What you're implying is if they did what a lot of people ask me, not in meetings like this, but sort of general, not so thoughtful conferences, well, why don't they just show up and show us that they're real?
Well, you're in a sense answering why they don't, because there has to be some capacity to assimilate that impact by the people, and when it comes to powerful, you're saying people commit suicide.
(0:49:53)
That's also why the whole phenomenon is so interesting.
It's forcing us to ask the basic questions about what is reality anyway.
The other thing where I would maybe take issue with what Fred was saying is that this is all new, but it's also very, very old.
There are entire libraries written in Latin that address exactly this question.
(0:50:17)
Who are these beings? Are they good? Are they evil?
If you remember in medieval times, the big problem was, the assumption was they're all demonic.
But then when you sprinkle them with holy water, which was done in some occasions, they don't vanish.
They just stay there, which was a big problem for theologians in those days.
Also, that was at a time when people had a much wider concept of reality than we do today.
(0:50:45)
They were not limited to three dimensions.
They were very facile with the concepts of entities, planes, and so on.
I mean, there's one way to guard yourself from the demonic is you restrict the dimensions of reality so that you don't have to encounter it, except in nightmares or dreams or madness or whatever.
I wonder, we are limited in the amount of knowledge that we have about the nature of reality.
(0:51:13)
We, though, have accumulated some knowledge about how our own minds work and our attribution of whatever characteristics... We know that the process of projection is likely to happen in the absence of information that can be otherwise verified.
And other processes, either of affiliation or of aversion or of fear or of bondage... You know, the whole realm.
And I wonder if it's not a fruitful way to approach the issue of what does this mean or so what or what can we do constructively to look at our own human condition and look at the way our minds work and look at what we do know about the way humans are likely to respond in a situation like this with this kind of uncertainty.
(0:52:03)
But we have a couple of responses on that. Yeah. Last year I did a book on soul, from Socrates to Ray Charles. And as I was going around the country again and again, people would ask, even after my descriptions of Siberian soul journeys and Plato's image of the chariot and Ray Charles singing what I'd say, there would still be the inevitable question, yeah, but what is it and how can you prove it?
(0:52:31)
Well, I'd say, well, go to a Ray Charles concert or go to a peyote meeting and talk to a peyote road man who's gone off on a soul journey up through the top of the tipi and then he's come back and he can tell you stories.
Yeah, but what is it? What is it?
Just recently the state of Texas has officially declared that soul is, as Descartes said several centuries ago, in the pineal gland. And you want to know why? Because of the phenomena of heart surgery.
(0:53:00)
There are people going into heart surgery who are terrified of their old idea or image of soul in their heart.
So if they're going to have the heart replaced, they may be losing their soul.
So this has now become a major issue for people.
Are there any votes against this?
I don't know if there are any votes against this or not.
(0:53:20)
James Hillman calls this the contemporary sin of literalization in the country.
If you are literalizing everything, you have to pass a law to actually define where soul is.
Or you have to do what Francis Crick has just done and reduce soul to the mind. Reduce it to the mind.
To the brain.
A lot of people do that. Dennett does that too.
So I've just finished a book on the phenomenology of UFOs and I suspect I'm going to go into the same lion's den for the next year.
(0:53:51)
Yeah, but what is it? Yeah, but what is it?
My suspicion is that there is a lot of common ground between the two.
As Jung saw, there's a dimension of soul to the UFO phenomena.
Even Stryber talks about this as a soul crisis of some sort.
I'm reading this as I read the soul issue.
That it's a matter of our capacity of perception.
(0:54:19)
If you sit in a room with Aretha Franklin and ask her what soul is, she'll stare at you like you've got three heads.
Why do you have to ask? Soul is a depth dimension. It's something you experience. It's in the world itself.
And for me, the UFO issue, the meaning of it, as you're describing to us, could be a clarion call asking us where soul is.
(0:54:41)
Where is our capacity of perception?
I listen to these kids and I wonder why I haven't been able to perceive at a depth dimension that they do.
I sit in a room with blues players and I ask myself, why can't I feel at that depth dimension?
This is a capacity of knowledge. It's a capacity of perception.
Yeah, that gets to why I've been so interested in this.
(0:55:05)
You were asked, but you didn't go. We met with the Dalai Lama a few years ago.
He invited several of us who were working on the abduction phenomenon to meet with him about what does this mean for consciousness evolution and for the future and for the earth and so forth.
At one point, he stopped in a meeting and someone was trying to ask him to explain something.
(0:55:32)
He said, those creatures, they're spirits, but they're very upset.
He says, they're upset. We are destroying their physical and spiritual home.
They have no choice. They have to come into our physical world to get our attention.
That's the only way that they can communicate that they have lost this, that we are destroying their home, so they manifest physically.
And that kind of gets at where I think, certainly what has attracted me to this and why I work on this rather than channeling or something probably equally powerful.
(0:56:08)
As someone raised in a secular rationalist tradition of, you know, prove it's real, I've got to measure it, I've got to see it, you know, a physician and so forth.
This phenomenon has that curious quality of not respecting the divide.
What's your first name?
(0:56:27)
Phil. Phil, that Phil's talking about, the divide between the world of spirit, soul, the unseen world, and the physical world.
It destroys that deal that was made perhaps in the 17th century between the scientists and the theologians.
The theologians will take care of the spirit world and the soul, and the physicists and scientists will take care of the physical world.
And as long as we can keep them separate, we don't have too big a problem.
(0:56:52)
But this phenomenon has no honoring of that divide.
It destroys it, it crashes across it, and forces us to rethink the divisions, the philosophical intellectual divisions that we've made.
And I find that very attractive. I mean, I think that's interesting for somebody that tries to bridge these worlds myself.
Yeah. Here's a comment.
If you're going to bring metal... I did a book on faster than light travel and such.
(0:57:23)
If you're going to bring metal objects from other galaxies or planets, it takes an immense amount... it's almost impossible, basically.
So the easiest way is just to bring your soul, just to bring your mind there.
So if any... I would imagine if any galactic beings would want to travel here, they would somehow use some soul technology rather than material technology.
I think you just heard something invented here we've never heard on this planet before.
(0:57:45)
Has anyone ever said soul technology before?
Has that ever been... have those two words ever been put together in quite that way?
So if there are beings doing this, if there are... to suppose that some of these beings say... there is any implication that they're from somewhere else.
If these beings are doing this, then so could we.
So this sets up the idea that maybe we should start work on developing our own... maybe we can first start with places that are close by, first of all... One more comment... it was said that during the Second World War, that the biggest atomic secret that we gave to the Russians was the fact that it was possible to set off a bomb.
(0:58:35)
To the mind, the idea that it's possible.
No, the idea that once the bomb was exploded, no one knew you could actually make an atomic bomb, but the fact that the bomb was exploded, which the Russians soon knew, the fact that it was possible was the biggest impetus for their development.
That was the secret, the atomic secret, you could actually do it.
And if you can actually solve travel from planet to planet, this might be the greatest thing to turn NASA around, certainly.
(0:59:04)
Jacques, when you were in Brazil, did you encounter... maybe this came later, but there's a man named Vira, a Brazilian, and a man named Kevin de la Tour, they have something called the Institute of Projectiology in Rio. Have you heard of this? In which they actually do that.
They actually train people to project their souls and spirits through meditation and through various technologies. I have a whole literature on this.
(0:59:35)
And then they encounter their deceased mothers, and people that are out in the other realm, and they cross over the realm.
(0:59:41)
Not like Bob Monroe, where they have all kinds of... I haven't been to the Monroe Institute, but it uses physical technologies for out-of-body experience.
This is like moving your consciousness and soul, and how to be trained how to do that, to reach out into other dimensions.
You don't have to go to Brazil for that.
I was telling you yesterday, there are people all over the place doing this sort of networking in their dreams, and going out to galactic-sized warships, and deconstructing them to protect the planet.
(1:00:11)
Now, that's what they believe they are doing.
The only thing I am aware of is a failure of that.
Ingo Sohn claimed he was going to go to Mercury before the Mercury flyby.
He went there with his mind, he described all the purple rays, and all the sorts of things, and he failed to describe the one thing that the photograph showed that looked exactly like the moon.
(1:00:30)
So, I consider that a failure of astral space travel.
Are we being a little reductionistic in terms of this travel, and geography, and moving across space?
May I ask you to elaborate just a little bit more about what the Dalai Lama had to say, since they have worked on these kinds of technologies for many, many years.
They said about what? He said a lot of things in just three days.
(1:00:53)
He invited eight or ten people.
Peter Roycevich was one of them, who was a folklorist, and who studied through history the different ways in which the perception of beings, entities, what you were talking about, varies according to the cultural set and the mindset that is going on.
And it may be that one aspect of this, in terms of our side of it, is that we have reached a place where we can perceive vehicles in the air that have a concrete reality to it.
(1:01:37)
Jerry Clark, who is the editor of the International UFO Reporter, went back and examined very carefully the 19th century airship craze, where everybody that was remembered as in the terms of... I guess there were hot air balloons then, so a lot of the pictures and memory of that was that there were a lot of balloons kind of appearing all over the country.
But he went back and looked at the photographs again, and the eyewitness reports, and they, from this vantage point now, and this was in the 1980s, appear much more like UFOs than they do like balloons.
(1:02:18)
But nobody could perceive a UFO at that time.
It may be that we had to reach a place of some kind of technology of our own, some ability to perceive objects in the sky that are kind of like UFOs before we could get to the point where our consciences could perceive it.
Some of you are probably familiar with the work of Michael Grosso, who is a philosopher who has looked more systematically than I have, at the way in which the capacity... He's turned the whole belief thing around.
(1:02:47)
In other words, he's saying that belief actually facilitates the capability of perception rather than that it distorts perception.
(1:02:55)
In other words, that because you do come to a place, then you are able to see things and experience things that are there, but you couldn't even see or experience before.
That's what I'd be really interested in knowing, specifically what the Dalai Lama had to say historically about... See, these would be Bodhisattvas or something like that.
He didn't find this any big deal.
(1:03:13)
Did he say if advanced Tibetan practitioners reported precisely these kinds of phenomena?
And I'm wondering, in your clinical practice, do you have instances where people who have meditated for many years, say 10 or 15, many retreats, that kind of practice, then have reported these phenomena?
Yes. Prior to the experience, not that they've gotten interested afterwards, that someone has an abduction experience and then they become meditators.
(1:03:45)
It's so hard to think of temporality here and cause and effect in that way.
The Dalai Lama was not familiar with Tibetans having standard UFO encounters.
At some point he implied, we don't have to.
But there were a number of situations where monks would suddenly disappear for several months, be taken off by some kind of beings or entities.
But it seemed to serve the framework of that culture.
(1:04:13)
He was not so familiar with this sort of hard-edged UFO type of thing that we're talking about.
What you're talking about is much more complicated.
For example, in cloisters, people who are in cloisters, do they report these experiences?
I don't know. I don't know.
I know that very often people that have had experiences with psychedelics are more open to abduction experiences, which again creates this kind of ambiguity around, is this in the physical world or in the consciousness realm?
(1:04:43)
Obviously, you're not going to, I don't think, cause to materialize something in the physical world because you're having an LSD trip.
On the other hand, it may open your consciousness to something which on another occasion might actually appear in the physical world.
There are all kinds of ways in which this confounds our distinction between the consciousness world and the physical world.
That's, I think, as I was saying before, the most powerful thing about it for me.
(1:05:05)
It continuously attacks that dichotomy.
Well, that's why I was asking about meditators, long-term meditators, how that might affect them one way or another, their availability to that kind of experience.
I think that, I mean, I don't have anything but impressions that they are more available to them, that opening of consciousness does have an effect.
But this thing, again, is more like, I sometimes call this an outreach program for the consciously impaired.
(1:05:32)
It has this kind of way of crashing through.
And a lot of the people when they first have the experiences are far from spiritually minded.
They are just folks.
Like one woman that I had a lot of trouble getting her to keep coming back to the support group because she is a gas station attendant and she is a very simple person.
(1:05:52)
She says, this is horrible. They are doing these terrible things.
They are crashing in on me.
And we try to get her to sit with her experience and talk with her, meet other people and come to terms with it.
So, you know, very simple kind of untutored people in meditation or spiritual practice find this violating them and they are right.
But then they do, if they are going to do other work, then the experience will shift in its quality often.
(1:06:20)
That is true on the cultural level as well as the personal level.
Yes. What do you think the Dalai Lama meant when he said that we are destroying their physical and spiritual home?
This has to do with the whole ecological dimension of this.
I mean, one of the things that comes up, it came up with these girls and it came up with Kredo Mutwa. You know, I was going to... I am not going to do it.
(1:06:43)
But there are a lot of quotes from Kredo Mutwa where he talks about Africa is dying.
We are destroying the earth. These beings are trying to warn us of danger.
This is coming because we have gone wrong here.
And the abductees who are, again, not particularly environmentally minded, but in case after case after case, they have shown these visions of the earth destroyed, Florida splitting off.
(1:07:05)
Well, that might not be such a bad thing from some people's point of view.
But, you know, huge catastrophic scenes, earth polluted.
One woman, one of the first people I worked with, one of the first images that she remembered from an abduction experience was being herself participating with the aliens in providing food hydroponically because all the capacity of the earth to support food for its population had... you know, the life was destroyed and agriculture as we know it was gone.
(1:07:34)
And so we were growing food hydroponically.
It was kind of a view of herself in the future.
I mean, this comes up over and over and over again.
Our physical and spiritual home. And you said... he said their physical and spiritual home.
So I am wondering if he is perceiving some intrinsic link they have with the earth and with the spiritual domains in which we live and have our being.
(1:07:57)
Well, it's us and them again. I mean, they... it's all one in one sense.
I mean, apparently what you get over and over and over again is the communication that the earth is not ours to destroy.
The earth... and I was raised as a completely secular rationalist, whatever.
That, you know, we were alone and that the earth was the earth.
And I went... you know, I sort of got into the Gaia thing.
(1:08:19)
But the idea going beyond Gaia that the earth itself is part of a larger network of life and is sacred in a cosmic firmament and web.
That was... that's coming from this, which I never would have gotten before.
(1:08:33)
Credo put it this way. He said, Sir, according to African culture and religion, there are 24 mother worlds in the sky and our earth is the 25th. And all these creatures come from these different mother worlds.
A mother world is a specially made planet whose purpose is to give birth to life.
Now, these mother worlds are very, very rare.
You can find thousands of worlds without life in only one mother world.
(1:08:57)
So, that would... it's like both.
It is sacred to... at a universe level.
And, of course, it's our planet, so it matters to us what happens to it.
But it matters to... at a cosmic level too.
I mean, I have all kinds of my own mythology, which I take all the data and I put together and I create a story of... a kind of creation story of what's going on here.
(1:09:18)
But that's maybe for another time.
All right, maybe we should stop. It's after 4.30. This went very fast for me, I don't know.
(1:09:27)