UFOs

On the Larry King Show this evening, a panel of several people testified about their experiences with UFOs.  They were making an appearance on the program apparently in anticipation of an event in Washington, DC, this coming week, where officials and military folks from around the world will be meeting to discuss the UFO phenomenon - and to present the positive evidence that has been collected to date.

What do you think of this topic?  Is it a modern mythology, a technological twist on the same prerational, magical/mythic forms of thinking that have given us gods and goblins throughout the ages?  Or is there something to it - something that defies reduction to naïve cultural projections? 

It isn't a topic that is discussed much in Integral circles.  Should it be?

I think it is very likely that life exists elsewhere in the universe.  I would be surprised (and disappointed) if it didn't.  I am less sure that any of those life forms are actually visiting us right now.  I am open to the idea, but not convinced … I have not seen enough yet that would allow me to feel comfortable taking a decisive stand for it or against it.

A number of years ago, I was in an unusual position that allowed me to hear testimony that probably many people haven't heard.  I was working as a court reporter and was asked to transcribe a number of interviews with military officials, again in preparation for a meeting that was going to be taking place with government employees in the US capital in several months.  For fun, and hoping I'm not breaking any rules here, I'm going to quote from one of the transcripts I made.  I will change the names just to be safe.

~*~

COL. D:  I am LD, Colonel, U.S.A.F., retired.  I got a bachelor of science degree, and then the Air Force sent me to the _______ Business School to study management, and then promptly assigned me to Washington, DC.  And I served in the Chief of Staff's Office for orientation, and then they put me into the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission where I became responsible for maintaining the inventory of the accountability of the nuclear weapon stockpile and involved in the security and the - you might say, auditing the manufacturing facilities and the storage facilities for all the nuclear weapons in the U.S.  And while I was there, I had my first incident with UFOs, which, in mid-July, they flew over Washington, DC, and I saw my first nine UFOs.

INTERVIEWER:  What year was this?

COL. D:  It was July of 1952.  And, of course, during that period of time I made a lot of contacts.  I was a staff officer for the military liaison committee between the chairman of the AEC and the Secretary of Defense.  And so, I became acquainted with not only the Army, Navy, and Air Force, but civilian agencies, the CIA, the National Security Agency, and other contacts which I developed.  During that period of time, one of my functions was to accompany a security team, which visited all of the nuclear facilities to check on the security of weapons.  And we were getting reports of visits by UFOs over the storage facilities and even some of the manufacturing facilities.  And that went on continuously.

Now, we found that the reports - the formal reports were few and far between, but security people were reluctant to report many of them because the protocol and the bureaucracy involved in reporting them - they just avoided reporting. 

Later, I was assigned to the Sandia Corporation as a military liaison, and I was involved in establishing a quality assurance program for the manufacture and the quality and the maintenance of their nuclear weapons.  So we had to visit all of the manufacturing facilities such as [inaudible] and the Pantex facility, which assembled the nuclear components of [inaudible].  And so, there again, we observed the UFOs, who were very much interested in the facilities that we were visiting.  But we did get constant referrals.  What are all these UFOs hovering there for?

And so, then, after that - this was during the 1950s, through the entire ‘50s.  Then I was assigned to the United Pacific Command under Admiral Phelps during the ‘60s, and I was the officer in charge of the alternate command post involved with nuclear weapon operation planning.  And during that period of time, I was - I maintained contacts with NORAD, with the SAC operations, involved [inaudible] operational plans for the use of nuclear weapons.  And during this period of time, I also learned of a number of incidents which happened.

And then further on I finally retired from the Air Force and joined the Boeing Company, where I was assigned to the Minute Man program where I was responsible for the configuration accounting of all the nuclear fleet, the Minute Man One, Two, and Three.  And during that period of time, I also learned about incidents involving nuclear weapons.  And among these incidents were a couple of nuclear weapons sent into space that were destroyed by the extraterrestrials.  But in talking to various contacts throughout, they would allude to the fact that these did happen.  There was - for example, the missile - a Minute Man missile was destroyed at the launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base.  That's now a matter of public record.

Well, the one incident, for example, was they actually photographed the UFO following the missile as it climbed into space and shining a beam of light on it, which neutralized the missile.  And this was recorded.  It was all hushed up.  And they split up the team that observed it, but of course eventually the news came out.  And it was later published, and we confirmed it…

~*~

This is just an excerpt from the interview.  He also talked about a number of other incidents, some of which he witnessed firsthand.  He also described the study of extraterrestrial artifacts at Los Alamos and Livermore that he knew about.  He closed the interview by saying that there were quite a few people like him who were getting up in years and who were just tired of not talking about these experiences, and he believed that “sooner or later the truth will come out.”

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Re: UFOs

I've been waiting for 20 years for this particular aspect of the truth to be widely known. It never happened. There must be millions worldwide by now who've had some direct, first-hand experience of these visitors, and yet the story still hasn't broken into mainstream consciousness.

m

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200 billion suns in our galaxy alone.  A billion is a huge number.  To frame it, consider a cash machine that will deliver a dollar a second 24hrs a day.  It would take 11 days straight to build up a million dollars.  To become a billionaire, it would take 32 years.  200 billion is a huge number.  If only 1/100 of 1% of these suns might harbor life and 1/100 of 1% of that number might have developed a technological capability, and only 1/100 of 1% of those had mastered relatively local space travel, and 1/100 of 1% of those could really beat the distance thing, then there would be 200 civilizations in our galaxy alone capable of distance travel in space.

The same statistical approach can be applied to the countless stories of UFO sightings.  If there were 1,000,000 stories to start with (not an unlikely number when you consider the reports from thousands of eye witnesses to the same “event”) and you eliminated all of the remotely suspect for unverifiability and etc and leave only the ones that stand up to a rigorous and collaborated interview - let's say a hundred really puzzling and seemingly irrefutable “encounters,” and still you had your skeptical hat on looking hard at these hundred, you would have to admit that it was not possible, statistically, that all of these people who had passed all previous screenings were still fantastic, conspiratorial, deluded, hallucinating, liars.  You would have to admit, from a statistical perspective that at least one was telling the truth.  One is all it takes to accept the inevitability of the phenomenon.  In other words, both the opportunity set and the incident set are too large to sustain disbelief.  “Why not?” becomes the more legitimate question.

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Hey, Mascha and Michael, I'm glad to have some company in the tinfoil hat club!

Just kidding.  I think it is certain that there is life elsewhere in the cosmos, and believe it is likely (as Michael so nicely illustrated) that at least some of these beings will be capable of far distance space travel.  The question then is, Even if this is so, are any actually coming here?  I have hesitated to come down and state with certainty that “they're here,” simply because even if we acknowledge that out of all those who report seeing UFOs, there must be some who are telling the truth (I believe many are), we still don't know exactly what they're seeing.

The only “classical” UFO sighting I've had took place when I was a boy.  I watched a greenish point of light move across the sky, and then make a sharp right angle turn and fly away at a very high speed.  I've had some other, archetypal dream-like experiences that mirror other aspects of this phenomenon.  I'm not sure how, or even if, this physical sighting and these other more spiritual experiences are related.  (Not only in my case, but in general.  I raise the question because some writers on this phenomenon actually blur the line between physical and subtle/dream experiences, suggesting that there are beings who inhabit a space that can cross over between these dimensions of experience.)

A question that isn't often discussed when considering advanced extraterrestrial life forms, should any exist, is exactly “how” or in what ways such beings might actually be “advanced.”  Integral – and the Wilber-Combs lattice – suggest that the evolutionary arc will not only encompass many lines, but may well also involve a deepening in state experience and the attainment of high state-stage development.  Many popular depictions focus mostly on the technological and cognitive lines of development, perhaps just because that is what is most evident.  If beings develop not only technologically but in these other ways as well, then this blurring between “spiritual”/subtle and “technological”/gross phenomena may actually be something to expect.

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…*they* are here…we are them…Earth is a planet where souls come into existence for the first time but I would venture a guess that many posting at zaadz have an extraterestial soul origin…where ever you see the cutting edge of cultural change that is a good indication…most are not *contracted* to be fully awake…that is not a nessisary pre-requisite…but look around and you will see their faces…

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…UFOs that are visible are considered the jalopies of the universe…and most of them belong to our government…plasma drive is a reality…our government has two space programs…one for the public and one that they are desparately trying to keep secret…landings of other beings and contact will become common place within the next generation…but first Earth will have moved up an octave…the ones responcible for abductions are not of the highest sort…

…people are so afraid to even consider these things…but we need to release the flatlander mentality to get on with the business of raising the frequency…take off the tin foil hats…

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Hey all…

Just jumping into the pod after a long absence. This thread caught my eye because I recently saw a very interesting documentary about crop circles, aka agriglyphs. I didn't know that there have been over 9000 documented agriglyphs since the 50s. I also didn't know that, according to the researchers, new mathematical theorems have been constructed based on some of the geometrical formations. I didn't go looking for this DVD; it came up randomly when I was looking for rentals at Blockbuster.com (egad! not the imperialist, censoring, mom and pop store killer!) I felt that viewing it was time well spent.

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I'm 100% with Michael on this one - the odds on us being the only “intelligent” life form are pretty much nill.

Frans

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I strongly believe that there is life out there, and have a tendency to want to believe that other sentient beings have visited this planet. I'm just not sure about the lot of stories. There is tons of honest testimony - I've read about it so much over the years. Some are mistaken, some are authentically an unexplained phenomenon. That, coupled with some, and I mean some, alien abduction descriptions, make a good case for their “visitation.” Trying to take an integral perspective on this … I guess it would be cautious of me to say that if there is a sentient, intelligent life form contacting us, we will interpret it according to our own structures of consciousness, and experience as it occurs differently than another. That may go a long way to describe why alot of alien contact stories to sound purple/animalistic and mythic like in nature. It also may describe some of the pathologies that accompany this, such as narcissistic tendencies to believe your sperm is being used by the aliens to create the future hybrid race. It's a hazey line between the narcissistic, the mythic, and the authentic mystery of UFO's, aliens, or extra-dimensional beings. Whatever the case is, an integral model is definitely a big help to make things clearer.

What is everyone's take on alien abduction?

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I hesitate in sharing this - but thought it might provide another perspective and I think most of you have heard from me enough on II to know that I am very very well grounded. This is not about UFO's but about the topic of life on other planets, visitations, etc.

This is my daughter's first life time on the Earth. All previous lifetimes have been spent (I think) primarily on a specific planet (I don' t know the name/location, but I've seen it in dreams as well as the people and some various other environmental qualities). She's now 22 and I first became aware of this when I was expecting her. I have been a lucid dreamer for quite some time and had several very amazing dream experiences during my pregnancy. I will tell you that I have O % interest really in the topic at all and never had an interest in anything of this nature. As a young child it was obvious she was very different. She had abilities to see spirits of all types and our house seemed to be a gateway of sorts. Between her and my son (16 months apart  - he's a natural born dreamwalker but untrained and so some very interesting phenomenon occured in our house regularly) life was an adventure in the spirit world on a weekly basis for years. Some years after she was born, a teacher of mine validated my thoughts about my daughter's soul home. My daughter, I will tell you, isn't all that pleased about being here. She found all of it highly curious - just all of it and mostly kept to herself - writing and drawing these amazing pictures that I'd wake up to in the morning. I later came to know that she and I had connected a long long long time ago on that planet prior to me beginning incarnations on the earth and had maintained a connection in spirit over this time.

I haven't read anything about any of this and as mentioned, even having a personal experience with this doesn't really peak my interest. I find life here on Earth pretty darn engaging enough. However, in my view, this is another way that people from other planets  are making contact here outside of the visitation type of process.

OK - so is this too weird for all of you?? Has any one else ever read or heard about this? 

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Jayne,

No, not weird.  Probably more common than you might think.  For years and years I have concealed the suspicion that I am here from another planet myself.  That many of my last incarnations were on a post-apocalyptic planet that had long ago worked out this materialist bullshit and gotten down to the fruits of a deeply sustainable spiritual/theatrical community and economy.  All my life, I have been appalled at the way human beings treat each other.  I am coming to know who I am and why I am here and, like you, I feel there is enough here to keep me busy for the rest of this incarnation without slipping into some elitist fantasy about how totally blown everybody else is compared to me.  I used to think that but now with all this shadow uncloaking, I can see what a fuck I have been most of my life - covertly of course as the “look good” was pretty good despite the “do bad.”

Tell your daughter to quit bitching and get into it.  She's here for a reason and the sooner she discovers it the better off we will all be.  Being critical does not work.  Tell her that I already tried that for about 50 years or so.  Lovin' yourself and other people, that's what works as I am sure you know.

yer pal,
Michael

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Jayne,

ps:  If you haven't already heard about the indigo children phenomenon, you might google it up and see.  It is a world fraught with a ton of bullshit, but there is a glimmer of a “something” in there that still holds definite traction for me.  I think I was perhaps born indigo but shadowed it upon discovering that the lack of affection in my life could be effectively but toxically replaced by attention.  Hence, I became an attention freak and corrupted right into the red/orange/green whoop-dee-doo with everyone else.  Consequently I got downright narcissistic and wounded big time developing a righteous victim/martyr shadow with a messianic cherry on top.  Today, I know that I am no messiah but I do like the feeling of Christ /Krishna consciousness as it rises on occasion within me.

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Hey folks,

Jayne, you asked: Has any one else ever read or heard about this?  Yeh. My first meditation teacher (who I mentioned in a pm to you a while back) who had been a Jesuit in the Vatican in the 50s, was certain that his soul's origin was on/in another planet. I too was a dreamwalker in my first decade. I would include whoever interupted my outloud dream conversations in the conversation, without recall! That was pretty trippy for my parents.

Bruce, as a kid I saw what I thought was a satelite until it took a 90 degree turn and excellerated.

ShamanSun, I'm pretty sure I walked into a crop circle back in '79. There's more story to that; maybe later.


Toward the end of the cold war some in the the citizen diplomacy movement held out the hope that a difinitive extraterrestrial contact would inspire an kind of ethnocentricity at worldcentric, that a broad human unity would be affected through the recognition of a common other.

Since then I've come to see a whole set of developmental challenges that suggest a sliding scale of terms for stages. The subject/object, self/other progression seems evident in our perspectives on the 'big others', the challenges of kosmoscentricity. To me it's clear that the perspective of  'we're it, it's just us' expresses an egocentricity of even a post-conventional view.

IMP might offer the first decent chance at making sense of what we, as yet, understand least.

Still, I'm with Robert Frost on..”Earth's the right place for love. Don't know where it's likely to go better.”

Kerry

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Jayne,

That's fascinating!  I too have little interest in the topic, but have thought for some time that it would be no more than logical that we manifest in various lifeforms, in various locations (in many more respects than just physical location).  I've never heard of an experience like your daughter's before but see it as just another part of the mystery of life - no need to analyze it in my eyes…

Frans

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…okay…I'm et…I hope this doesn't tip the cart over…I came from a 5th D world where time is manipuable…I've had less than 10 incarnations…I was dropped off in the past and fast -forwarded so that I was prepared for this life …this is a pivotal generation and You are All a part of it…this is the changeing time…that's why you are at zaadz right?…to change the world?…this is part and parcel of the work…
   …I feel the faster we can get more critical mass to 3rd tier the sooner we can get this show on the road…

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Fascinating, Will. Can you say more? I admire you for going so far out on a limb…

For info more immediately verifiable, here's a link Marianthi posted on the recent UFO thread at Heartmind forums.

  www.blog.agoracosmopolitan.com/?p=107,   


“Brazil, India and China are taking the lead on extraterrestrial awareness”, Mihir Sen, from the India Daily reports. “They want to make sure the emerging new world understands that we have to co-exist with our advanced extraterrestrial neighbours.” The Indian Daily reports that Extraterrestrials will be forced to more publically reveal themselves in order to try to avoid a planetary disaster which is projected to occur in 2012.

As human civilization is being destroyed under the hyprocisy which guides the Western Scientific and pseudo-religious Establishment, the timely needed enlightenment of human populations on a reported Extraterrestrial presence could very well be led by China.
The government of China, notwithstanding accounts of human rights abuses, appears to have constructively prepared members of that
society on the kind of potentially vital awareness context, which Western governments continue to deny its own societal members.”

~~~~~~~~~~~

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Mascha, Dear Ones,

Thanks for including that alarming red quote summarizing the overriding sentiment among the many who have opened and are opening to the 12/21/12 date proposed by Mayan and other sources as the new millenial “end of time.”

I have been “on” this subject since I read an account of psycotropically-influenced cultural interaction by the McKenna bros. in 1968.  Simply, as an ethnobotanist and cultural anthropologist, the brothers contacted a previously sequestered tribe somewhere in Venezuela if memory serves.  Their protocol was fairly simple.  What they measured was the rate of information exchange between themselves and the native tribe they cozied up with.  Along with sharing language and habit while under the influence of psychotropics from both the native and First World compendia, the brothers routinely consulted the I Ching and recorded both the hexagrams and the rate/frequency/substance of the exchange of “habit” between themselves and the clan.  Deep into this study, they began to see a pattern emerging from the flow of the hexagrams superimposed on the important exchanges of skill, knowledge, and insight between the parties over “time”.  What emerged was an image of a multi-stranded rope that twisted open at the inception of the experiment and seemed to head towards a conclusion of sorts at a date fifty some years in the future.  As it turned out, once they got home and worked further on the details of the pattern, the date turned out to be 2012.  Neither brother at the time was aware of the significance of this date in Mayan deep astrology, but soon, they both were struck by the unfolding interpretations coming from the ongoing decoding of the Mayan calendar.

For those of you who are not aware of what the Mayan calendar points to, please allow the following description to encourage your curiosity:  simply, through dedicated observation, the Mayans and, perhaps, other astro-observational cultures which preceeded the Mayans, a certain galactic cycle had been noted as a repeating phenomenon.  Without detail, this cycle involves the up and down location of our part of the galaxy as it vibrates above and below the horizontal plane of the galaxy.  2012, precisely, as proposed by the current state of the art of this calculation, Dec. 21, 2012 is the moment when the earth will exactly coincide with this so-called galactic “plane.”

Boiling the Mayan heiroglyphic language down to its most basic, what is suggested, and what stands out as profoundly alarming, is the notion that what this co-incidence will precipitate is “an end to time.”

As this ultra-simplified reduction spreads thoughout the “millenial” community it has left the typical apocalyptic paranoia in its wake.  Dire shit, including the earth flipping on its axis, aborted rotation, mass extinctions from tectonic and corresponding volcanic activity, the collapse of civilizations and civility and on and on are swept into the doorway opened by the “end of time” summation. 

Compounding this “American” version of millenial thinking is the hoo-hah surrounding the predictions of Nostradamus as alchemized by the suggestions of Revelations in the bible.  To me, a critical co-incidence that has gone unnoticed in the years since Nostradamus produced his work, is the timing of his professions against the backdrop of European hegemony in the new world.  My suspicion is that Nostradamus became aware of the Mayan calendars basic notions about the “End of Time” as these notions were returned (in great secrecy) home to Europe on the ships bearing the gold and other loot acquired by the conquistadores.  Imo, the recent film The Fountain, by Darren Aronofsky attempts to address this issue obliquely but fails in the end to tie it in with any conviction.

To my knowledge, nothing in the Mayan calendar interpretations details such chaos.  Nevertheless, this “end of time” piece still stands out and begs for an integral interpretation.  My instinct and my intuition is that the “end of time” piece does not refer to material destruction so much as it does to our collective impression of WHAT TIME IS AS A PHENOMEMON.  I propose do develop this notion further as this discussion unfolds.

We are experiencing and coming to “know” a few things that support this intuition.  First, there is a collective sense that, despite all the friggin' low-end monkey-motion going on around here, the earth's cog is being forcefully raised, awareness is expanding, and the global perspective set is moving from 2p through 3p and on to 4p.  The 4p perspective, imo, includes the capacity for the observer to rise above the mundane drama of the 3p “flatland” and observe the goings on “below” from the dramaturgical perspective of 4p.  Such a developed perspective requires the witness to include a sense of conventional time in their considerations of both the drama in their own lives as well as the drama unfolding around them.  To see such drama as it is actually happening from a temporarily uninvolved perspective requires oversight, or an elevated location from which to track back in time to cause and forward in time to vision through imaginary projection. 

The dilemma for this dramaturgical perspective of 4p is that it is limited by the conventional notion of time being a continuum stretching linearly back into the past and linearly forward into the future.  This struggle with limitation, however seductive and dominated by consensus, is the herald to 2nd tier consciousness.  3rd tier consciousness, imo, is marked by an acceptance that 4p is a transitional stage at that only by opening to an advanced notion of what time might really be will the witness be able to assume the 5p position of being free from the strictures of the consensus notion of time and, transcluding 4p, drop closer to the flatland 3p stage into the middle of the tetrahedron created by the three corners of the flatland triangel of 1p-2p-3p, and the dramaturgical perspective 4p point centrally located above the center of the 3p flatland.  5p, or the doorway to bliss and 3rd tier exists equidistant from the vertices of the tetrahedron and dead center in the middle.  Here, establishment of self-as-Self, indigo awareness, and ego resolution is actually possible.  From this perspective, the mystical experience may be joined.

So, what to do about the “holy crap/paranoia” factor?  Well, a couple of considerations come to mind: 

One, the actual precision of the event.  How precise is this horizontal plane through which we are purportedly travelling?  Reason indicates to me, considering the overwhelming scale of phenomenon in the galaxy, that this “plane” is hardly an infinitesimally thin something-or-other.  If that is the case, then we have been transitioning through or near it for some time already, and we are already experiencing the effects, whatever they might be of this transition.  My reading includes some conjecture based on sophisticated calculations beyond the Mayan's keen but limited observations, that we have already passed the middle of the plane and are on into the “future” despite the apparent savant-like accuracy of the Mayan calendar.  This possibility might account for the seeming disruptions in weather, plate tectonics, increased volcanism and etc, that seem so evident now. 

Two, many of us are rankled deeply by the seeming manipulation of history by those who have had the balls to interpret it for us.  Such interpretations and translations are rife with conscious editing of what actually happened into what those who love to control things by inculcating fear have lied to us about from god knows when.  I, for one, take no comfort in these explanations and recommendations, preferring to cleave to my own counsel as well as that of others around whom I deeply trust myself, and the revelations that rise from self-inquiry. 

Three,  the apparent acceleration of “out there” phenomenon including crop circles, ufo's, abductions and the like.  Backing up to the operating conclusion that there is likely advanced life with distance travel technology, well, then there is probably also a, um, er … “federation” of allied interests out there that are paying close attention to the “experiment” unfolding here on earth.  So, why the increased “attention” and visitation phenomenae?  Well, if I were them, and I had vested interests here on earth, I would be worried that the whole shebang was about to go up in radiological smoke.  Additionally, given the chemical soup we are foisting on ourselves, the chances that we might significantly fuck up our genetics wholesale is a growing possibility.  If I, as a concerned scientist or cultural anthropologist from the Pleiades on duty behind the moon,  had a stake in the proceedings,  I would be all for manifesting crop circles and fly-overs to raise awareness here among us monkeys that there was a bigger picture, and that we were being observed and concern among the observers was rising as we marched down the trail to this lie-infested vision of inevitable Armageddon, or so it seems to me.

When I say “it seems to me,” I am reporting from the sum total of my observations, experiences, intuitions, and  logical reductions.  I do not ask that you believe me, but only that you consider as selflessly as possible what it is that I am saying.  Please ignore the bombast, pontification, and exercised certainty as it is mostly shadow working to draw attention to itself so that it might be finally saved from its darkness and included in full awareness.

Yer pal,

Michael

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Michael, there is such a keen self-awareness evident in your writing, to me it doesn't come across as pontificating and overly certain. In fact, I thoroughly enjoy the flamboyant richness you scatter like angel dust from so many different angles of this hologram we're admiring together, it inspires me to also say more (than maybe I should sometimes, hee).

Now I am very curious to hear if there are any practical consequences to holding such views as you and Will and Jayne (to an extent) have expressed here. IOW, how do you act in the world, given these perspectives? Do you navigate differently?

I appreciate these windows into your reality,

m

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Dear Mascha,

Thanks for the reassurance.  I know that this is not the case, but sometimes I do feel as if I were operating in a vacuum of sorts in the world at large.  That feeling is far less prevalent here, in the company of bright sparks like yours for instance.  Its not that many others here and elsewhere have not reached the same state of affairs with similar operating conclusions, its that I do feel that much of the time we are quibbling about the details and not seeking to grok the overall state.  Though I seem bound to engage it, the God debate to me is silly.  None other than Hans Kung, the excommunicated Catholic theologian who supported liberation theology that sprang from Jeusit priests ministering to Amazonian natives in Brazil, wrote a book entitled “Does God Exist?”  In it, he concluded that it did not matter if God existed. (though, to my ear, he successfully proved the case for existence)  “Why” he asked, “would you lead your life any differently?”  “Does not our every real yearning point in the same direction - towards peace of mind and communion?”  Unlike Kung, however, I believe that it does make a difference and that difference is centered on the utility of the precious energy and attention that is our real gift to ourselves and the world.  As long as we are side-tracked in acrimony about the existence or not of something that cannot be described with words, this precious energy will continue to leak and spoil in fruitless debate.  Empiricism is a boon when applied to the strictures of the mundane and a curse when it seeks to rule discussions of spirituality.

Mascha, you asked, “Now I am very curious to hear if there are any practical consequences to holding such views as you and Will and Jayne (to an extent) have expressed here. IOW, how do you act in the world, given these perspectives? Do you navigate differently?”

Well, for me, as I am not sure about others generally, I have become less transient and my “navigation” as you say, has turned within.  I vigorously explored the micro/macro outside cosmos  for almost 60 years before I realized that what I sought, the Kosmos, could be found only inside.  I heard this countless times before I turned-to myself from all sorts of sources.  Still, until I came to experience the imminent collapse of self through a succession of nominally “incurable” diseases, I did not know truly what it felt like to be powerless over my life.  Big pattern-recognizing brain, high-end education, middle to upper-middle class benefits and strivings and nose-rubbing encounters with great beauty, the wild side, and abject horror did not do the job - my ongoing confrontation with death and an early exit from this life, has.  I came to realize that I had been “dying to live” while all the while missing the benefits of “living to die.”

Though my academic labels are sparse, I am yet plastered with a confabulation of others.  These labels are more than superficial as they represent incorporated perspectives - most of them not obtained through study alone, but much actual experience in the world.  My appreciation of vibration for instance, does not come so much from my here-and-there studies of acoustics and crystallography so much as twenty years maintaining my balance on blood-slimed decks at sea.  The subtleties of wind, tide, current, wave and the inexplicable wonder of water are deeply imbedded in me.  I did not come to my appreciation of drama by studying it alone, though I have done a bit of that, but more by practicing it from every single aspect that the theatre has to offer.  I did not come to my appreciation of materials science just by inventing some weird stuff and trying to make a living thereby, (which I have done for twenty more years) but by sitting down at the potter's wheel in-between fishing adventures and turning out well over 100,000 pots and other ceramic doo-dads from the most marvelous and versatile stuff this planet has to offer - clay.  I did not come to appreciate the critical importance of self-inquiry and the overwhelmingly beautiful emotional reality by studying psychology.  Rather, it came to me out of desperation when I realized, fully, that I was full of shit and did not have a clue as to who or what I was.  Talk about inauthentic!  Hah!  No wonder some people still see a bit of it in me.  Jaysus, what a fool I have been. 

So, the consequences of this state of being are numerous and today, finally, I can say with some willingness and conviction that I am preparing to accept them all.  I will continue to discriminate and measure my honesty with compassion for myself and others but I intend, fully, to let my little light shine as brightly as I know that the all the gods in heaven would have me.  I am here to seek and provide encouragement for myself and others while becoming utterly transparent to the dense objections of those who are threatened by my attention when it turns to matters about which they seem to be confused.  Forgive me for my trespasses as I forgive you for yours.

In the end, my message is that it is far simpler than it seems to be - excruciatingly difficult at times, but simple in the end:  everything that we seek lies within.

yer grateful pal,
Michael

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[teeny tiny correction dear Michael – Hans Kung has not been excommunicated; he remains a priest “in good standing” although the Vat has rescinded his authority to teach “officially Roman Catholic” theology–excuse my silly editorial spasm–now back to the more exciting speculation on UFOs, consequences, & etc ….]  :-)

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Hey Michael, thankyou for sharing this lovely post with us. I really appreciate your interest and knowledge on these subjects. It seems too often to be pushed aside as taboo, leaving it desparately in need of an integral interpretation. Thanks for that!

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I always wondered why ghosts always bother people with opening windows and moving toothbrushes and appearing as cold winds, and why aliens appear as flashes of light or dots or green hazes. And why people with the “telekinesis-ability” only bother to move very small things, and only when people aren't looking.

Come on. If you were a ghost you would have more fun that annoying people by moving their cellphones or opening their windows at night. Or if you came across an advanced civilization on another planet with your spaceship, you wouldn't kind of just… fly past really, really fast and then… DISAPPEAR! What's the point in being so damn mysterious? If I discovered living creatures I would head down there to try and speak with them right away! (And just in case keep a poisonous ampule or something with me in case their consciousness was RED and tried to attack or torture me to death for being an outsider.) Or if you could do telekineses you would do some way cooler and significant stuff than moving pens away from you on a table - and share your ability with both other people and the scientific community for study!

My point is that when people from other planets (which I'm sure have existed in the past, exist right now, or will come to exist in the future) come here to us for a visit, it won't be as a mysterous and blinding purple light, mkey?

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Is, your posts are funny (if a tad, um, condescending).  I understand your points, and think a lot of silliness goes on in these areas of the “unexplained.”  Some of these so-called incidents are likely just cases of runaway imaginations – projections of fantasy on top of rationally (and conventionally) explicable events, at best.  But from what I've seen, they ALL can't be “reduced” in this way.  We can't say exactly what is happening in these different events, but I'm convinced that something significant is … something not explainable by appeals to magical thinking or superstition or hoaxes or whatever. 

Also, just to be clear:  Just because YOU wouldn't do something a certain way doesn't mean it can't happen that way.  Your argument in that regard is not rational … just a matter of preference.  Mmkay?

B.

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I have seen a UFO.  It was in Raleigh NC in 2004.  I was doing a time-lapse shot of the Raleigh skyline from a hotel balcony with a cameraman for NBC Olympics.  It was 6:30 in the morning and I was looking North-easterly and saw a blackish dot eight fingers above the horizon moving in a sine wave at incredible speed.  It covered 70 degrees of my lateral field of vision in about four seconds before disappearing behind a cloud bank. It made about four complete crests and troughs of the wave.  And of course the cameraman didn't see it nor was the camera pointed in that direction…   Classic! 

Watch a jet at distance and estimate 70 degrees of your vision and see how long it takes for the jet at probably 3 to 400 miles an hour to cover that area.  It puts the object I saw at speeds well into the thousands per hour.  I have no idea what it was but the speed and movement were fascinating…utterly remarkable.

Michael your post in particular pique my interest.  You've mentioned many things from the McKenna's to your ideas on 2012 that awakened my own views on the subject.  My own musings on this are based on some things I've studied indicating that yes we will cross the “galactic plane” which is an inertia plane acting like a fulcrum to our lever movements above and below it - so to speak.

I agree with you.  This won't precipitate an “end of time” but rather I think an experience of “no time,” a suspension of time.  We will enter a duration (?) of inertia in plane - a stillness where events “seemingly” stretch to a stop and with no events there is no way to mark time.  This could and will be frightening to those unaccustomed to meditation, contemplation, stillness, beauty, or a lack of stimulus.  We will experience the still power of the galactic fulcrum in equilibrium - I think…  Some may experience nothing out of the ordinary as this will be an inner phenomenon based on conditioning - or so I think.

The Mayans don't detail chaos as the experience will be individually subjective.  There's no way to know how the collective will respond.  I'm sure a full spectrum of unbridled fear all the way to bliss will be experienced.  Some will recoil and some will unwind and open to new perspectives.  Then again this is the future we're talking about and it may just be another day and my thoughts may just be good old fashioned magical thinking…

…But back to it, I know that I saw something.  I don't know what it was, perhaps, a natural phenomenon I'm unaware of…        Beats me, it was cool, though.

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Rod,

Thanks for the feedback esp. the piece about the fulcrum.  I had not heard it put quite that way before and can, ummmmm….. “drop” into it a bit and see how such a “pause” in “flight” very well might produce a “cessation of time” effect.

I think that this is one of those “red pill, blue pill” situations - freak out and fight or freak out and flee.  Screw the pills I say, just chop wood/carry water and be extra liberal with the affection in our lives.  Its like trying to prepare for a tidal wave that may come from any direction including up and down, outside-in. or inside-out.  This is not the first time that millenial fever has swept the land in the last 100 years or so.  This time seems a bit more genuinely pregnant though.  It sure seems capable of focusing our attention on just how small the earth is in relation to what's out there, and we just little micro-bugs scrabbling around this tiny dot so convinced that the entire thing is all about us.  The irony is that maybe it is all about us, or me, I mean.

Yer pal,
Michael

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Hi Everyone

I've followed this thread with an increasing sigh of relief.

Bruce:  The only “classical” UFO sighting I've had took place when I was a boy.  I watched a greenish point of light move across the sky, and then make a sharp right angle turn and fly away at a very high speed.  I've had some other, archetypal dream-like experiences that mirror other aspects of this phenomenon. 

I didn't know that a greenish point of light was a classic UFO sighting. I had this experience alongside my Aunt when I was about 17. It was new years eve and we'd gone back to my house to pick up some albums. We saw a very green point of light hovering over the hill against which our houses were set, it then moved away quickly. we sort of rationalised it as a firework but there was no noise, no fading and it was in the time when fireworks were ONLY used on Bonfire Night here in the UK.

A second incident happened maybe 15 years ago. We were woken in the middle of the night by a huge noise that sounded as if there was a jet plane taxi-ing or whatever on our street. It was really strange because the sound was so loud, sort of all-surrounding almost a physical sensation but it didn't hurt my ears (which usually happens for me with loud sound because of various ENT issues from childhood). I went outside to find the cats, several neighbours were out in their nightwear. We were just surrounded by this noise but there was nothing to see. The noise continued for 10-15 minutes as if directly overhead and then faded. I rang the police but couldn't get through. I rang the local paper in the morning expecting some logical explanation. They said the police had had several calls about the noise but had no idea about the cause. I was then treated to an interview by the local 'hack' who was desperately trying to get me to use the acronym UFO, which of course I resisted - what would people think?!!!!! And there the story died but to this day I have absolutely no idea what the noise was. We have no heavy industry or airfield etc in the area.

Juliee

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Great thread, Bruce & all.

Although this slightly departs from where this dialogue is at right now, I think many of you might be interested in this intelligently written article by Laura Knight Jadczyk who is a hypnotherapist and one from her husband, a physicist.

Ultra-terrestrials and 9-11

The article is complex and scientific in its approach,  will only quote the last paragraph, but it's worth reading the whole thing if you have a head for numbers etc.

We don't know - and cannot know at present - whether some super secret beam weapon was used to take down the Twin Towers on 9/11; but it is possible. And frankly, it is the one explanation that seems to cover all the anomalies. Bottom line is: Something is happening, there is a schedule, and the servants of the alien masters are pushing an agenda that few of us understand. They are trying to cement controls, to solidify their power base, because Something Wicked This Way Comes.

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“We don't know - and cannot know at present - whether some super secret beam weapon was used to take down the Twin Towers on 9/11; but it is possible.”

We don't know , and cannot know at present, whether some enormous but invisible – and mutated – alien aircrafts and glowing crystals with massive firepower, created by an ancient civilization of raving duck-billed platypuses and evil sloths, lost for centuries but now finally uncovered by a super secret excavation team venturing into the darkest depths of the Amazon, who then launched it far, far into the furthest reaches of the galaxy where it exploded into a billion peices, and then by the powers of human thought alone merged together to form an organic superweapon too frightening to imagine and too horrifying to even conceptualize by an intelligent mind, which then with an enourmous blast set off straight towards Tellus, dodging planets and gods on its way, to finally burst through the atmosphere – in a hail of rainbows – and then finally, in a mighty climatic thrust, transfigured into a robotic George W Bush II holding an american flag in one hand and Mao Zedong in the other, crying: “MAY ALL BEINGS BE FREE FROM THE OCEAN OF SAMSARA” and then crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11, in the EXACT same moment as a plane, type Boing, came from the other direction – but was of course only an optical illusion – which resulted in a worldspread wave of fear being injected into the populations of the world, leading inexorably, to eventually to a (secret) war on a global scale which benefits an ultra secret group of few very powerful men controlling everything, and especially YOU, and your family and your bank account … but it is possible.

This is all supported by modern quantum science of course. The evidence for this is simply astounding.