The God copout

In my last post, I mentioned the idea of a powerful collective unconscious that might somehow manifest phenomena such as UFOs. But I also said I thought this was kind of a copout. Having thought a little more about it, I wanted to explain why feel that way.

In the prescientific era, people had a ready explanation for any phenomenon they didn't understand: "God did it." (Or "the gods did it.") Thunder during a storm? It was the growling rage of a deity. A rainbow after a storm? God put it there as a sign. Crop failures, pestilence, plague? God was punishing sinners or teaching a painful lesson.

From a certain perspective, this makes sense. God is presumed to have infinite powers; he can accomplish anything; and he is the ultimate creative power behind everything that exists. Therefore it's perfectly logical to credit him (or blame him) for anything that happens that we don't understand.

The problem with this approach is that it doesn't get us very far. We never actually learn what causes thunder, rainbows, crop failures, pestilence, and plague. The only way to get real answers is to look for a clearly understandable mechanism – discharges of static electricity; the prismatic effects of water vapor in the air; boll weevils and other parasites; viruses and bacteria; unsanitary conditions, etc. As long as we are content to attribute everything that happens to the inscrutable will of an infinitely powerful and impossibly remote abstraction, we're not going to make much practical progress. The scientific era took off when people stopped being satisfied with the explanation "God did it."

The thing that worries me is that the collective unconscious is quite a bit like God. It is amorphous, hard to define, impossible to see, not amenable to proof, and credited with pretty much any kind of power necessary to accomplish anything we wish to attribute to it. UFOs? Manifestations of the collective unconscious. Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, the Mothman? Manifestations of the collective unconscious. Mediumistic communications, automatic writing, ectoplasmic materializations, poltergeist activity, apparitions, you name it … Manifestations of the collective unconscious.

It's a catchall explanation that actually explains nothing. Moreover, it assumes the existence of a collective unconscious that has powers far beyond anything we ordinarily observe in our own lives. For all the talk about manifesting success in love or finance by mastering the subconscious mind, most people still find love and money the old-fashioned way – by  taking concrete steps to obtain it.

The collective unconscious, much like God, is so ineffable, so all-encompassing, so unapproachable, that no possible mechanism can be imagined by which its actions are carried out. Nobody asks, "Just how exactly did God do it?" The assumption is he can do anything he wants, simply by willing it to be so. Much the same assumption seems to be made about the collective unconscious – that it can shape and mold the world however it wishes.

This requires the world to be pretty malleable, which is not at all how we experience it. In our ordinary experience, the world seems frustratingly solid. We can bang our head against the wall, but the wall stubbornly refuses to dissolve. We can strive to materialize fresh water in the desert, but unless we find an oasis, we'll continue dying of thirst. We can wish for a miracle, but miracles are rare.

We're told, through mediums, that the next plane of existence offers an environment that is considerably more malleable than our present one. Summerland is supposed to be a realm in which mental action largely replaces physical labor, a place where just imagining something is enough to make it so. Maybe so. But the point of this teaching is precisely that Summerland is significantly different from our current experience. It is not just a continuation of what we already know; it's a new kind of experience. If our world were easily remade by pure mental action, whether individual or collective, it would probably be a lot more like Summerland and a lot less like the mess that it is.

So even though the hypothesis of a collective unconscious that manifests UFO phenomena in symbolic and sometimes absurd, dreamlike terms is intriguing, I'm inclined to reject it. I'm not sure it really gets us anywhere. Of course, I'm not sure what other hypothesis works, either. As Yul Brynner might say, "It's a puzzlement."

Comments

[Michael D]

I don't remember if you have taken this approach before:

To me the overarching principle in this type of phenomena is that people's descriptions are constrained by their previous knowledge and vocabulary. They can't name or explain things they don't know about, so they look for the nearest similar thing they do know about and try to make the new instance fit withing that category.

This is what gives us airships that look like ships, flying "saucers", and even God imaged as a burning bush.

How would you describe a radio if one popped up in front of you in 1800? Certainly not with any degree of relevance regarding its function.

[jack]

Good post Michael,

it seems like "Super Psi" or the "Collective Unconscious" is the subliminal culprit in all these schemes. It seems to be the simplest solution. Not at all sure I agree.

[Leo MacDonald]

I am not impressed one bit for the evidence for UFO'S that is why I never discuss it. Is there intelligent life somewhere's else there is probably is. I see no need to link afterlife phenomenon with UFO phenomenon. They are very far apart.

[Bill Ingle]

I much prefer the idea of an all encompassing underlying being of consciousness to a "collective unconscious" or the sort of masculine gods of yore that were magnified projections of human attributes.

This may be called "All," The One," All That Is, etc.

This is not some Santa Clause-like being that knows (or cares) when you've been good or bad, or a being that punishes the wicked and rewards the righteous. It does not cast thunderbolts, smites no one, does none of that.

"All That Is" suggests there is nothing and no one that is not part of it, not connected to it.

That includes us, but how, specifically, are we connected to All That Is?

This connection could not be physical in nature, like a cellular backhaul network that could be monitored by physical devices -- so no one could prove either the existence of a personal connection to All That Is or the existence of All That Is, period, at least not by any physical means.

Knowing is of course different from "proving," but in this case necessarily subjective*.

I would suggest that the connection is associated both with "greater regions of self" (my term) and the energy centers known as "chakras," specifically the so called "crown chakra" found at the top of our heads.

Chakras and greater regions of self -- with All That Is being the greatest region of self, our usual conscious personalities or "outer egos" being at the other end -- can be directly experienced but doing this typically requires some persistence in terms of methods or techniques and some kind of effective knowledge regarding all of this.

Unfortunately, there are no end of traditions, teachers, alleged masters, gurus, and so on when it comes to seeking and finding effective knowledge.

There is no universal agreement about any of this -- we are left to our own seeking, our own explorations, yet I believe we all have the relevant knowledge -- it exists; we merely must access and utilize it.

I have my own techniques but I don't claim to be a master, that what I believe is superior to what anyone else might believe, but I do periodically sit in meditation with a variety of folks holding a variety of beliefs and share both my Seth-inspired "map" of how we are connected to All That Is and the techniques I use to access that connection, which boil down to focusing on and/or feeling that connection in a mind quieted condition.

Doing this has gradually changed me in a number of ways and I continue to pursue this.

Years ago I was intrigued with a prediction made in _Seth Speaks_ regarding certain methods that would spread around the planet by 2075, methods that would enable the attainment of "intimate contact" with one's "soul or entity." (One effect would be the destruction of Christian church organizations.)

Seth also laid out a basic description of regions of self that goes from "outer personality" through "inner self" then "soul or entity" to All That Is, likening the inner self to a "messenger" between outer personality and entity, the entity to a "mediator" between All That is and inner self. He also stressed that there is no place where one of these regions of self ends, another begins.

Seth did _not_ describe these future methods, however, only the results. A strong experience involving my crown chakra as I briefly into contact with my own entity (also called "oversoul" and "greater self" by various folks) -- this is long story and I've already written too much here -- led me down this path, fed my interest in tinkering with homemade methods. Possibly, similar results could be achieved by suggestion and hypnosis.

But Michael's post, traced backwards, deals with a theory underlying UFOs and their predecessors that in the first post also got into the nature of physical reality, subjective experience vs. an objective reality, etc.

Can I make a plausible connection between UFOs and All That Is?

That's tough. A big problem is that I know of no way to summon a UFO (although see some of Dr. Steven Greer's Sirius Disclosure YouTube videos, especially those concerning his workshops).

If there were an easy way to do this, I could sit with others in a mind quieted or meditative state. We'd summon a UFO and do our best to fathom the situation, possibly communicating with any beings associated with it.

Those beings would of course be connected with All That Is as much as anything or anyone else is; possibly, too, they would have a much greater knowledge of the nature of being and reality -- physical and non-physical.

Even if there were some known way to summon a UFO, I would probably be hesitant to conduct such an experiment -- I'm a little leery of having a direct encounter.

[Michael Prescott]

Leo wrote, "I am not impressed one bit for the evidence for UFOs."

I used to think the whole thing might be bunk, but I’ve read a little bit more since then. The book I referenced in a previous post, "UFOs: Pilots, Generals, and Government Officials Go On the Record," by Leslie Kean, provides some pretty amazing cases that are awfully hard to dismiss. These are cases where the UFO is tracked simultaneously on ground radar and the radar of military aircraft, while being visually observed by pilots and military personnel on the ground. The pilots and other personnel have gone public, so it’s not as if this is an urban legend with no clear source.

Many of the cases presented by Jacques Vallee might be bunk — he deliberately focused on the most far-out examples, which are seldom the best attested. But I don’t think there can be much doubt that unknown aerial phenomena are frequently observed, and that these phenomena give every indication of being physically real objects. (Sometimes they leave landing marks and a residue of radiation — as seen and measured by military personnel, per Kean's book.)

[Eric Newhill]

"I used to think the whole thing might be bunk, but I’ve read a little bit more since then. The book I referenced in a previous post, "UFOs: Pilots, Generals, and Government Officials Go On the Record," by Leslie Kean, provides some pretty amazing cases that are awfully hard to dismiss. These are cases where the UFO is tracked simultaneously on ground radar and the radar of military aircraft, while being visually observed by pilots and military personnel on the ground. The pilots and other personnel have gone public, so it’s not as if this is an urban legend with no clear source. " - Michael

Same here. I believe in the afterlife, OBEs , PK and psi partly because I have direct experiences (ADCs with regards to the afterlife) and partly because of the literature and research. Yet, if not for some personal experience, I'd probably still be a fence sitter.

I have never seen a UFO, but the military reports are very convincing. I used to know a pilot that saw (and reported) a UFO back in the 80s. He was totally convinced, off the record, it was a nuts and bolts alien space craft. These reports are , as you say, hard to dismiss.

I wonder, though, if the military reports are one class of phenomena whereas the other stuff, like the abductions and Joe Six-Pack's report from out on a dirt road in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere are of a another class.

The military reports (as well as commercial pilot reports) have confirming material evidence like radar and cameras, whereas the Joe Six-Pack sightings not so much, AFAIK.

I'm pondering if the military reports haven't biased Joe's reports somewhat. Joe sees something (in an altered state?) and then fills in the picture with what honestly makes sense, a UFO image that's in the back of his mind from the military reports he's heard about.

Similarly, someone experiences sleep paralysis, an OBE, maybe a lucid dream and then, subconsciously trying to explain the experience, draws upon the reports of UFOs as that explanation. The more this explanation gets used the more likely it is used to be again (via both normal information sharing and psychic/morphic field type mechanisms?)

Reading the military reports, I'm not seeing a lot of the related effects (like a buzzing sensation, etc) that Vallee describes as being common. I think he may have lumped together thing that shouldn't be.

[Leo MacDonald]

Hi Michael,

True there is some anecdotal evidence for UFO's but that's really it compared to the very strong scientific evidence for existence of an afterlife and psi phenomenon.

[Paul]

With regard to evidence for any phenomena, I guess our opinion is shaped largely by what we’ve read or experienced ourselves. It’s very hard to dismiss all the evidence for UFOs - Leslie Kean’s book, as MP suggested, is pretty persuasive in my views.

[Kamo]

http://www.consciousnessexplained.com

https://www.google.nl/amp/s/brainworldmagazine.com/brain-operating-system-user-manual-mind/amp/

https://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/10/prweb11255364.

https://www.amazon.com/Mechanisms-Mind-Parag-Jasani/dp/1684667798

Parag Jasani developed a model that fully explains consciousness. Materialists should be happy. We can all go home now and let go of silly spiritual myths and quantum woo! And we can forget about the afterlife, NDEs, OBEs, and other experiences.
We can also forget about afterlife evidence books!
This one person and his DOS model proves that mind emerged from the brain.
And he’s the only one to ever achieve this evidence.

He even has a $1,000 challenge to falsify his claim on consciousness, and so far, nobody has taken the challenge. ( sounds like the million dollar Randi challenge )

NOT.

A desperate hardcore materialist would readily accept and cling to this ( they already are ). Oh well. Anything that keeps the materialist fantasy alive and lets them sleep at night, I guess.
But I occasionally read his posts for laughs.

[Matt Rouge]

Great post, Michael.

I agree: "God of the gaps," "collective unconscious" of the gaps.

I think the bit of explanatory power that *does* exist in attributing UFO phenomena to the collective unconscious is the understanding (if it is in fact correct) that the phenomena are not wholly external and physical but have a mental component.

It is this dual mental/physical aspect of the phenomena that is truly confusing and calls us to go beyond that dichotomy.

[Bill Ingle]

Anyone who doesn't believe that Unidentified Flying Objects exist can watch this 2001 Conference:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DrcG7VGgQU

Are the witnesses testifying at the conference describing emanations from the "collective unconscious?"

I seriously doubt it ("unconscious?") but knowing and understanding what the witnesses describe is another matter. There is no generally accepted consensus. If any person or government has "captured" a UFO, they've kept this under wraps.

Then there is a lot of literature regarding "abductees" and strange experiences associated with unidentified flying objects -- books by Vallee, John Mack, and many others.

This is anecdotal, unlike a number of situations in the above conference, where the witnesses also provided what passes for physical evidence like radar records, photographs, etc., with a few exceptions involving such things as traces of radioactivity found at sites where abductions were reported.

Odd lapses in memory, etc., noted by Michael in Vallee's books are a significant part of this.

So, again as already posted, this connects one aspect of UFOs with the worlds of "psi," OOBE, dreams, trance states, consciousness, etc., including connections with older mysterious "fringe" stuff going back prior to the Industrial Revolution.

(Anyone who doesn't believe that "psi" exists, who believes that OOBEs are hallucinations, etc., at a minimum lacks experience and likely holds impenetrable beliefs. Their mind is closed to no end of supportive information and actual scientific research, even that conducted by the U.S. government.)

What does all of this add up to?

I'd suggest it says that "officially" our civilization knows next to nothing about the nature of self, the nature of reality, the nature of consciousness, etc.

We belong to a backwards, ignorant, primitive (and murderous, and polluting, etc., etc.) civilization.

Is there anything we can do about this? Will the situation change? Is it already changing?

Can we figure all of this out by reading endless books and websites, viewing on-line video, discussing and pondering it all?

Probably not, but attempting to do so can be fun.

[Amos Oliver Doyle]

It has been said that "God is closer than our very breath." One has to admit that that is pretty close! Of course that might be possible if each and every conscious living thing were actually a small part of God, kind of like neurons, axons or dendrites in a colossal brain; a consciousness, a spark of God if you will, communicating with each other across synapses by way of neurotransmitters of touch, speech, writing and psi. And that colossal brain is what might be called the 'collective consciousness', a collection of all of the living consciousnesses acting in concert at times but not really a 'collective un-conscious'. That could be what has been, down through the ages called "God", symbolically represented by Michelangelo as an old man with a beard as great thinkers of the time tried to understand a concept of God which was beyond their ability to understand.

I would like to make a distinction between being conscious, which is an awareness in a living being of what is going on in the local environment and a consciousness, which is the thing that may be aware of the local environment but may also be aware of an internal or other-worldly environment in dreams or out-of-body experiences. The dictionary doesn't want to define consciousness as a 'thing' but prefers to define it as a "state of being", I think because something spiritual would have to be acknowledged.

With the recent blaze at Notre Dame in Paris France I have wondered if that may be an example of an effect of the collective consciousness (collective unconscious). As greater and greater numbers of people in France reject Christianity and with the influx of people of other religious beliefs, could it be that there has been an over-flowing of the collective consciousness in France to a point which has manifested itself in the destruction of perhaps the most representative icon of Christianity in France.

I myself at one time hid a picture of Marilyn Monroe under a wall-calendar in my office. It hung there for a year or two until I eventually manifested and married a young blond actress, though not exactly like Marilyn Monroe she was similar as a stereotype of---well, you know. - AOD

[Steven Smith]

One of my pet ideas is that nobody has ever critically examined all evidence for the religions of the world and then made a decision to pick one. We just don't develop beliefs that way. What we all want is some kind of experience beyond our mundane existence, right? Something that makes us feel in awe of something bigger than ourselves.
Well, the UFO/Aliens/faerie/Bigfoot anomalous experience has similar effect as religious experiences (and NDEs) do in that they form our view of the larger reality we inhabit. So, my point is that I've personally had experiences both religious and of the Fortean (for lack of a better term) type. The common theme of both is that the materialist view does not adequately explain these experiences, or even the normal experience of everyday consciousness. Similarly, we can't assert that we know anything definite about some collective unconsciousness explaining everything not easily explained. The more you know, the more you know you don't know.

[Bruce L Siegel]

AOD said:

It has been said that "God is closer than our very breath."

I like this, Amos. Particularly in response to Michael’s:

“As long as we are content to attribute everything that happens to the inscrutable will of an infinitely powerful and impossibly remote abstraction.”

To those who have an NDE or other spiritually transformative experience, God is hardly a remote abstraction!

[IdPnSD]

It is the global destiny of the universe that makes things to happen, it is neither God, nor our science theories. Destiny means - everything is predefined and precisely predictable (before it happens) by any high level yogi with the power of third eye. Destiny also means if something is not written in your destiny it will not happen, no matter how hard you try. Similarly, if it is written it will always happen, only at the appropriate time and place. There is an example of a yogi creating a palace in Himalayas, just by thinking about it, to initiate his student to yoga meditation, and then made the palace vanish. You and I cannot do that, no matter how hard we bang our heads on the wall.

But there is no rational explanation of anything, other than the destiny theory. Do we know how a medicine works and cures a disease? No, we do not. Because we know that a placebo also cures that same disease. Do we know how gravity works? No, we do not know, because we have seen people can levitate, walk, float in air and above the ground. Therefore we are as ignorant now as we were million years back when we were in pre-scientific era. For more on science, pre and post, take a look at https://www.academia.edu/38590496/A_COMPARISON_OF_MODERN_SCIENCE_WITH_VEDIC_SCIENCE

[Michael Prescott]

//There is an example of a yogi creating a palace in Himalayas, just by thinking about it, to initiate his student to yoga meditation, and then made the palace vanish. You and I cannot do that, no matter how hard we bang our heads on the wall.//

I don’t believe the yogi did it, either. It’s a story.

//But there is no rational explanation of anything, other than the destiny theory.//

What you’ve posited isn’t a theory or an explanation (rational or otherwise). It has no content and explains nothing.

[Amos Oliver Doyle]

Bruce,
I took a look at your web site and read your November 7, 2018 post “The Big Picture”. I recommend it to anyone interested in ‘the big picture’. I resonate with much of it. Congratulations Bruce. When is your next book coming out? - AOD

[IdPnSD]

Michael Prescott: Thank you for accepting my comments. More details of yogic power and destiny theory can be found in the article given in my first post. That article has a list of original references. Anyone interested in the authenticity of the subjects should consult them for verification. The blog site at https://theoryofsouls.wordpress.com/ is a 300-page free book on the above subjects.

[Bruce L Siegel]

Amos, thanks for your kind words. I'm not surprised you like my post— the first paragraph of your comment yesterday speaks to the same Perennial Philosophy that has been close to my heart for decades.

To answer your question, for a variety of reasons, I'm no longer writing that "next book." But I'm delighted you would like to see one.

[Leo MacDonald]

Not going to say there is no evidence for UFO's but is their concrete evidence of little green men called aliens. I do think there is other life out there there is this massive multiverse. Why wouldn't there not be?. I just don't think we should mash Ufo's up with the evidence for the afterlife the same way we would with any other phenomenon. Also, if their is an afterlife it has massive fundamental importance to all living things on this planet. Other life existing somewhere's close by would not be nearly as shocking or revolutionary as the discovery of an afterlife.

[Roger Knights]

MP: "So even though the hypothesis of a collective unconscious that manifests UFO phenomena in symbolic and sometimes absurd, dreamlike terms is intriguing, I'm inclined to reject it. I'm not sure it really gets us anywhere. Of course, I'm not sure what other hypothesis works, either. As Yul Brynner might say, "It's a puzzlement.""

Here's a quote (which I posted here a few days ago) that could provide a mechanism:
------------

"Upstairs in his Evanston, Illinois home, Dr. J. Allen Hynek leaned back in his office chair, puffed on his pipe and explained his thinking on the theoretical presence of UFOs in our world to Quinlan.

Between the nucleus of the atom and the outside electrons there is relatively as much space as between the sun and the planets. There is a lot of space in matter. Matter is almost a vacuum really.
There could be interlocking universes. The cultists have been saying that for centuries but that’s not science.
If I had to be pressed to the wall for a hypothesis I would say we live in a multi-dimensional spacetime continuum and the typical world we see around us represents a cross-section through that.
Look at the evidence that these things are reported to do. They appear very suddenly and disappear very suddenly. The question is where are they right now? Where is this thing that visited these two in Mississippi [Pascagoula Abduction] right now physically?
Time and again I’ve had reports of where a sort of fuzzy cloud appears around them and then the whole cloud disappears. Almost like ectoplasm disappearing into another dimension.
They violate gravity. They take off with enormous acceleration without any sonic boom. A physical object can’t do that. They make right angle turns. Any object with appreciable mass can’t do that.
They behave more like holographic images, like projections, more than physical things. Yet they produce real physical effects, stop cars, frighten animals, break branches, leave marks on the ground, and in that sense they are almost like poltergeist phenomena. Nobody knows what they are but they’re pretty well documented.
That is why I say think the UFO phenomenon is a signal of another domain of nature that we haven’t explored yet.
Upstairs in his Evanston, Illinois home, Dr. J. Allen Hynek leaned back in his office chair, puffed on his pipe and explained his thinking on the theoretical presence of UFOs in our world to Quinlan.

Between the nucleus of the atom and the outside electrons there is relatively as much space as between the sun and the planets. There is a lot of space in matter. Matter is almost a vacuum really.
There could be interlocking universes. The cultists have been saying that for centuries but that’s not science.
If I had to be pressed to the wall for a hypothesis I would say we live in a multi-dimensional spacetime continuum and the typical world we see around us represents a cross-section through that.
Look at the evidence that these things are reported to do. They appear very suddenly and disappear very suddenly. The question is where are they right now? Where is this thing that visited these two in Mississippi [Pascagoula Abduction] right now physically?
Time and again I’ve had reports of where a sort of fuzzy cloud appears around them and then the whole cloud disappears. Almost like ectoplasm disappearing into another dimension.
They violate gravity. They take off with enormous acceleration without any sonic boom. A physical object can’t do that. They make right angle turns. Any object with appreciable mass can’t do that.
They behave more like holographic images, like projections, more than physical things. Yet they produce real physical effects, stop cars, frighten animals, break branches, leave marks on the ground, and in that sense they are almost like poltergeist phenomena. Nobody knows what they are but they’re pretty well documented.
That is why I say think the UFO phenomenon is a signal of another domain of nature that we haven’t explored yet."

[Art]

A long time ago (~Y2K), when I first started thinking and reading about life after death stuff, I read a book written by Dr. Fred Alan Wolf PhD called "The Spiritual Universe." Wolf was/is a physicist. I remember about halfway through reading the book a statement that said something to the effect that "thoughts are things" and something to the effect that matter is an epiphenomena of consciousness, and consciousness is primary and matter is secondary.

Most recently I read something to the effect that very early on in the study of quantum physics that they figured out there was a connection between consciousness and quantum physics. It had to do with the double slit experiment and when it was not being watched the photons appeared as waves and when someone was watching it the photons appeared as particles. Somehow the photons knew if they were being watched or not.

Quite often I'll be thinking about someone and they will appear in my life, even people I haven't thought about in a long time. It's very interesting but I'm not sure how it happens? A thought will cross my mind and then I'll see that person quite soon afterward. Did I conjure up that person or did my brain know beforehand that the person was fixing to appear? Maybe it was predestined to happen all along?

[Michael Prescott]

That’s a good quote, Roger. It’s certainly a possible explanation — though how much it actually explains is open to debate.

Art, I think the situation with photons is a little more complicated, since their location can be specified by their interaction with other particles, whether observed by consciousness or not. At least, this is the conventional wisdom, although of course it’s impossible to remove consciousness from the equation because, sans consciousness, whatever is happening would be unknown to any observer. So at some point consciousness has to enter the picture, and a determined proponent of the "thoughts are things" school can always say that the wave function collapses only at that moment and not earlier. This starts to sound like special pleading to me.

Individual photons and other quantum entities are notoriously hard to pin down, but when we scale up to the level of everyday objects like tables and chairs, they exhibit reassuring stability. The usual explanation is that while any individual particle may occupy a range of potential positions, the vast cloud of particles making up a macroscopic object will all occupy roughly the same range, and any outliers will be negated as essentially rounding errors. So the total assemblage of particles, as a whole, will occupy a definite, predictable region of space.

In other words, extrapolating from the quantum realm to the macro realm is probably invalid, though it is a pretty common tactic among New Age writers.

[Bill Ingle]

I watched the entire 2001 National Press Club UFO conference put on by Dr. Steven Greer again, after posting the link above.

Here it is again:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DrcG7VGgQU

It took place on May 9 and generated a lot of attention at the time but within a few months was completely overshadowed by the events of 9/11.

It includes a number of military witnesses; some speak of crashed vehicles and bodies; one of many types of humanoid "aliens" -- 57, I believe, like the 57 varieties of pickles once offered by Heinz -- in addition to several variations of the usual "grays."

Per many of these witnesses, all of this was classified, with compartmentalized security, and misinformation and "psyop" campaigns, not a surprise to anyone who has ever delved into "national security" or studied the growth of the military industrial complex, the related rise of intelligence agencies (with their clandestine branches) since WWII, etc.

It's easy to imagine this happening during the Cold War and the "Space Race," while WWII's Manhattan Project is one prime example of a genuine need for secrecy -- anything remotely connected to military technology would have been subject to the same or similiar security measures afterwards.

So it's easy to imagine that such secrecy never ended, even with the fall of the USSR; it was prevalent even in the PSI area per the book I mentioned above, _Phenomena_.

But 57 variations of humanoid "aliens?"

This reminded me of the idea that, if there is any accuracy to that number, there's no reason to assume that so many beings came from far away, physically, somehow surviving trips of impossibly great distances and time.

Some folks assume this is the case and maybe some in the military made the same assumption -- from that perspective, the crafts must use some technology that somehow drastically shortens the time required (but why go to so much trouble to visit our planet and its less than noble inhabitant?).

Maybe some unknown % of sightings -- and recovered vessels -- are of that nature, assuming the witnesses weren't lying or crazy.

Much more likely to me, however, is that they came from other systems of reality -- not so "far away" at all.

This brings the subject much closer to Michael's initial post and no "collective unconscious" need be brought in as an explanation.

Here, too, is something I can connect with my own experience, although there is no easy way I could replicate that, and no way I could prove its reality to anyone.

It's close to Seth's "probable realities."

That is a topic I first read about in 1982, as I read a number of the books Seth dictated that year, but Seth embedded exercises in his books to enable his readers to validate the material, and I found one particular exercise (the Preliminary Probable Self exercise found in _The "Unknown" Reality -- Volume One of a Seth Book_) particularly effective (and consciousness altering -- the Seth material ceased to be "very interesting but sci-fi like" for me at that point).

Years later, I met other formerly solitary Seth readers thanks to the early Internet and in time belonged to small groups that engaged in experimental conscious altering activities, on-line and in-person.

In 2000, I had a very strong experience while "meeting up" with such a group, one that connects very closely with the topic at hand.

Describing the circumstances and background might take the equivalent of the chapter in a book and are certainly too complex and long to fully relate here, but the short version is that I found myself traveling -- mentally, my body was seated in a circle with others in the living room of a house in Georgia -- through something akin to one of those "wormholes" in StarTrek episodes.

The sides of this tunnel or wormhole that flashed by -- this was happening at high velocity -- were different probable realities, dimensions, reality systems, or whatever anyone might choose to call them.

I knew from previous experience (not nearly as intense previous experience) that I had to focus on one thought for this to stop, and for me to enter one particular reality system, and did so, suddenly finding myself high above another version of earth and Georgia, looking down. There were no signs whatsoever of any human habitation; all was green -- trees and vegetation only.

The experience put me into an altered state, one that, like a previous but different experience, lasted for several days and included both telepathic and precognition experiences.

I believe this _might_ be replicated, but it required two different groups (a small group of six that was part of a second and larger group) engaging in two different "exercises" hours apart in the same physical location. What happened was a merging of the two exercises. (What I experienced wasn't planned and came as a complete surprise or shock.)

Setting this up would require travel and might take as long as a week to get everyone up to speed, while those involved in 2000 were some of the most intrepid -- in terms of engaging in experimental consciousness altering activities -- on-line Seth readers of the day, many of them very "psychic" for those who believe in such things. I don't know whether this would work or not with just anyone; probably not.

No matter -- and I expect nearly everyone reading this is dismissing my entire comment, doubting that I actually experienced anything like this.

Still -- If I could experience this once, in 2000, it's very easy for me to imagine some group or society "somewhere" getting very skilled and knowledgeable about such areas and, perhaps over a long time, developing the expertise necessary to visit some other place, such as our earth -- but from some "nearby" dimension or reality system, not some very distant -- physically -- star system.

Maybe they would combine this with that which we think of as "technology" in some way I have no way of knowing or understanding. This could include some kind of vessel or craft.

Maybe a highly developed version of traversing dimensions or reality systems would include creating the _appearance_ of some kind of vessel, something that people here might see and think of as a "flying saucer" or equivalent as the travelers emerged into our reality system.

[Roger Knights]

Linda Moulton Howe and George Knapp were on Coast to Coast AM last night and she told of recovered alleged saucer material that consists of 50 thin layers of supposedly unnamable and incompatible materials, including bismuth, which has been analyzed repeatedly at reputable labs and is still unexplained and not-copyable after 30 years.

She speculated that somehow this material could be vibrated in a certain way that would allow it to enter a different multverse and thence travel instantly to any spot in our universe.