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by Hammer of Los » Wed Jan 15, 2014 8:20 am
by Plutonia » Wed Jan 15, 2014 2:11 pm
Hammer of Los » Wed Jan 15, 2014 5:20 am wrote:...
I read the last one.
I've dipped into them before.
Might not be too good for me.
I would love to collaborate with other RI artists.
I got a sort of story to tell.
Maybe.
But this whole, what's really going on, thing.
That get's a bit much sometimes.
...
by guruilla » Fri Jan 17, 2014 1:45 am
by guruilla » Sun Dec 27, 2015 8:52 pm
"Practically anything goes at the American Academy of Religion's annual conference...What was almost impossible to find, at this orgy of intellectual curiosities, was discussion of the paranormal: ESP, premonitions, psychic powers, alien abduction and the like. This is a conference concerned with all sorts of supernatural and metaphysical claims....So why nothing about, say, mental telepathy? That is the question posed by Jeffrey J. Kripal, a professor of religion at Rice University in Houston and a renegade advocate for including the paranormal in religious studies."
by Wombaticus Rex » Mon Dec 28, 2015 12:43 pm
Practically anything goes at the American Academy of Religion's annual conference...What was almost impossible to find, at this orgy of intellectual curiosities, was discussion of the paranormal: ESP, premonitions, psychic powers, alien abduction and the like. This is a conference concerned with all sorts of supernatural and metaphysical claims....So why nothing about, say, mental telepathy?
by guruilla » Mon Dec 28, 2015 2:35 pm
Wombaticus Rex wrote:I expect nothing of value to come from this latest book tour / podcast extravaganza,
by Wombaticus Rex » Mon Dec 28, 2015 3:54 pm
by Iamwhomiam » Mon Dec 28, 2015 3:59 pm
WRex wrote,
This reminds me of one of my favorite General Patton riffs, about how self-identified "believers" will wax eloquent about gods, angels and demons, but if you bring up the very notion that we could communicate with those entities... suddenly you're the crazy one.
I can only quote a suspect uncle: "My observations of the Universe convinces me that there are beings of intelligence and power of a far higher quality than anything we can conceive of as human; that they are not necessarily based on the cerebral and nervous structures that we know; and that the one and only chance for mankind to advance as a whole is for individuals to make contact with such Beings."
by guruilla » Mon Dec 28, 2015 5:17 pm
Wombaticus Rex » Mon Dec 28, 2015 3:54 pm wrote:I cannot help but admire his success.
by Wombaticus Rex » Mon Dec 28, 2015 5:21 pm
guruilla » Mon Dec 28, 2015 4:17 pm wrote:Wombaticus Rex » Mon Dec 28, 2015 3:54 pm wrote:I cannot help but admire his success.
It's not like he didn't have help.
by guruilla » Mon Dec 28, 2015 5:26 pm
Wombaticus Rex » Mon Dec 28, 2015 5:21 pm wrote:
The same can be said of anyone who's not worried about making their mortgage payments and property taxes this year.
Another thing they all have in common: that "help" came with some sharp little fish hooks embedded inside of it.
by guruilla » Tue Dec 29, 2015 2:15 am
“Has the Space age at least fostered—especially among young people—a sense of awe, wonder, curiosity, and impatience to know, an urge to explore and a rekindled faith in progress, the future, and human nature, or perhaps even a postmodern, gnostic religious vision conflating transhuman evolution, biological or post-biological immortality, space colonization, and contact with extraterrestrials? Those have been stock themes of science fiction authors like Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke, none of whom could be considered a crackpot. Indeed, it was Captain Jacques Cousteau, not exactly a cult leader, who took the occasion of NASA’s 1976 conference on “Why Man Explores” to echo Konstantin Tsiolkovskii’s conviction that, in conquering gravity, humanity would conquer death. Perhaps the Space Age will alter the consciousness of a critical mass of people. Perhaps, as William Sims Bainbridge eloquently contends, such a quasi-religious consciousness may give rise to a new social movement transforming the scale and priorities of the human presence in space.”
—“A Melancholic Space Age Anniversary,” Walter A. McDougall, Remembering Space Age
by guruilla » Fri Feb 19, 2016 2:56 pm
)What is most productive, IMO, is to scrutinize the information of any particular case and find the inconsistencies, failures of logic, and hidden or de-emphasized elements which suggest an alternate reading to the "super natural" (or ET) one. Looking at Strieber's body of work for several years (not counting almost twenty drinking his Kosmic Kool-Aid), and having assembled my findings into some sort of coherent order, I have proven to myself beyond reasonable doubt:
a) that Strieber is lying about certain things and concealing others;
b) that he is or has been in the past affiliated with groups and agencies with a history of mind control;
c) that his own memory and ability to determine what is real is seriously in question;
d) that his experiences are at least partially orchestrated and shaped by human agencies, as part of a larger agenda.
Simply put, my relative certainty that Strieber and other abductees are prematurely positing the presence of something nonhuman is based on discovering a mountain of evidence for human manipulations, as well as direct correlations between Strieber's experiences and his own psychological issues, patterns, and so forth (consistent with waking phantasy), all of which was so overwhelming to me that I had to relinquish my once firm persuasion that a magical, faerylike nonhuman element was indeed involved. This is the sort of evidence that is relevant here.
To be blunt, I have rarely met a firm believer/defender of the nonhuman (much less ET) hypothesis who was capable of much by way critical thinking, because every believer is also a “denialist.” I think it's the nature of the material that, once one takes it to heart, there is a certain loss of critical faculties required to maintain that belief. Maybe this is the "apocalypse of thought" which Strieber & Kripal promise in The Super Natural?
It is astonishing to me how much work has gone, over the past six or seven decades, into creating this widespread belief in nonhuman beings among us, and how the belief does seem to be powerful to generate experiences, experiences that then act as evidence for the beliefs. What interests me, then, are the ways in which the beliefs have been generated, and shaped, and the reasons for it, more even than the perceptual experiences themselves. Logically, isn't it more useful to explore causes than effects if possible? This is even found in UFO literature: how elements of the UFO experience that become standard first appear in works of fiction.
….
Regarding the “false memory implantation” issue, I am definitely on the fence about this, as the False Memory Syndrome is almost certainly a CIA-created cover to discredit any of the probably millions of MKULTRA victims who start to remember their experiences. (The FMS Foundation was created by two people being accused by their children of sexual abuse; interestingly enough FMS and the old “satanic panic” meme is being regularly, and all but exclusively, promoted by the revamped Process Church at their website, here. http://www.process.org/discept/) At the same time, it seems more than likely that unethical practitioners of hypnotic regression would be able to implant false memories if the subject is trained and employed (or simply inclined by personal obsession) to do so. I think this becomes a lot more relevant when the subject in question, such as Strieber and possibly all “alien abductees,” has already been subjected to some sort of hypnotic treatments, behavioral modifications, etc., that primed him for the experiences. Strieber claimed to have found a psychiatrist to hypnotize him (Donald Klein) who was untainted by familiarity or association with UFO abduction lore; but that doesn’t leave out the possibility he was working with (or one of) Strieber’s CIA handlers.
I think a helpful line to draw is that of the demonstrably physical abductions. I am not inclined to try and argue that faerylore and all the other ancient folklore and myths about human interactions with a nonhuman presence were part of an ancient military mind control program. I think these experiences and the beliefs they generated may well have been exploited, even co-opted, for sociopolitical ends by elites, way back in those days; but the possibility of surrogate experiences being simulated, whole cloth, as physical events is probably fairly new. It’s here that what has generally been a highly subjective, psychic sort of experience blurs into an objective, physical one, and that I think it’s possible to propose an exclusively human-group-generated event.
It may appear as if we are discussing one larger, multicultural and age-long phenomenon, but that is exactly what the human-engineered simulation depends on achieving, this seeming consistency with genuine “visitations.” It may seem like it is still a blurry line if we allow that psychic trauma combined with occult ritual, etc., etc., can bring about a materialized psychism. But a) this doesn’t actually imply autonomous beings, much less ETs; b) we don’t necessarily need to posit this as yet, if we allow a combination of psychic (nonphysical) manifestation with human deviance creating physical traces to accompany those psychic experiences being generated. I would guess is the case with Strieber, that he is triggered/manipulated to have a psychic vision – go into trance state - while being manipulated by humans, who can then leave the physical traces, such as via REE, to support and “reify” the visions.
If there are several different phenomena all being grouped together under the UFO banner, then of course it is not possible to submit them all to a single interpretation, unless that interpretation is wide enough. IMO, the area being mostly left out of the discussion is also the most central and fundamental to understanding it: that of social engineering based on a knowledge and causation of psychic fragmentation.
There seem to be too many testimonies of abduction occurring to dismiss it all as fabrication/fantasy. Since I am sure you don’t consider military experimentation to be an impossible narrative, I presume the impossible element for you is that of creating full body hallucinations via external manipulations? Whether this is done via drugs, hypnosis, technology, staged events or, as would be my guess, a combination of all three, I can agree that it is hard to imagine, but so what? I suspect that even all of this wouldn’t be enough to create such a compelling and (for millions of people) persuasive narrative, where it not for the factor of psychic fragmentation via childhood trauma that places the subjects into a permanently dissociated state, and means that essentially they do a large part of the “fabrication” themselves—and maybe even the manifestation?
Impossible isn’t personally a word I use. There’s nothing impossible about ETs coming down to experiment on us, it’s just that a) the evidence doesn’t support this hypothesis and b) there is a lot of evidence that supports a very different one, including evidence to suggest that the ET/alien/interdimensional hypothesis has been manufactured, and exactly (or roughly) to what ends.
Here's a good old (1999) link that is always worth drawing back up, IMO:At this session, Strieber spoke extensively of the Secret
Government within our government.
He began by chronicling his personal experience of the CIA.
It was an organization that he hated. "I know a lot about the
CIA," he declared. "I know a lot of people in the CIA and I've
been very close to the CIA at certain times in my life."
But, he went on, "I don't like the CIA. I think it's a
disaster, a national catastrophe of the first order, a SATANIC
monstrosity ..."
Continuing: Then Strieber made the startling statement that,
for some at the conference, seemed to undermine the authenticity
of the 'Secret School' and open the discussion out to very
different vistas.
"In my childhood," he said quietly, " I was tested at a
university in San Antonio, in about 1954-55, for a long time,
with a lot of tests - this was the same time I was having my
encounters as a child. Intelligence tests, I guess they were; I
don't remember them very clearly. My brother was subjected when
he was the same age to the same tests at the same place by the
same doctor. We were never told what these tests were about.
We were never told by our parents why it was done."
"One of the things that I have been quietly researching over
the past few years is CIA mind control activities that took
place back in the 50s, using drugs, hypnosis, and involving
children especially bright kids. Because I fear that I may have
been part of that ... I want to find out all about it. I want to
understand it more."
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by lunarmoth » Tue Feb 23, 2016 10:46 am
by tapitsbo » Fri Feb 26, 2016 3:16 pm
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