Will the Real Whitley Strieber Please Stand Up?

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Re: Will the Real Whitley Strieber Please Stand Up?

Postby Hammer of Los » Wed Jan 15, 2014 8:20 am

...
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.
...
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Re: Will the Real Whitley Strieber Please Stand Up?

Postby Plutonia » Wed Jan 15, 2014 2:11 pm

Hi Hol. It's definitely trigger-y material, so better to be cautious than not.

But I'm sorry that you got the impression that is just a "what's really going on" narrative because I think it's much more than that.

But, one revelation of "what's really going on" that would be of particular interest you (I think) is that Strieber was hanging out with Martin Sharp, Eric Clapton and the OZ crew at the Pheasantry in 1968, right at the center of the Swinging London scene (!!!) improbable as that seems.

As to Rigger art projects, crucialfictions.com is meant to be an art installation and I think that form has a load of potential, particularly for information-dense conceptual pieces of the paranoid-ly aware variety. I'd be happy to help put another one together - perhaps for your story HoL?



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.
...
[the British] government always kept a kind of standing army of news writers who without any regard to truth, or to what should be like truth, invented & put into the papers whatever might serve the minister

T Jefferson,
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Re: Will the Real Whitley Strieber Please Stand Up?

Postby guruilla » Fri Jan 17, 2014 1:45 am

So this just showed up on my radar: http://disinfo.com/2014/01/can-childhoo ... ghtenment/ (Can Childhood Trauma Fuel Enlightenment?)
It is a lot easier to fool people than show them how they have been fooled.
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Re: Will the Real Whitley Strieber Please Stand Up?

Postby guruilla » Sun Dec 27, 2015 8:52 pm

The Kripal-Strieber double act is now official.

Image

Plugs from Jocelyn Godwin, Gary Lachman, Dean Radin, Jacques Vallee, and the NY Times. who write:
"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."


:deadhorse:
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Re: Will the Real Whitley Strieber Please Stand Up?

Postby 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?


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."

I expect nothing of value to come from this latest book tour / podcast extravaganza, but I've been called a cynic before.
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Re: Will the Real Whitley Strieber Please Stand Up?

Postby 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,

Agreed. But it does fire the old crusader in me. Maybe time to roll out Prisoner of Infinity part deux?

That's a McGregor Mathers quote, right?

What struck me about the NYT blurb was how they leave out Strieber entirely, and focus on the "legitimatizer."
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Re: Will the Real Whitley Strieber Please Stand Up?

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Mon Dec 28, 2015 3:54 pm

Crowley, alas.

Embedding the tatters of parapsychology into the Religious Studies silo is a sly bit of academic legerdemain. I kind of like that, cynical as it is. (What is Ramon Watkins up to these days? He deserves some grant money.)

Looks like your boy has a lot of development deals both in motion and in the the works, promising to weave his web through another generation of media consumers whether he lives to see them into fruition or not.

I cannot help but admire his success.
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Re: Will the Real Whitley Strieber Please Stand Up?

Postby 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.


Not always seen as crazy, unfortunately, but all too often seen by judgmental worshipers as having been possessed by demons, and therefore worthy of having the Hell beat out of them. Worshipers acting with purity of spirit in the name of and with the blessings of the Almighty. Let us Prey.

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."


Well, they'd really have to be a very loving species to intercede with us as we are, so I hope your uncle means this, that they soon interact with us to bring about a more peaceful, sharing and caring earthly existence, but if they are of the "We help those who help themselves" type, we're doomed.
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Re: Will the Real Whitley Strieber Please Stand Up?

Postby 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.

It's not like he didn't have help.
It is a lot easier to fool people than show them how they have been fooled.
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Re: Will the Real Whitley Strieber Please Stand Up?

Postby 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.


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.
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Re: Will the Real Whitley Strieber Please Stand Up?

Postby 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.

And in some cases, bio-electrical implants.
It is a lot easier to fool people than show them how they have been fooled.
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Re: Will the Real Whitley Strieber Please Stand Up?

Postby 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
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Re: Will the Real Whitley Strieber Please Stand Up?

Postby guruilla » Fri Feb 19, 2016 2:56 pm

Update: Reblogging part one of Prisoner of Infinity as a warm-up for Part Two, which will begin in March. Podcasting also about it, if anyone would like to participate (Smiles), let me know. This is somewhat deliberately timed with the release of Strieber & Kripal's The Super Natural, which I hope to destroy review at Reality Sandwich (tho I have a feeling they will pass, since Kripal and Mitch Horowitz both write there... :whisper: )

There's a fairly productive discussion at the Paracast forum (latest post here), which just interviewed Strieber. Surprise surprise, it has now veered into false memory syndrome and high-status pedophiles. Who, me?

Here are a few bits on UFOs just so it's on file over here:

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."

https://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@lists ... 26368.html

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Re: Will the Real Whitley Strieber Please Stand Up?

Postby lunarmoth » Tue Feb 23, 2016 10:46 am

I'm dying to share this with someone, anyone: http://justpaste.it/USNAVYSPECIALOPS
It covers just about everything, from ETs to sex to Lucifer. The author is allegedly an insider to these USNAVYSPECIALOPS. The relevant quote:

"I will put the subject of Extraterrestrials to rest right now. There are real ET’s, interdimensional beings, celestial beings and demons. Very few humans know anything about this. However, Greys, Reptilians and Nordics as reported by 90 plus percent of “alien abductees” are totally fake.
Page 6
They exist only as holograms in-person (if even that) and most commonly, as screen memories, in the mind of the military/government mind-control lab-rat abductee, victim. Moreover, these types
of fake “aliens” are more commonly appearing to regular targeted individuals. They’re simply holograms used in the torture process to make the subject appear insane. Advanced new world
order technology does not come from aliens and it never has. The entire alien theme is a very well crafted enigmatic hoax used as a cover story for NSA-based abduction and “human effects”
technology. Have higher intelligences played a hand in human sciences and events? Yes in my opinion. If you are atheist or agnostic that’s fine, makes no difference. The point is there are no
real greys or reptilians working in government labs.
For clarification, in this document the terms “controller, handler, operator and agent” are synonymous."
"We come from France"
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Re: Will the Real Whitley Strieber Please Stand Up?

Postby tapitsbo » Fri Feb 26, 2016 3:16 pm

Yes, the way in which the idea of "alien/other" beings has been used as a cover for mind control is not in any way discredited by the occasional appearance of such anomalous beings in their own right.

The idea that the entire noosphere is so precisely controlled, down to tiny details of individual mind-states, as suggested by lunarmoth's link, raises the question of what function a place like this board has in the ecosystem - participation in questioning these matters would be pointless (it would be an case of questioning "God".)

These allegations may be chaff to distract from similar but somewhat simpler systems that may be in place - but what do I know?
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