February 1, 2015 — Burnt State

[boomerang]

A very good show. Articulate, concise, and very believable. We vote for a return engagement.

Burnt's no-frills and straigthforward delivery enhances the credibility of his high strangeness experiences. Well done !

 

[Constance]

BS Mentioned that he polled his students on the veracity of psychic mediumship and that it scores poorly. I don't claim to have been through the entire back catalogue of the Paracast, but I don't understand the show to have investigated the topic in any depth.

I've only been here for about a year and half so I don't know if mediumship and other psi capabilities have been discussed at length yet. Would appreciate links to any such threads and broadcasts.

I would urge people to not be too hasty in writing it off as mere cold reading and crude psychology. The Windbridge Institute (Dr Julie Beischel)has been doing some very sophisticated quintuple blind experiments with a group of 20 mediums and conducting statistical analysis of the accuracy of the readings by some very sophisticated crosschecking methods.

I agree one hundred percent and am glad you posted about this, Latent Causes. Mediumship is an immense field of research in itself and is most closely related to psychical research in precognition, telepathy, remote viewing, and other psi capacities. The veridical evidence accumulated in these subject areas is a good balance to the current focus on terror and horror in paranormal experiences.

 

[LatentCauses]

I've only been here for about a year and half so I don't know if mediumship and other psi capabilities have been discussed at length yet. Would appreciate links to any such threads and broadcasts.

She has made 3 appearances on Coast2Coast and with her distinctive name Beischel she's very easy to search across podcasts on the iTunes search feature. She interviews well and addresses from the perspective of a good scientist.

The Windbridge Institute has all of its research papers available for download - there is some statistical stuff that is dry and might not mean much depending on your background. Her ebook is $3 on Amazon, and she goes into the statistical significance and the competing explanatory mechanisms for what is going on.

If you are into the comparative studies of anecdotal experience ie what happens to us when we die as reported via mediumship, Dr Stafford Betty is your man. Writes well and its fun to contrast the accounts for similarities and differences. Not saying that I accept any of it as reality, but without a shadow of a doubt it demands a whole hell of a lot more attention from bright minds than it is presently getting.

The really big thing happening in the world of psi at the moment is alleged psi abilities in children with severe autism. A little girl in India is astounding researchers, including psychiatrist Dianne Hennessy Powell, with her abilties. The aforementioned researcher is in the process of trying to bring laboratory style controls to the difficult situation of an emotionally unstable autistic child - but she's getting there. PM me if you want more - this is the tip of the iceberg

 

[Constance]

. . . The really big thing happening in the world of psi at the moment is alleged psi abilities in children with severe autism. A little girl in India is astounding researchers, including psychiatrist Dianne Hennessy Powell, with her abilties. The aforementioned researcher is in the process of trying to bring laboratory style controls to the difficult situation of an emotionally unstable autistic child - but she's getting there. PM me if you want more - this is the tip of the iceberg.

Thanks for the citations. I know about Julie Beischel and the Windbridge research, a continuation of Gary Schwartz's mediumship research at the University of Arizona. Have you read his book The Afterlife Experiments? I hadn't heard about the second person you cited. I'm by all means interested in Diane Hennessy Powell's research concerning psi in some autistic children. That came up for discussion here in November in the thread concerning Michael Shermer's (sp?) psi experience, and I was about to start a new thread on Powell's project from the information we looked at then. I'll first link or post what we considered in November and hope that this time the discussion will take off. I'm so glad you're interested in this as well.

 

[LatentCauses]

I'll first link or post what we considered in November and hope that this time the discussion will take off. I'm so glad you're interested in this as well.

I got half way through one of Dr Schwarz's recently on my Kindle - cant remember which book now - think the one focusing on his personal synchronicities from memory - didn't really do it for me but I do follow his work.

I'll get involved in any psi topic on the Paracast. IMHO you cant get away from if you are serious about having an all round view on the UFO thing...every second abductee/experiencer recounts mental telepathy as the mode of communication - though, of course, the interesting question is the anterior one of what "space" the encounter happens in in the first place!

 

[cytrincat]

It was both very strange and refreshing to listen to this show... I had developed panic disorder of the worst kind while pregnant with my daughter (it ended thankfully after her birth), and during the worst, most extended panic attacks I experienced the world in an altered state. It was as if I was viewing the world through a fish eye lens, and reality itself seemed almost painful. It was as if my whole being had become hyper-sensitized and my perception of reality was too lucid... like being touched after your skin has been abraded. Definitely felt psychedelic.

Also, I have read that 'praying mantis' beings are common visions during DMT experiences.

 

[Soupie]

Its connected to the idealism school of mind that says, grossly simplified, that the brain of all the creatures that live on this planet are essentially reducing valves, and brain function is the process of limiting how much information gets through. Take psylocibin, for example, and recent study suggests that brain activity quietens, rather than intuitive excitement of activity in areas one associates with vision. So the hypothesis goes that it is allowing more information in, rather than the production of anything per se in the brain i.e. hallucinations.

I was going to post the following in the George Hanson "trickster" thread, but it connects with comments made by @Burnt State in this Paracast episode, and with LCs comments. Maybe at some point a single thread to discuss this approach will materialize.

Some of us have discussed in various forum threads the similarities between abduction, close encounter, NDE, hallucinogen/entheogen, meditative, psychotic/mystical, and dream experiences. Essentially, they are all altered states of consciousness.

Often, the Trickster is referred to a change agent. A mechanism that causes -- or perhaps manifests -- during times of system destabilization. During his Paracast session, Burnt State noted how historically individuals who entered these altered states were shaman; individuals who used their ability to access altered states for the good of their community. In general, historically, there seems to have been much more openness, acceptance, and value of altered states and the knowledge and insights that could/can be gained from them. (It might even be argued that the use of hallucinogens/entheogens was historically more integrated into human cultures.)

While it doesn't explain those cases in which external stimuli have been documented, it's possible that both exogenous and endogenous chemicals and the altered subjective states/experiences which they catalyze in humans may be an evolutionarily adaptive mechanism that brings novel information/knowledge into human culture. In other words, this noted capacity for humans to experience self-initiated and spontaneous altered states may be an adaptive mechanism.

Or, for those who disdain reductive explanations, it may be a mechanism that was bestowed upon humans by some Other(s) for the same purpose: to advance the species/culture.

With that in mind, I found the following commentary very interesting. It comes from a long read article from the New Yorker about recent psilocybin (Magic Mushroom) trials for treatment of anxiety in individuals with terminal cancer being conducted at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and New York University. Although the entire article is excellent and I recommend reading it, the comments of interest come from neuroscientist Carhart-Harris.

I've underlined the juicy bits for the tldr crowd.

“If the only way we can access the unconscious mind is via dreams and free association, we aren’t going to get anywhere,” he said. “Surely there must be something else.” One day, he asked his seminar leader if that might be a drug. She was intrigued. He set off to search the library catalogue for “LSD and the Unconscious” and found “Realms of the Human Unconscious,” by Stanislav Grof. “I read the book cover to cover. That set the course for the rest of my young life.” ...

When, in 2010, Carhart-Harris first began studying the brains of volunteers on psychedelics, neuroscientists assumed that the drugs somehow excited brain activity—hence the vivid hallucinations and powerful emotions that people report. But when Carhart-Harris looked at the results of the first set of fMRI scans—which pinpoint areas of brain activity by mapping local blood flow and oxygen consumption—he discovered that the drug appeared to substantially reduce brain activity in one particular region: the “default-mode network.”

The default-mode network was first described in 2001, in a landmark paper by Marcus Raichle, a neurologist at Washington University, in St. Louis, and it has since become the focus of much discussion in neuroscience. The network comprises a critical and centrally situated hub of brain activity that links parts of the cerebral cortex to deeper, older structures in the brain, such as the limbic system and the hippocampus.

The network, which consumes a significant portion of the brain’s energy, appears to be most active when we are least engaged in attending to the world or to a task. It lights up when we are daydreaming, removed from sensory processing, and engaging in higher-level “meta-cognitive” processes such as self-reflection, mental time travel, rumination, and “theory of mind”—the ability to attribute mental states to others. Carhart-Harris describes the default-mode network variously as the brain’s “orchestra conductor” or “corporate executive” or “capital city,” charged with managing and “holding the entire system together.” It is thought to be the physical counterpart of the autobiographical self, or ego.

“The brain is a hierarchical system,” Carhart-Harris said. “The highest-level parts”—such as the default-mode network—“have an inhibitory influence on the lower-level parts, like emotion and memory.” He discovered that blood flow and electrical activity in the default-mode network dropped off precipitously under the influence of psychedelics, a finding that may help to explain the loss of the sense of self that volunteers reported. (The biggest dropoffs in default-mode-network activity correlated with volunteers’ reports of ego dissolution.) Just before Carhart-Harris published his results, in a 2012 paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a researcher at Yale named Judson Brewer, who was using fMRI to study the brains of experienced meditators, noticed that their default-mode networks had also been quieted relative to those of novice meditators. It appears that, with the ego temporarily out of commission, the boundaries between self and world, subject and object, all dissolve. These are hallmarks of the mystical experience.

If the default-mode network functions as the conductor of the symphony of brain activity, we might expect its temporary disappearance from the stage to lead to an increase in dissonance and mental disorder—as appears to happen during the psychedelic journey. Carhart-Harris has found evidence in scans of brain waves that, when the default-mode network shuts down, other brain regions “are let off the leash.” Mental contents hidden from view (or suppressed) during normal waking consciousness come to the fore: emotions, memories, wishes and fears. Regions that don’t ordinarily communicate directly with one another strike up conversations (neuroscientists sometimes call this “crosstalk”), often with bizarre results. Carhart-Harris thinks that hallucinations occur when the visual-processing centers of the brain, left to their own devices, become more susceptible to the influence of our beliefs and emotions. ...

In “The Doors of Perception,” Aldous Huxley concluded from his psychedelic experience that the conscious mind is less a window on reality than a furious editor of it. The mind is a “reducing valve,” he wrote, eliminating far more reality than it admits to our conscious awareness, lest we be overwhelmed. “What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive.” Psychedelics open the valve wide, removing the filter that hides much of reality, as well as dimensions of our own minds, from ordinary consciousness. Carhart-Harris has cited Huxley’s metaphor in some of his papers, likening the default-mode network to the reducing valve, but he does not agree that everything that comes through the opened doors of perception is necessarily real. The psychedelic experience, he suggests, can yield a lot of “fool’s gold.”

Nevertheless, Carhart-Harris believes that the psychedelic experience can help people by relaxing the grip of an overbearing ego and the rigid, habitual thinking it enforces. The human brain is perhaps the most complex system there is, and the emergence of a conscious self is its highest achievement. By adulthood, the mind has become very good at observing and testing reality and developing confident predictions about it that optimize our investments of energy (mental and otherwise) and therefore our survival. Much of what we think of as perceptions of the world are really educated guesses based on past experience (“That fractal pattern of little green bits in my visual field must be a tree”), and this kind of conventional thinking serves us well.

But only up to a point. In Carhart-Harris’s view, a steep price is paid for the achievement of order and ego in the adult mind. “We give up our emotional lability,” he told me, “our ability to be open to surprises, our ability to think flexibly, and our ability to value nature.” The sovereign ego can become a despot. This is perhaps most evident in depression, when the self turns on itself and uncontrollable introspection gradually shades out reality. In “The Entropic Brain,” a paper published last year in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Carhart-Harris cites research indicating that this debilitating state, sometimes called “heavy self-consciousness,” may be the result of a “hyperactive” default-mode network. The lab recently received government funding to conduct a clinical study using psychedelics to treat depression.

Carhart-Harris believes that people suffering from other mental disorders characterized by excessively rigid patterns of thinking, such as addiction and obsessive-compulsive disorder, could benefit from psychedelics, which “disrupt stereotyped patterns of thought and behavior.” In his view, all these disorders are, in a sense, ailments of the ego. He also thinks that this disruption could promote more creative thinking. It may be that some brains could benefit from a little less order." ...
​

Once again, humans may simply be reinventing a "technology" that nature has already perfected over millennia of evolution. Spontaneous, endogenously caused altered, tricksterish states may be an intrinsic mechanism of the human (and other) species that promotes change, survival, and potentially progress.

 

[Sand]

Excellent show. It has sparked much interesting discussion on the Forum.

Burnt, I’m curious about a little detail of the sighting. You said that as the object initially approached you thought to yourself, “We are going to be abducted.” From some things you’ve said, I take it the sighting occurred around 1978. Was this thought about abduction just a simple basic, “It’s coming towards us. It’s going to get us”? Or at that time did you have a good familiarity with the few abduction cases that had been prominent in the media during the years just prior - Walton, the Hills, Stanford Kentucky?

Do you recall if there had been any other UFO reports in news during the years prior to the sighting that had particularly gotten your attention? (Just trying to view it in the context of the time it happened)

 

[Constance]

I was going to post the following in the George Hanson "trickster" thread, but it connects with comments made by @Burnt State in this Paracast episode, and with LCs comments. Maybe at some point a single thread to discuss this approach will materialize.

Some of us have discussed in various forum threads the similarities between abduction, close encounter, NDE, hallucinogen/entheogen, meditative, psychotic/mystical, and dream experiences. Essentially, they are all altered states of consciousness.

Often, the Trickster is referred to a change agent. A mechanism that causes -- or perhaps manifests -- during times of system destabilization. During his Paracast session, Burnt State noted how historically individuals who entered these altered states were shaman; individuals who used their ability to access altered states for the good of their community. In general, historically, there seems to have been much more openness, acceptance, and value of altered states and the knowledge and insights that could/can be gained from them. (It might even be argued that the use of hallucinogens/entheogens was historically more integrated into human cultures.)

While it doesn't explain those cases in which external stimuli have been documented, it's possible that both exogenous and endogenous chemicals and the altered subjective states/experiences which they catalyze in humans may be an evolutionarily adaptive mechanism that brings novel information/knowledge into human culture. In other words, this noted capacity for humans to experience self-initiated and spontaneous altered states may be an adaptive mechanism.

Or, for those who disdain reductive explanations, it may be a mechanism that was bestowed upon humans by some Other(s) for the same purpose: to advance the species/culture.

With that in mind, I found the following commentary very interesting. It comes from a long read article from the New Yorker about recent psilocybin (Magic Mushroom) trials for treatment of anxiety in individuals with terminal cancer being conducted at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and New York University. Although the entire article is excellent and I recommend reading it, the comments of interest come from neuroscientist Carhart-Harris.

I've underlined the juicy bits for the tldr crowd.

“If the only way we can access the unconscious mind is via dreams and free association, we aren’t going to get anywhere,” he said. “Surely there must be something else.” One day, he asked his seminar leader if that might be a drug. She was intrigued. He set off to search the library catalogue for “LSD and the Unconscious” and found “Realms of the Human Unconscious,” by Stanislav Grof. “I read the book cover to cover. That set the course for the rest of my young life.” ...

When, in 2010, Carhart-Harris first began studying the brains of volunteers on psychedelics, neuroscientists assumed that the drugs somehow excited brain activity—hence the vivid hallucinations and powerful emotions that people report. But when Carhart-Harris looked at the results of the first set of fMRI scans—which pinpoint areas of brain activity by mapping local blood flow and oxygen consumption—he discovered that the drug appeared to substantially reduce brain activity in one particular region: the “default-mode network.”

The default-mode network was first described in 2001, in a landmark paper by Marcus Raichle, a neurologist at Washington University, in St. Louis, and it has since become the focus of much discussion in neuroscience. The network comprises a critical and centrally situated hub of brain activity that links parts of the cerebral cortex to deeper, older structures in the brain, such as the limbic system and the hippocampus.

The network, which consumes a significant portion of the brain’s energy, appears to be most active when we are least engaged in attending to the world or to a task. It lights up when we are daydreaming, removed from sensory processing, and engaging in higher-level “meta-cognitive” processes such as self-reflection, mental time travel, rumination, and “theory of mind”—the ability to attribute mental states to others. Carhart-Harris describes the default-mode network variously as the brain’s “orchestra conductor” or “corporate executive” or “capital city,” charged with managing and “holding the entire system together.” It is thought to be the physical counterpart of the autobiographical self, or ego.

“The brain is a hierarchical system,” Carhart-Harris said. “The highest-level parts”—such as the default-mode network—“have an inhibitory influence on the lower-level parts, like emotion and memory.” He discovered that blood flow and electrical activity in the default-mode network dropped off precipitously under the influence of psychedelics, a finding that may help to explain the loss of the sense of self that volunteers reported. (The biggest dropoffs in default-mode-network activity correlated with volunteers’ reports of ego dissolution.) Just before Carhart-Harris published his results, in a 2012 paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a researcher at Yale named Judson Brewer, who was using fMRI to study the brains of experienced meditators, noticed that their default-mode networks had also been quieted relative to those of novice meditators. It appears that, with the ego temporarily out of commission, the boundaries between self and world, subject and object, all dissolve. These are hallmarks of the mystical experience.

If the default-mode network functions as the conductor of the symphony of brain activity, we might expect its temporary disappearance from the stage to lead to an increase in dissonance and mental disorder—as appears to happen during the psychedelic journey. Carhart-Harris has found evidence in scans of brain waves that, when the default-mode network shuts down, other brain regions “are let off the leash.” Mental contents hidden from view (or suppressed) during normal waking consciousness come to the fore: emotions, memories, wishes and fears. Regions that don’t ordinarily communicate directly with one another strike up conversations (neuroscientists sometimes call this “crosstalk”), often with bizarre results. Carhart-Harris thinks that hallucinations occur when the visual-processing centers of the brain, left to their own devices, become more susceptible to the influence of our beliefs and emotions. ...

In “The Doors of Perception,” Aldous Huxley concluded from his psychedelic experience that the conscious mind is less a window on reality than a furious editor of it. The mind is a “reducing valve,” he wrote, eliminating far more reality than it admits to our conscious awareness, lest we be overwhelmed. “What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive.” Psychedelics open the valve wide, removing the filter that hides much of reality, as well as dimensions of our own minds, from ordinary consciousness. Carhart-Harris has cited Huxley’s metaphor in some of his papers, likening the default-mode network to the reducing valve, but he does not agree that everything that comes through the opened doors of perception is necessarily real. The psychedelic experience, he suggests, can yield a lot of “fool’s gold.”

Nevertheless, Carhart-Harris believes that the psychedelic experience can help people by relaxing the grip of an overbearing ego and the rigid, habitual thinking it enforces. The human brain is perhaps the most complex system there is, and the emergence of a conscious self is its highest achievement. By adulthood, the mind has become very good at observing and testing reality and developing confident predictions about it that optimize our investments of energy (mental and otherwise) and therefore our survival. Much of what we think of as perceptions of the world are really educated guesses based on past experience (“That fractal pattern of little green bits in my visual field must be a tree”), and this kind of conventional thinking serves us well.

But only up to a point. In Carhart-Harris’s view, a steep price is paid for the achievement of order and ego in the adult mind. “We give up our emotional lability,” he told me, “our ability to be open to surprises, our ability to think flexibly, and our ability to value nature.” The sovereign ego can become a despot. This is perhaps most evident in depression, when the self turns on itself and uncontrollable introspection gradually shades out reality. In “The Entropic Brain,” a paper published last year in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Carhart-Harris cites research indicating that this debilitating state, sometimes called “heavy self-consciousness,” may be the result of a “hyperactive” default-mode network. The lab recently received government funding to conduct a clinical study using psychedelics to treat depression.

Carhart-Harris believes that people suffering from other mental disorders characterized by excessively rigid patterns of thinking, such as addiction and obsessive-compulsive disorder, could benefit from psychedelics, which “disrupt stereotyped patterns of thought and behavior.” In his view, all these disorders are, in a sense, ailments of the ego. He also thinks that this disruption could promote more creative thinking. It may be that some brains could benefit from a little less order." ...
​

Once again, humans may simply be reinventing a "technology" that nature has already perfected over millennia of evolution. Spontaneous, endogenously caused altered, tricksterish states may be an intrinsic mechanism of the human (and other) species that promotes change, survival, and potentially progress.

Excellent post, Soupie. Carhart-Harris's research and resulting theory makes great sense to me. It recalls for me again Panksepp's recognition of "seeking behavior" even in primitive living organisms. I think that the road through the evolution of species to consciousness and mind has been cleared by this exploratory behavior, its outer-directedness. Experience in the world, more or less understood, has been laid down in subconscious and also conscious memory and carried forward, but our deepest memories seem to be species memories that have much to tell us about the nature and structure of our own minds and the nature of reality as a whole. In our age of constructed complexity, high technology, overspecialization, and stress, it seems that radically altered states (often reached through powerful drugs) are by now necessary to awaken many humans to our natural state of openness to the world. If those drugs can help people stricken with deep depression, for whom contact with the outside world seems to have been shut down, they can be a great benefit to them, a life-saving benefit. And I think there's no doubt that psychoactive drug use in our time has opened 'the doors of perception' for great numbers of people, supporting alternative thinking and new world views and a greater sense of the possibilities, and potential meanings, of our existence.

 

[Burnt State]

So let me ask you, Robert if we are responding biochemicaly to some kind of outside stimuli do you think this still constitutes someone's imagination ? If what we see or think we see is real to us but we didn't go about it by letting our mind wander...which is how i consider the act of imagination to be...could it truly be " all in the mind" it's almost a zen question if we see it but it is not tangible is it our imagination?

Regarding your personal expieriences, i really enjoyed the "heather" story, especially because of the coincidence of the charm in the snow spotted later on. I can tell it made a big impact on you as your tone got very animated in the retelling of it. but i was a little confused about the story of your dad's coworker. Maybe i missed something but to me this story summed up perfectly your feeling on the ouija board and the fact that it was an unconscious collaboration between the participants but your inclusion of it indicated to me that you found it circumspect. What i mean was this Heather contact came out of the blue but there was prior knowledge of your dad's coworker existence. Was not his death known as well?

Re: external stimuli vs. human imagination
I think there are two options here. Either it's all in our heads and our imagination is running away with itself, as Soupie is indicating above, and these images are a result of the default network going offline, allowing for random dream imagery to have its way with us, OR we are imaginatively responding to weird stuff in the landscape. Of course this does not help to explain paranormal experiences that are shared simultaneously with others or those with trace evidence or those with radar.

My dad's coworker story: we went through this quickly and I even threw too hurriedly in the date of his death as I don't remember the specific date only the general timeline. So here's what happened: about a week or so prior to this ouija session in front of my father he had taken me to this man's house. He had no less than four stunning, large aquariums with a dazzling array of exotic oceanic creatures. It made quite an impression on me as did his colleague, very affable, pleasant and eager to meet my curiosity.

During the ouija session after producing my mom's mother's birthday, it identified itself by initials and then first name. When asked by my dad, "where are you?" Ouija said, and I remember this specifically, "In hell." That was a little spooky. My father had hidden from me his coworker's s very recent suicide, after all, I had just met the guy. Following this session he explained his own shock over the suicide and what ouija said. The man's new wife had called him to say she would be home soon and when she got there she found him hanging in a closet with the proverbial note attached to him. Funny how these details are still very present for me.

Like finding the charm on the street, in the sand by the curb, not snow, there was this sense of something from beyond entering our world or making contact. With Heather, it was an intriguing mystery that I was bent on solving. I was adamant about getting her death date and I spent countless hours panning through microfiche at our city library. The librarians came to know me well. I could not find evidence of her story, but learned a lot about the history of my town. When my Dad told me of the suicide I actually got a little scared.

I feel that finding the charm was just an impossible coincidence and the message from hell with my grandma's birthdate to be equally inexplicable. While I feel that our general narratives were unconscious collaborations those two events along with the fire ouija session were just plain weird, on the high end of strange.

 

[Burnt State]

Whoa, what a roller-coaster of surprises. Believe it or not, I'd never heard of the Zanfretta or of the Delphos stories.

And although I had read about @Burnt State s childhood sighting, it's another thing entirely to hear you talk about it. To hear something like this from someone you've come to know as a highly intelligent, learned and actually very skeptical forum poster... amazing. No wonder the two of you went UFO-hunting all summer.

But what baffled me most was to hear that you've actually been dabbling in the occult. Did you write about that on the forum? If so, sorry it escaped me. I guess it would have explained a thing or two in terms of your replies to my posts.

So, @Burnt State, I have to ask this, if only because this once I get to be the doubter (yes! ): is there any possibilty that someone in the group tricked you? Maybe even the grandmother's birthdate was a setup? And if your theory is right, if it was the group collective, why do you think it turned on you, threatening each one of you individually?

I have detailed my Heather story on the forum elsewhere. My early teen occult history was pretty typical satanic bible stuff. The ouija session regarding the date and my dad's coworker was with family. My younger brother on the other side of the planchette as skeptical dad asked questions. No setup there at all.

Why it turned, or why we turned on ourselves, probably had more to do with teenage horror movie watching than anything else. But it was a weird night - the first time with five people simultaneously on the planchette using just one finger each. The feel was edgy, violent and threatening, unlike all previous sessions. The door slamming on cue upstairs just was over the top. Even I decided at that point, the sessions were done.

 

[Wade]

During the ouija session after producing my mom's mother's birthday, it identified itself by initials and then first name. When asked by my dad, "where are you?" Ouija said, and I remember this specifically, "In hell." That was a little spooky. My father had hidden from me his coworker's s very recent suicide, after all, I had just met the guy. Following this session he explained his own shock over the suicide and what ouija said. The man's new wife had called him to say she would be home soon and when she got there she found him hanging in a closet with the proverbial note attached to him. Funny how these details are still very present for me.

Thanks for putting this into context, it does make a big difference in my view

 

[Burnt State]

BurntState, you really should consider your appearance on The Paracast as a harbinger of things to come. You speak every eloquently "off-the-cuff". You are a natural. Perhaps this is also an ability you have fine-tuned on all your years of teaching. But you really should consider doing your own audio blog, or some sort of podcast. Perhaps it could be part of THE PARACAST PLUS? I do think you have already created a large fan base from your one appearance. You have the gift, my son. LOL Are you considering taking all your knowledge and ruminations on the paranormal and perhaps presenting it to a larger audience via YOUTUBE or some other medium? I am not seeking competition to The Paracast, but instead supplementation. I would love to hear/see you doing a audio/visual blog, for example. Please consider it.

If I might respond to something you said.....you said that you theorize that the Little Girl was created by the group's collective consciousness. While this is a very popular idea now, that we can literally create doppelgangers and beings from without ourselves, isn't this just as unproven an idea (at this point) as the ancient concept that we can conjure up independent entities from the astral plane or other neighborhoods in the invisible realms? I just recall one time a medium had supposedly brought forth a grandparent, who told their grand daughter where to find a piece of jewelry. One paranormal researcher theorized that the medium had actually read the granddaughter's subconscious mind. I laughed at that. In a scientific evaluation of such situations, does it help to explain away one paranormal explanation by positing yet a different paranormal explanation?

I confess that I dimly recall an intentional experiment where a group did manifest a totally imaginary being (named something prosaic like Bob) from a made-up biography they all kept in their minds. Once manifested, I do not recall if they had trouble eliminating this construction or if it refused to be dispersed.

Anyway, my obvious point is just that if we have a paranormal situation, does it really move things along to propose a different paranormal cause? I realize you have a right to posit your own theory. But how will we ever know for sure?

Give the idea of having an informative show of your own some thought, OK?

thanks for the many compliments in here. Doing this show has produced a lot of unexpected positive feedback and messages. I am very indebted to Gene and Chris for extending the offer to be on. There's something satisfying about having the experiences recorded this way. As for doing a show/blog - check me when I retire and there's time for such things. Right now, posting here is a much free time I can spare. Writing was some thing I gave up on decades ago, but I can see that it's something i'd like to turn to if time allowed it.

Reading about The Conjuring Philip team cracked open my ouija days for me. Group mind, group think, and maybe even group psi are strange spaces that can create all manner of weirdness. Get a crowd together and you can create your own special kind of "madness" or delusion, or second coming. I don't think we fully know what we may be or what we are capable of in group settings. But i've seen fear catch on from one person to the next in such rapid succession that it in turn scared me. We can take each other into altered states. The shaman did it; the friendly entheogenic guide does it.

The passport to Magonia can still be easily obtained by all.

 

[SheaOlmsford]

thanks for the many compliments in here. Doing this show has produced a lot of unexpected positive feedback and messages. I am very indebted to Gene and Chris for extending the offer to be on. There's something satisfying about having the experiences recorded this way. As for doing a show/blog - check me when I retire and there's time for such things. Right now, posting here is a much free time I can spare. Writing was some thing I gave up on decades ago, but I can see that it's something i'd like to turn to if time allowed it.

Reading about The Conjuring Philip team cracked open my ouija days for me. Group mind, group think, and maybe even group psi are strange spaces that can create all manner of weirdness. Get a crowd together and you can create your own special kind of "madness" or delusion, or second coming. I don't think we fully know what we may be or what we are capable of in group settings. But i've seen fear catch on from one person to the next in such rapid succession that it in turn scared me. We can take each other into altered states. The shaman did it; the friendly entheogenic guide does it.

The passport to Magonia can still be easily obtained by all.

While I certainly respect your focus, I would like to simply humbly point out that with a blog you could reach a much larger audience than the relatively few folks who check this forum routinely. For example, you could easily take your posts here and modify them slightly to be "stand alone" pieces on a blog open to everyone. I suggest this as a retired technical writer who devoted a large portion of my working life to taking difficult concepts and presenting them in easy terms for the average person. This is a talent, and you have it. It would not require you to really do 2 sets of writing. I confess that in past years I was very active on forums (not now), and would often do what I suggested as a way to share my views with a more general public while maintaining my focus on the forums. Now I am rather burnt out, Mr. Burnt State! LOL I am at a point where after literally decades of research and obsession, I frankly don't care any more what they are. THEY ARE. This is the fact. Everything else we say is just embellishment.

 

[DissectionStalker]

I am at a point where after literally decades of research and obsession, I frankly don't care any more what they are. THEY ARE. This is the fact. Everything else we say is just embellishment.

Now, here's the really sick part. WE keep reading and posting anyway. I swear. Reminds me of a long-ago movie too. We shape these landing zones with compulsive zombie keystrokes; a replacement for the dirty business of slapping mud-castles.

"They" are shaping us aren't they?

 

[fastwalker]

I enjoyed the show, Good job.

 

[LatentCauses]

Now, here's the really sick part. WE keep reading and posting anyway. I swear. Reminds me of a long-ago movie too. We shape these landing zones with compulsive zombie keystrokes; a replacement for the dirty business of slapping mud-castles.

"They" are shaping us aren't they?

Just like the character from Close Encounters of the Third Kind and his compulsion to model the clay to meet the form pushed into his consciousness by the aliens...

What did Spielberg know I wonder?

Its like trying to wake up from a dream on a merry-go-round.

 

[Pigsinzen]

I enjoyed listening to this weeks show. It was a refreshing break from the Bruce Maccabee's & the Richard Dolan's and I found Burnt State's on-air demeanor to be a lot like he is on this forum; friendly, disarming, thoughtful, introspective, witty and an excellent communicator. Listening to him recount his childhood experiences really took me back to my own childhood and to some experiences of my own. Thanks for that!

The Ouija board was off limits in my childhood home. According to my mother, she & my father had a frightening Ouija session while I was an infant & the board went out with the trash.

 

[Burnt State]

Excellent show. It has sparked much interesting discussion on the Forum.

Burnt, I’m curious about a little detail of the sighting. You said that as the object initially approached you thought to yourself, “We are going to be abducted.” From some things you’ve said, I take it the sighting occurred around 1978. Was this thought about abduction just a simple basic, “It’s coming towards us. It’s going to get us”? Or at that time did you have a good familiarity with the few abduction cases that had been prominent in the media during the years just prior - Walton, the Hills, Stanford Kentucky?

Do you recall if there had been any other UFO reports in news during the years prior to the sighting that had particularly gotten your attention? (Just trying to view it in the context of the time it happened)

The very first UFO book I purchased was called The Total UFO Story, edited by Milt Maclin and includes Steiger, Clark & T.G. Beckley as writers. It's publishing date is 1979. So i feel that either tbe winter of 78 or 79 is the year of that sighting. There's a guy who keeps a database from of Ontario sightings and my event is not there.

I had always thought I had read that book prior to the event but I can not be totally certain. Still, this text includes a chapter by Steiger called "Close Encounters of the 4th Kind" all about abductions. I would imagine television also brought me some interesting stories via UFO Docs., movies, In Search Of and Arthur C. Clarke's show. The idea of the abduction was obviously something that I was aware of through one of these related avenues. The paranormal in general was a personal fascination from about the age of 10 onwards. At various points I have these five year gaps where it's not on my mind at all. I would describe the last five years as an increasing immersion that has given birth to much more focussed, critical & skeptical thinking about the subject.

 

[Burnt State]

While I certainly respect your focus, I would like to simply humbly point out that with a blog you could reach a much larger audience than the relatively few folks who check this forum routinely. For example, you could easily take your posts here and modify them slightly to be "stand alone" pieces on a blog open to everyone. I suggest this as a retired technical writer who devoted a large portion of my working life to taking difficult concepts and presenting them in easy terms for the average person. This is a talent, and you have it. It would not require you to really do 2 sets of writing. I confess that in past years I was very active on forums (not now), and would often do what I suggested as a way to share my views with a more general public while maintaining my focus on the forums.

I had thought about collecting the writing here into a blog space but that would take effort. There are many exceptional blogs out there by people critically engaged in the field as both investigators and researcher/thinkers. I see myself more as a commentator with some specific areas of interest. I have learned a lot through reading good books, good thinkers and most of it has been through this show, the forum participants and Radio Misterioso. On occasion I post what I consider to be an article with stolen and/or manufactured art to accompany it in response to certain episodes or ideas. That seems to satisfy my creative brain and after all there is already an exceptional group of people here to engage with aleady. If I really felt the urge to write more seriously on the subject then I think I would need to also be able to give over the time to read much more thoroughly, specifically in the areas of neuroscience, anthropology and those diligent, critical ufo thinkers and writers like Rutkowski and Curt Collins (as soon as he decides to start publishing).

Now I am rather burnt out, Mr. Burnt State! LOL I am at a point where after literally decades of research and obsession, I frankly don't care any more what they are. THEY ARE. This is the fact. Everything else we say is just embellishment.

They Are, They Have Been, They Will Be - the title of the Kolchak episode on UFO's. I keep asking myself, "Are they really and if they are, why are they here with us?" Maybe we really are special, and I mean really special, or we are just really very confused and don't quite understand that much about what we may be.