February 1, 2015 — Burnt State

[Constance]

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.

I don't think that we, as a species, are likely to be that special at this point in our evolution, but I think earth probably is. Life probably takes a foothold on many planets, but ours is mega-prolific, perhaps a kind of rare garden planet.

 

[Burnt State]

I don't think that we, as a species, are likely to be that special at this point in our evolution, but I think earth probably is. Life probably takes a foothold on many planets, but ours is mega-prolific, perhaps a kind of rare garden planet.

What I think about, in terms of our species, is not our inability to stop waging war or master our energy needs without imploding first, but that we have these certain creative capacities. That as such a young child species, as far as life on earth goes, we can see almost to the beginning of time, is quite incredible. For only being 10 seconds old in the 24 hour clock that is the history of life on earth we have done incredible and exceptional things, along with awful habitat destroying things. Perhaps we have even exceeded certain expected limits and that's why we receive all the attention from elsewhere, if indeed that is a viable paradigm.

I agree, as Biedny used to often say, we really could be that rare garden planet, or as is suspected by many that life may in fact be ubiquitous, and we just need to learn how to look better, or a little further afield. I think answers to those questions are going to be found in our own lifetimes.

 

[Burnt State]

1. Amongst several insightful things said by BS was that we have to "honour the witness". For mine, this is the key. John Mack put it another way when he said the only really useful way to get any further in these fields is to be comfortable with, and understand intersubjectivity, as part of the investigative methodology. As soon as we demand criterion that are objective in the sense that we can all agree upon the method of measurement, and the categorisation of the result, we run around in circles in these areas.

It seems to me that dynamics between investigators and witnesses are what created what we know about ufo and "alien" contact. Of the big three, with regards to abductions, only Mack explored these interior spaces from a more open ended open mind. His relationships to witnesses does not have the tainted legacy of the other two. He was exploring these interior experiences to follow paths as opposed to drawing up the map and categories first. Paying more attention to experiences that do not fit categories is how we will uncover something more tangible about the phenomenon. The other approach is sociological, where we create metaphor and interpret the experiences based on their effects which leads to the trickster for example.

2. I think BS used the phrase "the brain responding to anomalous stimuli". Maybe we need to shift the focus from looking for the stimuli to searching for the commonalities between the circumstances in which people report these things. Perhaps it is the environment that is key to the experience. What is it about the environment that lets these things in? Why is it that it is so common for one witness to see something that the other cannot?

How can we determine differences between environmental effects and biology? Is it something in the landscape or is it about what is happening deep in the space between the ears?

3. So much of what we read about in these areas defies rationality – the experiences are essentially a non sequitur. Maybe that is because certain environmental conditions allow a superimposition of something else - something from otherwhere, something that doesnt belong - So what is it that the witnesses share in their environmental conditions, or their brain electrical activity or chemistry, that opens up the filter and lets far more in than is necessary to function in day-to-day life?

This also asks the same question: is it all about ley lines or is it about the brain negotiating impossible signals? I'm starting to think that, given the irrational nature of some experiences, that the point of origin may be that brain that is the dream warehouse and great manufacturer of the irrational in the first place. I wouldn't want to reduce all paranormal experiences or ufo encounters to such personal products, but I think many solo experiences may have more to do with confronting cerebral dissonance than actually encountering centaurs, say for example.

 

[Burnt State]

@Soupie thanks so much for posting about the default brain mode as increasingly it is cropping up as an area to place much more emphasis on. What's curious about the psychedelic experience is that following the smashing of the ego - sometimes a difficult entry without a cushion - there is a new mode of reality. Everything is new, tactile, intensely visual like your senses are suddenly wild. I can also see how the reptilian brain gets activated as the 'startle capacity' is on high alert. For fear junkies, you don't really know what being scared is until you've been scared on acid. The sudden shifts and alterations of external reality may indeed be crawling up from deep in the mind's resevoirs, but the experiencer does not have any awareness of this whatsoever. I can see how when the doors are wide open, anything can jump out.

These are journey experiences, and like any significant journey the imprinting on the individual is very intense. Elsewhere on the forum we have described dreams, and right now there is a thread asking about your most powerful dream. That images can have such a profound effect on us, even moreso when accompanied with the right neurochemistry, is fascinating. How can you not share such things with the rest of the tribe? I don't believe that our dreams are commonly interpretable, or that dream symbols are open to being categorized. However, our own dream imagery can have exceptional individual meaning. In some cases they mean so much to us that the images become unforgettable.

When ego dissipates, one can't help but wonder how startling our own mind can be when it is allowed to manufacture its own random imagery. I can still remember a very intense childhood dream of my father defending our family from a male and female Bigfoot who had broken into the home. It was maddening. But it can only hold the meaning that I choose to give it, and just as easily I can surrender to the power of such images and let them occupy my daytime concerns. This may in turn lead to other problems of my own unknown manufacturing.

 

[boomerang]

@Soupie What's curious about the psychedelic experience is that following the smashing of the ego - sometimes a difficult entry without a cushion - there is a new mode of reality. Everything is new, tactile, intensely visual like your senses are suddenly wild. I can also see how the reptilian brain gets activated as the 'startle capacity' is on high alert.

When ego dissipates, one can't help but wonder how startling our own mind can be when it is allowed to manufacture its own random imagery.

Burnt--Isn't bypassing the ego to meddle with the subconscious at least in part what the UFO is all about? It's almost as if the phenomenon has the equivalent of a hacker's "back door" into the operating system of the mind.

 

[SheaOlmsford]

Burnt State, I would claim that John Mack had just as much an agenda as "the other 2 guys". John Mack wanted the aliens to be Green Peace Workers, environmentally sensitive creatures who cared about the flora and fauna. His aliens always seemed to be the alien equivalent of TV's public service announcements. His aliens were in league with Smokey the Bear. His aliens were here to help humanity, much like the Nordic Space Brothers of the contactee movement.

 

[Constance]

@Soupie thanks so much for posting about the default brain mode as increasingly it is cropping up as an area to place much more emphasis on. What's curious about the psychedelic experience is that following the smashing of the ego - sometimes a difficult entry without a cushion - there is a new mode of reality. Everything is new, tactile, intensely visual like your senses are suddenly wild. I can also see how the reptilian brain gets activated as the 'startle capacity' is on high alert. For fear junkies, you don't really know what being scared is until you've been scared on acid. The sudden shifts and alterations of external reality may indeed be crawling up from deep in the mind's resevoirs, but the experiencer does not have any awareness of this whatsoever. I can see how when the doors are wide open, anything can jump out.

These are journey experiences, and like any significant journey the imprinting on the individual is very intense. Elsewhere on the forum we have described dreams, and right now there is a thread asking about your most powerful dream. That images can have such a profound effect on us, even moreso when accompanied with the right neurochemistry, is fascinating. How can you not share such things with the rest of the tribe? I don't believe that our dreams are commonly interpretable, or that dream symbols are open to being categorized. However, our own dream imagery can have exceptional individual meaning. In some cases they mean so much to us that the images become unforgettable.

When ego dissipates, one can't help but wonder how startling our own mind can be when it is allowed to manufacture its own random imagery. I can still remember a very intense childhood dream of my father defending our family from a male and female Bigfoot who had broken into the home. It was maddening. But it can only hold the meaning that I choose to give it, and just as easily I can surrender to the power of such images and let them occupy my daytime concerns. This may in turn lead to other problems of my own unknown manufacturing.

I wonder if there's general agreement yet among neuroscientists concerning the nature of the 'default brain mode'. This is something we might want to explore, and @Soupie should probably be our guide. I first saw a reference to the 'default mode' or 'default network' about two years ago in an article in which it was described as a kind 'offline' state of inattention to present tasks, circumstances, etc., to which humans typically revert often while awake, entering states more like daydreaming, reverie, etc.

I'm not sure that it's the same state that leads to experiences by people having or dreaming about 'abductions' or having close encounters with a ufo and/or strange occupants of ufos in the vicinity of a landed ufo. Over the years I've read many of the latter type of accounts and am not remembering descriptions of the kind of terrorizing entities Burnt seems to be referring to. But I haven't read everything that Burnt has read concerning events described by John Keel; in fact, I haven't read Keel at all.

Anyway, I do wonder what the source is of genuinely terrorizing images of entities that I gather are encountered by some users of 'mind-altering' drugs such as LSD and Ayahuasca, and also why it seems that many DMT experimenters are reported to encounter certain specific types of entities (insectoid ones as well as cartoon-like characters). It does seem to me that these apparently powerful substances must be significantly responsible for the types of human experiences that result, and that these experiences are significantly different from, e.g., NDE's and deep meditative states, which @Soupie included in his speculations.

I think that to understand all this better we need to sort out/make some distinctions among different types of experiences of altered consciousness rather than assuming that they all have a common cause. And I think we also need to be aware of the limitations of current neuroscience in understanding the subconscious mind and what it contains.

In general I found myself in agreement with @LatentCauses post earlier in this thread (linked below), from which I extract this paragraph:

". . . the reason that we feel as though the witnesses describe non sequiturs, is because their senses are overwhelmed with far too much information, and information in a form that our pattern recognition processes have never seen before. At this juncture you can throw in a pinch of Jung and say that when confronted with this information, our brain scrambles around for the closest analogy, and drags bits and pieces from popular culture, mythology, our fantasies [insert whatever you like here...] and mixes that with its best approximation of what is actually there. Hence the persistent confusion and bizarre nature as to what is reported."

There are other ideas we can pursue in the rest of that post, at this link:

https://www.theparacast.com/forum/threads/february-1-2015-burnt-state.15873/page-2#post-215035[/USER]

I think it's reasonable to say that both mind-altering drugs and shocking, disorienting experiences such as ufo/alien encounters clearly disable an individual's sense of what is normal and 'real', a sense developed over years of ordinary experience in our typical surroundings [a world taken for granted]. In fact that ordinary sense of reality is suddenly displaced, and one result is a deep sense of fear, of incapacity to cope with what is encountered. Our 'fight or flight' responses, originating deep in the primitive hind brain, are summoned into action in such experiences. It might well be that this sense of danger, of fear or panic, is itself sufficient to trigger a grasping for explanations, and that the brain/mind seeks and finds some possible explanations or images stored in personal subconscious memory or in our species' collective unconscious. Any of these 'memories' might be more or less sourced in real experiences (our own or those of our predecessors) or alternatively sourced in overwhelming feelings we've had while watching horror movies or reading Grimm's fairy tales as young children.

 

[Burnt State]

Burnt State, I would claim that John Mack had just as much an agenda as "the other 2 guys". John Mack wanted the aliens to be Green Peace Workers, environmentally sensitive creatures who cared about the flora and fauna. His aliens always seemed to be the alien equivalent of TV's public service announcements. His aliens were in league with Smokey the Bear. His aliens were here to help humanity, much like the Nordic Space Brothers of the contactee movement.

I hear what you are saying about Mack, but it's not always that way. In a classic discussion piece with Hopkins and Mack on abductions, as preserved on Hidden Experience, we hear them taking contrary positions and Mack is suddenly being much more "warning" with regards to contact and Hopkins is singing the spacebrother song. It was that specific lecture/presentation that made me reconsider his position as only being about the "nice" aliens. I feel the other two have more forced positions whereas he left the door open for other potentials and to recognize subjectivity and internalization of the experience. I do feel the answers reside in us, in our interiors and how these may intersect with unknown stimulus that are processed through our own biological mechanisms and systems we are equally oblivious to.

 

[Burnt State]

There are other ideas we can pursue in the rest of that post, at this link:
https://www.theparacast.com/forum/threads/february-1-2015-burnt-state.15873/page-2#post-215035
I think it's reasonable to say that both mind-altering drugs and shocking, disorienting experiences such as ufo/alien encounters clearly disable an individual's sense of what is normal and 'real', a sense developed over years of ordinary experience in our typical surroundings [a world taken for granted]. In fact that ordinary sense of reality is suddenly displaced....

I have a related follow up also going on over here:
January 18, 2015 — Greg Bishop

 

[Burnt State]

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC14647/pdf/pq000676.pdf

 

[Burnt State]

Psychoactive Substances and Paranormal Phenomena: A Comprehensive Review
This paper investigates the relationship between psychoactive substances and so-called paranormal phenomena falling within the study of parapsychology. It is primarily concerned with extrasensory perception (ESP)—telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance—as well as out-of-body experiences (OBEs) and near-death experiences (NDEs). Psychokinesis (PK), aura vision, encounter experiences, and sleep paralysis only make a very limited contribution to this review as they are seldom related to psychoactive drugs within the parapsychological literature. The paper borrows widely, but by no means exhaustively, from parapsychology as well as transpersonal studies, anthropology, ethnobotany, phytochemistry, psychiatry, psychotherapy, psychopharmacology, and neurobiology, particularly neurochemistry. It is organized into neurochemical models of paranormal experience (section 1), field reports of intentional and spontaneous phenomena incorporating anthropological, historical and clinical cases, and personal accounts (section 2), surveys of paranormal belief and experience (section 3), experimental research (section 4), and a methodological critique of the experimental research with recommendations for further work (section 5).

http://www.transpersonalstudies.org/ImagesRepository/ijts/Downloads/Luke IJTS 31(1)-2012.pdf

 

[Soupie]

It does seem to me that these apparently powerful substances must be significantly responsible for the types of human experiences that result, and that these experiences are significantly different from, e.g., NDE's and deep meditative states, which @Soupie included in his speculations.

As we don't have an explanatory model for consciousness in general, and altered states in particular, I think we need to remain open to the idea that they may have more similarities than differences. For instance, you suggest that deep meditative states are significantly different than altered states caused via hallucinogens, but they indeed may not be significantly different.

From the New Yorker article above:

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.​

We also have Rick Strassman's new book, "DMT and the Soul of Prophecy" which identifies commonalities between DMT experiences and "prophetic states of consciousness."

At long last, I’m delighted to announce the publication of my latest book DMT and The Soul of Prophecy. In this book, I tackle the major unresolved issues with which I was left after finishing my DMT project nearly 20 years ago. This was to find a model that fit the data from our volunteers’ reports of the drug state. This ultimately led me to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) where the notion of a “prophetic state of consciousness” began taking shape. At the same time, in order to make sense of the Hebrew Bible, I turned to the classic medieval Jewish philosophers like Maimonides, who proposed rather sophisticated metaphysical/spiritual mechanisms for the prophetic experience. Thus, to the extent that the prophetic and DMT states resembled each other, I could propose metaphysical and spiritual mechanisms in common in addition to shared biological mechanisms.

While the phenomenological properties of the two states overlap convincingly, the information content of the prophetic state appears to be much more highly articulated, enduring, and pervasive as evidenced by the Hebrew Bible’s influence throughout the world over the last 2500 years. The striking differences in the prophetic message versus the DMT one then led me to propose fundamental differences in how the two states come about. This finally led to a novel model of spiritual experience—either prophetic or psychedelic— that works from a top-down rather than bottom-up perspective. The bottom-up perspective is represented by neurotheology wherein changes in brain chemistry give the impression of communicating with the divine, whereas my new model, theoneurology, posits that God communicates with us via the agency of the brain.
​

I'm not arguing that all these experiences are exactly the same, because objectively and subjectively they clearly are not. However, the involvement of certain (endogenous and/or exogenous) families of molecules and the activation/deactivation of certain key brain networks may indeed be common to all experiences.

 

[Burnt State]

And then there's that whole other wacky idea that aliens from other planets in real hardware are visiting us leaving trace evidence and engaging our radar. While I feel that perceptions of reality and perceived objects interacting with consciousness processes in the brain can produce all manner of experiences, as can meditation, pharmacology, fear and altered bio-medical states that terms like schizophrenia describe, it is not explaining the rest of some of the hardcore UFO cases.

Unless we are willing to suggest that our anticipations in the mind that co-create the UFO experience in group settings, are also able to have tremendous impact on physical structures in the world, then this is still the beginning of a discussion. I'm not sure I'm willing to accept a paradigm that our minds can will materialism, and create material effects, by converting concentrated energy packets that we interact with unknowingy in a perceptual information exchange resulting in said physical evidence.

I think I might even be more willing to accept time traveling humans from the future who have lost their way as a species as a consequence of prolonged genetic engineering. But then that's my limitation.

 

[LatentCauses]

in fact, I haven't read Keel at all

eek! my god you have to rectify that he's like all the other awesome influences you obviously have, only the pulp fiction version that you start at 8 pm and finish at 2am in the morning - once again inspired to stay in a field you know deep down has no answers for us whilst we remain on this mortal coil. Mothman Prophecies, Our Haunted Planet, Operation Trojan Horse, Disneyland of the Gods - they are all freakin' amazin!!!

 

[LatentCauses]

And then there's that whole other wacky idea that aliens from other planets in real hardware are visiting us leaving trace evidence and engaging our radar. .

You know Burnt everytime I slip back to the same sentiment, and I do frequently being a Vallee, Keel et al fan boy, I think about Japan Airlines flight 1628 over Alaska in 1986 and their encounter with the battleship sized craft out the cockpit window. And I think about the pilot and co-pilot corroboration, cockpit transcript available for all to read and the radar traces captured in Alaska, and that brave JAL pilot who got punished with a desk job for 6 months for refusing to recant his version.

And I say whatever it is, it may as well be "aliens from other planets in real hardware are visiting us leaving trace evidence and engaging our radar" because every other aspect of it is equivalent. So if it its equivalent, why the dichotomoy between nuts and bolts on the one hand and imaginal on the other? Isnt it both - simultaneously.

 

[LatentCauses]

I'm not arguing that all these experiences are exactly the same, because objectively and subjectively they clearly are not. However, the involvement of certain (endogenous and/or exogenous) families of molecules and the activation/deactivation of certain key brain networks may indeed be common to all experiences.

Well said Soupie _ I'd add that letting more information through the brain as reducing valve is shaping up as a commonality in a few of these research areas.

 

[LatentCauses]

I hear what you are saying about Mack, but it's not always that way. In a classic discussion piece with Hopkins and Mack on abductions, as preserved on Hidden Experience, we hear them taking contrary positions and Mack is suddenly being much more "warning" with regards to contact and Hopkins is singing the spacebrother song. .

Burnt can a well read guy like yourself tell me why it is that Dr Karla Turner, and her three books, are all but forgotten in this field of abduction research?

 

[LatentCauses]

I don't think that we, as a species, are likely to be that special at this point in our evolution, but I think earth probably is. Life probably takes a foothold on many planets, but ours is mega-prolific, perhaps a kind of rare garden planet.

Constance, do you find it frustrating that you intuitively feel/know with absolute certainty that this planet Earth is a garden of Eden planet yet your rational , and well versed side says -hold on.... thats just your anthropomorphism running wild and there is no basis for suggesting that there is anything special about this place? Seems unlikely to me that there is nothing special about this lovely, lovely little watery blue ball in space - but there I go again getting all anthropomorphic all over the place

 

[DissectionStalker]

Burnt--Isn't bypassing the ego to meddle with the subconscious at least in part what the UFO is all about? It's almost as if the phenomenon has the equivalent of a hacker's "back door" into the operating system of the mind.

Some of us seem to be able to call them in by reading, dreaming, audio and video entertainment, DMT'ing, etc. Are we just calling home what is already present within our own witches brew? It's just a mirror staring back at us as "the wind" swirling the sand that we keep conjuring in our cauldrons in one form or another century after century. We have an evolutionary advantage to create and learn more using "the mirror" that reflects our unique time space continuum.

 

[LatentCauses]

Cant remember if this is the thread with the link to Vallee talking TEDx about the little sister of physics - ie information theory. In any event its amazing. Here is the summary

Vallee's 4 requirements for a new Physics

1. Recognise the universe we perceive as a subsystem of a meta-reality of information associations - all is simultaneous

2 recognise dimensions (ie space and time) as a cultural artefact – we create them in order to make our mathermatical models – we should do away with the concept of dimensions in the physics of the future

3. Treat the present as overdetermined – in other words it's determined from the past - adopting Guillemant's ideas that our intentions cause effects in the future that become the future causes of present effects

4. Consciousness is generating the impression of space and time – in other words consciousness traverses associations, in the process generating our mind's impression of space and time - that is essentially what space-time is