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  • Reptilian Revelations Out of Africa

    Reptilian Revelations Out of Africa

    From New Dawn Special Issue 7 (Autumn 2009)

    South Africa-based Zulu shaman Credo Mutwa confirms the story of reptilian-extraterrestrials in Africa, another hidden chapter of the lost history of Planet Earth. Having traveled throughout the world, Credo Mutwa, says that the “legends” of the interactions of humans and reptilians are common knowledge in Australia among the Aborigines, the cultures of Japan and Taiwan, as well as indigenous Native American people like the Mayans, Sioux, Cree, and many others. The Hopis’ Kachina, for example, reflects their understanding of the extraterrestrials’ presence on earth. Now it seems that only so-called Western civilisation authorities officially deny the existence of these creatures.

    In an interview with Rick Martin, Credo Mutwa explains the manipulation of life on earth by these negative entities, “Our people believe that we, the people of this Earth, are not masters of our own lives, although we are made to think that we are.” Referring to the reptilian race, he says they are called “Chitauri” which means “the dictators” and “‘the ones who tell us the law.’ In other words, they who tell us secretly what we are to do.”

    The intergalactic con for Earth-based humanity began with the arrival of the reptilians, who wasted no time in setting themselves up as “gods” and “overseers” to the humans living on the planet. Credo Mutwa says that “when the Chitauri came to Earth, they arrived in terrible vessels which flew through the air, vessels shaped like great bowls, which made a terrible noise and a terrible fire in the sky. The Chitauri told human beings, whom they gathered together by force with whips of lightning, that they were great gods from the sky and that from now on they would receive a number of great gifts from the gods.” Of course, there would be hell to pay, so to speak, for these alleged “gifts.” Was the gift of “religion” one of them?

    This then is the essence of history disguised as mythology – or science fiction. “These so-called gods were like human beings, but very tall, with a long tail, and with terrible burning eyes,” Credo Mutwa continues, describing the real-life version of a prototypical horror movie. “Some of them had two eyes, yellow, bright eyes; some had three eyes, the red, round eye being in the centre of their forehead.”

    The Zulu shaman then expresses surprise, when he describes the Darth Maul character in the Star Wars movie which shows “a character exactly like a Chitauri…with horns all around its head.”

    Credo Mutwa’s insights into human-reptilian interactions are credible because they explain the otherwise unexplainable behaviour of warmongers, politicians, corporate chiefs and others who are “placeholders” in the Illuminati control system on Earth. “One other thing that our people say is that the Chitauri prey upon us like vultures. They raise some of us. They fill some of us with great anger and great ambition. And they make these people they’ve raised into great warriors who make terrible war. But, in the end, the Chitauri do not allow these great leaders, these great war chiefs and kings, to die peacefully. The warrior chief is used to make as much war as possible, to kill as many of his people and those he calls enemies, and then, in the end, the warrior chief dies a terrible death, with his blood being spilled by others.”

    Explaining why the spiritual evolution of humanity has been stifled, Credo Mutwa continues, “These creatures then took away the great powers that human beings had: the power of speaking through the mind only, the power of moving objects with their mind only, the power of seeing into the future and into their past, and the power to travel, spiritually, to different worlds… There are such creatures, and the sooner skeptics amongst us face up to this fact, the better it shall be. Why is humankind not progressing? Why are we running around in a great circle of self-destruction and mutual-destruction?”

    Despite the harsh realities he describes, Credo Mutwa ends his interview on a positive note. He says, “There is hope! First of all, there is a God above us. And this God is more real than most of us believe. God is not a figment of someone’s imagination. God is not something dreamt-up by old men and old women in prehistoric times. God exists. But standing between us and God are creatures who claim to be gods. And these creatures we must get rid of in order to get closer to God.”
    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn Special Issue 7.[/alert]

    [alert type=”success” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider subscribing to help maintain this website.[/alert]

    REFERENCES:

    Interview with Credo Mutwa by Rick Martin, www.metatech.org/credo_mutwa.html

    Interview with Credo Mutwa by David Icke on the Reptilian Agenda, www.youtube.com/watch?v=oh6MhHc8JQk

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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  • Is the Afterlife What We Think It Is? A Challenge from Near-Death Studies

    Is the Afterlife What We Think It Is? A Challenge from Near-Death Studies

    There are millions of stories now of near-death experiences from around the world; each a snippet, a teaser, of what appears to exist on the other side of death. No other human drama carries quite the power this phenomenon does to unmask traditions of a “grim reaper,” and reveal instead an aliveness that continues after our bodies take their last breath and our brains cease to function.

    This aliveness we call an “afterlife,” because in most cases, what near-death experiencers describe sounds like or certainly seems to be sparkling luminations of higher, finer aspects to what we know: cities, gardens, forests, landscapes, roads, rivers, busy people quite alive and doing things, schools, hospitals, opportunities of varied types to reassess earthly existence, to forgive, learn, and then advance toward a goal we can only term “spiritual.”

    Because the stories that come from experiencers are so compelling, I’d like to share a few from my research base. Surely after hearing them, you will be more than impressed that an afterlife must indeed exist and that life goes on after we die. Once I have shared these accounts, though, I intend to introduce others that will stretch what we think we know about life after death. The concept of “afterlife” may not be as previously stated or broadly believed.

    Afterlife Stories

    Arthur E. Yensen died in 1932, at least as near as we can tell he did, from severe injuries in an automobile accident. The vividness of what happened next remained fresh in his memory, not only after he revived, but throughout what later became a long and productive life. As Yensen put it: “Gradually the earth scene faded away, and through it loomed a bright, new, beautiful world – beautiful beyond imagination! For half a minute I could see both worlds at once. Finally, when the earth was all gone, I stood in a glory that could only be heaven.

    “In the background were two beautiful, round-topped mountains, similar to Fujiyama in Japan,” Yensen continued. “The tops were snowcapped, and the slopes were adorned with foliage of indescribable beauty. The mountains appeared to be about fifteen miles away, yet I could see individual flowers growing on their slopes. I estimated my vision to be about one hundred times better than on earth. To the left was a shimmering lake containing a different kind of water – clear, golden, radiant, and alluring. It seemed to be alive. The whole landscape was carpeted with grass so vivid, clear, and green, that it defies description. To the right was a grove of large luxuriant trees, composed of the same clear material that seemed to make up everything.”

    Yensen described the people there as young-looking and lively, yet possessing a weightless grace in their movements. Their bodies were somewhat translucent, so was the grass and trees; their clothing minimal. One man told him: “Everything over here is pure. The elements don’t mix or break down as they do on earth. Everything is kept in place by an all-pervading Master Vibration, which prevents aging. That’s why things don’t get dirty, or wear out, and why everything looks so bright and new.” Yensen learned how heaven could be eternal from this man (Atwater, 1994, 53-55).

    Muriel E. Kelly, weakened by rheumatic fever and a serious heart murmur, became very ill and passed into another world. “I found myself standing on a cobble-stone road with people around me dressed in bright robes – red, blue, pink. Everything was so bright and sunny. Birds were singing. Baby angels were smiling and flying around. I saw all different sizes of angels. The music was hauntingly beautiful.”

    Hearing her name called, Muriel turned to see Jesus beside her, dressed in a white-and-red robe. “He knelt down,” she said, “and gave me a hug and I hugged him back. He told me we were going somewhere to talk.” During the course of their time together, Jesus led her to an apartment building with many doors, and told her which door to knock on. A voice inside beckoned her to enter. It was her mother, who had died when Muriel was nine, leaving behind five children. Their reunion was love filled. “I asked Mama where Daddy was, and Cecil, Willie, John, and Paul. Mother told me they weren’t there ‘cause it wasn’t their time. I had no idea what she meant, so she took me to an area where we sat on a cloud and looked over the whole world. My mother located my dad and brothers riding in a car. We could see right through it. Dad was driving, and we heard my brothers and Dad crying, saying, ‘I wish Muriel was still here. We miss her.’” Muriel began to cry for her earthly family and wished to be back with them. She got her wish (Atwater, 1999 and 2003, 106-107).

    Cecil L. Hamilton told of swimming with his brother. “He had a problem. I tried to get him out of the water, but in his panic he pulled me under several times. We both drowned. He died, but I came back.” While Hamilton was in the grips of death, he suddenly found himself stepping into a light-filled world. “I noticed everything – sky, buildings, glass – emitted its own light. And everything was much more colourful ….a river meandered around. On the other side was a city, and a road running through it to another city, and another city, and another and another. Right in front of me but across the river were three men. They projected themselves to me. They didn’t walk or fly; they projected over. I didn’t recognise them, yet I knew one was Lynn Bibb.” Hamilton explained, “I was named after him. He died a matter of weeks before I was born.”

    Hamilton continued with his story: “I knew these three men were looking out for me, like a welcoming committee to escort me over the river to the first city. I had the feeling that if I went with them, there would be no coming back, so I hesitated. The first city was like first grade. People stayed there until they were ready to go to the next city – your eternal progression, from city to city. Behind me and to the left was a strong light source, very brilliant and filled with love. I knew it was a person. I called it God for lack of a better term. I could not see it; I felt what seemed like a male presence.”

    God and Hamilton engaged in a long conversation, the young man asking Him about the universe and reasons for everything. Then God questioned if Hamilton wanted to return to the physical world. “I do want to return,” he said. God asked why. “I said I would help my mother whom my father had left with four children and one on the way. God kind of chuckled and asked for the real reason. I said I would leave the earth a little better than I found it. ‘Then you may return with some of the knowledge of the things you have learned, but the rest will be veiled for a time. Live in such a way that you will not feel bad when you return here again.’ I woke up face down in the mud of the river bottom and was ‘lifted’ to the top” (Atwater, 1991 and 2003, 45-47).

    Each of these three accounts describes a particular arrangement of structures, shapes, people, and behaviours that are familiar to us – adding heft to the belief that the afterlife either reflects our earthly life or is an extension of it. The testimonies that follow, however, deviate from what I have just relayed. The focus with them is more fluid with an absence of structured form. I’ll begin with the near-death experience of Ray Kinman that he had as a teenager from an accidental overdose.

    “Now this is very difficult to describe,” cautioned Kinman. “Time ceased to exist. Past and future were completely nonexistent. I was traveling in an intense, burning ‘now.’ ‘Now’ was everything. I ceased to be a noun (person, place, or thing) and became a verb (an action). I was Ray-ing, instead of Ray. I was given a huge message. The Being told me, ‘This is Who You Really Are,’ as the Universe opened up to me. I could not tell the difference between myself and the infinite galaxies. I became all-powerful and all-knowing – yet I was still Ray. Then the Being introduced me to another Being of the most Incredible Beauty and Love that anyone could comprehend. It was a Greater Being of intense Light. It was God. The first Being guided me to this Light and let it enfold and swallow me up. I became one with Love times a million, billion, trillion forever and ever. We were made of the same stuff! Every Being that had ever existed in all of Creation was now part of this Greater Whole Being called God. I was one with all of them, and yet I was still Ray – all-powerful, little old me!

    “‘This is Who You Really Are,’ thundered the Light. It looked like a galaxy except the points of light were not stars, they were Beings. Every Being there was singing this incredibly beautiful music and praising God. After some indefinite length of Now-ness, I was told that I must go back. I was given another message that was very important. I was told I may return anytime I wished to. Coming back to my body felt like I was stuffed into a vessel of pain and exhaustion.” Kinman was very clear that this was not like any drug experience. This was truth – he was shown the way things really are (Atwater, 2007, 35-36).

    Tannis Prouten had a severe anxiety attack that seemed to claim her life. As she explains: “I felt like ducking as the ceiling was only an inch from me, then I was outside, moving through very dark, very vast space.” She saw small, round, glowing spheres around her that she came to realise were lost souls. Before she could react, “Very rapidly I was enveloped within this most divine, living, golden-white light, my HOME. The joy, bliss, humility, awe were beyond human capability to bear. The LIGHT was an infinite, loving, accepting BEING without form. IT had personality. IT communicated with me telepathically. IT was pure TRUTH.”

    As the intensity of her experience increased, she came to realise: “I was the LIGHT and the LIGHT was me. I was still a unique, separate, point of consciousness with the same sense of humour and awareness that I had always had, but the paradox is that I was MORE. I had become homogeneous with the LIGHT. I was all love, wisdom, truth, peace, joy, for all eternity. Human words fail to express this experience. Not only was the message of my true nature conveyed to me telepathically, but I experienced the SPIRIT of the message – I felt IT with every speck of my being. There was absolutely no possibility of hiding, distorting information, or lying in communicating with the LIGHT. I fell madly in love with the SPIRIT OF TRUTH! There was no concept of space or time in the GREATER REALITY. All takes place or exists in the ETERNAL NOW. That is my last conscious memory of the experience” (Atwater, 2007, 26-28).

    Neath-Death Experiences that challenge accepted notions

    Many near-death episodes are like these last two, seeming to counter the idea of biblical, religious, medieval, or even mythological traditions of an afterlife that features core imagery basic to the spread of culture and consensus throughout the human family. We have a long history of such commonalties especially in regards to death, the greatest of all mysteries, and what happens to us after we die. Findings in the field of near-death studies, though, are beginning to challenge not only traditional but non-traditional beliefs as well. Maybe there’s more to learn from our shared histories than what we thought.

    Scenarios are reported that openly defy the idea of an afterlife as an end point or a dwelling place or a platform for progressive states of learning. Here are some examples of these exceptions and the questions they invite:

    How can a future sibling exist concurrent with a present one?

    Merla Ianello recalls that as a child she saw a guest in her home who was three or four years old choke to death trying to eat a plastic-wrapped frozen juice treat called an Ice Pop. She insisted on naming them “Death Pops” after that, and one day she asked her mother who the child was. Her mother, staring in disbelief, said, “It was you.” Merla remembers her mother’s screams and how upset her father was, yet couldn’t identify with the distressed child because to her that child must have been really naughty to have caused such a fuss. Even though it took her years to admit that the child was her, one feature of the episode was never in doubt – the presence of her little brother Michael in the kitchen with the rest of the family. She talked a lot about Michael, much to the chagrin of her mother. You see, Michael wasn’t conceived until the following year. No mention had ever been made of a future child nor did the mother even want one. How then could he appear physically and fully present, even holding an Ice Pop, long before he was born? (Atwater, 1999 and 2003, 142-144.)

    Does the belief of an “afterlife” apply when incarnations are back-to-back?

    Rand Jameson Shields was hit on the head by a man diving into a swimming pool. Dazed, he ventured out into deep water and drowned. “The ceiling of the sky above me rolled back to reveal an infinite light universe, the earth below me dissolved away, and I intuitively understood my soul’s purpose and the nature of the spiritual universe.” A woman grabbed for him and he was resuscitated, yet during the following year his soul was pulled away from his body eighty times. “I was made to physically ‘re-experience’ sixty-eight events from previous lives. Thirty-four of these experiences were of my most recent life, including the entire period my soul spent between my last death and my birth in this life.” Years later he was able to visit one of the towns involved and uncovered “114 precise pieces of evidence verifying that every one of my thirty-four unique childhood re-experiences occurred to this man who died twenty-eight months prior to my birth, to the day. I have not found one piece of evidence that contradicted any of my past-life memories” (Atwater, 1999 and 2003, 140-141).

    What are we to think about continuous lives, one occurring soon after the other, rather than an individual taking up residence in some heavenly realm after dying? Or, the full manifestation of a future sibling, even participating in a family event, long before the child was born? Exceptional cases such as these are actually rather commonplace – like missing twins reappearing, aborted fetuses coming back as older or grown children, animals as much a part of “the other worlds” as they are in this one. And, here’s another “wrinkle,” there are group events that further stretch the time-honoured definitions of an afterlife.

    How can four separate experiences be the same – and – simultaneous?

    My very first encounters with the near-death phenomenon happened at St. Alphonsus Hospital in Boise, Idaho. The woman I was visiting had suffered a heart attack yet revived. She was white with fear when I arrived and told me that while clinically dead she had floated out of her body and into a dark tunnel which led toward a bright light. Once in the light, she saw a landscape of barren, rolling hills filled to overflowing with nude, zombie-like people standing elbow to elbow doing nothing but staring straight at her. This so horrified her that she started screaming and snapped back into her body. She continued to scream until sedated. As I listened to her, two other people entered the room, an elderly man and woman, both using canes. Each had suffered heart failure at the same time in the same hospital, were considered clinically dead, but were resuscitated. None knew each other before being rushed to the hospital, nor did they have the same doctor. They found out about each other thanks to nurses who heard their strange stories – the same as the woman I was visiting – which also matched that of one more person. I was unable to see this man as he was still sedated after screaming uncontrollably. None of these people had the same religion, background or lifestyle. None had mutual friends or common interests. All had lived long lives of varying degrees of hardship and success; two were still married to their original spouse and had several grown children. The others were divorced. The only common denominator I could find after asking a lot of questions to them or to people who knew them, was that their strange encounter at death strengthened the pain they already felt from deeply-held guilts and fears about how they had lived and what they had done in their lives (Atwater, 1988, 14-16).

    Why would 20 people have the same experience at the same time in the same place?

    Arvin S. Gibson shared with me a case of his where a 20-person fire-fighting crew called “Hotshots” all succumbed from lack of oxygen while trapped by a sudden burst of flames near a mountain top. One by one each of the men and women fell to the earth, suffocated. Each of the twenty saw each other leave their bodies and float upwards. One, by the name of Jake, looked down at a fellow crew member who had been born with a defective foot. As the man came out of his body, Jake said, “Look, Jose, your foot is straight.” A light brighter than sun shining on a snowy field appeared. Jake was met by his deceased great-grandfather, who acted as a guide throughout a long and extensive near-death scenario. Jake pleaded to stay, as he did not want to revive in a horribly burned body. He was then told that neither he nor any of his crew who chose to return would suffer ill effects from the fire. “This was done so that God’s power over the elements would be made manifest,” Jake affirmed. After rescue, each crew member confirmed the mutual event. Some claimed to have talked to each other while out-of-body. Separately, each of these claims was verified. All involved had met deceased relatives as part of their scenario, and had to choose whether or not they would return to earth (Atwater, 2000, 165-166).

    ‘Seeing’ Beyond the Veil of Death

    It is easy to assume that the four people who had matching hellish experiences met in dying what they had repressed during their lives – negative emotions that were still “eating away at them.” Such an assumption would be in keeping with the voluminous writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, an incredible scientist several centuries back who had also mastered the ability to “see” beyond the veil of death. It was his contention that after we died, we entered realms of our own making, based on our attitudes and beliefs (Atwater, 2000, 233-235, 424). We could expand on this idea by inferring that, because the hellish accounts were virtually identical, there could have existed at that hospital a type of energy (perhaps from previous emotional outbursts) that the four of them unconsciously activated in a similar fashion to outpicture their deeply-held beliefs. Possible? Yes, but there is more to consider.

    The group experience of twenty hotshot fire-fighters challenges the conclusions of Swedenborg and anyone else, myself included, who tried to tie near-death scenarios solely to the attitudes and beliefs of experiencers – the idea that “you get what you expect.” What appears to be obvious may not necessarily be as true as it seems.

    There are lots of shared experiences, such as between a parent and child in the same accident, between friends who die together and similarly revive, between people who never knew each other but found out about their mutual episodes years later once they started asking questions. People on opposite sides of the world can go through the same thing, at the same or different times, yet their separate lives, beliefs, feelings do not match nor did they ever – even though their near-death experiences did. And there are even incidents like what happened to Nadia McCaffrey.

    Nadia was a participant in the original research I conducted with child experiencers of near-death states (Atwater, 1999 and 2003, 86-88). Years later, while caring for a woman who was dying, she nearly died herself following severe seizures. Several days afterward, still in pain, she called me and we exchanged stories. The upshot was that Nadia’s seizures had begun at the same moment our granddaughter Myriam’s seizures had. When Nadia died, so had Myriam (from bacterial meningitis). The two met each other in spirit as they died. Myriam enabled Nadia to have another near-death experience, this time one that clarified and detailed her life’s mission. Myriam had always been unique in this regard, for she had the ability to force, push, or aid a person in accessing their own inner truth. Nadia’s first near-death experience had left her with many questions, especially about her purpose for being alive. Her second one, thanks to Myriam, filled in the missing pieces and helped her launch a new type of hospice (Atwater, 2004, 122-123).

    How can this incident be explained? Or any of those I’ve shared? Do our moments at the edge of death or while clinically dead really unveil an afterlife? Or, is there something else going on that we miss in our great hurry or even greater desire to accommodate what is before us and name it what our traditions claim it to be?

    Near-Death Episodes as Growth Events

    Two clues, present in almost every case I have worked on, caused me to toss the notion of “afterlife.” I no longer consider it relevant. To help you understand why I say this, a presentation of the clues and my observations follow.

    Clue #1 – almost to a person near-death experiencers say “I got what I needed.”

    To an extent, Swedenborg was right. What he missed is what people really meant when they spoke such words, and the broader perspective necessary to interpret what people experienced and what he himself actually witnessed. Being literal isn’t always productive. It’s like trying to see an aura. Aim your gaze a little past what is in front of you and suddenly you begin to see things you never recognised before. Do this with the phrase, “I got what I needed,” and you’ll notice as I did that the near-death experience unfolds in patterning that mimics an accelerated “growth event.” Life insists on growth and change. If we block these urges, something will happen to unblock them. That something is what I call a “growth event.”

    A growth event is any kind of sudden, unexpected twist in life that twirls you around and changes your attitudes and stretches your mind. Growth events, all of them, give us an opportunity to face our inner selves and be honest about what we find, to glimpse higher, more spiritual realities, to expand beyond limiting ideas, to discover the impossible and experience the “paranormal,” to become in some way transformed.

    I believe the near-death experience is a growth event, perhaps one of those that seems “reserved” for people who need a “good shove” in making life changes. Here is a brief synopsis of what I found that underscores this:

    • Most near-death episodes happen during major junctures or times of unusual stress in the individual’s life, when guidance or direction would be most helpful.
    • Young children, relatives and caregivers can be affected as well – to the degree that it is almost as if the child had the experience for them. Yet the extent to which the episode transformed the youngster becomes more apparent as he or she matures, and can be a quiet but powerful directive in the life path chosen.
    • Causes and conditions of death can reflect, at least symbolically, the experiencer’s past or current state of psychological growth.
    • Greeters on death’s threshold always match (accommodate to) whatever is necessary to alert or calm the experiencer.
    • As the episode deepens, the scenario’s message parallels almost exactly the subconscious needs of the individual at that moment in time.
    • Life reviews and “lecture” sessions cover material either omitted, ignored, or not yet learned in life by the individual involved. Life previews alert to what might be the future – for good or ill.
    • Afterward, the experiencer’s behaviour tends to shift to whatever has been undeveloped or partially developed – physically in the sense of brain function/-nerve sensitivity, and psychologically in the sense of personal growth/maturity – as if whatever traits are missing in the individual’s maturing process are now being “filled in” (Atwater, 2007, 244).

    Whatever the truth of this, and it may never be proved one way or the other, the need factor is plainly obvious as to the timing, storyline, and outcome of near-death states – not in the sense of predetermination, rewards/punishment, or wish fulfillment, but rather, in terms of a subconscious “agenda” of a higher order.

    Clue #2 – the most oft-repeated phrase near-death experiencers say after their episode is “Always there is life.”

    This fact struck me. If it is true, and I believe it is, then how can there be an afterlife? Or a before life? Or anything else but life? Implied here is that in some form, somewhere, somehow, eternal and forever, life exists as an ongoing extension of itself, acting upon and interacting within itself, ever conscious, intelligent, and aware…. life unending. Indicated as well is that we are that life, existent within the existence of a forever that can be counted on. These four words sum up and explain all else. They take us beyond attitudes, dictums, dogmas, preferences, traditions, even what we can imagine. These four words are as if a prayer answered.

    Once I recognised the import of this, all the experiencer narratives I had ever encountered or heard from other researchers made sense. If you allow yourself to step back from all the minutiae – who said what where and under what conditions – a different picture emerges that transcends the individual storylines from both adults and children. That “different picture” describes a vastness to the creation we are a part of, while focusing in on the souls that we are, as we participate in a journey of awakening to our real identity and purpose…. what reality really is.

    Tens of thousands of reported cases, not only in the Western world, but throughout Africa, China, India, the Pacific Rim, Russia, Israel, Thailand, Korea, Turkey, from jungle dwellers to desert clans, from the backs of buffalo riders to the canyons of Wall Street, this, the near-death phenomenon, if viewed as it occurs at the time that it does, offers a picture of the other side of death that mirrors what quantum physics seeks to uncover and explain…. that all is consciousness…. and everything else is illusion. With experiencer estimates running between four to five percent of the general population worldwide, umpteen million are involved. The phenomenon is that widespread.

    The 12 Heavens and Hells

    It is no small thing, then, for us to take a second look at what has been reported. The concept of heaven and hell changes when we do this.

    Near-death states show that once you leave your body in death, regardless of whatever comes next, you eventually find yourself moving to or present within an energy frequency you resonate with. What you find there corresponds for the most part to what you are capable of responding to, i.e., beings, shapes, forms, activities. These frequency realms resemble a “layer cake” of many levels, each separated from the other by degrees of lighter or heavier vibrations. The heavier more dense vibrations hold what most people call “hell” in that they consist of negative or lower forms of thought that reside in close proximity to the earthplane. Apparently you stay within this range of vibration for as long as it best serves your development as a soul. You do not leave until you have changed your attitudes, thoughts and feelings, and are ready for another opportunity to improve and advance. The faster, higher, more subtle vibrations are what most people term “heaven” and they also are in close proximity to the earthplane. There is a sense of benefit here, as if one has found one’s true home. You leave whatever level of this positive, supportive domain you are in once you have further advanced as an awakened soul and are more unified in spirit.

    I have counted from experiencer descriptions what appears to be the existence of twelve heavens and twelve hells. Yet, this “layer cake” of energy frequencies (layered thoughtform realms) seems to be open at both ends. I have found nothing to indicate otherwise. Claims of souls forever and eternally trapped or condemned in the heavier levels, or basking in the glory of ascension in the finer, lighter ones, do not hold up. When you really study the import of what people encounter on the other side of death, you come to realise that unlimited possibilities are available because of the power unleashed from awakenings. To whatever degree a soul awakens, consciousness expands – individually and universally.

    Yes, “detours” are reported, to places like borderlands or shadow areas where individuals in spirit form may tarry. It seems that in some cases where the ego personality refuses to merge with its soul, spirit can remain “apart” somehow, as if lost, disconnected, confused, or determined to fulfill a vow or promise before moving on. Spirits like this are often seen as “ghosts” by those who are still embodied. The idea, then, of “way stations” is upheld in near-death accounts, places where spirits reside until helped in some fashion. These “catch-all” places appear to be necessary diversions so that one can “shake” free of that which initially hinders. What matters most throughout this entire arrangement of heaven/hell/borderlands, though, is the resonance factor, i.e., “like attracts like.” Our religions insist that it is deeds done or not done that is the final determinate of where we wind up once dead, yet nothing from experiencer cases fully validates this. Their testimony indicates something else – that self-acceptance or self-rejection is what creates our energetic “signal.”

    Time and Space, Soul and God

    The concept of time and space also changes when we take that second look. Near-death experiencers are adamant in stating that neither time nor space exist. They claim that everything on the other side of death resides in a kind of “NOW” moment devoid of boundaries, limits or definitions other than that of the relationship between perception and perceivers. Time and space are seen as purposeful, however. From the bulk of near-death accounts, time is experienced by individuals as a type of “doorway” space moves through in sparkling waveforms of potential. That sparkle comes from light in the process of becoming dense enough within the “cradle” of space to take on the shapes and forms of what is termed matter. What becomes apparent from experiencer testimony, however, is that, in a way few can understand or explain, time not only enables but protects the manifestation of existence that space allows, so thought can reproduce itself. It’s consciousness. It’s as if all of life, every tiny speck of it, all of what we encounter on the other side of death, every vibratory “wiggle” of it, exists as it does within a giant brain processing thought… and we are projections of that thought, and so are planets, asteriods, solar systems, and so forth.

    This brings us to another way of considering soul.

    Near-death states illuminate the reality of soul, our soul, everybody’s soul, and establish soul as a power source without form or gender. Some call it our Higher Self or our Greater Self, and that we as a soul are immortal, an extension of The Divine. Soul is experienced as having its own will, and an agenda above and beyond anything we might relate to from the personality level of our egos. What emerges from this discovery is the realisation that souls go through learning cycles similar in purpose to people on earth, and that souls can and often do incarnate in groups to accomplish specific things of a larger nature. The soul-level of our being is recognised as possessing perfect memory and an almost unbelievable grasp of Creation’s Story and our place in its overall scheme. On this level, which most experiencers consider a higher level of being, the goal of continued incarnations in human or other forms, appears to be a furtherance of what can be experienced creatively as we seek to expand our roles as Co-Creators with the Creator. Winding our way through the peaks and valleys of humanness appears to aid in this process. You get a real sense that life and death and the forms we take on fulfill an even Higher Will for an even Greater Purpose.

    With that said, we can approach the topic of God or Deity.

    The greatest discovery the vast majority of near-death experiencers make after realising there is life on the other side of death, is that an intelligence beyond what we can fathom exists – there is a Deity. And that Deity or God is so massive, so powerful, so encompassing, that it is often described by experiencers as more brilliant and mighty than a million suns, existent as a Presence without need of name, identity or definition. The biblical injunction to call It “I AM THAT I AM” suffices as a reference. All that exists is seen to exist within this allness, this oneness. It is as if there is only One Mind, yet many thinkers. This, the One Mind, is often described as spreading out from a webbing or matrix field of Its Own Consciousness, embracing what exists from the stirring of Its Own Thought. Changeless as the Supreme Consciousness it is, The One appears ever changing once projections of Its Thought take on free will and the endless variation possible in that freedom. Life is God made visible. The awesomeness of this tends to dissolve any ideas or previous beliefs anyone ever had about religious dictums or mythological characterisations. A favourite phrase experiencers come to use is: We are one with The One.

    When reconsidering near-death cases, realise as you do that four patterns to the phenomenon exist, not just one. The spread that follows results if you also factor in deviations in experiencer behaviour and beliefs before and after their episode:

    • Initial Experience (very few elements): An introduction for the individual to other ways of perceiving reality… stimulus.
    • Unpleasant or Hellish Experience (frightening scenarios): A confrontation with distortions in one’s own attitudes and beliefs… healing.
    • Pleasant or Heavenly Experience (uplifting scenarios): A realisation of how important life is and how every effort that one makes counts… validation.
    • Transcendent Experience (limitless expanses): An encounter with Oneness and the collective whole of humankind… enlightenment (Atwater, 1999, 133).

    If you are objective about this spread, what you see here is a fascinating panorama, not about the existence of an afterlife and the do’s and don’ts of living, but of what very well could be the movement of our consciousness as it evolves through the human condition via stages of awakening. These stages of awakening extend from the first realisation of something greater, an initial awareness, to confrontations with the bias of perception followed by opportunities to cleanse and start anew. This leads to the bliss and the ecstasy of self-validation and the discovery of one’s worth, until at last the moment comes when unlimited realms of truth and wisdom are embraced.

    It’s all about consciousness, moving in and through our story and larger types of stories, as the One Mind experiences Itself through variations in Its Thought. Still, there is more to note here. Present in experiencer accounts is a deeper sense seldom vocalised that consciousness itself, by itself, as itself, is also awakening and expanding. To give this meaning, let me quote St. Teresa of Avila, the great Spanish mystic and reformer, who, near the end of her life, said: “The feeling remains that God is on the journey, too.” The invitation here is for us to move past defining concepts and ideas of an afterlife that are birth-to-death centred, and embrace instead a new vision of life as an emanation of spirit evolving in its capacity to handle the power from its Source. Why limit ourselves; experiencers don’t.
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    References

    P. M. H. Atwater, L.H.D. with David Morgan (2000), The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Near-Death Experiences, Macmillan/Alpha Books, Indianapolis, IN.

    P. M. H. Atwater, L.H.D. (1988), Coming Back to Life, Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, NY.

    (1994), Beyond the Light, Birch Lane Press, New York, NY.

    (1999), Future Memory, Hampton Roads, Charlottesville, VA.

    (1999 and 2003), Children of the New Millennium, Three Rivers Press, New York, NY; replaced by The New Children and Near-Death Experiences, Bear & Co., Rochester, VT.

    (2004), We Live Forever, A.R.E. Press, Virginia Beach, VA.

    (2007), The Big Book of Near-Death Experiences, Hampton Roads, Charlottesville, VA.

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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  • Mysteries, Miracles & Parapsychology

    Mysteries, Miracles & Parapsychology

    From New Dawn Special Issue 9 (Sept 2009)

    Parapsychology is full of anecdotal accounts of strange occurrences, which cause many people to simply shake their heads in disbelief.1 The phenomena of parapsychology grade into the mysteries and miracles that are the boon and bane of much religion. After all, to use a Christian example (and in no way am I making a statement about Christianity per se), not only can Jesus and the saints perform miracles, but so can Satan and his cohorts!

    When it comes to the question of whether or not parapsychological phenomena are real, for many people the stakes are high, as the answer has the potential to confirm or deny their worldview. Some are incredulous when it comes to telepathy, even though it has been statistically demonstrated time and again in laboratory settings, whereas the credulity of others stretches much, much further.

    In popular culture often the reality, or not, of the paranormal (viewed popularly as “miracles”) is seen as confirming, or refuting, one of the fundamental tenets of many religions, namely life after death. As the late parapsychologist and University of Virginia (Charlottesville) psychiatrist Dr. Ian Stevenson (1918 – 2007) wrote,

    Some persons can segregate beliefs about different aspects of non-material existences and events. This would be particularly likely to be true of persons who have made a special study of psychical phenomena…. However, I think that members of the general public do not usually make such a distinction. For most of them, a belief in life after death almost entails a belief in miracles, such as the phenomena described in the Bible, and also a belief in what we call paranormal cognition. Conversely, members of the general public who do not believe in life after death are also likely to be skeptical about all kinds of paranormal phenomena, the recognition of which would imply for them a soul that would survive bodily death.2

    The Incredulity Meter

    I am absolutely convinced that telepathy is real, even if a somewhat fickle and uncontrollable phenomenon. Given the choice between a telephone and telepathic rapport to communicate an important and specific message, I will use the phone. In my opinion there is nothing miraculous about telepathy, although how it occurs remains a mystery (there is still no generally agreed upon theory as to the mechanism for telepathic transmission).3 I should note, however, that I always attempt to maintain a healthy skepticism about any particular claim of telepathy (it is human nature to be disingenuous, or to fool one’s self), but there are plenty of well-documented cases of telepathy in the literature, and I have had my share personally.

    My incredulity meter really begins to perk up when it comes to physical parapsychological phenomena, such as psychokinesis and levitations, materialisations of solid substances out of “thin air,” or the ability to withstand physical trauma, such as walking on hot coals or applying extreme heat or fire directly to the skin without damage. Lacking good, indeed virtually impeccable, documentation for certain extreme feats of this nature, I instinctively dismiss them as nonsense, or at the least remain agnostic.

    Of all the cases that register high on my incredulity meter, however, some are classics and though they may boggle the imagination, it is difficult to dismiss them. Here I will focus on particular aspects of two such celebrated examples from the history of parapsychology, one from the seventeenth century and the other from the nineteenth century. They are, in the opinions of some, intimately tied to religious beliefs and the concept of miracles.

    The Flying Saint

    Saint Joseph of Cupertino (San Giuseppe da Copertino, 1603-1663; born Giuseppe Maria Desa in Cupertino, southeastern Italy) was considered rather dull witted (in modern terms, he may have suffered from learning disabilities), and said to possess a violent temper (a point we will return to). Joseph was extremely pious, however, and became a Franciscan friar. Joseph exhibited various mental psychic phenomena; for instance, it is said he was aware of the thoughts of penitents and knew if they were not fully honest and forthright during confession. Due to his mental deficiencies, he could learn only a small amount of material at a time. When preparing for exams he simply studied one specific topic, and then prayed that that would be the very subject, of all possible subjects, that would be asked of him – and so it was. Was this an example of precognition, or was Joseph telepathically influencing or accessing (perhaps unconsciously) the examiners in terms of the questions they would put to him?

    Joseph was also said to have the power to heal the sick. But it was his bodily levitations, his literal flights in the air, that he is most famous for, and which by many are considered to be absolutely mysterious and miraculous, either justifiably earning Joseph the appellation of Saint (he was canonised in 1767), or in the skeptic’s opinion dismissal as either a fraud, or at the least someone who incited hallucinations among those witnessing the supposed levitations. At first glance, St. Joseph’s flights rank high on my incredulity meter.4

    Although we are separated from St. Joseph by three and a half centuries, and his time still contained a strong element of superstition and anti-scientific sentiment (after all, the Inquisition was in full swing during Joseph’s lifetime, persecuting Galileo in 1633), it is still difficult to dismiss all of the varied eyewitness accounts of Joseph’s flights. Reportedly the first levitation was in his hometown of Cupertino during an outdoor procession on the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi. Joseph took off, flying over the crowd. After it was over, in embarrassment, he fled to hide in his mother’s house. From then until the end of his life, Joseph experienced uncontrolled fits of bodily levitation. Various minor incidents could potentially initiate a levitation: a casual remark about the wonders of God, or viewing an image of the Virgin Mary, could send Joseph into ecstasy, and then with a loud sob or cry he would fly into the air.

    His reported flights were not trivial. On one occasion he flew from the middle of the church to the high altar, a distance of forty feet, and remained there for about fifteen minutes before descending. He once flew over the heads of bystanders to reach a statue of the Immaculate Conception, and then flew back again over their heads once more. Another time he reportedly flew eighty yards, over a pulpit, to a crucifix.5 During another levitation he ended up in a tree, and once he came out of his trance he was unable to get down until a ladder was fetched. On several occasions he carried another person up with him, holding them by the hand or hair.

    Although it is “only” eyewitness testimony (but what else can we have from the seventeenth century?), it is incredibly varied and consistent, and Joseph’s levitations were not always viewed positively. Indeed, his superiors often found Joseph to be an embarrassment. His unannounced flights during solemn ceremonies could cause a disruption. Once floating before the altar holding the Holy Sacrament, his sandals fell off. Joseph was at times banned from choir practices, public masses, and even from meals with his fellow friars. Joseph and his “miracles” attracted a huge following, and especially later in his life, the church authorities periodically attempted to place him in seclusion. In my mind, these facts only reinforce that the levitations may well have been genuine. Prominent witnesses to Joseph’s levitations were the High Admiral of Castile, Spanish Ambassador to the Papal Court (his wife fainted at the sight); John Frederick, Duke of Brunswick (who converted from Lutheranism to Catholicism as a result of witnessing Joseph levitate); and Pope Urban VIII (during a papal audience Joseph fell into ecstasy and levitated).

    The Inquisition and Poltergeists

    What do we make of Joseph’s levitations? Could they have been genuine? They are difficult to explain away as hallucinations on the part of the witnesses. Furthermore, they hardly fit the mold that would be expected of stories tailored to aid in the canonisation of a beloved friar. Due to the publicity he attracted, in 1638 Joseph was investigated by the Inquisition in Naples, but cleared of any wrongdoing. Joseph’s levitations were undisciplined, uncouth (he apparently cried out at the start of each incident), and disrupting to those around him. What is really pertinent in my mind is that Joseph is not the sole example of such levitations, for similar phenomena are reported widely in medieval church accounts, popular folklore, and in ethnographic accounts of “primitive” peoples and their myths.6

    Joseph’s levitations strike me as perhaps a form of self-directed “poltergeist” affliction. Derived from the German, meaning a boisterous or noisy ghost, typical poltergeist incidents include strange noises (scratching, raps, knocks, banging) and the movement of objects. In a typical poltergeist case objects inexplicably fall off of shelves or get thrown through the air even when nobody is close enough to reach them, and no physical means are apparent that could have caused the objects to move.

    As the physicist and early psychical researcher Sir William Barrett wrote in 1911, “Of the genuineness and inexplicable nature of the phenomena there can be no manner of doubt, in spite of occasional attempts at their fraudulent imitation.”7

    It appears that in most cases the affected objects are not being moved by spirits or ghosts, as traditionally believed, but unconsciously via paranormal means by a living person, someone who is typically emotionally or psychologically disturbed, with unresolved repressed feelings of deep guilt or fear, and intense “hysterical” tendencies. The poltergeist instances swirling around such a person are a sort of unconscious acting out and externalisation of the emotions.

    Interestingly, very similar types of poltergeist phenomena have been described for thousands of years in different cultures on different continents;8 such facts lend credence to the idea that poltergeist instances are genuine (and I will admit that I have witnessed a mild poltergeist instance first-hand). Modern researchers, such as Dr. William G. Roll,9 have intensively studied various modern poltergeist cases and it is clear that the paranormal movement of material objects against the forces of gravity and inertia is real (that is, objects are levitated) and such movements follow general patterns (as would be expected of a genuine set of phenomena).

    I believe that Joseph was a psychologically disturbed, highly conflicted, individual prone to extremes in temperament. This is evidenced by his reported fits of rapture and ecstasy, as well as his occasional violent temper (even the saints can have bad days, I suppose). His own frustration with his apparent learning disabilities and mental limitations probably added to his troubles. Joseph also suffered from cataleptic or epileptic fits, convulsions, and severe attacks of depression (melancholia, as it was called10). Joseph, I suggest, did genuinely levitate. I hypothesise that Joseph was essentially the centre of what we might now refer to as poltergeist activity (or to use the more modern terminology, recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis, RSPK), but in his case the activity (the levitation of objects, or an object) was directed unconsciously toward his own physical body. Joseph basically inflicted the levitations upon himself.

    The Levitations of Home

    In the nineteenth century the famous Scottish (though raised in America during his childhood) spiritualistic medium Daniel Dunglas Home (1833 – 1886) was known for his bodily levitations, as well as levitations of other objects, in séance settings.11 In one famous instance, Home reportedly went into a trance and was levitated out a window about seventy feet from the ground, observed to be floating in the air outside an adjacent window (seven and a half feet from the first window), and then glided in through the second window feet first.

    The well-known English physicist and chemist, Sir William Crookes (1832 – 1919; he was knighted in 1897), a careful laboratory experimentalist (among other things, he was a co-discoverer of the element thallium, invented the Crookes radiometer, and developed Crookes tubes), carried out investigations of D.D. Home and other so-called mediums. Crookes witnessed Home levitate numerous times, as he describes in his own words:

    The best cases of Home’s levitation I witnessed were in my own house. On one occasion he went to a clear part of the room, and, after standing quietly for a minute, told us he was rising. I saw him slowly rise up with a continuous gliding movement, and remain about six inches off the ground for several seconds, when he slowly descended. On this occasion no one moved from their places. On another occasion I was invited to come to him, when he rose eighteen inches off the ground, and I passed my hands under his feet, round him, and over his head when he was in the air. On several occasions, Home and the chair on which he was sitting at the table rose off the ground. This was generally done very deliberately, and Home sometimes then tucked up his feet on the seat of the chair and held up his hands in full view of all of us. On such occasions I have gone down and seen and felt all four legs were off the ground at the same time, Home’s feet being on the chair. Less frequently the levitating power extended to those next to him. Once my wife was thus raised off the ground in her chair.12 

    All Hallucinations?

    The reported incidents of levitation by Home, both of his own body and objects around him, are numerous, reported by many witnesses, and they fall into a larger pattern including not just St. Joseph. As the early psychical researcher and Scottish folklorist Andrew Lang (1844 – 1912) wrote,

    …when we find savage ‘birraarks’ in Australia, fakirs in India, saints in mediaeval Europe, a gentleman’s butler in Ireland, boys in Somerset and Midlothian, a young warrior in Zululand, Miss Nancy Wesley at Epworth in 1716, and Mr. Daniel Home in London in 1856-70, all triumphing over the law of gravitation, all floating in the air, how are we to explain the uniformity of stories palpably ridiculous?13

    Other than mechanical tricks, such as concealed strings, wires, and rods (which, in my opinion, really strain credulity as an explanation for the best cases of levitation in the likes of Joseph or Home – I hardly think Crookes would have overlooked a mechanical apparatus and they seem out of the question for Joseph), a classic “explanation” for levitations is that of “excited expectation” and “mass hallucination” on the part of the duped observers.

    Addressing this theory, Lang received the following information from Mr. Hamilton Aïdé (a member of the nineteenth century London literary scene):

    The argument of excited expectation and consequent hallucination does not apply to Mr. Hamilton Aïdé and M. Alphonse Karr… Both were extremely prejudiced against Home, and at Nice went to see, and, if possible, to expose him. Home was a guest at a large villa in Nice, M. Karr and Mr. Aïdé were two of a party in a spacious brilliantly lighted salon, where Home received them. A large heavy table, remote from the group, moved towards them. M. Karr then got under a table which rose in [the] air, and carefully examined the space beneath, while Mr. Aïdé observed it from above. Neither of them could discover any explanation of the phenomenon, and they walked away together, disgusted, disappointed, and reviling Home.14

    So, might at least some (if not all) of Home’s levitations have been genuine? Possibly. And possibly they were due to self-inflicted poltergeist-type manifestations. My sense, reading about his life and career, is that Home, like Joseph, suffered from various emotional and psychological issues, and it is documented that he was the focus of classic poltergeist manifestations during his youth. It is often stated that Home was never caught in any fraudulent behaviour. This is true to a point. In fact there were allegations of fraud made against Home, but these were investigated explicitly, and thoroughly, shortly after Home’s death by the meticulous psychical researches W.F. Barrett and F.W.H. Myers, who concluded “…we have found no allegations of fraud [italics in the original] on which we should be justified in laying much stress.”15

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    Fire Ordeals

    Besides his levitations, Home was also well known for his ability to handle hot coals with immunity, and even to be able to transfer this ability to observers around him.16 Home could perform such feats as holding a handkerchief in his hand, and place a hot piece of charcoal on it, taken directly from a burning fire, and yet the handkerchief would not burn. Crookes studied these fire phenomena intensely, even subjecting such a handkerchief to laboratory analyses afterwards to test for fire retardants, but found nothing unusual. Likewise, hot coals applied to St. Joseph’s body had no effect when he was in an ecstatic trance.17 Indeed, incidents of handling hot charcoal, coal, and other hot objects, walking on fire, and other “ordeals by fire” are widely reported in the ethnological literature18 and in that sense are nothing unusual, but are they genuine or simple conjurers tricks?

    In 1959 the psychiatrist Berthold Eric Schwarz, M.D., investigated first-hand fire ordeals among members of a fundamentalist Christian sect, known as The Free Pentecostal Holiness Church, found in the rural mountain regions of Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina. On numerous occasions Schwarz observed church members place their hands and feet in kerosene flames with immunity.19

    In one instance, shortly after washing his hands (thus presumably precluding the possibility that they were coated with a fire retardant or non-conducting substance), an individual smeared fuel oil on his hands and feet, and held them in a flame for over ten seconds, but they did not burn. He poured a pool of oil into his cupped hand and attempted to light it with a torch, but it only flickered and would not burn. As a control, Schwarz reports that both an iron poker and a wooden dowel sprinkled with the fuel oil burst into flames when the torch was brought to them, and Schwarz himself could not keep his own hand closer than three centimetres to the torch flame for more than one or two seconds without pain or being burnt. Other examples of fire handling reported by Schwarz include:

    On three occasions, three different women held the blaze [from kerosene or fuel oil torches] to their chests, so that the flames were in intimate contact with their cotton dresses, exposed necks, faces and hair. This lasted for longer than a few seconds. [This is very similar to the immunity to fire that Home was said to be able to impart to handkerchiefs, clothing, and people. – Note by Schoch.] Twice, at separate times, one of the ‘most faithful of the saints’ slowly moved the palmar and lateral aspects of one hand and the fifth finger in the midpoint of an acetylene flame… He did this for more than four seconds, and then repeated the procedure, using the other hand…. Once this saint, when in a relatively calm mood, turned to a coal fire of an hour’s duration, picked up a flaming ‘stone coal’ the size of a hen’s egg and held it in the palms of his hands for 65 seconds while he walked among the congregation. As a control, the author could not touch a piece of burning charcoal for less than one second without developing a painful blister.20

    Although he did not observe it directly, Schwarz was told that during winter services the young girls would hug red-hot stovepipes and pass around hot glass lamp chimneys with immunity. The key to these miracles, at least according to his informants, was that one must be in a trance and truly believe that no harm will occur. When not entranced, even members of the sect suffer burns. Schwarz recounts a couple of examples. A male congregant was applying a kerosene torch to his hand with no ill effects, until he noticed that a piece of the wick was breaking off. This caused him to come out of his religious trance and he suffered a burn only in the one spot where the flame had touched his skin post-trance (the areas where the flame was applied to his skin during the trance were not affected). In a similar manner, a female congregant who had often handled hot glass lamp chimneys with immunity developed blistering burns when, one night when the electric power at the church failed, she reflexively grabbed a burning kerosene lantern hanging on a wall. She was not in a trance state at the time and so suffered.21

    Something Strange

    Are levitations and fire ordeals real? Is there something more to them than simple conjuring and fraud? If so, how do we explain what is happening? Mysteries and miracles? Do such phenomena support certain religious beliefs, or the value of faith? Do we need to extend our common sense concepts of what is possible? I will refrain from making pronouncements but, to quote the title of Professor Archie Roy’s book on the paranormal, I have “A Sense of Something Strange.”22

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    Footnotes

    1. Parapsychology is the study of paranormal psychical phenomena such as direct mind-to-mind interactions (telepathy), precognition, and the possibility of mind-over-matter phenomena (also known as psychokinesis). For an introduction to parapsychology, see Robert M. Schoch and Logan Yonavjak, compilers and commentators, The Parapsychology Revolution: A Concise Anthology of Paranormal and Psychical Research, New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2008.

    2. Ian Stevenson, “Thoughts on the Decline of Major Paranormal Phenomena”, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 57, part 215, pp. 149-162 (April 1990); quotation from p.155.

    3. See discussion of, and evidence for, telepathy in Schoch and Yonavjak, 2008.

    4. For information on Joseph’s life and paranormal feats, see Brian Inglis, Natural and Supernatural: A History of the Paranormal from Earliest Times to 1914 (Revised Edition), Dorset: Prism Press, 1992; Andrew Lang, Cock Lane and Common-Sense, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1894; Montague Summers, The History of Witchcraft, New York: The Citadel Press, 1970 (originally published 1956).

    5. Lang, 1894, p.104.

    6. Lang, 1894; see also, Andrew Lang, The Making of Religion, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1898.

    7. William F. Barrett, “Poltergeists: Old and New”, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, vol.15, pp.36-40 (1911); quotation from page 37 and reprinted on page 103 of Schoch and Yonavjak, 2008.

    8. Lang, 1894, 1898; Caesar de Vesme, A History of Experimental Spiritualism, Vol. 1, Primitive Man (translated from the French by Stanley de Brath), London: Rider and Co., 1931; Caesar de Vesme, A History of Experimental Spiritualism, Vol. 2, Peoples of Antiquity (translated from the French by Fred Rothwell), London: Rider and Co., 1931.

    9. William G. Roll, “Poltergeists, Electromagnetism and Consciousness”, Journal of Scientific Exploration, vol. 17, no. 1, pp.75-86 (2003); reprinted in Schoch and Yonavjak, 2008, pp.105-122.

    10. Lang, 1894, p.102.

    11. For general information on the life and mediumship of D.D. Home, see W.F. Barrett and F.W.H. Myers, “Review of D. D. Home, His Life and Mission, by Madame Dunglas Home”, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, vol.4, pp.101-136 (July 1889); Stephen E. Braude, “The Fear of Psi: It’s the Thought that Counts”, Darklore vol. 2, pp.98-111, 266-267 (Brisbane, Australia: Daily Grail Publishing, 2008); Hereward Carrington, The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism, Fraudulent and Genuine, Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1908; William Crookes, Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism, London: J. Burns, 1874; David Fontana, Is There An Afterlife? A Comprehensive Overview of the Evidence, Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania: O Books, 2005 [2007 reprint]; D.D. Home, Incidents in My Life, London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1863.

    12. Quoted in Carrington, 1908, p.380.

    13. Lang, 1894, pp.99-100.

    14. Lang, 1898, pp.362-363.

    15. Barrett and Myers, 1889, p.102.

    16. Carrington, 1908, pp.399-409.

    17. Lang, 1894, p.103.

    18. See discussion and references in Carrington, 1908; Berthold Eric Schwarz, Psychic-Nexus: Psychic Phenomena in Psychiatry and Everyday Life, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1980.

    19. See Schwarz, 1980, chapter 1, “Ordeal by Serpents, Fire and Strychnine: A Study of Some Provocative Psychosomatic Phenomena,” pp.3-24 (originally published in Psychiatric Quarterly, vol.34, pp.405-429 (July 1960).

    20. Schwarz, 1980, p.14.

    21. Schwarz, 1980, p.15.

    22. Archie E. Roy, A Sense of Something Strange: Investigations into the Paranormal, Glasgow: Dog and Bone Press, 1990. Archie Roy, Emeritus Professor of Astronomy at Glasgow University and a past president of the Society for Psychical Research, has carried out extensive research on paranormal phenomena; he agrees that there is “something to it” and psychical research deserves to be taken seriously.

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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  • Ouija: How the Spirit World Helped a Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet

    Ouija: How the Spirit World Helped a Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet

    From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 6 No 2 (April 2012)

    Sois sage dear heart & set my teachings down 
    If you do not your world will be undone
    & heaven itself turn to one grinning skull.1

    These lines appear in the poem “The Will,” by James Merrill (1926-1995), arguably the greatest American poet of the latter half of the twentieth century. Critics rarely mention that for most of his life Merrill was deeply involved with discarnate entities on a Ouija board, and that the poet’s 550-page masterpiece, The Changing Light at Sandover (Knopf, 1982), is based entirely on his conversations with those spirit guides. Fully one-third of the book consists of direct quotes from the numerous spirits with whom, with varying degrees of belief, ambivalence, and denial, Merrill hammered out the problems of the universe.

    The lines quoted above are channeled from “Ephraim,” the first spirit guide with whom Merrill communicated on the Ouija board. Ephraim’s words place a crushing burden on the poet’s shoulders. The spirit is telling Merrill that if he doesn’t tell the world everything the spirits have told him, the world will be “undone,” i.e., destroyed. And that isn’t all: “heaven” (the “afterworld,” the “divine”) will be destroyed as well.

    Ephraim seems to be implying (this is borne out by other quotes in The Changing Light at Sandover) that the afterworld exists, but that it needs man to give it definition, to give it shape and purpose. Behind this outlandish assertion lies the strange assumption that the spirits come to us, via the Ouija board or by whatever means, not because we need acknowledgement and answers, but because they need acknowledgement and answers. The German phenomenological philosopher Martin Heidegger has said, “God needs Being;”2 Ephraim’s statement seems to bear this out.

    Over the past 160 years, the West has seen a great flowering of interest in, and practice of, channeling, i.e., receiving messages ostensibly from the spirit world. During this period, four literary/philosophical figures of stature have, by dint of lengthy encounters with the spirit world and the records they’ve kept of those encounters, provided us with valuable information concerning the nature of channeling. James Merrill is the most recent of these four.

    The first was Victor Hugo (1802-1885), author of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables. Hugo’s feverish conversations with a hundred and twenty discarnate entities on Jersey island in 1853-1855 were at the centre of a sudden, ecstatic, upsurge of interest in channeling in England and France beginning in 1852. Instances of Ouija board-type channeling already went back a long way: In Rome, in 371 CE, a group of noblemen used an olive wood tripod supporting a circular metal dish with the alphabet engraved on the rim (a ring on a thread was suspended overhead) to obtain a message whose content led to all of the participants’ being executed for treason.3But from the time of the consolidation of Christianity up till the early nineteenth century, there are few records of such séances, no doubt because such activity usually led to a burning at the stake. By 1848, the grip of religion had relaxed sufficiently to allow the Fox sisters, of Hydesville, New York, who were channeling raps from the afterworld, to capture the attention of the world and bring about the birth of Spiritualism in the US and England and Spiritism in France.

    The Irish poet W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) was a third dominating literary influence to become immersed in channeling. In 1925, Yeats published A Vision, a summary of his three years of talks with the spirit world through the agency of his wife Georgie’s automatic writing. Nobody was much interested; by this time the anti-mystical influence of Freud and a growing disillusionment stemming from World War One had dampened interest in channeling. (In 1992, the University of Florida published all 4,000 pages of the transcripts of Yeats’s talks with the spirit world.) In 1916, the Swiss philosopher-psychiatrist Carl G. Jung (1875-1961), who had broken with Freud and was already exploring other dimensions of reality, had a frightening encounter with the spirit world whose full details became known only in 2008 with the publication of Jung’s personal diary, The Red Book. (There had been some mention of the encounter in Jung’s 1962 autobiography.) Carl Jung was the fourth towering figure of our times to take the phenomenon of channeling seriously.

    James Merrill and his lifetime companion David Jackson first used a Ouija board in 1955. (The planchette, a three-legged marker sliding over the letters of the board, had by now replaced the three-legged table, tapping with one leg, that Victor Hugo used.) By this time the influence of Jung, with its focus on transpersonal realms of archetype and collective unconscious, had superseded that of Freud. The wisdom of the East was opening up to seekers in the US and Europe. The stage was set for a second great upsurge of interest in channeling, one that reached its peak in the early 1980s and has only recently begun to wane.

    People tend to either dismiss channeling completely or hang on the spirits’ every word. This is too bad, since the truth of channeling is not only complex, but may be far different from anything we have imagined so far. Carl Jung found this out in the summer of 1916. One day, a huge host of unhappy spirits of the dead seemed to stream in and occupy his living room. Before he could ask them anything, they hurled questions at him: “What is the nature of man?” “What is the nature of the universe?” “Who is God?” “Is God dead?” They told Jung that the dead know nothing beyond what they know at the moment of death.4

    Was this an isolated incident? To say that the spirits come to us because they need help, and not the other way round, seems like a preposterous assertion. Yet there are hints here and there, especially in the writings of Hugo, Jung, Yeats and Merrill, that to pose such a question is at least to embark on a fruitful inquiry. This writer can’t hope to do anything more than point the reader in a few directions. To explore in depth what the spirits told James Merrill seems like a good way to start.

    James Merrill

    The future author of The Changing Light at Sandover was born in New York City on March 3, 1926, the second son of Charles Edward Merrill, co-founder and senior partner of the investment brokerage firm of Merrill-Lynch. The younger Merrill grew up in a milieu of wealth and privilege. He attended the best schools in New York and New Jersey and graduated from Amherst College with highest honors after having taken a leave of absence to serve in World War Two.

    At 28, Merrill, with several volumes of poetry under his belt and a well-received off-Broadway play, had established himself as a talent to be watched. That was when he and David Jackson, living in Stonington, Connecticut, came across a Ouija board, began playing with it, and watched with bewildered amusement as the heart-shaped marker moved rapidly from letter to letter of the alphabet laid out in two curving rows on the brown, placemat-sized, board. Ephraim had arrived; he claimed to be a bisexual Greek Jew strangled to death at age 32 in 36 CE at the court of the Emperor Tiberius;5and he was charming and witty enough to hold the attention of the ultra-sophisticated, very intelligent, very well-read, and very skeptical Merrill and Jackson. Their attention rarely wandered as, over the ensuing months, years, and decades, a steady stream of equally captivating spirits came gliding across the Ouija board to beguile them with enchanting tales of our multidimensional reality.

    By 1975, the hard-working Merrill had garnered a reputation as America’s leading poet. In that year, he put together his first volume of poetry devoted almost exclusively to his Ouija board adventures. Published in 1976 as Divine Comedies, it earned him a Pulitzer Prize. In 1978, Merrill published Mirabell: Books of Number, a continuation of the Ouija board saga; and in 1980 the final volume, Scripts for the Pageant, for which he earned a National Book Award. All three books were published together in 1982 as a single, 550-page poetic epic, The Changing Light at Sandover. James Merrill died suddenly of an AIDS-related heart attack on February 6, 1995. He was not quite sixty-nine.

    The Spirits on Ancient History

    Over more than thirty years, the spirits communicated to the two men a dazzling vision of our world as one set in motion by a God who is only one of a pantheon of gods, and who, like the deity of the Gnostics, has all but withdrawn from His creation. Our world, the spirits told them, was shaped and is controlled in its human and non-human dimensions by four archangels who are aided in their task by the discarnate spirits of a sentient species, long extinct, that preceded ours on earth. Reincarnation is a definitive, abiding principle of our world and the other levels of reality to which it is linked. But our universe is a troubled one; the gods are at war with one another, and our own God is failing for reasons that have entirely to do with us, his human creation. Only Merrill and Jackson – and all of us together – can help Him survive.

    The spirits call this God “God B,” or “God Biology.” The “youngest brother” of many gods, He was, eons ago, made custodian of the Milky Way galaxy and charged with the task of seeding our planet with sentient life.

    Four archangels, Michael, Gabriel, Emmanuel, and Raphael, work at his side. It was they who moulded our world, bringing it through geological age after geological age until it had been properly prepared for habitation.

    Two “root races” preceded our own, although that term – familiar to students of Madame Blavatsky, Rudolph Steiner, Edgar Cayce and their depictions of the Lemurians and the Atlanteans – is not used by Merrill’s spirit guides.

    The first sentient species God placed on earth was a race of intelligent, immortal, winged humanoids living in what is now China. The spirits allude to this species’ central city… a vast obsidian pile gleaming on the plain rutted by his machines. The winged humanoids destroyed themselves in an atomic war of such violence that God had to throw up a shield of positive matter6 – the Himalayas – to protect our planet from radioactive fallout.

    The second species, whom the spirit guides call the Atlanteans, was a race of unusually intelligent half-men/half-horses, resembling the centaurs of mythology. On the one hand these centaurs, in the beginning a grazing, pastoral breed, were limited in their ability to manipulate the environment because they had forelegs with hooves, not hands with opposable thumbs. On the other hand, this didn’t seem to hinder them from breeding a species of winged feathered servants by feeding uranium into the eggs of green grass flies. The centuries flashed by. The centaurs’ forehooves evolved into stubby fingers and they were able to store their grain in silos, using refracted sunlight to control the temperature. They continued to breed their winged servants in incubators, speeding them through 6,000 generations a year. When the servants emerged from their incubators, they were as tall as their masters, humanoid in shape, pitch-black in colour, and with burning red eyes. They resembled giant upright bats – and (coincidentally, or not) the “mothmen” described by John Keel in The Mothmen Prophecies.

    These bat-creatures became the centaurs’ engineers, constructing their masters’ arenas and cities and running their heating and lighting plants.

    There was a problem. The centaurs were immortal, and the Atlantean continents had become crowded with fenced-off areas containing all of the older generations of the centaurs down to the most primitive and ancient. The young, “witty” centaurs had taken to tormenting the very old trapt in their primitive form.7 The centaurs came up with a solution: They would annihilate the previous generations using atomic bombs. And they would get their servants, the bat-creatures, to do it for them.

    The servants faithfully carried out their duty. But now the bat-creatures, being themselves immortal, and proliferating quickly, began to fear that their masters would do the same thing to them. They rose up against the centaurs and, using atomic bombs, slaughtered all but a few.

    The bat-creatures now set out create an empire in the air. They forced the surviving centaurs to build landing strips and antigravitational skeins – continent-wide “crusts” sculpted with latticed cities and smooth plains. They forced the centaurs to man “anchor points,” huge stones glowing with radiation. This radiation, beamed up, would hold the floating continents in place in the ozone layer.

    The bat-creatures enjoyed their empire in the air for a thousand years. But earthly vegetation had encroached more and more thickly on the anchor points, which could no longer be manned by the centaurs since they had evolved into ravenous longnecked creatures / reptilian heads [ripping at] greenery – dinosaurs.8

    The radiation moorings frayed; the bat-creatures, arrogant and complacent, ignored this. Then one beam tore, then another; there was a sudden cataclysmic unravelling of the moorings; and the bat-creatures’ latticed cities shimmered, shred, and plunged to earth. All died; and all were damned, first for killing the centaurs, then for neglecting the mooring points. The bat-creatures, now a useless squeaking thinking cloud shunning light,9 were condemned by the four archangels never to take life again but to labour constantly in the service of mankind.

    God B took the fate of his first two creations (and of the bat-creatures) very seriously. He decided that what had brought about the downfall of these species was their immortality. Being immortal, they could kill each other only with nuclear weapons. And, being immortal, they had not overcome the need to fight because they had not been able to learn properly – because immortality had provided them with no deadlines.

    And so God brought homo sapiens, ourselves, into the world, and gave us mortality and a cycle of reincarnations.

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    The Spirits on Reincarnation

    In The Changing Light at Sandover, the spirits have a great deal to say about reincarnation. They explain that all nature is suffused with soul; that “Mother Nature” is the resting place of soul,10 and that the reincarnational cycle of which humankind is a part demands that we live lives as animals, plants, and even rocks, as well as men and women. Merrill is told he is now living his 268th and last incarnation. Jackson is told that he has lived 289 lifetimes and must live several more. He is understandably dismayed, since this means he will be separated from Merrill.11 

    The spirits explain that, “Soul falls into two / Broad categories: run-of-the-mill / souls who / Life by life, under domed thicknesses, / Plod the slow road of Earth – billions of these / Whom nothing quickens, whom no powers indwell / …The other soul belongs to an elite: / At most two million relatively fleet / Achievers…”12

    The souls of the two million elite, whom the spirits call the movers and shakers of mankind, enjoy a privilege not available to the other souls on earth: they spend time between lifetimes being recalibrated. This process, called cloning, takes place in the “Research Lab” and is carried out by the shades of multitudes of bat-creatures who labour without rest. Merrill is told that, between this lifetime and his last, these workers

    wafted him hither, added the humus of / the Jew plus the gene of a chemist (& failed musician)

    with the result that

    et voilà U are not JM [James Merrill] what u might want to be / but a productive 5.5.13

    “5.5” is Merrill’s talent rating, so to speak, a component of his Basic Formula. A talent rating quantifies the soul’s aptitude for serving mankind; Merrill, a partial 5,14 is very high on the scale.

    Esoteric essences, called soul densities, may be injected into souls between lifetimes; one such is shooting, a special quality found only in plants. It is a cool upward thrust of / carbons. An intensity that might translate as pride; its insertion gives the soul, when reborn, spectacular vitality but a short lifespan. The poet Edwin Muir, the novelist Yukio Mishima, and the horticulturist Luther Burbank, all benefited from this lively brand of Lab cloning.15 

    In some schools of thought, such as Hinduism, and some channeling experiences, such as that of Victor Hugo, the rebirth of human being into animals, plants, and especially rocks, is seen as a punishment; according to Merrill’s guides, it’s a gift, an opportunity for enlightenment and exploration – a saintly elevation.16 The poet W.H. Auden (1907-1973), eventually one of the spirit guides on Merrill’s Ouija board, has been reborn as a soul romping through the mineral world; the spirits report one night that, Our witty poet surfacing off Alaska as a vein of pure / radium has havocked a nosy radio ship. 58 in lifeboats!

    Most of the world’s population – the “run-of-the-mill / souls who/ Life by life, under domed thicknesses / Plod the slow road of Earth”17 – spend no time in the Research Lab but instead “get a short pep-talk, then rejoin the race.”18It seems that Earth’s population explosion beginning in the nineteenth century has stretched the amount of available soul matter thin. The spirits tell Merrill that to rectify the situation,

    We have in the past century had to resort to / souls of domestic animals, most recently the rat./ By 2050 these too will be exhausted, & then?/ Wilder strains, mountain cats & forest monkeys. So / now u / Begin to see how without visibly interfering / We of the Lab must go about our work.19

    Only the souls of the elite two million are eventually able to graduate from the cycle of reincarnation. Then they move upward through nine levels of afterworld purity. Those that reach the top are the best that humanity is capable of. They are incorporated into a kind of celestial blood bank from which transfusions of their soul-matter are made available on the basis of need to earth’s most talented mortals, especially its geniuses. The spirits explain that,

    Since mid 19th cent. souls of the great scribes / Have been used 1/9 on earth reincarnated, 8/9 / as let us say safety deposits. We mine them… Proust / is deservedly enshrined. Tap him & as a statesman / at a dull banquet he converses, seems to be himself / But part of his mind literally wanders: Out on loan!20

    (Victor Hugo’s spirit guides describe a roughly analogous procedure to the French poet.)

    Merrill and Jackson are told that the shade of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud shared its soul matter with that of the living British-American poet T.S. Eliot; this afterworld-to-earth Vulcan mind meld gave birth to Eliot’s famous poem The Wasteland. W.H. Auden’s shade, often present at the séances, is connected to the living Merrill in the same way, while the largely silent presence of the shade of W.B. Yeats has the same kind of relationship with the mortal David Jackson.21

    The V Group of Gifted Souls

    A group of spectacularly gifted souls, numbering five and called “the Five” (or, “the V”), play a very particular role in the advancement of humanity. When we’re born, we have no memory of our past lives – except for the V. These five souls reincarnate again and again remembering every detail of all their previous lives. They are the spiritual leaders of mankind, whose “immortal” names are Laduman, Soriva, Rachel, Torro and Von.22 They take life again and again as athletes, artists, scientists, politicians and religious leaders.

    The spirits explain:

    These have lived centuries & live today heldover lives / Not in the scheme you know of the 9 stages. Remaining / Aware of it all, knowing the fruitlessness of speaking / Of their knowledge, they return to earth charged with / Energy / Beyond the norm.23

    The Five began as “reincarnations” of the archangels Michael, Raphael, Emmanuel and Gabriel, each of these archangels representing one of man’s five (“V”) senses. Michael is “God’s seeing on earth;” his earthly incarnations include Akhnaton, Madame Curie, and Galileo. The Archangel Raphael is God’s hearing on earth, and has been reborn as Homer, Mohammed, Mozart, and an East German astrophysicist (alive today, but anonymous), inter alia. The archangel Emmanuel, God’s touching on earth, has spent time among us as Montezuma, Noah, and George Cotzias. (Cotzias is a scientist/friend of Merrill who had been engaged in unlocking the genome governing aging and now speaks to Merrill from the afterworld.)24 Sometimes these supercharged beings return to earth to live completely anonymous lives. (These often our choicest agents, declare the spirits).25 

    The Spirits on a Curious Period in Ancient Egypt’s History

    The first two representatives of God B’s V were the twinned souls of Akhnaton and Nefertiti. The lifetime in ancient Egypt of this strange twinned soul is of particular importance, and the spirits spend some time explaining it to Merrill. His account in The Changing Light at Sandover reads like ancient Egyptian history seen through hallucinogenic glasses, or the acid trip of a genius.

    Akhnaton/Nefertiti were married at age thirteen and ruled for eighteen years, according to Merrill’s spirit guides. The royals oversaw a switch in religious belief and a leap forward of all the sciences. Polytheism was abolished; the temple priests were strangled; the slaves were freed; and the worship of a single god was introduced. A surge of creativity sweep across Egypt: Physicians found great cures; there were no fevers / A generation was born a hand taller than its parents / Light storage much like the battery was invented / both palaces and humble homes were lit and heated by the sun.26 Harnessing the power of the sun, the Egyptians controlled the tides up and down the Nile and closed the Straits of Gibraltar, allowing just enough water in to turn the Mediterranean into a tranquil lake.

    The crowning achievement of this epoch was the erection of a fifteen-metre-high rock crystal pyramid with dimensions sculpted in such a way as to harness every ray of the sun and enable Akhnaton to rule the world. For one year, 1,500 workers polished the capstone to perfection. On the night before it was to be lowered onto the top of pyramid, Akhnaton, watching with Nefertiti on a barge decorated with diamond pyramids, was so intensely thrilled his physicians fed him opium each hour.27

    The setting-in-place of the capstone, attempted at the first moment of dawn, was a cataclysmic failure. The proportions of the pyramid were a fractional millimetre wrong;28 there was a violent, fiery explosion, and the crystal pyramid rose, fell, then melted into a lake of molten crystal (which, the spirits tell Merrill, is still there, solidified beneath Thebes). Far away on the island of Crete, the volcano Thera erupted, destroying the city of Minoa. Akhnaton and Nefertiti, their twinned soul unutterably harrowed, cut their wrists, held their arms over the side of the barge, and bled to death into the Nile. The devastation was such as to render the surrounding deserts infertile for 1,200 years.

    This fiery ending to monotheistic Egypt (provoked by no less than His beloved, first two, “twinned,” V souls) devastated God B and made him rethink his plans.

    God B & the “No Accident Clause”

    Up until this time, it seems, mankind had complete free will; “Chance” prevailed upon the earth. God B now decided to invoke the “No Accident Clause,” that is, to remove an element of free will from the souls of the elite two million who guide the destinies of man. Hitherto, these movers and shakers were free to do whatever they liked – to remain open to the randomness of the universe. But God B now moved from a policy of, so to speak, total deregulation, to one of some regulation, commanding his archangels to clone certain controls into his ruling elite. As scholar Judith Moffett tries to explain, “Apparently the No Accident clause means that what happens to [God’s chosen] souls is planned and purposeful to the minutest detail.”29

    From the 14th century BCE to the 20th century, then, mankind has not had complete free will; through the movers and shakers of humankind, God B has exercised a high degree of control over our lives. But now the No Accident Clause is unravelling. This is because religious and moral standards are eroding quickly in our time, and also because human beings not belonging to the elite are increasingly acquiring the money, the power and the leisure time to do great damage, e.g., to buy and sell atomic bombs. Accidents have begun, the spirits tell Merrill. Like the first faint twirls of smoke / We see all the old signals.30

    The spirits hint that God B fears that mankind, his third sentient species upon earth, may also be about to destroy itself with atomic bombs. He has prepared for this contingency. A fourth sentient species, which God calls Alpha Man, waits in the wings. This race will be immortal (after a little time), winged, and without genius. The divine spark of genius is responsible for mankind’s greatest achievements, and also for his most hideous disasters; if homo sapiens fails, there will be no more genius. The new race of Alpha Man will – if it is needed – Swim & glide, / A simpler, less willful being. Duller too? / If so, is that sharp edge not well lost / Which has so variously cut and cost?31

    James Merrill on the Spirits

    What did James Merrill think about all this? Did he think the spirits really existed, and that the stories they told were really true?

    In an interview with this writer, the poet claimed to have “maintained an attitude of perfect ambivalence toward the spirits for twenty-five years,”32 never being quite able to accept them, and never being quite able to reject them. Either these “communicators,” as he called them, using Yeats’s terminology, were outside us working on our minds, which was fantastic, or they were inside us working through our total consciousness, which was also fantastic. We were all far more than we knew.

    What was the reality of these spirits? The poet said they often seemed to him to be metaphor and reality – subatomic reality – both at the same time. They were literally who they said they were – and they were also powers, energies, manifesting from “within the atom,” the elemental forces of nature itself. The bat-creatures’ story of building cities into the sky was exactly that. But it was also, somehow, the story of a fatal destabilising of the atom – or an account of the extension of man’s brain, in an earlier phase of our evolution, through the addition of a cortex.33

    Merrill insisted all his life that the spirit guides, if they possessed a measure of objective reality (and he tended to believe they did), were dependent for the expression of that reality on pictures and ideas created by the mind of man. These powers/energies would be “invisible, inconceivable,” he said, “if they’d never passed through our heads and clothed themselves out of the costume box they’d found there.” It followed from this that the spirits would manifest themselves differently from culture to culture, from epoch to epoch, from person to person. “A process that Einstein could entertain as a formula might be described by an African witch doctor as a crocodile,” said Merrill, adding that, “what’s tiresome is when people exclusively insist on the forms they’d imagined. Those powers don’t need churches in order to be sacred. What they do need are fresh ways of being seen.”34

    He wasn’t just “making it all up,” Merrill insisted. “I worked very hard,” he said, “in putting the poem together, to try to persuade the reader that these things actually happened… What does rather sadden me are the critics who think that we were pretending – that we didn’t have the experience.”35

    It seems that the disasters attended man on earth have also attended God B; that God’s welfare is intimately bound up with that of his creations.

    Towards the end of The Changing Light at Sandover, Merrill and Jackson are brought into the presence of God. The spirits empower them to use the Ouija board to “listen” to His “song.” What the Ouija board spells out is:

    Ive brothers hear me brothers signal me
    alone in my night brothers do you well
    I and mine hold it back brothers I and
    mine survive brothers hear me signal me
    do you well I and mine hold it back I
    alone in my night brothers I and mine
    survive brothers do you well I alone
    in my night I hold it back I and mine
    survive brothers signal me in my night
    I and mine hold it back and we survive 36

    The shade of W.H. Auden, listening in from the Other Side, tells them the Deity is like a shipwrecked sailor, alone / keeping up his nerve on a life raft.37

    Even such urbane and skeptical Ouija board adventurers as Merrill and Jackson are shocked and saddened by this encounter. It sets them to thinking; and, in this brief discussion, we can take up only one thread of that thinking.

    In the beginning, Merrill had thought the spirits were himself and David Jackson. Then he thought they were a kind of amalgam, some otherworldly energy necessarily filtered and distorted through his mind and sense organs.

    He had become increasingly aware that the spirits shifted and changed the more he got to know them, as if he were in some sense the author of this drama – and as if they too were the authors.

    Merrill now recalled the time when the spirit guide who spoke to them most often revealed that, when he began to serve them through the Ouija board, his form on the Other Side was as a black-and-white centaur. But, he says, as he had grown to love them, and they had grown to love him, he suddenly found himself transformed into a Technicolour peacock. He tells them:

    B4 [before] our meetings I was nothing no time passd but now / yr touch like a lamp has shown me to myself & I am / me! [the peacock].38

    The mortals’ “touch like a lamp” has been sorely lacking in mankind’s relations with God. There has been a reverse transformation: Over the past few centuries, our increasing indifference to God has drained Him of His power. Earlier “Great Scribes” (to whose number, the spirits tell Merrill, he belongs) have described, in function of the fullness of their faith, a God very different from what Merrill and Jackson have seen. The spirits tell Merrill this when, speaking directly in the afterworld to two deceased friends of the Ouija board adventurers, Maria and Wystan, while Merrill and Jackson listen in through the Ouija board, they say:

    Dante heard that song [God B’s desperate “shipwrecked sailor” plea] / The lyrics may be changing / Dante saw the rose in fullest bloom / Blake saw it sick / You and Maria [deceased friends of JM and DJ, observing from the other side] who have seen / The bleak unpetalled knob / Must wonder, can it last till spring? / Is it still rooted in the sun?39

    How the Spirit World Relies on the Living

    At séances, in some religious philosophies, in accounts of experiences in other aspects of multidimensional reality, other hints peek through that the paranormal beings with whom we speak need us as much as we need them. At a séance conducted by prominent South Florida medium Marilyn Raphael, one of the more forceful spirits, a frequent visitor at these séances, stated:

    We as inhabitants of the spirit world no longer have what you call a light around us. You are our light. The light is created by the living. The disembodied soul has no energy to create light. When we come into your room, we feed on your light and your energy. Now once we feed on your energy, we feel your thought patterns. You create the vision for us to see ourselves. Your energy is what we here live from. We become the apparition, we become the dialogue, we become the writer of ourselves when we can have your energy. But we do not take your energy unless we are invited.40 

    It is as if humankind were the sense organ of God; as if it were only through the human imagination, functioning in the incarnate mode, that the spirit world can sense and see itself. And, if that is so, then the exhortations of these beings to humankind to survive and expand are in a sense cries for help; they, too, are fighting to survive.

    Dannion Brinkley writes in Saved by the Light his classic account of a near-death experience, that, while communicating with a group of Light Beings, he was seized by “the amazing realisation that the Beings were desperately trying to help us, not because we were such good guys, but because without us advancing spiritually here on earth, they could not become successful in their world.”41

    In Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, Harvard Medical School Professor of Psychiatry and Pulitzer Prize-winning author John E. Mack wonders if the alien abductors aren’t extensions of ourselves seeking redemption through reintegration with us. “The alien identity seems to be connected in some way with the soul of the human self,” he writes, “and one of the tasks the abductee then confronts is the integration of their human and alien selves, which takes on the character of reensoulment of their humanity.”42

    Even astral-traveller Robert A. Monroe, in his three autobiographical volumes, hints at the importance of man to other dimensions of the universe when he says that we secrete an astral substance, called Loosh – that only we secrete – that is essential to beings in many levels of the universe, who periodically, and surreptitiously, come and “harvest” us.

    On a more conventional note: the importance of man to God was understood very well by the Kabbalistic scholars of long ago. Gershom Scholem, world authority on Jewish mysticism, sums it up:

    “Opposite poles, both man and God encompass within their being the entire cosmos. However, whereas God contains all by virtue of being its Creator and Initiator in whom everything is rooted and all potency is hidden, man’s role is to complete this process by being the agent through whom all the powers of creation are fully activated and made manifest. What exists seminally in God unfolds and develops in man… Man is the perfecting agent in the structure of the cosmos… He is also the ‘transformer’ who through his own life and deeds amplifies these forces to their highest level of manifestation and redirects them to their original source.”43 

    James Merrill’s spirit guides might have been dictating this.

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 6 No 2.[/alert]

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    Footnotes

    1. Merrill, Divine Comedies, 41; 2. Heidegger, 291; 3. Dodds, 222; 4. Chambers, Secret Life of Genius, 215-217; 5. Merrill, Sandover, 8; 6. Ibid., 459; 7. Ibid., 168; 8. Ibid; 9. Ibid., 122; 10. Ibid., 389; 11. Ibid., 143; 12. Ibid., 139; 13. Ibid., 145; 14. Ibid., 143; 15. Ibid., 151; 16. Ibid., 309; 17. Ibid., 511; 18. Ibid., 139; 19. Ibid., 145-146; 20. Ibid., 189; 21. Ibid., 217, 219; 22. Ibid., 131; 23. Ibid; 24. Ibid., 142-143; 25. Ibid; 26. Ibid., 227; 27. Ibid., 126; 28. Ibid., 127; 29. Moffett, 198; 30. Ibid., 476; 31. Ibid., 512; 32. Personal Communication, January 1978; 33. Moffett, 191-192; 34. Merrill, Recitative, 68; 35. Radio Interview, “Voices and Visions,” 1985; 36. Merrill, Sandover, 360; 37. Ibid., 362; 38. Ibid., 155; 39. Ibid., 363; 40. Unpublished manuscript: Night Out on the Earth Plane; 41. Brinkley, 46; 42. Mack, 49; 43. Scholem, qtd. in Reincarnation, 191-192.

    Works Consulted

    Dannion Brinkley, Saved by the Light: The True Story of a Man Who Died Twice and the Profound Revelations He Received, New York: Harper Collins, 2008.

    E.R. Dodds, Professor, “Supernormal Phenomena in Classical Antiquity,” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 55, Part 203 (March 1971): 189-237.

    C.A. Buckley, “Quantum Physics and the Ouija-Board: James Merrill’s Holistic World View,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 26 (2) (Spring 1993): 39-61.

    John Chambers, “The Channeled Myths of James Merrill,” The Anomalist 5 (Summer 1997): 41-58.

    John Chambers, The Secret Life of Genius: How Twenty-Four Great Men and Women Were Touched by Spiritual Worlds, Rochester, VA: Destiny Books/Inner Traditions, 2009.

    John Chambers, Night Out on the Earth Plane, Unpublished Manuscript.

    John Chambers, Victor Hugo’s Conversations with the Spirit World: A Literary Genius’s Hidden Life, Rochester, VA: Destiny Books/Inner Traditions, 2008.

    Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Eknowning), [Beiträge zur Philosophie: Vom Ereignis], Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.

    John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, New York: Scribners, 1994.

    J.D. McClatchy, ed., Recitative, San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986.

    James Merrill, “The Art of Poetry, 31: James Merrill,” The Paris Review 84 (Summer 1982): 184-219.

    James Merrill, The Changing Light at Sandover, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

    James Merrill, James Merrill: Voices from Sandover, Princeton, NJ: Films for the Humanities and Sciences, FFH 4182, VHS, 1990.

    James Merrill, Radio Interview, “Voices and Visions”: A Guided Tour of Revelations,” Documentary, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1985.

    James Merrill, “The Will,” Divine Comedies, New York: Atheneum, 1976, 41.

    Judith Moffett, James Merrill: An Introduction to the Poetry, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.

    Gershom Scholem, qtd. in Reincarnation: A New Horizon in Science, Religion, and Society. Sylvia Cranston and Carey Williams, New York: Julian Press/Crown Publishers, 1984.

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  • UFOs, the Government & Faking an ET Invasion: An Interview with Norio Hayakawa

    UFOs, the Government & Faking an ET Invasion: An Interview with Norio Hayakawa

    From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 6 No 5 (Oct 2012)

    Norio Hayakawa, a resident of Rio Rancho, New Mexico, has been engaged in the study of UFOs for more than fifty years. An expert on Nevada’s Area 51 and the alleged underground base near Dulce, New Mexico, he was responsible for organising ‘The Dulce Base: Fact or Fiction?’ conference – the first event of its kind ever held – which took place in the town of Dulce in March 2009. During his many years as a UFO lecturer, activist, and researcher, he’s brushed shoulders with such well-known figures as the late William ‘Bill’ Cooper, Bob Lazar and the late Gabe Valdez.

    Much of Hayakawa’s research focuses on the technological-militaristic and socio-political aspects of the UFO phenomenon – an area overlooked by most other UFO researchers. A unique and discerning voice in the field of UFOlogy, he suggests there’s been an effort on the part of the authorities, for reasons both disturbing and far-reaching, to manipulate the public’s beliefs concerning UFOs and aliens. Like Dr. Jacques Vallée and others, he isn’t afraid to point out the shortcomings of the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH), while at the same time maintaining an open-mind. Hayakawa kindly agreed to discuss his work with New Dawn magazine.

    LOUIS PROUD (LP): Can you please describe your background and how you came to develop an interest in the UFO phenomenon?

    NORIO HAYAKAWA (NH): I started getting really involved with UFO research around 1961, when I was a sophomore in high school. However, when I was in elementary school beginning in the early 1950s I had already known about ‘flying saucers’ because I used to listen to my father tell me of his sighting of a strangely manoeuvring green ‘ball’ of fire, which took place when he was fishing one summer night in 1947, in the Bay of Yokohama, Japan. My father was quite familiar with shooting stars and other astronomical phenomena, because he had spent years night fishing and was so used to looking at night skies. But that particular summer night in 1947 was definitely unforgettable to him, he used to tell our family at our dining table as he enthusiastically described his sighting to us.

    Artist’s impression of the famous Socorro incident in 1964.

    From 1961, I started getting involved and began to subscribe to newsletters of NICAP [National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena] and APRO [Aerial Phenomena Research Organization] and other groups in the US, even though I was living in Japan. I also began to attend meetings of UFO investigation groups in the Yokohama and Tokyo areas. In 1964, when I was attending college in Tokyo, I became fascinated by a newspaper article about a strange encounter involving a highway patrol officer named Lonnie Zamora who claimed to have witnessed a flying saucer sitting on the desert, just outside of a sleepy little town in New Mexico, US, by the name of Socorro. Of course, that was the famous Socorro incident of 1964. The sighting really convinced me that I have to get to the bottom of this strange phenomenon.

    LP: You say the authorities have exploited and benefited from the UFO phenomenon, by using it as a smokescreen for various top secret militaristic projects.

    NH: Many defence contractors in the US periodically create ‘cover’ stories in order to detract attention away from covert military projects by some curious segment of the population. These ‘cover’ stories sometimes involve false UFO sighting reports. Such reports are frequently used when contractors come up with new military weapons systems or new military aircraft and so on – for example, new generations of remotely-controlled platforms for various programs. Creating the so-called ‘laughter curtain’ (i.e., bringing up the subject of UFOs or aliens) is one way to curtail serious scrutiny of certain military bases or programs. A very good example is how Area 51, a very important military research, development and testing location, has become associated with rumours of UFOs or aliens. This may well have been concocted by the Air Force itself, for example.

    Cellphone photo of UFO taken on 1 March 2011 by Dulce resident Dory Vigil (supplied by Norio Hayakawa).

    LP: You seem to disagree with the mainstream scientific notion that we have all the answers concerning UFO activity on Earth – or in other words there is no UFO “cover up.” In fact, you’ve stated the authorities are just as baffled by the UFO phenomenon as the general population. Moreover, you suggest the authorities have tried (and are still trying) to promote among the public certain beliefs concerning UFOs – namely, that UFOs are extraterrestrial spacecraft piloted by physical entities – as part of a sinister and elaborate psychological manipulation program.

    NH: I am of the opinion that the government, or ‘authorities’, are just as perplexed about the nature of the UFO phenomenon as the public. The only reason they have not disclosed anything conclusive despite many years of research and collection of vital sighting report files is because they are unable to explain it to the public, having long known that the phenomenon cannot be sufficiently explained simply through contemporary, empirical science. The government has never been in the business of explaining anything that is outside of empirical scientific explanations. The UFO phenomenon seems to go beyond just being a physical phenomenon.

    LP: What is your perspective on Operation Paperclip?

    NH: We cannot underestimate the importance of Operation Paperclip in the aftermath of WWII. Operation Paperclip was a US sanctioned program through which hundreds of former Nazi German scientists and engineers (and even former SS intelligence officers) were brought to the US in order for the US to acquire some of the interesting military technologies that the Germans already had in the late 1930s and early 1940s, such as advanced rocket science and development of prototypes of flying wing aircraft – some of which were even equipped with ramjet engines and attained speeds of up to 500 or 600 miles per hour. New Mexico was one of the primary locations for these scientists because New Mexico already had important laboratories such as Los Alamos, and also important rocket testing ranges such as White Sands. Even today, White Sands Missile Range is the location of the most advanced testing of directed energy weapons systems, with the use of lasers and microwaves.

    LP: What is Project Blue Beam and how does it tie into your research and the notion of a coming global crisis?

    NH: Project Blue Beam is an alleged secret and futuristic NASA program in which advanced technologies (such as the use of airborne holographic projection devices and manipulation of various frequency waves) could be utilised to create fake visual/audio simulations to convince the public (or the enemy) that they are witnessing a real event – whatever that scenario may be.

    The late Canadian investigative journalist Serge Monast, with whom I corresponded in 1993 and 1994, was the first to come up with the allegation that NASA will develop this technology in the near future. HAARP, which began to be talked about in the early 1990s, was basically another version of Project Blue Beam, utilising some of the Tesla technologies. According to some researchers, programs such as HAARP and the Blue Beam Project could be utilised in the future to generate panic (such as by creating a fake ‘extraterrestrial invasion’ scenario) so that the frightened and deceived public would clamour for some type of global authority and unity to fend off such ‘threats’.

    LP: Could you please elaborate on the notion of a “fake ‘extraterrestrial invasion’ scenario,” using Project Blue Beam and HAARP technologies, as a way to enforce a totalitarian one-world government, or ‘New World Order’?

    NH: If there really exists a global cabal whose long-term plan is to enforce a global government, the most logical way to carry out this plan would be to create an absolutely convincing need for such an authority. The ultimate means to achieve such a plan would be to artificially generate worldwide panic by staging a fake ‘extraterrestrial threat’ through the use of such technologies as HAARP and the alleged Project Blue Beam. An unprecedented series of global crises such as natural catastrophes or conflagrations (both of which could also be created) would be the final condition under which such schemes would be realised.

    LP: During a recent interview on Truth Connections Radio you made a comment to the effect that there would no UFO history were it not for the US state of New Mexico.

    NH: The importance of New Mexico can be seen from the fact that the atomic bomb was first tested in this state. New Mexico is the location of Los Alamos National Laboratory, probably the world’s largest conglomerate military/scientific research community. Los Alamos, by the way, has the world’s most advanced DNA, human genome, and genetics facilities in the world. Albuquerque, New Mexico is the headquarters of Sandia National Laboratories, which, located inside Kirtland Air Force Base, is probably the world’s largest military research, development and testing conglomerate.

    New Mexico is such a huge state in size (the fifth largest in the Union), yet is scarcely populated in proportion to its huge area. Even today, the total population of New Mexico is about two million. It has enough space to conduct any kind of covert military research, development and testing programs. By the way, there are more scientists per population in New Mexico than in any other state. Yet the irony is that the level of public education in New Mexico ranks about 48th in the nation.

    As I stated earlier, the White Sands Missile Range is today the location of the world’s most advanced directed energy weapons testing programs, involving lasers and microwaves. If aliens really exist, then this, for obvious reasons, would definitely be the primary place of interest to them. In fact, many people seem to believe that an extraterrestrial spacecraft has already crashed in New Mexico (the famous Roswell UFO incident of 1947).

    LP: There is said to be a clandestine (and possibly extraterrestrial) underground facility near the town of Dulce, New Mexico – a topic on which you’ve conducted an extensive amount of research. What are some of the discoveries you’ve made concerning Dulce?

    NH: Although I have been involved with investigations into the claims of an alleged underground joint US-alien base in Dulce (alleged biological laboratory) for many years, I have yet to see any solid, tangible, physical, irrefutable documentary evidence whatsoever of its existence. Yet, I can also say there seems to be lots of circumstantial evidence that there is ‘something’ there. What that ‘something’ is, I still do not know.

    LP: What is your take on the cattle mutilation mystery?

    NH: The cattle mutilation mystery, to my knowledge, began to be reported primarily in the mid-1970s in the Dulce, New Mexico and southern Colorado areas. It is my conjecture that it may have had something to do with the government’s monitoring of radiation levels of certain cows in the northern New Mexico region, especially in the aftermath of alleged radiation leaks that began to affect animals and even humans in the Dulce vicinity, after the US exploded an atomic device deep underground, about 22 miles southwest of Dulce in 1967. This experiment, codenamed Project Gasbuggy, was realised by the US Atomic Energy Commission, ostensibly to help ease the flow of natural gas trapped deep beneath hard rocks in the Dulce region. The high rate of cancer in the Dulce area as well as widespread fertility problems among young women in the area is quite noticeable, even today. Plus, there is a possibility the government may have used the Dulce area as a dumping ground for toxic waste materials, besides possibly conducting some form of bio-warfare research involving substances such as anthrax.

    Gabe Valdez, working as a New Mexico state patrol officer in charge of the Dulce, New Mexico area, investigates a cattle mutilation incident in the mid-1970s.

    The cattle mutilation incidents may also have been a series of staged events by the government to cause local people and the public to believe that Dulce is somehow associated with alien visitation. The late Gabe Valdez, a former New Mexico state patrol officer in charge of the entire Dulce region for many years, also seemed to come to that conclusion. He further concluded that UFO incidents were staged by the government with the use of holographic projections and other mind-control technologies then being developed at places such as Sandia National Laboratories.

    LP: Please shed some light on your association with the late Milton William Cooper (otherwise known as William ‘Bill’ Cooper) – the famous conspiracy theorist and author of Behold a Pale Horse – and how his work is of relevance to your own.

    NH: When William ‘Bill’ Cooper first came on the scene in 1989 in Los Angeles, I was quite impressed with his speeches. He had brought a new, global conspiracy-type angle to the UFO phenomenon, which sounded very fresh and exciting to lots of us in the so-called UFO community, including myself. I even helped him launch his first public lecture at Hollywood High School in 1989.

    As the years went by, Cooper began to disassociate himself from UFOlogy. He went into the ‘militia’ or ‘Patriot’ movement and, unfortunately, met a violent death in 2001 in Arizona. What I admired about Cooper, despite his well-known obnoxious and rather egotistical personality, was the fact that he began to admit that he may have been purposely shown disinformation by the Navy concerning UFOs. He also began to believe that in the future a secret global government could even stage a ‘fake’ extraterrestrial event to create panic in order to establish a forced global governance of some type.

    LP: What do you make of the claims of Robert ‘Bob’ Lazar – who says he took part in a top secret government project, based at Area 51 [Nevada, USA], to reverse-engineer recovered extraterrestrial spacecraft – and others who’ve come forward with similar sensational stories?

    NH: The claims of Bob Lazar are simply claims and cannot be verified. However, over all these years Lazar has never changed his story. The very fact that Lazar still has a scientific equipment business in Michigan (United Nuclear) and still seems to be doing occasional work indirectly with some defence contractors seems to indicate he is indeed knowledgeable in the scientific applications associated with military technologies. But there is also a theory that Lazar was intentionally manipulated by the government to strengthen the ‘extraterrestrial’ element to the Area 51 story, thus bringing about the ‘laughter curtain’ whenever discussion of this important military base is brought up by the public.

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    LP: In your opinion, the UFO phenomenon is non-physical in nature, having nothing to do with flesh-and-blood extraterrestrial beings. Alternately, you’ve expressed a strong appreciation of Dr. Jacques Vallée’s extra-dimensional hypothesis, which interprets UFO events in terms of other “dimensions” or “realities” existing alongside our own.

    NH: The vast majority of the world’s scientists as well as the public at large seem convinced there has to be advanced extraterrestrial civilisations elsewhere in the universe. However, when it comes to the question of UFOs most of them do not support the theory that we have ever been (or are being) visited by physical extraterrestrial beings in physical spacecraft; physically it is impossible, they say. Even Stephen Hawking, one of the world’s most brilliant minds, while acknowledging the existence of extraterrestrial civilisations are almost certain, says that no aliens have ever come to earth in UFOs.

    But the UFO phenomenon seems to be real. I totally agree with Vallée, who continues to support the extra-dimensional origins of UFOs. I also tend to believe that UFOs are not objects nor are they flying. I tend to believe they are temporarily materialising and dematerialising – in other words, intruding into our dimension for reasons unknown and receding back quickly into their dimension. UFO reports have existed from time immemorial. Even today we do not comprehend the true nature of this puzzling phenomenon.

    LP: You once worked as a licensed funeral director, while some of your blog posts concern philosophical topics such as death and the afterlife. Do you believe these topics are of relevance to the UFO phenomenon and, if so, how?

    NH: The world is filled with mysteries. There are things in this world that cannot be sufficiently explained. Life and death are mysteries unto themselves. So, in this sense, the UFO phenomenon is no different from the mysteries of life and death. The phenomenon, which has existed from time immemorial (i.e. sighting reports), has not been solved yet. This is the reason I am so fascinated with the topic. The world would be dull without such mysteries. In fact, as I’ve stated many times in my public presentations, the UFO phenomenon is perhaps the most important topic of mankind.

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