Tuesday, April 6, 2010

The Time Has Come The Walrus Said To Talk Of Many Things: Of Rainbow Light, Of BOLs At Night, Of Spatulas With Wings.

Whenever we enter this blog, stepping off the concrete highway of our lives and onto the forest path of the anomalies, we are experiencing at least possible collisions of spiritual and physical models of our reality. The UFO entries seem mostly "physical" though very anomalous nonetheless. The psychic and apparitional seem mostly "spiritual". But much of what we have been exploring seems either in between or maybe one, maybe the other. Ofttimes manifestations of "Light" seem at the heart of our experience and confusion. Two of the following incidents are of this sort. They came [to my eyeballs anyway] from the pages of Exceptional Human Experience. The third is something that happened "just the other day". ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This first EHE is already known to some of you, but it is new to me. It was part of the formative life of a man described as a 19th century mystic, Richard M. Bucke. He tells us that he had this experience as a young man in 1872. He reported this in the Proceedings and Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada. Bucke and two friends had spent the evening reading the Romantic Era poetry of Wordsworth, Shelley, et al, and of Walt Whitman. [It was obviously a different world than our cruder one of watching TV]. Afterwards he took a long, and peaceful, ride in a horse-drawn carriage after midnight. Reflecting in simple pleasure on the imagery of the readings and ideas, "All at once, without warning of any kind, I found myself wrapped around as it were by a flame-colored cloud. For an instance I thought of fire, some sudden conflagration in the great city. The next, I knew that the light was within myself. Directly afterwards came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe. Into my brain streamed one lightning flash of--Splendor which has ever since lightened my life; upon my heart fell one drop of--Bliss, leaving thenceforward for always an aftertaste of heaven. Among other things, I did not come to believe, I saw and knew that the Cosmos is not dead matter but a living Presence, that the soul of man is immortal, that the universe is so built and ordered that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all, that the foundation principle of the world is what we call love and that the happiness of every one is in the long run absolutely certain." This state lasted only "a few moments" for Bucke, but forever in his memory. For us, we each will take from it what we wish. Bucke's interpretations of the experience are up for scrutiny. But on the phenomenological side, he certainly believed that this happened as he described [he based his life on it] and has left us to marvel and wonder what indeed the experience was? "Light" surrounding; "Light" within; "Light" to his life.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The second anomaly-of-the-day was from the same EHE, and is, I believe far less known. It involved a science-trained [and highly skeptical] professional science writer, and his wife. The reporter's name was Henry Pierce and he wrote for a Pittsburgh newspaper. The event happened in 1966. He and his wife were asleep. About one hour into it, he woke up with the feeling that he had been outside his body and was just re-entering. He also felt that his wife's health had been in jeopardy. While still feeling that he was close-but-still-out of his body, he asked his wife if she was alright. She, too, felt that she had been in a limbo state between waking and sleeping, and was choking--choking in a way that she felt if she tried to do anything about it, it would get worse and possibly she would die. At that point she felt a presence beside her and near her husband's head that she recognized as somehow being him. She described it as a sphere of energy--"The closest I can come to it is a ball of light, but I definitely knew it was the real you." Sensing that his "energy" was nearby, the choking stopped immediately. She said that the two of them were in close communication, and that one knew exactly what was happening with the other at that "healing" moment. She also believed that if she could have retained the depth of the awareness that she had at that time, she could have explained exactly how he had stopped the emergency--but she could not, and he did not have that awareness anywhere in memory as she did. She felt that the two of them were somehow joined in some other "dimension" of reality, wherein the answers to such questions were so obvious as never to need being asked. But with their "return" such understandings were lost--only the glimmerings that they were at least real. This experience attacked the worldview of the science writer such that it significantly stressed him. As time went on, he began to find excuses for the event, or at least denial of its extreme anomalousness, finally saying that he had returned to his ultra-skeptical stance, while still admitting that the experience as he described it was real. There was, however, one salutatory effect: he became puzzled as to why "science" should automatically reject such experiences without even addressing them. Was it really "scientific" to discount unusual experiences without discussion? "Wouldn't the most appropriate response for a scientist, in such a case, merely be to indicate that he has no way to test the person's claims and that therefore his story, while interesting, is beyond science? This, it seems to me, would be far better than the systematic attempts to discredit anyone who tries to report such an experience." AMEN, Brother. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The third experience has nothing to do with light, and possibly not with enlightenment, but you can decide. It happened "yesterday" [i.e. around the last week of March 2010]. My Mother and my sister-in-law were sitting down for breakfast in the old historical house, which has its occasional anomalies. Today was such a day. Their conversation was interrupted by a loud rattling. The rattling persisted long enough for its location to be determined. It was the container of kitchen utensils on a cabinet to the left of the stove. Focussing on this oddity, one of the utensils, a spatula, "decided" to go on a jail-break, and flew up from the container through the air over the stove area and clattered to the floor near my Mother's chair. Mother at 93+ is taking anything up to the invasion by Huns in stride, and simply reacted as if this was another mysterious thing. My sister-in-law, who has lived with this in this house, viewed it as an amusement and said: "well, you've got our attention; what do you want?" No reply was forthcoming and no further flying utensils manifested. So, I suppose that we may never know "what 'they' want", but perhaps they're happy just to show that they're around. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I find it impossible to sort out what the UFOs have to do with the "lights" or what the "lights" have to do with the "things that go bump in the night". It seems a glorious mess to me. Some of the "lights" seem surely to be UFOs and in the sense that they are part of some technology resident in the law-abiding physical universe. Some lights may be other law-abiding "natural" things. Some seem very "spiritual", perhaps obeying laws, but not laws from the textbooks. Are those lights departed spirits, spirit entities never in the body, psychic energy forms [whatever that could be?], or somehow "just" part of us? A mess. A Glorious Mess.

5 comments:

  1. Great Title. A glorious mess indeed

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  2. Prof, here's my take, for what it's worth.

    I watched this documentary about how they'd realised from 'sounds' detected within the sun its internal architecture, rather than being a general swirling plasmatic chaos, actually consisted of different types of 'chambers' performing different types of 'mixing' activities, all interconnected by a variety of tube-like 'rivers' which distributed the various 'products' of these 'chambers' back and forth across the entire system.

    Near the end, though, these amazing findings, which make the sun seem positively alive, provoked from one British professor type the almost disapproving observation: the sounds of the sun are a "cacophany".

    This mentally provoked from me the response: if you simultaneously heard two Beethoven pieces playing together they might SOUND like a cacophany, but they wouldn't be - they'd be works of musical genius.

    The problem'd be we haven't yet developed the capacity to appreciate hearing them at the same time.

    That's my take on the 'mess' - it's only a mess because we're a mess, i.e., the conceptual approach we attempt to reduce everything to's clearly presently - and for a long time's been - at best of limited use.

    In fact, if you take the 'mess' from the point of view of its net effect, you could almost argue its general collective 'purpose' seems to be to make it exceedingly difficult for us to automatically slip into our usual lazy addiction of attempting to reduce everything down to one last final definitive answer so we can turn our attentions to something else.

    In fact, if the 'mess' were a kind of existential video game, you'd be forced to come to the conclusion the reason we can never seem to find the secret entrance to the game's hidden next level is because we can't collectively stop ourselves reflexively running into our usual collection of favourite dead ends - it might even help if we could collectively develop the humility to conceive the possibility we're only at the beginner's training level of the game.

    Ah, but what do I know?

    "Googoocajoo". (John Lennon - RIP)

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  3. p.s. I'm intrigued by your kitchen located poltergeist incident.

    These things often have a 'tarot' like component - or so experience's taught me - in that such forces often employ any negative energies available and thus reflect the concerns provoking those negative energies.

    It strikes me this incident reflects a certain collective tension about having to perform various functions for your mum, but also your mum's own tension at having to depend on other people.

    My own mum's taken to being looked after like a duck to water on one level - me Dad used to treat her royally, in that regard - but on another level she resents it's no longer by choice.

    The spatula's a peculiar symbol in that it possibly reflects powerlessness at not being able to cook for oneself, but there's also a pun there - spatula meaning 'little spade' - the implication possibly being: maybe everyone'd be happier if I let a 'big spade' take me away.

    Just a thought.

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  4. To Alanborky: I labeled the mess a "glorious mess" because I believe that its components are all real and just mixed up for the moment in our minds but are plenty Beethovenesque in their own rights whenever we figure them out.-----regarding the interpretation of the poltergeist event, I refuse to do so. The event happened, that is all I'll say. Interpreting it in "Tarot" or Jungian terms is not useful to me [or mother] in the current situation as it can involve [as you have reasonably imagined] possible underlying stresses that do us no good if meditated upon and which come to mind with or without poltergeist "assistance" anyway. Even if the interpretation is true, as it could be, now is not the time to be meditating about that. Each day I hope to help mother think the exact opposite way about her life, and that's the only way to go.

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  5. Fascinating post and further evidence that this is a strange world indeed.

    I too would be more comfortable with science admitting that some things are just untestable and, as such, outside its domain.

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