A bloggers very literal dream of detailed events that happen the next day. A great example of the high strangeness that often surfaces around UFO experiences. Seems very similar in character to my prior awareness experiences.
Entangled Myth
I recently read the book Entangled Minds by Dean Radin. I have read a number of other books that also review the large body of rigorous, repeatable lab studies that have demonstrated a measurable effect of PSI interaction over the last hundred years. What most impressed me about Dean Radin is that he goes beyond the now thoroughly established, if not well publicized, conclusion that PSI is real. Radin’s multi-disciplinary background as well as personal experience may have given him a bit more insight to begin proposing a mechanism behind the magic.
Basic physical concepts like time, space, energy, and matter were imagined to be fixed, absolute, and fundamentally different substances. It was taken for granted that reality existed in an absolute sense, independent of observers, and it was an additional token of faith that action at a distance was impossible. The concept of mind, then viewed through the fledgling discipline of psychology , and especially its rising fad of behaviorism, was regarded as an illusion created by the clockwork mechanisms of the brain. Because mind was an illusion and action at a distance was impossible, genuine psi phenomena were also impossible.
Radin, Dean (2009-11-19). Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality (pp. 241-242). Pocket Books. Kindle Edition.
Our cultural framework is still heavily embedded in a mechanistic world/cosmological view. Even practitioners of other scientific disciplines seem to have little awareness of the potential upheaval that could result from the application of the principles of quantum entanglement to the molecular scale. The social sciences, which include my own academic background, are even further out of touch with the frontiers of the physical, chemical and biological sciences. The foundation needed to understand and apply a new understanding of the fundamental nature of matter and energy rarely exists outside of the practitioners’ discipline.While the public is still unaware of the successful research of PSI events, surveys show that most people do accept the reality of PSI. The remaining mystery is how it might work based on our current scientific knowledge. Radin begins to tie the emerging understanding of entangled particles and quantum physics with the patterns of PSI events. Unfortunately, the public is generally unaware of role of the observer in establishing reality and the measurement of quantum particles’ ‘spooky action at a distance’ as famously labeled by Einstein. So tying one mis-understood event to another probably does not go far to break the stalemate that keeps PSI research on the fringe of science and society.
Psychologists still practice as if the brain and the mind were the same thing. Yet, there are documented cases where the mind is operating without the brain functioning. Any out of place thought is a delusion, rather than a stray idea from a passer by.
Bio-chemists and medical researchers are still focusing on the role of specific disease agents and chemical compounds in restoring health. Yet, their population based research has only partial predictive value in managing illness. The role of the mind in establishing and maintaining health is rarely acknowledge, other than as a placebo effect.
It seems we are stuck at the beginning of a scientific revolution, not because the research is unavailable or inconclusive, but because the general academic community and the public can’t absorb the results. The scope of cosmological and theoretical physics have moved so far out of alignment with the general world view that they have become akin to magical arcane practitioners of dark arts.
Messengers or monsters
What other beings exist among us? The Judeo-Christian tradition tells of many kinds of supernatural beings. Angels are God’s messengers and the demons are the fallen angels trying to lead humans to destruction. A literal reading of the Bible and other ancient texts identify many types of entities all in a massive power struggle. All traditions I am aware of also have similar stories of struggle, deception, corruption and redemption. Even our modern forms of entertainment paint the monsters’ portraits and tap our deepest fears. Somewhere inside us is a core that knows without seeing that something dark is out there. We try to reduce that fear with rationality, science and a materialist paradigm that tells us we are alone. But we are not alone.
When one sense is lost, the others become stronger. We have come to rely on sight, sound, touch, taste and smell as if they were the only senses. So we comfort our fears by turning on the lights and closing the doors, as if that would ever be enough to stop the monsters. Our ancestors left us warnings and tried to prepare us to face the unknown. Somehow, through the generations, we suppressed the abilities to sense and communicate with the other side and with each other. By denying the reality of unseen and powerful forces, we cut ourselves off from our own strengths as well.
Long ago, all members of a community believed in good and evil with powerful forces at work in our lives. That common belief gave the group unity and strength, but may have opened the door for both good and evil. Now that few believe and try to deny the other senses, we declare the world of our five senses to be all that exists. This new form of faith has closed many doors. But the darkness has not vanished. The struggles we face are inside. That is where the others still wait for us.
Do they have tooth and claw, with hideous faces and terrifying howls? Do they plot evil with twisted games and crimes of greed? Do they sneak up on us in the night and suck our blood? No, because those simple actions are all comprehensible to us and are only how we have tried to metaphorically understand elemental forces. Those forces are already here, inside us and everyone around us. By unleashing our own inner venom, greed, rage and hate, we continue to feed uncontrolled manifestations that can reach into our reality. I don’t know if there are other races of evil intent trying to break into our reality or if the essence of corrupted human souls continue to seek our destruction, even after death.
I suspect that our animating force or consciousness manifests many different ways in many different realities. After all, if we can reincarnate as humans or animals, as I know from experience we can, then why not as aliens or demons or any other entity? Perhaps our own inner creative forces actualize the entities that do reach us. Physics leaves open the possibility of many realities, with the role of observer as the defining force of creation. The others we vaguely sense may be our inadvertent creation as our fears are made stronger by denial and isolation. The doors inside that we lock in fear are also starving our souls of the meaning, connection, magic and mystery that we need to grow together.
The cosmic struggle that we are locked in is really a war of unity vs. discord. We are on a path of collective evolution into ever more integrated living systems. Yet, our material universe is in a state of explosive decay. Perhaps our consciousness is immortal but divided and immature, needing cycles of incarnation to grow and develop. I see us now like bacteria that must bind together to form a colony to survive the changing environment. Living beings have the potential to form webs of cooperation, caring and creativity. We need to fully develop both as individuals and as communities to reach the next level of development and evolution. There is an ultimate conflict ahead when our collective consciousness will either find a way to transcend or transform the material plane, or the cycle of life will finally draw to a close.
Downside Up
Last night I dreamed that I was traveling with friends on a train over a long distance. As we traveled, we would occasionally pass through a tunnel that would immerse us in total darkness. As we emerged into the light again, each time I noticed something else that was just a little bit different. One tunnel would change a companions hair, the next another’s pants, as it went on the results progressed in intensity. Eventually a whole person was replaced. I seemed to be the only one who noticed.
Then I shifted and I was a mother who had lost a child during one of the tunnels. I looked every where for my missing child. But as I asked, each person seemed more and more confused as they had not seen a child with me. Finally, I stopped asking and began to realize why. Although it felt as if all of these changes were happening in front of me. I eventually realized that the people around me are not changing places, instead I was the one who was sliding from one reality to the next.
Chicken and Egg
This morning as I was chatting at the playground with a grandmother I had just met, we starting talking about zoos. She felt that zoos which confined the animals in small enclosures were depressing. Although I agreed, I also pointed out that large open air zoos make it hard for the kids to see and relate to the animals. We sat quietly for a moment.
Then I thought, it would be great if there were tunnels with observation domes among the animals. So I started to speak, but she beat me to it. You know, she said, if there were tunnels under the animal enclosures, and you could pop up in a dome every so often to view the animals, that would be the best of both. I could only agree and let it go.
No one wants to hear that you accidentally read their mind. After all, I don’t know for sure if I read her or if she read me. Judging by how often this is starting to happen, I am guessing it is me. I wonder how often this happens every day with people all over the world. Maybe we all are constantly hearing each other’s thoughts but never know it.
As we move through our busy lives busting about, working hard, who’s will are we doing? Which of our impulses and feelings are really our own? Is there a puppet master pulling the strings? Or are we all part of a human hive fulfilling some greater purpose of which we known nothing? Perhaps deep within us all is a receiver that is tuned to the signals of a collective whole or an outside entity.
Considering the amazing research I have read recently on psi, I wonder if our conversation attuned us to the same channel and we then somehow collectively processed the problem so that we shared the job of finding a solution. The accumulation of evidence suggests that psi is a low level but common ability which can be boosted by multiple people focusing together. Athletes, performers, politicians among others work to focus the will of the crowd to support their goals. In what other ways are our abilities harnessed without us even realizing it? Are bureaucracies almost alive with the persistent effort and support of their members? Are formal ceremonies more than just a recognition of an event or are they actually a transformational experience? Are researchers around the world working on the same research actually functioning as part of a network of analytical capacity? Is inspiration a flash from our subconscious or is it really the output from shared thought?
Locks and keys
The quest to understand my ‘future sense’ continues, but as I look to scientific experts for answers I find the promise of enlightenment keeps fading the deeper I dig. Struggling to learn about physics, cosmology and neurology, I begin to feel that despite all we have learned, we still have the blind leading the blind. As I keep digging, I find leaders in these fields looking for the same kinds of answers. But the questions are too small to open the doors needed to find what we are looking for.
My questions may take me into a wild frontier, but I am willing to consider the possibilities and share my thoughts.
Does precognition require that the future be fixed and unchangeable? No, I get plenty of warnings ‘in time’ that allow me to avoid the implied consequences. Yes, some who prefer a set future, will argue pre-determination and say that I was destined to avoid those. Unfortunately, I also miss some, which has helped me learn the ‘rules’. I now often ignore the warnings that are minor. At first I ignored them because they seemed too silly to bother with. Now, I am usually able to tell that they are real. By going on alert and watching for the consequence without taking evasive action, I try too polish my ability to ‘interpret’ the warning by matching it up to the results. Some events do seem to be much harder to avoid, so that even with the warning and the evasion, I still manage to end up with the consequences. Perhaps they are mitigated in some way, but some events seem more fixed than others.
If the future is malleable, then are there all probabilities in play at all times? No, my ongoing daily experience suggests that there is a flow and momentum toward and around a few set events. I think of it as being in a small boat on a lazy river. If I watch the way the water moves ahead of me, I can infer the location of hidden boulders that could damage the boat. I can’t tell the exact nature of the obstacles, but I can feel a disturbance in the flow. I can try to avoid the obstacles, but sometimes the current is stronger and I hit them anyway. At times, rarely, it seems that even extraordinary effort can’t avoid the event. Then there are the points int he river where another river joins and pushes me along faster and in a new direction. The most rare future warnings come on slowly and build up a tremendous internal pressure in a particular life event direction. These life pivot points are so powerful that even if I resist and go the other way, many circumstances will arise that make resisting the ‘planned’ direction more and more difficult and miserable. Eventually, I have to give in to the life change direction that I apparently should go in just to avoid the cascading negative consequences of resisting.
So now I am thinking of my ‘future sense’ less as ‘sight’ and more like ‘sonar’. If you have ever tried to figure out exactly what a fishing scanner has found in the water beneath your boat, you will understand what I mean. It gives you some idea of distance and scale, but no details. My experience suggests that there is an echo from future events to now. It is almost as if the emotional impact of the event in it’s own ‘when’ then kicks back an echo into it’s past. It then works a little like a reverse memory. Just as seeing a item may remind you of one you saw before, encountering a circumstance that ties to a future event triggers a minor reverberation – future emotions bouncing off of now and creating a noticeable disturbance in the flow of thought. Since the echo of the future seems to be more of an emotional event and not a rational/analytical thought process, perhaps the ‘future sense’ is really a consequence of quantum forces at play in the function of the sub-conscious and emotion. Could the fact that my physical self is present in both the past that encountered the echo and the future which experienced the event/emotion be the link? Would the same molecules from two points in ‘time’ have a form of quantum entanglement just as two parts of the same whole separated by space?
Is time an illusion? In some ways yes, the idea of a rigid linear progression is an illusion, which I believe is created by our brains trying to make sense of too much input. So in the practical sense that most people do experience time in a similar linear way, it is functionally real. There is decay and entropy, which tends toward disorder. We measure the cycle of orbits and half-life of decay to establish conventional units of measure for communication and coordination. At the macro scale these conventions of measuring progression serve a very useful purpose, to allow us to coordinate activities as a society. But when we drill down into the underlying forces at work, the illusion starts to slip. When I speak into a phone and when I am heard are not exactly simultaneous. An orbital cycle is not exactly identical every trip around the star. Half-life decay can be partially reset by cosmic events. Anything I perceive with my senses glosses over tremendous detail and variation. My mind attempts to apply order to match each experience to a pattern and find an appropriate way of dealing with the situation, even to the point of overriding the sensory input if it does not fit. So, I remain unimpressed with any definition of reality that presumes that human observation and measurement are inherently concrete and substantial.
In the shadows
Most people seem to accept the idea of a supernatural/paranormal level to existence, even if they do not claim to know exactly what that is. Although I have had some contact with the unseen for most of my life, I have never felt sure of what is out there than I somehow catch echos of. My experience tells me that most religious traditions have codified an allegorical reference to someone’s long ago authentic experience. But the narratives have been so distorted that ‘truth’ is not clear. How can we peel back the layers and find the substance?
As I let the many traditions and modern theories swirl in my overloaded brain, I cannot escape the impression that all paths are ways to approach the same thing. If there is truly one core metaphysical reality that somehow interacts with our own, what would it be. If we sift all of the common elements together and then stop back, what kind of picture emerges? So many have proposed unifying ideas of the other, but so far I have not felt that ‘snap’ that indicates a solid lock. To me so many traditions seem to have a gilded facade that may hide a darker truth. What unpalatable reality may be underneath the stories of faith and redemption?
So far, these attributes seem to fit the essence of the many traditions:
– There is a form of consciousness that exists outside of our daily sensory realm.
– There is an inherent connection between that entity and ourselves.
– I suspect some kind of symbiotic interchange exists between us and has for most of our existence as a species.
– Conversely, there seems to be some faction of the entity that is parasitic and hostile.
– They do not inhabit the same sensory realm as we do.
– They seem to need something intangible but essential from us.
– They seem to be capable of manipulating our perceptions.
– They are shadows in our world and we are shadows in theirs.
Possible interpretations:
– We are pawns in some other entities long term internal power struggle.
– We provide something intangible they need or want, so they manipulate our perceptions to elicit certain reactions.
– We may be a form of livestock to them to be maintained and drained as needed, as aphids are to ants and as cows are to us.
– We are not supposed to know what is really going on, we are fed lies and illusions to pacify us.
– We are somehow related or connected, yet not eqipped to directly interact without an extreme effort or altered state.
Critical questions:
– Some of their reality does spill over into ours, but how much is real and how much is illusion? Is the distortion intended or accidental?
– Where they somehow responsible for our existence, as so many traditions refer to a creator?
– Are they a remnant or a vanguard?
Don’t try, do
I have been reading about the research by Russel Tarq into remote viewing. His research among others, clearly found the best results came from learning to step aside from the analytically part of our thoughts. To me it seems automatic to try to name and categorize everything I experience. Remote viewing seems to be a way of learning to hover in a drifting state of mind to receive information, without trying to make sense of it. I find letting go and just opening up to be the hardest skill of all. So perhaps it is a more animal, instinctive part of our mind that taps into the intangible.
Yet, unlike remote viewers, I consistently get warnings without preparing but rarely get visual input. If I could get both the heads up warning and the visuals, my extra sense might be a whole lot more useful. I wanted to see if this was a skill I could develop. Since I clearly have to deal with the unknown anyway, why not learn to be intentionally part of the process.
I found some online randomized psi training tools that replicate the classic card guessing lab tests. After trying them out a few times, I was discouraged. Then I realized what was wrong. I was trying! Duh. So in that one moment of clarity, I just started clicking as fast as I could go on the cards in a 50 card set. When I had been averaging the expected chance results of about 25%, the results this time were 38% or far above chance. But as soon as I started feeling cocky, the results on the next few runs were back to chance. I was trying again. So I stopped the exercise in discouragement.
Later as I was playing a very simple fishing game on my tablet with my toddler, I was getting frustrated at how hard it was to get the timing right to catch the fish. You have to anticipate the vector of the fishing line and the future location of the fish so that they meet up exactly to be successful. To make the game even more difficult, if you miss the time it takes to reset will often cause you to miss a chance at another fish cruising by. I was only catching about 10% of the fish. Heeeyyyyy, light bulb! I closed my eyes and stopped trying. I left myself open to feel a very subtle kind of shift in my mind with no concrete thought or focus. Shift, tap, fish. Shift, tap, fish. For about three minutes, I was almost continuously catching virtual fish while keeping my eyes closed. Once again, as soon as I felt like I was the bomb, the effect disappeared.
As much as I would like to think I have got this whole thing figured out. It is clear that there is more than a lifetime of discipline needed to reach the open, serene, receptive state of mind needed to hear everything the universe has to say.
Glitch in the matrix
A few days ago, late in the evening, I walked into my living room which has a high a peaked ceiling. Just as I stepped into the room, I glanced up at the peak windows and the night reflected a swirl of black above me. My mind immediately dismissed it as shadows from a ceiling fan. Then my conscious thoughts caught up and realized that this house, which I have lived in only two years, does not have ceiling fans. I looked up again and the black swirl was no longer there. So I began to convince myself it had been an odd shadow or my eyes reacting to the change in light. Well enough.
Until I turned and saw it again in a different corner of the room. It was a set of spiral bands of black pivoting around a central point. But the arms were not straight, they were twisted as if distorted by the rotational movement. Once again, I tried to dismiss it in my thoughts, but I had no explanation. Then I realized what made the sight so odd at first. The first time I saw it, I saw it as a reflection in the glass, which would place it above my head. The reflection was not complete, as the source overlapped the edge of the glass, so I only saw about two thirds of the swirl. The second time I saw it in a specific location in the opposite corner of the room, away from me and I could see all of it. If it was an illusion or my eyes playing tricks, why would there be a reflection of a partial image in the glass, rather than the whole imaginary image?
Passing Through
You don’t have to be from another planet to be an alien.
I used to find it very odd that unwelcome visitors from other countries were called aliens. Since I read so much sci-fi as a kid, I would get the two kinds mixed up. When I heard a news blub that mentioned aliens crossing the border, I would picture in my mind hordes of little green men invading from outer space. Ridiculously, since I most often heard about ‘wetbacks’, I usually embellished my inner news clip with amphibious frog-like Kermit aliens. This left me somewhat confused as to what the panic was all about as a herd of muppets couldn’t be all that dangerous.
Clearly, I was not properly indoctrinated into the local phobia regarding the most recent immigration wave. In the world of right wing politics and culture war hysteria that I grew up in, there were rigidly defined camps. You were either right or left (wrong) or rarely center (wimp). Given the available options, I wasn’t even on the map. If anything, I was vertical. All I wanted was out.
Perhaps if I could travel to the stars like the characters in my books, I could find the people like me. Over the years, I avidly followed the development and launch of the shuttle. I was sure that by the time I was an adult, star travel would be as common as flying across the country. Then came the Challenger disaster and years of cautious rebuilding. I watched and I waited, but it seemed that I would never find my way home.
Then one day, in my own backyard, I looked up and saw something that seemed impossible. A strange craft in the sky, flying above my house. It had a flat triangular tip in the front, a long narrow fuselage, and ended in narrow wings where the tail should be, but they bent up vertically in the middle. It moved like a plane, but it did not look like any plane I had ever seen on TV. Were the aliens finally here? I ran and grabbed my Kodak 110 and took as many grainy, low res photos as I could. I was ready for first contact!
Alas, this was not an alien craft, but instead an experimental plane designed by Burt Rutan. When years later, I heard that his team was competing for the X-prize for the first private craft to reach space, I was ecstatic. I followed his progress to victory in Space Ship One. Thanks to him and many other pioneers who have helped the private space race to finally begin, we are a few steps closer to reaching the stars. For some, it will be the final frontier. For others like me, it may be at last a place to belong.
Visionary Explorer 