In Cal Roeker's comment, living life is enough, and it becomes sweeter because he believes he is guaranteed a place in heaven. On the one hand, I have no qualms with that - I not only believe in "God" - beyond definition, but fundamentally the ground for all existence - but know he/she/it IS.  If Cal also KNOWS that he is guaranteed a place in heaven, who I am to say he is not?  I do not have that certitude.  I know that we exist beyond the chemical/material of our brain and bodies, but beyond that  can only guess.  This is in part due to my own experiences - experiences
with alternative realities that have little mammalian kindness in them.

And in that, I get to the point - while we may cherish warm versions of humans within the environment, the environment itself - God made - is not a warm and fuzzy place.  It is, above all, based on change - and change is annihilation to forms, including planets, mountains, everything; with the life form, in this world it is built on the capturing of energy, that energy often captured at the expense of other beings.  We, animal life in particular, live under Darwinian law; the big fish eat the little fish.  It is not chaotic, but it does bring sickness and death to all living things.  This is the nature of our external reality.

Socially, we cherish a more caring ethic, but this can only be taken so far - we have limited resources, and eventually, some will have to be abandoned.  No society can escape natural law forever.  As we know it, these forces can only be ameliorated.  And yet, the same religious tradition that gave Cal his certainty of heaven also gives us the image of Eden, a golden age whose memory-myth is found in cultures throughout the world.  The effort to understand the core of our reality - and in its core is death - is to understand how it might be transformed.  From a scientific angle, we already know that energy is virtually immortal - that it shifts and will shift between form and non-form for as long as this universe exists.  There is, then, at the core of this dog eat dog reality an immortality that is present in us all.  We all know this somewhere in our minds, and it is to find this 'somewhere' and bring it into actuality that many of the efforts of these pages are dedicated.  

It may, in truth, be a losing battle, just as medicine is ultimately a losing battle against death.  It may be that our very existence as humans - as the beings we think we are - is predicated on this Darwinian universe.  It may be that we will have to wait until heaven, whatever that is.  The Eastern religions deal with this extensively, and in manners that are often over my head.  They understand that Being as we know it DOES necessitate suffering and a struggle - but they also show a way out, one that is entirely inner directed.  But can we expand this liberation beyond a very select few?  Is there a way for us all to peer beyond the veil, and then to tear it apart?  Can we, in Cal's terms, unite heaven and earth?

It is worth trying, isn't it,? even if only on an individual basis.  I do know that knowledge of eternity - which can only be experienced - can come to someone as base as myself.  It may be that immortality is beyond our current status as human beings, and has been for our entire sector of evolution.  However, I also know that it is possible, if improbable, that we could as a collective live in this aura of eternity, even though our forms may change.  Perhaps that is what the Golden Era was all about.  Still, we know that even this reality is mutable, able to change by thought, prayer and intent.  The former, a change in reality perception, would be enough.  But there is more that is possible.  Maybe it is Prometheus's fire and is out of our bounds.  But don't you, Cal, want to know?  FK   

Today I have taken a portion of a chapter from  my published book, "Dream Weaver," and placed it in the Essay section.  I am editing other essays for publication late this year or next year, and so will sometimes miss writing new essays for the end of the week.  This one is of an incident from my youth, something that I wouldn't run on for president, but facts are facts and those were the days.  I marvel at it, the boneheaded stupidity and dumb luck, but think I could, maybe, would do it all over again, god help me.

The longer we live, the more death moves in as a close and unwanted companion, and so it has been in recent years.  It is, when it happens, so unbelievably final, an iron curtain that separates the person you once talked to so matter- of- factly.  It comes with as much shock as with grief or sadness.  Death is reality, but it is also its antithesis, everything that is not real.  In the final analysis, is does not exist - that is, the life that was, is gone, absolutely.  Things like that don't happen in reality - yet they do.  Reality is a paradox; and while daily situations seem normal, the context for normality is anything but.  As you drive to work with your cup of coffee, pissed off at the morning traffic, a solar system is turned into something else in a black hole, or another universe is spouted from a universal source of which we cannot possibly conceive.  Death, in all this, is not more real than life; but it is more real than how we conceive life.  It is a mystery; our conceived reality is not.  But real reality is.  Death slaps us across the face like some hero in a war movie slapping the hysterical cadet, an event that should wake us the hell up, but seldom does, at least not for long.  

It has long been noted that death in the age of science has been cordoned off from normal view, taken from the home and placed in an official space where specialists of death prevail.  We are spared its existence, at least its human side, except for the exceptional cases when it directly affects us.  And then we are cordoned off, too, until a redemptive period has passed.  We, too, become as taboo as death until its lingering mystery is lost in the ether of our conceived reality.  We become cleansed by ignorance.

Death to the Greeks was a dismal thing; although they, as with all people before the present, believed in an afterlife, it was popularly pictured as a gloomy place where souls gradually lost all memory of their existence, and then simply disappeared almost literally as mist does in the morning sun.  Christianity was for them a great thing, a promise of a shining eternity, and it should come with less wonder to us why it was so eagerly embraced, even as believers were heavily prosecuted.  But the Greek wise men for the most part never forgot that there was an eternal reality behind this, ours and theirs and everyone of this age's, conceived realities.  They were able to peer behind the iron curtain of false reality to see that continuity, but it wasn't easy - and that, I believe, is the meaning of our Age.  Reality for us is shut off from us just as densely as death, which is, in part, unadorned reality.  I don't know what makes up this iron curtain - is it fear passed down from some fallen ancestor?  Is it Adam and Eve's attempt to gain knowledge?  Could it be shifted away at birth, if we were only raised by an enlightened community? Or is it a true age that cannot be escaped by the masses until time wheels us around to another age? 

Whatever, there it stands.  In my out-of-body experiences, it became shockingly clear that we exist outside of our mortal shells.  What exists seems to be personal awareness.  Where it goes or how it exists, I do not know.  But I think that to get to know reality, we must get to know death.  And yet to do so seems so antithetical to life.  It isn't, but that is our conceived reality.  Yet we can nip around it at the edges.  It is, finally, in our beings to know.  And so we press on, to expand this reality more and more so that we might one day bring down that iron curtain.  FK              

 

This blog has often showcased authors who have worked a scientific angle - read quantum physics - to convince us that the universe is made not of matter, nor of energy, but information.  This information, they say, is malleable, as malleable as thought itself - which is information.  Many of the writers are physicists themselves, and I presume know what they are talking about.  I do not, and so cannot come across with the feeling of this mutability.  Rather, because of my limited background, I remain more impressed by what I can - or believe I can - access.  This has led to an interest in spirits, UFO's, telepathy and ultimately, mysticism, things that I may not understand in words, but do in feeling.  In this, I think, lies the key to grasping other realities.

But "feeling" is nebulous, by definition.  It does exist, but we cannot grow it in a test tube or tease it apart with an electron accelerator (although some quantum theorists believe we can - I leave that to them).  If we think back to childhood, we understand that we understood many things wrongly - my idea of conception, for instance, was that it occurred when the newlyweds drank a glass of wine at the reception.  Certainly there seemed to be a cause and effect!  Yet it is not these misconceptions that bring back the essence of childhood - it is the sense of wonder and awe that surrounded it, as well as the terror of an unintelligible world run by unintelligible (adult) beings.  Still - where is the essence of reality in feeling?  Nothing in fact changes, just our ideas about it.  This can be tremendous and can, and has, changed the world.  Empiricism, as stated many times before, has disenchanted the human world and led to certain excesses and social forms that attempt to make up for this lack.  Belief in Revelations through a psychopath like David Koresh led to a very different feeling-reality for the people in the compound at Waco.  And so on.  However, we have numerous accounts of actual, on-the-ground differences in reality for people of different historic ages or different cultures.

There are so many accounts of ESP and prescience among traditional peoples that they have become sideline oddities in anthropology.  I was unwittingly drawn into this myself, after observing a mystical/religious increase ritual of the Hoti Indians in Venezuela (on which I read an account at at an Anthro meeting that was later published).  Two days after, I had planned a hunt with some Hoti, and the night before had this dream where a voice told me, "you will hunt (kill) 7 animals."  I told my fieldwork partner the next morning and shrugged it off before setting out into the forest.  After several hours and several successes, we were nearly back to the village when I told one of the Hoti about my dream, ending, "but I only got 6.  I guess the dream was wrong."  "No," said the Hoti, "that squirrel you shot at, (so and so) found it after in the bush.  You got 7 (where he held up his fingers).  The Awato Feast (the ritual of a few days before) is very strong."

Still, such things can always be explained away as "coincidence."  Other accounts, such as those of miracles in the Bible, are swept away as myth or primitive imagination (like a child having an imaginary friend).  Magical healing, too, is usually explained away as psychosomatic healing, as if that answers anything, but it seems to assuage those who are committed to scientism.  But there are some accounts that cannot be so easily pushed off.  These include visions of spirits who tell people where to find things that they could not possibly know, or sightings or actual close encounters with UFO's or aliens by otherwise reliable people.  For me, one of the oddest reliable accounts of a physically different reality came while doing fieldwork with a group (tribe) in lowland Venezuela.

These people by in large spoke Spanish and were familiar with mainstream Venezuelan culture, although they lived off the land and maintained some of their traditional beliefs.  We were sitting around discussing old times with two older members when the topic of the "little people" came up.  In the past, gnome-like people of the forest were invited to yarake (manioc beer) festivals and came with regularity.  We asked the two what had become of them.  One who spoke little Spanish immediately pantomimed the coming of one into a festival no more than three years earlier.  He showed how he looked and how he had gone to the woods to invite him in.  The other, who was fluent in Spanish, agreed.  "Yes, he came!  He was here just as you are here now!"  He showed us how tall he was, gave a description of him and of the good time he had drinking with them (manioc beer would not account for such hallucinations. It is at best about half as strong as standard American domestic beer).  

The two were firm in this - as all were on the existence of ghosts at the edge of the village at night, among a slew of other things seen by many or all that we would call fantastic.

Maybe the quantum theorists are right - we will look at them closer at another time.  But it does seem that reality construction and feeling go deeper than the head and the heart - different realities might actually be REAL, in the sense that we hold today.  It is, coincidentally, why this site includes such things as ghosts and psychic phenomena along side religious and mystical experiences.  While the latter point towards an ultimate reality, the former show that this reality - one that has been so stripped of depth - is only one of many, and not nearly as impressive (if technically flat) as we are often told.  FK                         

The other day, this blog got into the murky waters of reality-making through paradigms - and how these paradigms (like gods needing the blood of humans to keep the world alive) become more and more focused with time, excluding more and more external phenomena.  But those certain explicit ideas and events are some of the easiest aspects of reality- making.  Below that and more fundamental to human reality systems are the feelings that are compelled or chosen by a society in reaction to external stimuli.  


Although that may sound grand, it is really very simple: how do people respond to things and events in their lives?  In any given culture, these reactions are considered natural.  However, they are often learned, and expose in part the nature of the reality system in place.

For instance: the fictional work Shogun tells of a Dutch sailing vessel in the 17th century that runs aground in feudal Japan. The crew become captives, and one is  put in a large pot by a local shogun and slowly boiled to death, the temperature kept just low enough to keep him alive for several hours.  His wails of agony and pleas for mercy and death are listened to by the shogun who is sexually stimulated - pleasured to ecstasy - by his suffering.  While the work is fiction, the sentiments from that part of the world, at least back in time, are not.  Genghis Khan, whose words were often recorded in writing, spoke of conquest: (paraphrase)  "There is no greater pleasure in conquest than raping your enemy's wife before him and slashing the throats of his male children."  While such attitudes may not have been the norm for average people from those groups, they were the norm for those in power.  Power to them meant the power to cause exquisite suffering in those they did not like.  This feeling lay at the bottom of conquest and power in the East, and was re-enacted vigorously during WWII.  It suffused the power structure, and probably seeped right down into individual families.  It would define the rhythm of history for them - conquest, total rule, and the re-conquest of revenge.  It would also permeate their spiritual training, as it changed from a shamanic form of the individual melding with the nature spirits, to strict, arduous years of self-denial in formal schools.  


We could go on: the Fatherland brought tears to the men of Germany in the 19th and early 20th century; and songs of lost love, tears to American men of the later 20th century.  Each told the direction that the nation would take.  In our case, we might say that we are on a sentimental journey defined by international liberalism that wishes to make up for mistakes of power in the past by a conciliatory restraint of power in the present.  This is America's sentiment, a lover's regret; however, it is not the sentiment of most of the power elite of the world.  It will lead to its own conclusion, one that is not anticipated because it is not based on the more widespread  pan-human feeling-reality of the present. 


That last must be emphasized - the pan-human feeling-realities of the world are still only temporary sentiments.  They are what defines our age, and they will change again, just as the European powers changed from the colonial imperialists that they were.  There is, however, an optimal feeling-reality, defined by the spiritual masters of the past.  It is what they tried to guide us to - and in it is bliss and cosmic union.  As such, it is is beyond the ephemera of history.  It is the Golden Era, or the New Age, and its actualization gives us a reality far removed from the dreary disappointments of our current age.  However, I am not sure if such an age changes physical reality or not.  While this seems impossible from our current reality, there is evidence that this might occur.  To be discussed at another time.  FK   

The article last week concerning the certain existence of extra-human (extra terrestrial or extra dimensional) intelligence on our planet got me to buy the book, "UFO's and the National Security State," by Richard Dolan, perhaps one of the best writers on the subject.  To those who are not interested in UFOs for whatever reason, I promise to not stick here permanently, but to those who are, there are more than a few things to discuss.  One is the nature of the extra-human intelligence; the other is the problem of paranoia, or the Black Helicopter syndrome.

Paranoia about government secrecy did not lead me into an interest in UFO's - rather, accounts of people close to me,as well as a penchant for the unexplained,did.  I have recently talked about my father and how his squadron saw UFO's after a bombing raid towards the end of WWII.  But there were many other accounts that I heard, a few very close and personal.  Dolan's book brought one memory to mind, after I read about the year 1975 in America, when a slew of UFO sightings were associated with a rash of bizarre animal mutilations.  It so happened in that year, (give or take a year, to be honest) that the dairy farmer behind my parent's property complained about a rash of cow mutilations, with all the classic incisions and oddness: the tongues were cut out, the genitals and anus removed, among other things, and, most oddly, the blood was drained to near completion.  These things were reported in the paper, with a conclusion drawn that it must have been done by coyotes, new to Connecticut then.  But the farmer disagreed - the cows were not torn and their was no other sign of animal presence.  And what about the lack of blood?  

The exact same thing was going on throughout the country, from Maine to the South West, with the same vexing problem, although some were examined in greater detail.  Often, the heart was missing, even though the casing to the heart and the chest cavity itself had not been pierced.  The mutilations were done with such precision that only a lazer could perform them, but no signs of carbonizing (from high heat) could be found.  There was the inexplicable blood drain as well, and lack of predator spore.  It was also noticed by many that such areas were often inundated by unmarked, black helicopters.  No agency claimed ownership, although they were seen by thousands of people, including a large number of police and national park field agents.

In my neck of the woods, I do not recall black helicopters, but we had many UFO incidences.  The most remarkable happened near my girlfriend's house.  They lived in the country, and one night her younger sister, age about 14, was awakened by bright colored lights.  Looking out the window, she saw a classic flying saucer of mother ship proportions, over 100 yards in diameter, circling above an area to the west about half a mile away - which would be about where my parent's and farmer's property were.  She woke her parents and the three watched the object for about 45 minutes until they became tired and went back to sleep.  The girl was excited to tell me about it, but the father, when asked, got serious and a bit hostile, and said, "I didn't see nuthin'"  Proof positive.

During the same year-long period, my girlfriend had a friend who was working at a hospital in a town just to the north. Driving home one night, lights came over her car and the car died.  The lights went before her and hovered, shining a beam into her car.  She was terrified.  After several minutes, the lights went away and her car started without a problem.  

There were other oddities that happened at this time as well, but these should be enough to show that something was going on.  What it was, though, was simply not clear, nor are the explanations given now, for the UFO phenomena is weirder than most science fiction.  If these "ETs" were only aliens with greater tech knowledge than us - like a Star Trek team from another planet - I believe people could handle the truth.  But the incidences are so weird - including abductions, floating through walls, mutilations, appearances and disappearances, crop circles and so on that many researchers serious about the topic favor the idea that ETs are really EDs - extra-dimensional.  That is, that they are far too alien for most of us to grasp in most ways.  This sort of alien-ness is terrifying, like waking nightmares.  So much so that the author, in the first chapter, admits (as I have done after long thought about it) that discloser by agencies that know of their existence would cause a massive change in human behavior, some of it very negative.  The "black" agencies do have a very good reason to hide the truth based on conformity and control of world governments and commerce.  However, the author gives this analogy: no new parents are ready for their first child, but they adapt - in time, they learn to be parents.  He feels that we would be at first overwhelmed, then would adapt.  I agree; but it is that time in between that our watchdogs fear.  


Unfortunately, that has given rise to the "black helicopter" syndrome, as secrecy and weirdness often does - that is, to a proliferation of conspiracy theories that tend to cloud the REAL conspiracies.  But who can choose among them?  Which are real and which are not? On and off over the next week, I will provide the reader with what I glean from Richard Dolan.  I only hope that he does not fall into the tin-hat confetti, although, admittedly, the UFO phenomena is so strange that to cull reality from fear and fantasy is often a very difficult thing.  FK              

A phone call from Connecticut last night got me thinking about how thoughts are corralled to make inescapable realities.  In the conversation, the caller told me about new gun laws in the state (following the Newtown Massacre) that are unbelievably draconian.  He also claimed that the state is flying drones over large swaths of suburbia, and has built a prison camp by an airfield on the coast to confine those who do not register or turn in their guns or otherwise comply with the new rules.  So far, 84% have not, but the camp remains empty - and waiting.

Several years ago, I had a conversation with a neighbor about guns.  As her husband is a regular hunter, I brought up the notion by some that concealed carry laws make for a vast increase in gun crime - what is often called a "Wild West" scenario.  I mentioned that everywhere that this law has been enacted, gun related crime has  either stayed the same or decreased.  She replied, "I know - but it shouldn't!"  That was her argument for gun control.

This essay is not about gun control, though, but about how ideas about reality are formed, and then tightened.  In Connecticut, as well as other densely populated areas, more laws and more government control has been escalating for decades.  In one way it makes sense - more people bump into others, necessitating laws that resolve certain conflicts.  But it is more about a feed-back mechanism than anything else - if more laws are good, then more government control is good.  The mentality of the lawmakers is thus formed, and the population often becomes like a victim of a boa constrictor - with every breath out, the snake squeezes a little more, until finally no breath can be taken.  Thus we get a natural progression, and one that is almost certainly inevitable, barring intervention of some kind, sometimes even revolution.  So inevitable was this thought to be by the American founders that they purposefully hampered the abilities of the government, making one section fight against another for power - leading to inefficiency, but also to a check on power consolidation.  So strong was this idea that Jefferson thought it good that we have a revolution every generation or two.

The same is at work in our consensus about reality.  This is not about the reality of a chair, say, although it could be; but more about how the chair and the house and the tree and people and so on fit together.  We start from a consensus - maybe newly formed by a Copernican revolution of some sort, or the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire.  In the wake, a new premise about reality is formed, generally in response to the ashes of the old (we find this idea in Hegelian and Marxist dialectics).  However, just as in politics, there is a kernel or tendency in the consensus that is born to grow and consolidate.  In neo-Marxism, the kernel is always POWER, and so it often seems in hierarchical societies, but this is not always, or even often, the case.  It could be a vision of humanity and its place in the Cosmos.  In Christendom, this led to certain concepts of the Divine Right of Kings, and an attack of apoplexy when Copernicus offered the realm a heliocentric universe.  In time, new paradigms would grow that reacted to, rather than dovetailed with, Christendom.  Thus our place in history.

The Aztecs had a concept of a devouring world, one that required the life of humans for life to continue.  This metastasized into massive formal rituals of slaughter, some including a hundred thousand victims or more.  It so terrified the satellites of this empire that they willingly sided with Cortez to bring  down the Aztecs, and bring in another form of tyranny - but anything, apparently, was better than what they had.  

This reality progression works on the individual level as well.  Many authors discussed in this blog talk about the "disenchantment" of the modern world, a world modeled by the rejection of theocracy.  I have personally found this to be true.  Living with autonomous Indians of the Amazon area, I found them to be childlike - not because they were immature, but because they were open to wonder.  We have lost that.  A working progression has affected us, and like all progressions, will run its course - into what, we can only guess.

The discussion of UFO's come to this point.  Certain people in our world  hierarchies know that a full knowledge of aliens in our world (let us take for granted that they exist, for now) would shatter the flat but known and manipulable mentality of modern societies.  They would.  The idea, then, has been to marginalize anyone with more than a passing belief in them - especially those who have actually witnessed them.  While the reality of aliens might not be firm, the reality of others who say they have experience them certainly is - and so is their marginalization. 

Beyond UFOs, though, and science and history, is the indisputable fact that our reality is shaped by consensus.  Today, we believe OTHERS have been shaped - primitives, North Koreans, Jihadists - but certainly not us.  We have, at last, the truth, dreary as it is.  But we do not, and regularly dismiss facts that do not fit in with this flat but predictable mentality.  But it is not whole, and somewhere, we know it, as people always do who are brought face to face with their marginal reality systems.  The anthropologist Gregory Bateson thought that our entire thought process included all the fundamental realities of nature - as we ourselves are natural - and that we choose, for various reasons, only certain elements to form a manageable whole of  sorts.  But the other intuitions of truth remain, buried within, striving to  get out.

Our current dead-end is just this, disenchantment.  We grow tired of it, of the knick-knacks and machines and games that try to quell our boredom.  This, too, shall pass.  What comes next is, again, not knowable, but we can help it along by searching for Bateson's inner sense, the whole that makes us part of the true, greater reality.  FK                          

To Cal Roeker' new comment: no, there was no intention to take anyone to task.  I, too, would like "full disclosure" so that the issue of UFO's and intelligent alien life on Earth is clarified.  The trouble is, the evidence that might lead to a full understanding is downplayed and never publicly analysed.  In other words, the analyses that we need to verify, once and for all, what is happening, are either stifled or hidden from view.  This is not speculation - we have videos of odd lights, frank talk from pilots on alien craft and so on, and then that's it.  No scientific task force digs in to the information, at least in public view.  It is a Catch-22; we want the proof verified by our experts, but the experts are never there to verify.  Thus you don't believe.  It is a round-robin that has worked well (if we presume a cover-up) for nearly seventy years.  

Thus the question always remains: is there really a cover-up?  When some undersecretary of defense is caught sneering at such an idea, we sneer with him.  Hah!  Tin-hat society!  Which is exactly what THEY would want you to think, if there were a cover-up.  Catch 22.  What makes it more than a paranoid dream, however, is, as always, the evidence, however fleetingly it appears, and the clear testimony of people who otherwise are reliable witnesses.  Is Edgar Mitchel crazy?  The ranchers at Roswell?  The numerous commercial and military pilots, the ex-security officials,leading psychiatrists - and my staid, businessman father?  Perhaps the information is too far above our science, and some of that is probably  true, but that does not excuse the way fairly clear evidence of something is either left to dangle in the wind or is quickly mocked. 

We have spoken often in these pages of the disenchantment of the world in recent times, and I have little doubt that some people, people who are not otherwise crazy, wish to find that enchantment in the UFO phenomena.  I am not one of them.  Yes, internally I often find this disenchantment, but that is easily blown away by quickly expanding my thoughts to what is immediately available to our minds and senses.  We come from nothing that we know of; we die into nothing that we know of; the world around us works on matter by physical laws that have arisen from nowhere; the universe is endless, or at least only limited by another incomprehensible law of nature; the universe itself came from nothing, and may return to nothing; and we are a mere speck in it all, incapable of understanding it all from our ordinary faculties.  Pretty amazing to me.  By this I mean, I don't "need to believe."  I don't even like the idea of aliens flitting around; as Stephen Hawkins said recently, when aliens (or different cultural types) with superior technology come into contact with their technological inferiors, the results are almost always disastrous.  Ask the American Indians or the 'Kung bushmen.  I'd rather be surrounded by angels at the command of a loving god and be done with it.  But the evidence - it is there.  

And I think it means something greater than a mere invasion, as in Cortez, Pizarro and company.  In Arthur Clark's "Childhood's End, " the book begins with aliens taking over Earth politics.  It is revealed later that this was done to keep humans from destroying themselves so that they might reach a greater potential.  This occurs  towards the end, when children begin to be born en mass with psi abilities -which then leads to a  great evolutionary leap.  In my autobiography "Dream Weaver," I begin with just this speculation - that the baby boomers were given, almost out of nowhere, new insights into spirit, as well as certain psycho-active drugs to help them realize further their meaning.  Many of us, including myself, abused the material, but all of us were changed and are changing still.  To those who now have Millennial children, I have to ask: don't you find them different?  I do, and in a subtle way that it hard to describe.  There is a furthering going on, and perhaps - and I have no proof of this, although many have experienced this personally - an alien psychic direction is going on.  Who is directing them is hard to say, and maybe we confuse them with the angels.  Or maybe they ARE the angels.  Or maybe they are Cortez.  It would be nice to find out.  FK                        

It's good to hear from Cal Roeker again in the comment section!  Yes, seeing is believing - but much of what we believe is based on trusting what others have seen or discovered.  All of history, for instance; and much of science.  We see pictures of viruses but cannot see them ourselves.  We trust our scientists and doctors to tell us the truth.  DNA, black holes, molecules, atoms, electrons - we experience things and trust that our scientists are telling us WHY we experience certain things, and have particular results, but we never see them or knowingly touch them.  Just what consciousness is a killer in science, so much so that some extreme materialists claim we have no consciousness, only reactions (including the scientist's).  We know we have it only because we experience it - we  cannot hold it in our hands.  But others react to it, too, and seem to have it as well.  

Thus with UFO's - others have experienced them, gotten little implants from them, gotten pictures of them, collected residue from their power drives, even demonstrated materials found near crashes.  We don't believe because certain authority figures tell us not to believe.  Yes, we have plenty of generals and flight officers and policemen and security agents and at least one astronaut who swear by their experiences of them, but they are then officially ridiculed or ignored.  We follow this lead.  It all comes down to who you believe. 

Man-made Global warming, or AGW (anthropogenic global warming) is a case in point, and one on the cusp.  We know that there has been some warming, a degree or so since records have been kept.  Certain experts tell us it is AGW due to increases in CO2 and other warming gases.  Others, a skeptical minority, tell us that such gases are minute, fluctuate with time, and are present primarily from natural causes.  The factual data - that which you can hold in your hands - has not panned out according to AGW theory from the 90's - but they now insist that this was a minor glitch and that we are headed for even worse AGW than first anticipated.  Do we believe them?  Is it influenced by politics or ego or research funding?  The cost of decreasing CO2 is tremendous - do we trust in a theory that has not yet actualized and that will noticeably decrease our standard of living?  And if we don't, will we regret the day?  Can we do anything about it at all at this point, even if it comes to be true?

It all comes down to: who do you trust?  With AGW, I just don't know; with UFO's, I do know - the real people who have experienced them - have in some cases actually "held them in their hand, " so to speak - seem far more convincing that government officials who regularly mock the issue.  And I have my dad.  I also believe the scientists that tell me we have DNA in our bodies and black holes in space.

I have mentioned this before, but it is apt - the crop circles.  Today there was a video of a fantastic "crop circle, " or intricate design, found in a desert .  Unfortunately, it wouldn't download, but the picture of it is convincing - it is beautiful, elegant and enigmatic.  If made by humans - and it is possible - it would have taken days to complete, fighting with winds and shifting sands.  There also would be sign of human activity around the sand.  In this picture, there are no signs of human presence.  In other circles investigated, there are indications of heat, of ionic residue, of many things that ordinary humans would not have access to - as well as other phenomena that cannot be easily explained by covert human activity (or, in some case, by any human activity).  Yet a few weeks ago, there was another picture of a "crop circle," defined by the reporter as "beautiful and enigmatic," to match comments made about other crop circles.  But even in the picture, one could see the entrance point of a tractor or some other large, thoroughly human device.  There was symmetry to it and some exactness, but not that much; it was clearly not enigmatic.  In fact, it looked like a computer chip.  And surprise, we were "stunned" to find that  it was made as an advertising gimmick by a computer company.  "Fooled you again!" could have been the caption, but it was not of the same quality of the true crop circles.  Yet someone wanted us to believe it was - and as such, that ALL are hoaxes.  I'm not buying it.

Thus even in things that we can see and hold in our hands, there are multiple explanations.  Again, it all depends on who you believe.  The same, I have found, works with consciousness - it can explain the world in entirely different ways, ways so different they radically alter how humans, all with the same human DNA, see and deal with the world.  We as a people have a consensus on reality - but it is not the only reality, by far, and can change, even among a group.  Sometimes it might be altered by the alignment of the stars (for all I know), or a great leader -  but fundamentally, it depends on who you believe.  FK                               

The Olympics were started by the Greeks in what we call their "Golden Age," when philosophy and certain forms of the arts flourished, but to the Greeks, the Golden Age had already long passed.  There had been a golden age, but it was lost in a mythical past, sometimes named Arcadia after an ancient city in the northern mountains, but the history of it is unclear - unclear, because the Golden Age had no history or writing to record it.  It was Edenic - that is, it shared attributes with the Hebrew notion of a perfect past that was lost when humans first sought knowledge, out of disobedience to God.  That brought struggle and strife and labor, and the downfallen world we experience today.  There are notions of this time in myths throughout the world - where humans had direct contact with the creator or creators, as well as with animals, as humans and animals were then often interchangeable.  But around the world, there was a notion of a past that was, if not perfect, was perfectly open to the mysteries of the universe, gained not through intellectual artifice, but through being itself.  Gold was the standard - it was pure and eternal, never rusting, never decomposing, always separable from any alloy.  Perfection.  Thus the gold now goes to the greatest athlete.

From there, cultural complexity and technology separate the peoples of the earth.  In Greece, there was the notion that the golden age was followed by the silver, one of gods and titans, a world of fantastic powers but also strife - a world no longer based on universal union.  It was a great age, but alloyed - and the next best athlete got silver to designate this status.

The Bronze age came about in the Mediterranean at the beginning of high civilization - the era of kings and pharaohs and mathematics and great monuments and writing.  It was the first age of Man, lower still than the age of the titans, but still near- mythic in the greatness of the human warrior.  This was the era of Ulysses and Agamemnon, whom Homer would someday immortalize.  It shared attributes of the gods in the powers of the humans, and the gods themselves actively engaged humans, but it was a fallen time, none-the-less.   Still, far above our times today - and thus to the third and last decorated athlete, the bronze.

For the Greeks of the first millennium BC, as well as to the Vedic peoples of India, the last and lowest epic of humans was entered at about the same time that philosophy and the arts flourished in Greece.  It was  derivative time - there was seldom any direct contact with the gods, let alone the cosmos, save for those few individuals who by grace or extreme practice were able to break through the barrier that now separated humans from everything - from Union, from the gods, from nature, from mythic heroism.  It was - and is - called the Iron age, and, as the I Ching would say, it is not here as a matter of our individual actions, but as a set condition of the times.  There are no iron metals for athletes, for we are all of iron, even the best of us.  The metals speak of other times when greatness was natural, but now we can only allude to them through metal and our medals.  Ah, sad and fallen world!

This progression - or de-volution - is in accord with perennialist  principles, but sometimes we have to wonder.  Gold was used for ornamentation but had little practical use, at least as far we know; the same goes for silver.  Bronze, however, made great weapons and plows and tools, and iron, once the alloys were figured out, did even better.  Human thought took symbolic metals and many other things and made something useful out of them.  No longer dream-stuff - in the Iron Age, the rubber meets the road, and the actuality of it - the hard truth of it - makes us wonder: was the Golden Age really so great?  Were there toothaches and childbirth deaths and burst appendixes and 30 year life expectancy rates?  Were there, in that Golden Age, clan wars and feline and ursine predation?  Was it, then, as bad as paleo-anthropologists say, and the Golden Age a myth of mind?  

Two points come to mind, the first practical.   Certainly, they - those of paleolithic or neolithic times - did not think of their illnesses or dangers as awful calamities.  They were, like car accidents and cancer of today, dark parts of every day life.  What, though, was their reality?    Those who live most like them today, such as a few remote Amazon Indian tribes, conceive of themselves in mythical ways; the moon and sun and trees and animals are all situated in a cosmology that keeps giving back a reference that we would call magical thinking.  And of course, magic in such a world is commonplace, just as monkeys can become humans and trees sprout gnome-like protectors.  This could have been what was passed down as the age of myth, the silver age - for still, the golden age is gone even with these people, and they, too, look at it as a thing past (or embedded in an endless NOW that is accessible through ritual).

The second point, far less practical, is: was there truly a Golden Age?  Was there truly a time of union, of intuitive harmony with the ALL?  Would, then, in such a dimension of experience, the paleo-anthropological findings be irrelevant?  For in the bones they would  only find bones, not the lives lived of these people - and maybe it was so profoundly different that their world was, to them, as of heaven.  I don't know: there have been findings of early Homo remains that have been eaten by leopards - certainly the lion did not lie down with that lamb.  And there has been evidence of  Neanderthal warfare and cannibalism - not an idea of heaven, either.  There are only a few of such findings, but it does make us pause.  Still, could the experience of even these things be so alien to us - and so perfect to them - that we cannot find the heaven in it where they can?  Could it be that perception alone could change us from an iron age to a golden one?  

In other words - would a return to a golden age change the laws of physics, or at least the laws of animal behavior?  Or is it all perspective?  If the latter, it is powerful stuff - and something within our grasp.  It may not be the right age, but it would seem we could conjure the Gold - somehow.  FK  

I had not thought of UFO's for a while until an article appeared in the Sunday edition of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in the editorial section.  Written by Richard Thieme, it first shocked me that such an article would be in the editorial section, which is usually loaded for bear with political squabbles and spin.  Not this, and at the top of the page no less.  Entitled, "A confession: I'm out of the closet on UFO's," it is a shocking testimonial by a regular guy on the reality - not speculative but real - of UFO's.  And by this term he is pointedly specific: "I mean anomalous vehicles that for decades have been well-documented by credible observers."  No fudging there.  It is, also, something of a plug for a book in which he was an editor. "UFO's and Government: An Historical Inquiry."  It is here that is amassed a "bullet proof" (his words) volume of testimonials and government responses that are all in hard print.  There is, from his perspective, no doubt: aliens are amongst us .   

He did not start out that way, and was incurious to the phenomena until 1978, when an Air Force "decorated pilot with all the right stuff" told him, "We chase then, and we can't catch them."  He notes again and again in the article that high-ranking people, some at the head of national security agencies, have told him that yes, they exist, and then goes on to explain why we are not all agog at their existence.  Says Thieme, our government has been learning about the aliens since the 50's, but since the 50's the government has discouraged belief in them.  According to CIA records, this is done because "The reports themselves [of UFO's] were considered to be the primary threat by the CIA."  Why, he does not say, but dismissing speculative theories on the cover-up for now, the idea is simply that our government does not trust public reaction to such information.  Apparently, the reaction to the radio broadcast of War of the Worlds really got their attention.

How, one might ask, have they been able to cover it up, when so many know about it?  That has always been the fall-to with doubters, but the author shows clearly how this is done.  It is not that people in the agencies don't talk about it to others - it is rather that they are not believed by the great outside, and they know it, for they have manufactured this disbelief.  Said one NSA analyst (the author has given many lectures to the CIA, NSA, FBI and other government agencies throughout the years), "the three legs of cover and deception are: illusion, misdirection and ridicule.  But the greatest of these is ridicule-"   Absolutely.  Some reading this now are probably smirking, and no wonder; when someone tells me of abduction, and more than a few have, I often think: Are they crazy?  Is it a waking dream?  And so on, often saving credulity for the last option.  I, too, am not immune from the stigma of ridicule, even though the evidence for UFOs is overwhelming.  They do exist, and they are an alien force.  Exactly what kind of force I do not know, but that does not deny their - its? - existence.  

Personally, I have believed ever since my father told me that he had seen them towards the end of WWII while flying back from a bombing mission over Japan.  He said 'cigar shaped' flying objects came out of nowhere and hovered near their planes for several minutes before veering off at impossible angles at impossible speeds.  It was not only my father or his crew who saw them but the whole squadron!  When they returned and told their superiors, they were told to not mention it again, for fear of demotion or some less than honorable discharge.  They officially shut up, but they talked.  Many talked and are still talking.  


They exist, but we do not totally believe that they exist because of the air of ridicule and apparent lack of public support for such a belief (it is not really a belief, but a reaction to empirical data, but I leave it at that.).  I tend to believe that if we really DID concur on their existence, we would fundamentally alter our society.  This is what the CIA and others fear, for they cannot tell HOW we would fundamentally change, and such change is potentially dangerous to the status quo, if not for national or international security.  One might also say that if we really believed in the divinity of our religious founders, or in an involved God, or in psi phenomena, we also would be fundamentally changed.  This is a primary reason why this website concerns itself with such things that often seem so divergent.  In any case, we should change; we want to change and know we must change but are afraid to, as all change is frightening, as the CIA well knows.  Yet - our world is a fantastic place that we cover with profane and flat ideas.  We  want to rid ourselves of this illusion of flatness.  We can start anywhere, and UFO acknowledgment is one place among many.  They are here.  Now to find out "who" and "why."  FK