About 15 years ago, when I started writing seriously, a few words came to mind when trying to explain just what greater consciousness is. One was "the Overmind," which I first came across in an out of body experience, and then encountered again and again both in meditation and randomly. This was that part of the mind that was both part of me, but not - something connected both to myself but to a much larger information- set that seemed above time and space. It seemed to know where I was going and why, and was quite calm about it, as if it were an adult speaking to a very young child about, say, thunder. Not long afterward, as I began reading more about the weird, I found that this word, and some others very similar, had longed been used for the exact same phenomena. This was both a revelation and a welcome surprise.
Another was the term "flatland," which I used to explain our limited daily perception of reality because, in times of heightened awareness, this is exactly how it seemed. Again, I soon found that not only had this word been used by others before for the exact same phenomena, but that it had actually been the title to a a sci-fi style book by Edmon Abbot published in the 1880's that emphasized the same thing. It quickly appeared that not only was I not alone in these thoughts, but that there had been ample precedent to them in modern times. These were not quirks of mentation or pathologies of the brain, but rather common experiences that had even elicited independently the exact same labels.
Rummaging around Kindle Books looking for something exciting, and a bit less religious for a change, I came across a familiar author with a new co-author that I could not resist: Whitley Strieber's and Jeffrey Kripal's The Super Natural: a new view of the Unexplained. Strieber is familiar to most of us through his remarkable book, Communion, in which he relates experiences of abduction by aliens, as well as visions of the dead, of elves, of all manner of strange things since his first experience in his cabin near Rosendale, New York, in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains (of which I am very familiar. The woman spoken of in my last essay, Car Wash, lived in Rosendale at the time of her incident, and I wrote of it earlier in my own book, Dream Weaver, as a mystical place that seemed full of odd things like elves and such before I knew of the location of Strieber's cabin, and before the incident in Car Wash took place. It was the area where Washington Irving wrote of his famous Rip Van Winkle, and also an area that, in the 1980's, witnessed a several-year period of intense UFO sightings - exactly when Strieber had his first experiences.) His later books on this same subject became confused and less interesting, but Communion is a classic, and scary as hell. One could see that the author had been traumatized and was desperately looking for an explanation for his odd experiences, where ever that might lead.
To date, it has led him to this book, which is co-authored by a professor of comparative religion. So far, 86 pages into the 360 page book, it seems a good fit. We learn more of Stieber's still ongoing experiences of the weird, and then have Kripal expand on them with his deep knowledge of religions. So far, the point has been made clear that such oddness has been experienced by members of all societies that have left traces, at all points in history. Many, claims Kripal, have led to the actual founding of religions, and certainly of myths. When the authors come together, we see that they are pointing in a different direction than what we might think: not towards UFO's and interstellar aliens (although those are not ruled out as part of the mix), but towards a greater depth of mind - of human mind - that brings us genuinely real experiences that are not part of our reality. The authors are suggesting at this point that these disparate incidences are a kind of language, distorted by our own backgrounds, that are trying to tell us something, or many things, that are beyond our current realm - beyond, that is, our mind as we experience it in the Flatland, exactly as Kripal calls it.
As I read last night, it also became evident that these authors and Carl Jung, in his book on his own adventures into the unconscious named the Red Book, were talking of the same thing. Jung himself was shocked to find that he could not reduce this unconscious to epiphenomena, that is, solely to things that appear to us in the "real" world. His experiences in the unconscious were absolutely real to him, and he tried to do what I believe the above authors are trying to do - find the key to the bizarre language in which it spoke. Jung found that it pointed to something he labeled the archetype, whose base was portrayed in myth and religion, but he in no way exhausted its meaning - nor did he think he could. But he tread carefully. As he himself admitted, he had a reputation to protect.
Unlike Jung, however, the above authors do not feel as if they have anything to lose. They are delving, and will continue to delve, into this strange world of UFO's and gremlins with the point of view that these things are real - but just not like things in the flatland are real. Very interesting. We will see shortly what revelations they bring to us. FK
Another was the term "flatland," which I used to explain our limited daily perception of reality because, in times of heightened awareness, this is exactly how it seemed. Again, I soon found that not only had this word been used by others before for the exact same phenomena, but that it had actually been the title to a a sci-fi style book by Edmon Abbot published in the 1880's that emphasized the same thing. It quickly appeared that not only was I not alone in these thoughts, but that there had been ample precedent to them in modern times. These were not quirks of mentation or pathologies of the brain, but rather common experiences that had even elicited independently the exact same labels.
Rummaging around Kindle Books looking for something exciting, and a bit less religious for a change, I came across a familiar author with a new co-author that I could not resist: Whitley Strieber's and Jeffrey Kripal's The Super Natural: a new view of the Unexplained. Strieber is familiar to most of us through his remarkable book, Communion, in which he relates experiences of abduction by aliens, as well as visions of the dead, of elves, of all manner of strange things since his first experience in his cabin near Rosendale, New York, in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains (of which I am very familiar. The woman spoken of in my last essay, Car Wash, lived in Rosendale at the time of her incident, and I wrote of it earlier in my own book, Dream Weaver, as a mystical place that seemed full of odd things like elves and such before I knew of the location of Strieber's cabin, and before the incident in Car Wash took place. It was the area where Washington Irving wrote of his famous Rip Van Winkle, and also an area that, in the 1980's, witnessed a several-year period of intense UFO sightings - exactly when Strieber had his first experiences.) His later books on this same subject became confused and less interesting, but Communion is a classic, and scary as hell. One could see that the author had been traumatized and was desperately looking for an explanation for his odd experiences, where ever that might lead.
To date, it has led him to this book, which is co-authored by a professor of comparative religion. So far, 86 pages into the 360 page book, it seems a good fit. We learn more of Stieber's still ongoing experiences of the weird, and then have Kripal expand on them with his deep knowledge of religions. So far, the point has been made clear that such oddness has been experienced by members of all societies that have left traces, at all points in history. Many, claims Kripal, have led to the actual founding of religions, and certainly of myths. When the authors come together, we see that they are pointing in a different direction than what we might think: not towards UFO's and interstellar aliens (although those are not ruled out as part of the mix), but towards a greater depth of mind - of human mind - that brings us genuinely real experiences that are not part of our reality. The authors are suggesting at this point that these disparate incidences are a kind of language, distorted by our own backgrounds, that are trying to tell us something, or many things, that are beyond our current realm - beyond, that is, our mind as we experience it in the Flatland, exactly as Kripal calls it.
As I read last night, it also became evident that these authors and Carl Jung, in his book on his own adventures into the unconscious named the Red Book, were talking of the same thing. Jung himself was shocked to find that he could not reduce this unconscious to epiphenomena, that is, solely to things that appear to us in the "real" world. His experiences in the unconscious were absolutely real to him, and he tried to do what I believe the above authors are trying to do - find the key to the bizarre language in which it spoke. Jung found that it pointed to something he labeled the archetype, whose base was portrayed in myth and religion, but he in no way exhausted its meaning - nor did he think he could. But he tread carefully. As he himself admitted, he had a reputation to protect.
Unlike Jung, however, the above authors do not feel as if they have anything to lose. They are delving, and will continue to delve, into this strange world of UFO's and gremlins with the point of view that these things are real - but just not like things in the flatland are real. Very interesting. We will see shortly what revelations they bring to us. FK
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