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UFO Documentary: I Know What I Saw
For anyone who hasn't seen it, here is a wonderful 90-minute documentary called I Know What I Saw, which Leslie Kean helped to produce, and which makes for a great companion to her book.
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soon enough ^_^
Posted February 5th, 2011 by Corey deVos in response to Stop with the UFO stuff...LOL don't worry, we will resume "normal" programming on Wednesday. But until then, i say we take this opportunity to have some fun, stretch our imaginations, and bask in this mystery for a little while longer.
Oh, and all hail our new alien overlords!
--
Corey W. deVos
Editor, Writer, Producer
Integral Life
Managing Editor
KenWilber.com
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(((((you)))))
Posted February 6th, 2011 by Jennifer Grove in response to Stop with the UFO stuff...Hi, Lincoln. I just wanna sit and be Present to what you've expressed here for a bit.
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I can feel a faint resonance inside of a fear something like that. It doesn't have the same object, but the sensation is prolly similar. It involves my Egg Donor not giving me any consistent or believable signs that she is willing or able to protect me from harm in a seemingly infinite world of dangers. My Brain blocks the sensation of that fear out of my conscious awareness most of the time, but it will creep in disguised as any convenient monster when I am on the verge of sleep sometimes. I'm not trying to suggest that this is what is happening to you. I'm just looking at what is happening to me in an attempt to imagine what you must be feeling. All I know is that if the spectre in question is brought to my attention by someone else and I'm forced to look at it, I fall into a Black Hole of Terror that infinitely increases the intensity and speed of the images - and I can't get out. It is unimaginably, unspeakably horrible.
Our Brains have a way of isolating this stuff to protect us. I wish I knew of a fast and easy way to resolve these terrors. I pretty much dedicate all my time to this search out of desperation. But ironically, one thing I haven't done yet is told anyone about this process. I've heard others describe it and thot to myself, "Yeah. That's how it is." But I've never just come out and told anyone what it was like for me. I suspect that it is good to turn what has been part of the Subject into an Object in my awareness. That's been happening alot lately with the NMOD conversations. It changes things.
For the last several nights, I haven't been able to simply fall asleep. I've had to endure drifting and then waking with a start to the terrors and tossing and turning while my mind explodes with them for an hour, then drifting and repeating the process several times before finally dropping hard in exhaustion. I'm gettin' kinda tired of it. Y'know? I actually imagine that being dead would be better than fearing these things over and over and over and over like this every night. I hate to admit it, but as much as it seems that I am fearless about interior work, I see now how much of my awareness is spent whistling in the dark like everyone else. I guess my Brain has done a good job at constructing a world for me to live in that seems manageable. But it's not real. Not really real. And it's not going to hand over the controls until I somehow find a way to stay protected even if what I fear is really real.
That is what I must do. Somehow.
Can you relate at all?
--
"The Left Hand Path, not merely the Right ... must take the lead."
~SES pg. 148
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Vivid fears...
Posted February 7th, 2011 by Lincoln Merchant in response to (((((you)))))Hi Jennifer,
I don't get terrors about aliens anymore, but it still happens occasionally around my greatest fears about what could happen to my loved ones. I also had a health issue that scared the crap out of me last year. I am really sorry that it happens to you so frequently, especially the Black Hole of Terror thing. That shit is awful.
When I was a kid I'd watch the show Unsolved Mysteries which, though usually about murders that hadn't been solved, would sometimes do alien abduction re-enactments. They depicted the abductee lying in bed and then a light shining through the window. The abductee would awaken, but be unable to move. The window would open of its own accord and the abductee would float out the window into the alien vessel where weird experiments would be done on their body. My folks did a good job of sheltering me so it's kind of funny that we'd all sit and watch a show about killers still on the loose and paranormal monsters that might be real.
The part that really stuck with me after being tucked into bed was the thought that the aliens could prevent me from doing anything to defend myself and I'd be totally conscious the whole time. This powerlessness terrified me. Ghosts and demons can be exorcised and the weaknesses of vampires and mummies are well known, but aliens were beyond us in every way. Therefore, as a kid the only thing I could do was take it to the only thing more powerful than everything...God. I had an elaborate prayer ritual where I'd visual a protective bubble descending from Heaven (which was even higher than space where the aliens came from) and surrounding me and all my loved ones. I put it all in His hands.
As I became a teenager, fear transformed into interest in science fiction, space exploration, and the frontiers of science. But even as terror transformed into curiosity, it was still a powerful motivator. I even seriously looked at becoming a physicist in my late teens so I could contribute to NASA. It's what I initially went to college for (for about a semester).
It was around that time that I came across the book The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, which was my introduction to Existentialism. Becker made a great case that almost everything we do and believe in the West is designed to help us avoid thinking about the terrible facts of the human condition, i.e. the inevitability of suffering and death. He also introduced me to one of Freud's associates, Otto Rank, who interpreted the Oedipus Complex in terms of how the child deals with loss of power as their understanding and world get larger as they get older. For most people when we're babies, all we have to do is cry and someone will rush to our side with food or warmth or hugs and so on. Rank look at how it then all seems to go down hill from the child's perspective and he looked at the impact of how the child adjusted to those changes.
For a while now, I've subscribed to the notions in Albert Camus' Myth of Sisyphus, that suffering and death are inevitable, but that we must embrace and own the human condition. Existence is terrible and absurd, but also a miraculous mystery that is the only thing we'll ever have. We have to accept it and fight for it, fight through it. It's related to Nietzsche's Amor Fati...the love of fate...such that we are so conscious and intimately embracing of our actual lives that we'd be willing to live the same life over and over for ever. And this not based on whether our lives are good or bad or sad or painful...but radical acceptance.
This is more like the higher end side to the book of Job. God is omnipotent transcendent God...that's why our only relation to God is worship and submission. We don't worship God because he protects us from alien abduction, we worship God because He's all there is. Both yourself and the aliens doing the probing are Him. Jesus said to love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind...and not just if He gives you a nice mansion in the afterlife.
When I was little I had no grasp of this conception of God, I needed the Big Sky Daddy to protect me from danger.
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Hi.
Posted February 10th, 2011 by Jennifer Grove in response to Vivid fears...I'm glad you talked more about this.
The way you've described the interplay of consciousness here is fascinating.
"The part that really stuck with me after being tucked into bed was the thought that the aliens could prevent me from doing anything to defend myself and I'd be totally conscious the whole time. This powerlessness terrified me. Ghosts and demons can be exorcised and the weaknesses of vampires and mummies are well known, but aliens were beyond us in every way. Therefore, as a kid the only thing I could do was take it to the only thing more powerful than everything...God. I had an elaborate prayer ritual where I'd visual a protective bubble descending from Heaven (which was even higher than space where the aliens came from) and surrounding me and all my loved ones. I put it all in His hands."
I've done some experimenting lately with the period between being awake and falling asleep - the Hypnagogic State - and I've discovered that the territory there is very different than when fully conscious. At some point in our development, a part of us becomes aware that we are really vulnerable when we're asleep. This is prolly that early childhood time when we imagine monsters under the bed and in the closet and such. Before then, we didn't know that we fell asleep and became unaware of or unable to contribute to what was happening around us. When we were awake, the world existed. When we were asleep, "someone" pushed the "Pause" button. So, when we figured this out, all of a sudden the Ten Thousand Things appeared. Ten Thousand creepy crawly and mean and nasty things. All the bad stuff that we prevented from happening while we were awake could now happen because we were off the job. And we were totally helpless. The idea of aliens paralyzing us while awake was a way of describing that terrifying possibility.
The visceral sense of need for someone to be more powerful and benevolent who could be relied upon to protect us jumps out of your story. This is a very real and legitimate need. I don't think anyone would escape childhood sane without this potential being around.
I experienced an extreme sense of vulnerability when descending towards sleep - what that article called "heightened suggestibility". I couldn't get above anything. Everything was interpreted as is and assigned meaning directly to concrete experiences stored in memory. There were no abstractions mediating the world. Lies could be felt as real. Images or verbal descriptions held the same affective power as an actual object in front of me. And part of me knows that when I'm like this, I'm in danger.
I spent most of my life not knowing that I had Hypothyroidism. This disorder kept me below the full state of consciousness alot of the time. I spent whole weeks full of whole days being drowsy and unable to process what was going on around me with any kind of mature skills. And part of me knew this and tried to avoid letting me get into situations where I would be too vulnerable. But this was not a part of my self who could talk about it and describe it to anyone. I didn't really awaken to what was happening until someone else who had had the same experience described it to me and then described what it was like to not feel that way. I had hints of it because sometimes I could caffeinate myself enuf to wake up and be able to process, but this was too random and impractical. I grew up simply assuming that I was dumb or lazy or something worse.
Now I totally get how radically different the world seems when our consciousness dips towards sleep. I'm actually kindof amazed that we figured out how to understand anything at all. I suspect that our ideals of scientific inquiry and factual knowledge are actually still very primitive compared to our potentials for understanding what is real. And at the same time, I also see that reality evolved along with our ability to discern things. While we need a God, God is there. When we don't need God anymore, God transforms into the next thing that we need. Saying God no longer exists is kindof silly because God does still exist for the child who requires a God. It may be more true to say that God becomes what we need God to be. And our needs will constantly change.
I love your Nietzsche bits. He's one of my faves. And honestly, I've been thinking about death alot lately. I'm not sure what's up with that and I haven't talked about it much, but I'm starting to wonder about what will come to an end and what will continue. When I listen to music, I marvel at how much pleasure is felt in my body and mind and emotions, and how that will all rot. It seems like such a waste. But that music will still be here when I'm gone and my kids will listen to it and they will feel pleasure too. We create these artifacts which will be around longer than us. Those artifacts bounce meaning and value from those who came before to those who come after, like a ball being bounced over a high wall, creating a kind of continuity. Those who sent the ball over are gone, and those who received the ball will eventually send it on farther and disappear also, but the ball remains. What is that?
Why must we disappear? And why must we become conscious that we will fall asleep or disappear? Why this constant probing? What a waste! Why bother?
"Existence is terrible and absurd, but also a miraculous mystery that is the only thing we'll ever have."
I really love this line. It reminds me of Achilles sharing his perspective with Briseis in "Troy" about how the gods envy us because only we can feel the urgency of it and are thereby gifted with the drives to overcome.
Love and Blessings to you, Hon.
--
"The Left Hand Path, not merely the Right ... must take the lead."
~SES pg. 148
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Thanks...
Posted February 10th, 2011 by Lincoln Merchant in response to Hi.I've kind of had this idea if I was to take Nietzsche's challenge and say "yes" to everything ("yes" to this thought thinking, "yes" to this feeling of separation, "yes" to my fingers typing, "yes" to fear of death, "yes" to judgements on my own thoughts and behaviors, etc.) I'd eventually end up in such a flow of acceptance that "I" would stop being the doer of actions and become what actions are done through. I feel like there's a bridge here between Existentialist's Amor Fati (Love of Fate) and the Taoist's wu-wei (actionless action). But I need a lot more practice to say for sure.
Also, speaking of the sweetness of childhood...
Metallica - Enter Sandman (Official Music Video) [HD] from MetallicaHD on Vimeo.
Here's the lyrics to Metallica's Enter Sandman
-LYRICS-
Say your prayers little one
Don't forget my son
To include everyone
I tuck you in, warm within
Keep you free from sin
'Til the sandman he comes
Sleep with one eye open
Gripping your pillow tight
Exit light
Enter night
Take my hand
We're off to never-never land
Something's wrong, shut the light
Heavy thoughts tonight
And they aren't of Snow White
Dreams of war, dreams of liars
Dreams of dragon's fire
And of things that will bite, yeah
Sleep with one eye open
Gripping your pillow tight
Exit light
Enter night
Take my hand
We're off to never-never land
Now I lay me down to sleep
Now I lay me down to sleep
Pray the lord my soul to keep
Pray the lord my soul to keep
If I die before I wake
If I die before I wake
Pray the lord my soul to take
Pray the lord my soul to take
Hush little baby don't say a word
And never mind that noise you heard
It's just the beasts under your bed
In your closet in your head
Exit light
Enter night
Grain of sand
Exit light
Enter night
Take my hand
We're off to never-never land
Boo! Yeah yeah!
We're off to never-never land
Take my hand
We're off to never-never land
Take my hand
We're off to never-never land
We're off to never-never land
We're off to never-never land
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Wonderful...
Posted February 10th, 2011 by Jennifer Grove in response to Thanks...I love snakes. LOL But that's ALOT OF SNAKES!!
One of my favorite teachers did a lesson about saying, "Yes." like that once. I'll see if I can find it. It does exactly what you describe.
--
"The Left Hand Path, not merely the Right ... must take the lead."
~SES pg. 148
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wow
Posted February 5th, 2011 by Ambo SunoNow I am getting the interest in this. Yeah, what is going on? UFOs. I feel some chagrin. I do wonder now differently.
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integral
Posted February 7th, 2011 by stefano in response to wowI think it is interesting how a bit of integral awareness can open up a topic that has been traditionally locked down hard between two totally opposing camps.
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:)
Posted February 7th, 2011 by stefanoCool video. Thanks!
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Stop with the UFO stuff...
Posted February 5th, 2011 by Lincoln MerchantI was totally scared of alien abduction when I was a kid. I had nightmares
...I don't want to think it might be real. Why can't they just leave us alone...

