Passport to the Cosmos | Dr. John Mack | From the Edge of Experience: The Concept of Marriage

From the Edge of Experience: The Concept of Marriage
by Program for Extraordinary Experience Research (PEER)

PEER's mission to enhance the voices of experiencers of alien encounters whose insights may otherwise remain unheard, or heard by only their closest loved ones, takes several shapes. We have presented the emergent themes from experiencers from around the world in various papers and books, and when possible we have brought experiencers into contact with members of academia, the media, and the greater public in an effort to stimulate others to consider the alien encounter phenomenon — and what the phenomenon might mean for our culture — in all its depth.

In late 2000, Dr. John Mack invited three experiencers to share their stories at a small private gathering in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The following is a transcript from one; a man in his early thirties. He has not worked directly with Dr. Mack or the clinical staff of PEER, but is known to the project as a credible witness whose insights are similar to those of many men and women whom Dr. John Mack and other PEER personnel have worked with since the project began in 1993. This was his first time speaking to a group about his experiences.

Please note: Some corrections have been made to the transcript to improve written clarity, though these corrections are minor as the text is provided to accompany an enclosed audio presentation.

Click here to listen to this presentation
*some sound processing has been applied to this recording
to preserve the speaker's privacy.

I am going to speak only briefly. Starting off, I just want to say that when I was first asked to speak here I was not sure if they wanted me to just talk about the nuts and bolts, the X-Files “aliens in the bedroom” type of experience, or if this group would want to hear about the more spiritual side of it. Our host suggested, “go ahead, talk about the spiritual side.” That's fortunate, because this experience… I'm not going to say it is a spiritual experience, but by its very nature it casts you into reflection about your existence.

I was a pretty naive person. We all know that in movies and plays the characters have “character development.” They have “story arcs” and they end up different than when they began. I didn't really think that applied to real life. I thought that was just a technique that story writers used. So, when I joke that this experience really kicks you in the pants, it does. Experiencers are not special people. We're just people who got kicked in the butt by this, and forced to reflect on ourselves.

So why does it make you examine yourself? Well there's a few reasons. The first reason you examine yourself is because when this experience first happens all your assumptions about life and the way the world was are broken. People talk a lot about how your view of the “outside world” is broken, but it feels more like you were wrong for ten years, for twenty years. That everything you had based your character on, your development of yourself, was wrong. You feel therefore that you are just washed up on the shore with no personality, nothing. And that's a time when a group like PEER is really useful. Now, I haven't worked with PEER in that capacity but fortunately I was able to get some help.

The other reason why it makes you examine yourself is after you're past the initial shock (which for me lasted a couple years) there is a sense of familiarity with these beings. On the X-Files I don't think you really see that; the beings on that show are just sort of scary, they're there, they take you, you're freaked out, and that's it. But with the grey beings that maybe you've seen on the cover of Whitley Strieber's book Communion, there is a sense of intimacy that feels like you know them, and more than that, that they know you. This entices you to examine your life — to discover why this might be.

I've been with a couple sets of beings. One set wears hoods and you can't see their faces, and I treat them like people, I even call them people, I don't call them aliens. They're pretty easy to be with, they seem almost to have a sense of humor and things we can relate to. But when you're in the presence of these grey beings with their large eyes it feels like magic. It feels like you're behind the scenes of an incredible play, behind the most incredible theater. There is this excitement but there is also a sense of not being able to look them directly in the eye, a sense of fear.

In January of 1999 I had an experience. I have experiences maybe once every six months or once every year or so, which I always consciously remember. I usually only remember a couple of minutes at a time. I don't use hypnotic regression or anything like that so I tend to only get fragments. But I figure this fragment was something I was supposed to remember. I woke up on what seemed to be a bus. There were all these people, and two people were staring at me. I realized their eyes were all wrong. They were making efforts to look as if they were Asian people, their eye sockets weren't very deep, but I realized that they were masks that had been pulled over their faces. And I felt this incredible sense of joy when I recognized that they were actually grays disguised as people. I felt really happy and I really wanted to see them and be with them. And all the while knowing that these kind of moments are very brief, they only give you small glimpses.

So, they knew I was recognizing them, and one then asked me a question, mentally said, “Do you think that we could be married?” They always speak like that; you have to assume they're talking metaphorically or something. So I mulled this thought over in my head a few times, saying what do they mean, “could we be married?” Figured they must mean could people and aliens coexist, can we hang out together? And so in my great wisdom I said, “Well, maybe for about 20 minutes, and then I think I'd have to run.”

And I woke up from that experience with this memory that they were asking me about the concept of marriage. And I feel that the reason why they are not directly with us right now, why they're not walking through the hall right now is because they recognize that it's very difficult for us to get together. I don't know why. But they're posing a problem, and the problem is that they want to coexist with us, but the question is how do we do that? I don't know the answer to that but it's something that we should work on. And I feel it's very important.

A last point about the familiarity and then I am going to stop. That sense of being behind the scenes of a theatre, of an incredible play, I am tempted to assume that means this whole play of life, this play that we are all in, the whole cosmos. [LIGHTS IN ROOM DIM] Alright… They seem to know us not just in the way that someone could from observing your life from afar. It's not a sense that they're spying on a person, it is more a sense that they are familiar with us beyond our own familiarity with our own selves. I think that they're aware of our lives; not just the life we're living now. I think they know our future, or rather, I don't think that the future is set but I think they have a sense of the course of our spiritual lives. And I believe that they know us pre-life. I believe they have a full accounting of all of our lives that we have lived.

Now, if you don't believe in reincarnation just don't worry about this, these are just my opinions. But it would not surprise me if that familiarity is because the human soul itself may not simply have been birthed on Earth. I mean it certainly has obviously for all of us here, and speaking for myself I believe I know of at least one other life a couple hundred years ago, a very mundane normal-person life, but it would not surprise me if the Earth is a place where souls from across the cosmos are being incarnated, and that our souls and their souls are related. They may be a different species, but we are family. And this family is reaching to touch us, to come together with us, and that's why even though these experiences are frightening, it's why I love them, I want them to come in.

My dream would be in six months, two years, three years, however many years it takes, if the nature of the world has to change a little bit for them to come into this world, then we should do that. It's going to be a beautiful change; it might have more beauty, it might have more fear, it might have more good, it might have more evil with that. But fundamentally it's going to be …a bright new day. So, that's what I hope we all work for. That's it. Thank you.

home