Portuguese
BBC News, June 8, 2005
Not many scientists are prepared to take tales of alien abduction seriously, but John Mack, a Harvard professor who was killed in a road accident in north London last year, did. Ten years on from a row which nearly lost him his job, hundreds of people who claim they were abducted still revere him.
Dear Friends/List,
I cannot comment directly on what was said in the Psychology Today article, for, like many people in this and related fields, the distortions of positions and outright misquoting is so rampant in most mainstream articles on these subjects that it is impossible to “set the record straight.” It may be unwise to give interviews at all, but there is always the hope that something useful may get across — the reporters always assure you of their openness (they may be sometimes; editors and executives is another matter). There is also the damned-if-you-do damned-if-you-don’t problem: if you give an interview you’re likely to get distorted or boxed by a twisting context; if you don’t they sometimes get downright nasty.
Oberlin Alumni Magazine, Fall 2002
Vol. 98, No. 2
If someone out there is trying to warn us, shouldn’t we make an attempt to listen?
ABSTRACT — The scientific method has been highly successful in giving us reliable ways of knowing about the material world as we know it. But we have yet to develop methodologies that are as reliable with respect to matters that are not clearly in the objective or the subjective realms but seem to partake of both. In this paper I will consider the elements of an expanded epistemology which might help to legitimize experiences that are giving us vital information about the cosmos but which cannot be substantiated by the ways of knowing now considered reliable in Western culture.
Harvard psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer John E. Mack, M.D., spoke at the Seven Stars book store in his hometown of Cambridge, Massachusetts, earlier this spring (March 2000). Dr. Mack talked about his new book, Passport to the Cosmos, and shared where his journey has taken him in his understanding of the relationship between alien encounters and human transformation.
At a mutidisciplinary meeting of academicians convened by the Center’s Program for Extraordinary Experience Research (PEER) in April 1999 at the Harvard Divinity School, PEER’s former clinical director Roberta Colasanti, LICSW, spoke about the people who seek clinical assistance in dealing with life-long alien encounter experiences. This transcript is excerpted from her presentation.
The majority of “abductees” report some degree of trauma in connection with their experiences. The intrusive events themselves may be terrifying. Experiencers feel afraid to talk about what they have undergone lest they be ridiculed and further isolated. The experiences shock their ideas of reality. Finally, they feel helpless to predict or control when the experiences will occur again or befall their children and other loved ones whom they cannot protect.
Despite official skepticism and even cynicism in media, government, and scientific circles, it must be evident to many Americans that something extraordinary – at least from the standpoint of the Western worldview – is going on. No conventional explanation for the thousands of reported cases of encounters with alien beings has been sufficient, and this remains true in spite of the fact that the experiencers themselves would, with rare exceptions, welcome any explanation other than that they are being visited without their permission by humanoid creatures from another place.
Developed from a talk given at the International Association for New Science Conference, Fort Collins, Colorado, September 16, 1995
I want to talk with you about what I have been finding over the past now nearly six years in studying the alien abduction phenomenon. In the context of this meeting I wish to talk particularly about the ways that we know, how we actually know anything. What is the appropriate epistemology for a particular subject? It seems to me that all science, all knowledge really, is about the discovery of patterns, and that includes patterns of meaning. But how we know, the approach that we use, depends on what the matter at hand happens to be. For the sake of clarity, I would divide the realms that we are considering here between what has been called the gross material world on the one hand and the subtle realms on the other, or, in [psychiatrist] Stanislav Grof’s language, the hylotropic versus the holotropic world, or in [physicist] David Bohm’s terms, the explicate or manifest order or the implicate, or hidden, order, by which he means the structures, deeper reality and meaning in the universe.
John Mack and I were at the Ariel School, a small elementary school outside Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, listening to Elsa (not her real name) describe her encounter last September 16 [1994] with an “alien” being. In all, sixty children, ages six through twelve, reported seeing one large and several smaller “spaceships” land – hover, really – over the scrubby bushland adjoining their playground.
We are seeing lately an expanded interest in psychotherapies, human growth-promoting workshops, and spiritually focused methods of inner exploration, which have in common the use of nonordinary states of consciousness to access deeper and more intense experience and emotion. At first glance, these approaches may appear new, deviant, or even radical. In actuality, however, they represent means of rediscovering access to realms of the psyche that have been familiar to ancient peoples and non-Western societies from the beginning of recorded time. Shamanic healing, mysticism, kundalini yoga, naturally growing hallucinatory plants, meditation methods, and ecstatic religious experiences arc but a few of the ways that human beings throughout history have opened themselves to the deeper regions of the psyche.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally presented at the International Transpersonal Association Conference on “Science, Spirituality, and the Global Crisis: Toward a World with a Future,” which was held in Prague, Czechoslovakia. It was delivered on 25 June 1992. It was subsequently published in Primal Renaissance: The Journal of Primal Psychology, Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring 1995, 96-110.
This paper appears in Alien Discussions: Proceedings of the Abduction Study Conference (North Cambridge Press, 1992).
We hear the expression “consensus reality” used more and more often to distinguish the conventional Western/Newtonian/Cartesian world view from other possible philosophies or frameworks of thought. The frequent bracketing of these words in writing and conversation implies that there is one accepted version of reality that includes a social agreement about what the mind may or may not legitimately countenance, if its owner wishes to remain within mainstream discourse. Yet there is also a connotation of questioning or doubt in the use of the modifying adjective “consensus,” even a certain defensiveness. It is as if the speaker, who may generally accept the prevailing paradigm, does not completely agree that what we have been acculturated to believe is, in fact, the only reality.