The overwhelming question of our reality

Copyright 2019, InterAmerica, Inc.

Every day most of us try to come to terms with what reality is, for us, individually and for the human species.

(I think the ETH is, for many, thought to be a possible source to explain why we're here, who we are, and the other questions of existence. But is it the best source, relying it seems, on an iffy answer from an alleged visiting advanced, extraterrestrial species?)

The idea for visitors from the cosmos is, for me, as you well know, a ludicrous or, at least, zany pie in the sky hope.

No one has come or is coming to provide us with the answer(s) to what’s the purpose of life, and our part in that purpose.

Yet, there are persons and groups who have tried, since immemorial times, to fathom the “reality” we find ourselves in: religious prophets, philosophers, poets, imaginative writers, artists, and just before and after the Enlightenment, scientists.

But who among those groups is best qualified, or likely able to have that Eureka moment whereupon the purpose of being is elucidated?

When I read Maurice Bucke’s opus Cosmic Consciousness, I thought there might be, within it, some edifying insights, by someone, as to what their experience told them and thus tell us something of the ultimate reality.

But no, that was not to be.

My favorite theological philosopher Thomas Aquinas and after him Teilhard de Chardin, I thought would offer something to help us understand why we’re here, the purpose of being.

When the great Thomas had his “vision” of what reality was, saying that what he had written about life, humanity, and God was like straw in the wind, he clammed up. He gave nothing more.

Was it because he wasn’t – as articulate and brilliant a he was – able to express any concept of the reality he saw or experienced?

Did he see a computer simulation as the reality in which we find ourselves, and being lodged in the technologically absent Thirteenth Century, had no way to provide an understanding of what he saw?

Was this also the case with Giordano Bruno? Or a few other adepts, such as Hildegard de Bingen?

Today, who is able to discern what may be our reality? Is it a techie like Elon Musk? Or a theoretical physicist from the past or currently? Here’s a list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_theoretical_physicists

Or Occultists, past and present? Here’s a list:

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmXoypizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72vedxjQkDDP1mXWo6uco/
wiki/List_of_occultists.html

How about a side-lined, ignored master of life and brilliant expositor of pertinent things: The mystic Meister Eckhart?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meister_Eckhart

There are clues about reality in many of the works of those listed above, but no clear outline or thesis explaining the questions at hand here.

Authors, especially in the sci-fi genre, have come close to outlining where we’ve been as a species and where we may be going, sometimes hinting at our purpose for being. Philip K. Dick is representative of those brilliant explicators who struggle with or struggled with the point of it all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick

Eric Wargo, at his internet digs – thenightshirt.com – is a Philip k Dick fanboy and one of the few web writers who seriously approaches the meaning of it all.

And author Ted Chiang, noted both by me and Eric, and touted by exemplary writer and pedagogue Joyce Carol Oates provides fictive clues to what it’s all about.

Yet, no one, in all of time and history seems able to grasp or explain why we’re here or our purpose for being if there is one.

No discipline – certainly not “ufology” – is up to the task or has been up to the task.

The mystery of life eludes us all, even those with the brilliance of Coeus.

That may be why some among the UFO crowd insist upon those alleged ET visitors; they must have the answer(s) to life, yes?

If not, we’re in an “existential” muddle from which there is no exit.

RR

Degrees of “insanity” – the UFO experience among them

Copyright 2019, InterAmerica, Inc.

Insanity – a term decried by Thomas Szasz – is used here as a sobriquet for the kinds of mental aberrations that seem to lie outside the norms of mental behavior: neurological disorders (not incurred by biologic failure), dementia praecox, hysteria, hallucinatory episodes, disruptive anti-social outbursts, paralysis (not caused by biologic failure), schizophrenia, paranoia, et al.

Those in my circle, who are attuned to psychological disorders – Tim Hebert and Gilles Fernandez – are aware of the many kinds of mental disorders that are called insane, but know that the panoply of bizarre human behavior also includes anti-social behavior which lie outside this discussion, and are deliberate in nature whereas “insane” activity is often spontaneous and out of the control of the person afflicted.

An article in the May 27, 2019 New Yorker by Jerome Groopman (Recanati Professor of Medicine at Harvard) looks at Psychiatry’s fraught history in his review of Mind Fixers [Norton] by Anne Harrington (history-of-science professor at Harvard).

The article/review presents a concise rendition of the struggle by psychiatry and neurology to determine the cause of mental illness: insanity.

All the names, theories, and efforts are proffered: Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Pierre Janet, Freud, Charcot,  Adolf Meyer, Eugen Bleuler et al.

The “battle” has been to determine if insanity is derived from biology (the body) or the mind, with reference to Descarte’s theories.

Schizophrenia, psychotropic drugs, “cures” and failures – something Tim Hebert and I discussed in comments here about Adamski’s apparent “lunacy” [See below] – are well delineated.

But for this piece, here, I’m accenting disturbances of the mind, accepting biological failures (Alzheimers and dementia) as outside the scope of my point.

People who hear voices, see odd things, and have illusory episodes that are hallucinatory in nature but come to them as a material, actual event or episode is the gist of what I’m getting at – or, rather, what Jose Caravaca is getting at in his Theory of Distortion.

A notable example of what occurs to people who sink into mental illness, or even just have a recoverable bout of bizarre observations or encounters (UFOs, Big Foot, Nessie, angels, spirits, et cetera) is what happened to John Keel.

Momentary bouts of hallucination or UFO (or monster) observations are akin to what many of us experience as a déjà vu moment – when we think we are experiencing something we have experienced before. The moment passes and we are no worse for wear.

The insane person is one who continues to be assaulted by bizarre experiences, sightings, and hallucinations.

Tim Hebert observes, from his work with schizophrenics, that psycho-medicinals often quell their “insanity.”

For UFO observers, something curbs, usually, their “insane” transient episode, although a few have gone off the deep end as it were: some contactees, and a few cases from UFO literature such as the ongoing Billy Meier oeuvre.

It’s when a person remains to be assaulted, over and over again – with UFO sightings or feelings of being abducted – that “insanity” may be allowed as the operating meme.

Jose Caravaca’s litany of Marian encounters – the Fatima episodes being the de rigueur example – are a kind of soporific insanity.

The episodes reek of hallucination and often hysteria but subside and slide into a pastiche of holy (or religious) sanctimony. In UFO lore, the 1964 Lonnie Zamora/Socorro episode is of a like kind.

No matter how we look at UFO sightings or Big Foot encounters, those who present their experience may be said to have been temporarily “insane.”

It’s not an epithet – insane – to be used in its historical context – as Foucault brilliantly offers, but it is a term that aptly applies, and which could, one day, replace the inherently ignorant thinking that UFOs are visits by extraterrestrial entities.

One can only hope.

N.B. My persistent use of the words "insane" and "insanity" derives from their endemic presence in the New Yorker article itself

RR