From Jose Caravaca [Portions I find interesting are placed in Bold type, RR]

Copyright 2020,  José Antonio Caravaca

UFOS: An Unknown "Psychic" Virtual Reality? By José Caravaca

That UFO manifestations, especially close encounters, possess not only human characteristics, but manifestly socio-cultural aspects analogous to those developed by our civilization, are very evident.

The interaction with the UFO phenomenon, is produced, based on some very concrete and specific concepts, both aesthetic and narrative that are structured on human knowledge. And all this is shown in a disordered way, since each witness interacts in a very determined and different way with the paradigm, but under the same premises.

An example. The behaviors of the ufonauts have been described in different ways. Basically in the UFO literature we find the following behaviors of the UFO occupants: elusive, fearful, violent, communicative, indifferent...

We can also extrapolate a series of basic activities that ufonauts perform when they land: examining the surroundings, taking samples from the ground or repairing their vehicles. And the curious thing is that all these behaviors and activities are shown and exhibited with human gestures (in the face and body) and even using tools and utensils as those of our technology.

But what I want to emphasize is that all these points are shown in a disorderly way, even chaotic, as if the phenomenon did not have a defined purpose or a clear objective, as if it has no memory. Let me explain.

We can find a UFO encounter where the ufonaut is communicative, and later we find another event where the occupant of the flying saucer flees from the place as if he had never seen an Earthling. Then we find a case of an indifferent or violent humanoid.

Invariably, everything starts again as in an endless roulette that does not stop spinning, and where the behaviors that we are going to find in future incidents seem to be unpredictable. Or are they?

From my point of view the personal and non-transferable interaction of each witness with the phenomenon makes the ufonauts behave in a certain way, possibly in line with internal psychological factors of the observers (fear, curiosity, fascination, shyness, etc). In the same way, the ufonauts show us the interior of their spaceship and invite us on a space tour and in other cases they flee in fear of our mere presence.

Is the witness who visits the interior of a UFO more curious than the witness who claims that the ufonauts fled the site? To what extent can a person's courage, curiosity or fear determine the degree of immersion in these experiences? Are the actions taken by the ufonauts resonant with the abilities of the witnesses in their ordinary lives?

The UFOs, as an important fact to take into account, do not have memory to transfer from one incident to another: neither in aesthetics nor in narrative, beyond the broad outlines, because most of their content is based on a joint and unpredictable construction, that forges at the same moment (so there is no before or after) between the paradigm itself and the witnesses, full of nuances and differences.

UFO events are an enormous psychic architecture that can, at times, interact physically with the environment and the witnesses, causing all kinds of consequences. But if we carefully observe this physical aspect of UFOs, we will see that it also behaves in a random and disorderly way, sometimes the lights of the UFOs burn, and in other incidents they don't, the saucers leave traces in some places and in others they don't. In the case of UFO encounters, sometimes flying saucers have interiors without any accessories (austere in detail), and in other cases they are full of screens, computers, chairs, levers, etc.

And all this is propitiated, perhaps, by the innate capacity of each individual to interact with a greater degree of psychic involvement with the phenomenon.

UFOs come from an unknown dimension, highly immersive and malleable to the presence and interaction of witnesses. And so each witness has the opportunity to translate different narrative and visual schemes into their experience. UFOs represent an artificial "reality" built on human socio-cultural elements, by trying to decode a wide and disconcerting unknown cognitive phenomenon that goes beyond the range of ordinary senses.

The closest thing we know to all this would be an immersion in a powerful virtual reality, with physical effects, which would originate at the very moment of our connection, and whose characters and scenarios react to our unconscious desires, without the individual himself being aware that the whole universe he is witnessing and experiencing is being constructed in part, not only with his presence, but, with high doses of creativity, depending on each witness.

JAC

A 2018 Posting that pertains to my current struggle with pal Bryan Sentes

Saturday, September 29, 2018

Cosmic Consciousness, Reality (and UFOs)

Copyright 2018, InterAmerica, Inc.

Not to get too far adrift, and in conjunction with Jose Caravaca’s “Distortion Theory,” I’d like to address the concept of Cosmic Consciousness that often intrudes here, as part of the conjectural tone.

Maurice Bucke’s masterwork, Cosmic Consciousness:  A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind [E.P. Dutton and Company, Inc. NY, 1901/1923] is and has been a seminal work for me.

Bucke tells his readers, in Part I First Words that Cosmic Consciousness is “a higher form of consciousness than that possessed by ordinary man.” [Page 1]

Of course he elaborates on that simple definition, and while the concept has been grist for many later CC interpreters (which, if deconstruction were still fashionable would be suitable here), I’ll stick to Jacques Derrida’s plea (in Literature in Secret) to stick with the original work, unsullied by later accruing remarks and debate.

Every polymath and intellectual wannabe have provided their take on Cosmic Consciousness, but it is only Bucke’s insightful work that matters. And what he proposed in 1901 was that certain individuals had, some time in their life, experienced a vision or episode that showed them a reality beyond the “ordinary” reality we call life.

Among the fourteen persons Bucke cites as having that vision (a Cosmic Consciousness episode) are Gautama the Buddha, Jesus the Christ, St. Paul, Plotinus, Mohammed, Dante, Francis Bacon, William Blake, Balzac, and Walt Whitman.

Bucke doesn’t include Thomas Aquinas, who Bryan Sentes referred to recently; Thomas, allegedly seen floating in front of an altar and afterward saying what he had seen (in his vision) made all that he had written as straw in the wind.

Aquinas never told what he had experienced, nor had anyone listed by Bucke in his fourteen CC personages.

Apparently what these individuals saw (experienced) was so profound that it eluded description,

Recently it was noted by some celebrity mavens that former Beatle Paul McCartney, under the influence of psychedelic drugs, says he saw God. (Bryan Sentes will like that.)

(Now what exactly did McCartney see? God is ineffable, beyond comprehension, unknowable, and according to Scripture, looking upon the Face of God is a death sentence. McCartney is blubbering.)

But, it seems, some persons do have occasion to view some other kind of reality, one that Bucke and others (Plato among them) offer as an experience that provides a profound glimpse of the real reality that encompasses our existence.

(Jose Caravaca is fleshing out his views about intercessions from that other real reality.)

The illumination brought to humans by Cosmic Consciousness is also what I call the madness of schizophrenics or other “insane” manifestations that are treated as mental illness only because the persons afflicted have not been or are not able to articulate what they have seen or experienced, most succumbing to a withdrawal from normal behavior, so traumatized are they by the vision(s) or voices they perceive.

Now, my point, which I appear to have distanced myself from, is that UFOs are part of this other reality (as Caravaca suggests) and as others have surmised, without pursuing the matter seriously.

Yes, it seems that the other reality, the real reality of Plato, intrudes on and in our lives, but only to the extent that we see (or feel) a hint of that reality.

Bucke, in his Chapter 6, [Page 267 of my book] writes about the phenomenon. The “sign,” the “voice,” “god,” or “demon” and notes that Socrates, who had the “Cosmic Sense” was considered by French writer F. Lelut (who considered all mystics as lunatics) as “insane” from the siege of Potidæa, 429 B.C.

This is how many considered to be mentally ill (insane or mad), and those who’ve seen a UFO or reported a UFO sighting, are perceived by “normal” folks.

But person in the throes of madness and UFO spotters are merely experiencing a dose of another reality. (This is what Jose Caravaca is getting at.)

And let me close by saying that those who see psychedelic drugs or hallucinogens as a doorway to a Cosmic Consciousness are so far removed from the real reality that we can discard their pronouncements out of hand. They are the loony ones, just as are those who think that UFOs do not exist or are seen only by crazies.

RR