~ A New World View on UFOs ~
Article by Harvard Professor John Mack, MD
 |
|
A New World View on UFO's and
Close Encounters
Including article by Harvard Professor
John Mack, M.D.
"Our sun is one of 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Our galaxy is one of billions of galaxies populating the universe. It would be the height of presumption to think that we are the only living things in that enormous immensity."
--- Wernher von Braun (Past director of NASA space program)
"More young people believe they'll see a U.F.O. than that they'll see their own Social Security benefits."
--- Mitch McConnell (United States Senator)
"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."
--- Carl Sagan (Internationally acclaimed scientist and author)
* Skip to Dr. Mack's Article
* Skip to Star Visitors in Japan
* Please link to this page by using ~ http://www.paulapeterson.com/NewWorldViewUFO.html ~ Thank you!
Introduction by Paula Peterson
Some folks have UFO sightings and extraterrestrial encounters while others don't. Why are the "experiencers" unique in this regard?
Even though a large portion of society has never had sightings or encounters, doesn't mean that they don't happen. For decades, individuals from all walks of life have come forth to report their experiences - and yet, these events are still scoffed at and debunked by mainstream media.
Some of those who have come forth are highly educated and accomplished individuals with respectable credibility: such as military officers, medical doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists and respected journalists.
If these experiences cannot be proven false - and legitimate encounters have never been disproven - then why not consider that these events are very real?
Its baffling that there are still those on this planet that believe we earthlings are the only ones in this vast universe or that its impossible for there to be other intelligent civilizations in space. Or ... if there really are intelligent civilizations "out there" its not likely that their technology would be more advanced than ours. These viewpoints are like continuing to believe that the earth is flat and that anyone who challenges this perspective is in league with the devil.
So Why Don't More People See UFOs?
If you were an extraterrestrial visiting from a distant planet, would you just blatantly drop in for a public visit to a planet whose military forces are reported to have fired unprovoked at UFOs? Or would you use your intelligence and observe the inhabitants of this planet for awhile ... a long while ... before making a conspicuous broad-daylight-here-for-all-the-world-to-see landing?
And if you were that extraterrestrial visitor who was observing planet earth, and wanting to make your presence known, perhaps you would carefully chose to contact - one by one - only those inhabitants that would be the most open minded and accepting of your presence.
Listen to the indigenous peoples of this world - like the Native Americans - and they will tell you that star visitors and UFO sightings have always been - and continue to be - simply another part of the human experience and nothing to get worked up about as these events have occurred for thousands of years.
Perhaps the inability for many folks to accept the idea of extraterrestrials visiting our planet is because there are still a lot of folks that don't take much of an interest in life beyond prime-time television, the daily newspaper or the latest romance novel. Or don't take the time out to contemplate the deeper meanings of life and read the philosophies, discoveries and revelations of great thinkers.
Personally, the idea of extraterrestrial visitors observing planet earth - and even interacting with earth's inhabitants - is nothing short of awesome. We have entered an era where we have awakened enough in consciousness to accept our original ancient lineage with those from the stars. And those from the stars have not forgotten us ... although some scholars and researchers feel that the orginal star visitors of ancient times went away for awhile to allow humanity to bumble around in darkness for a few eons so we could evolve and find our own way back to our true origin.
Star Visitors in Japan
Several years ago, when I was sponsored in Japan as a public speaker, teacher and personal counselor, my schedule was booked up with people wanting to have a session with me. Since I did not speak Japanese, an excellent translator was provided for all personal sessions and speaking engagements. Each client paid for their session in yen currency, which at the time was the equivalent of $400 American dollars to have a one-hour personal session with me (ee-gads ... I only charge $95 here in the States!).
Now ... if folks are paying that kind of money to have a session with me, wouldn't it seem reasonable to assume that they are going to make the most of their session and get down to some real "business"?
Surprisingly, in the midst of their personal session, a few Japanese clients suddenly started talking about their encounters with extraterrestrial visitors. Their reports were very similar to the encounters that many Americans have reported (and being debunked for the most part).
Why would anyone pay that amount of money to tell me about an experience that didn't really happen? Why would they waste their expensive session telling me a false story?
These folks only wanted their experience to be heard by someone who would not ridicule them. They were merely seeking some insight as to what it all meant. They were kind, courteous, sensible and calm. They were not seeking notoriety nor attention since my commitment in keeping my consultations confidential was well known and has always been kept. So, what was the point in these people telling me their stories?
Because their experiences really did happen. And all they wanted was to achieve some kind of peace of mind about it.
In many parts of the world, there is an acceptance of UFO craft and encounters with unusual beings ... and those who report such occurrences are not ridiculed like they are here in the US. Many people never tell about their experiences - mainly because they are afraid of the backlash. I kept my encounters secret for years before I told anyone ... and there are still some experiences that I may never tell about.
That's why any UFO researcher of respectable credibility who goes public with their viewpoints becomes almost like a savior to experiencers everywhere.
One such researcher was John Mack, M.D.
He was a professor of psychiatry at Harvard and won a Pulitzer prize for his
biography of Lawrence of Arabia.
He served in the US Air Force from 1959 to 1961 and rose to the rank of captain.
In 1964, he joined the Harvard
Medical School faculty, becoming professor of psychiatry in 1972. He was
founding chairman of the department of psychiatry at the Cambridge Hospital.
In 1983, he founded the Centre for Psychology and Social Change, to research
"the full breadth of human experience, including spiritual experience not
generally accepted by more conservative branches of psychiatry". In 2003, it was
renamed the John E Mack Institute.
He created
more controversy, however, with his investigations of accounts of alien
abduction.
Mack spent five years interviewing more than 100 "experiencers" to produce
his book Abduction - Human Encounters with Aliens. It made him internationally famous
and a regular guest on television talk shows. However, his emergence as a guru
for UFO believers caused Harvard University acute embarrassment.
Nevertheless, he approached the topic of alien encounters with intelligence and a courageous heart.
When asked what his message would be if he could broadcast it to the world, he first
replied, "I would be humbled", but then offered the following prescription:
"Wake up, find your way, whether it is through prayer or psychedelics or abductions
or shamanic journeys or talking with gurus or seeing movies like The Matrix
and The Truman Show. Whatever it is, find your way to break out of the
program: the commercial materialist program."
Regretfully, Dr. John Mack died suddenly only a few months ago in 2004. The news was blitzed across the internet at lightening speed throughout the UFO community a few days after his passing. It was a sad day indeed and he is greatly missed as a highly credible leader and intelligent spokesperson for bringing public awareness to a very real phenomena.
The following was one of Dr. Mack's most noteworthy presentations:
* Please link to this page by using ~ http://www.paulapeterson.com/NewWorldViewUFO.html ~ Thank you!
|
|
ESTABLISHING A NEW SCIENCE OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE
By Dr.John Mack
Florence, Italy
November 16, 2003
Thank you to the Gruppo Academico Scandicci GAUS and Paola Harris for
inviting me to Florence for this conference.
What I'd like to do first is give an overview of the "so called abduction
phenomena and lead into questions of how do we know or what are the ways of
knowing when we are dealing with something this strange. I also will discuss
the implications of this and phenomena like this for our world.
I am a Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst and I have a special interest in
extraordinary experience. I'd like to discuss how our language shapes the
experience. For instance, words like "abduction" and "alien" shape the
conversation a certain way.
The word "abduction" is off in two different
ways: First, it implies that every person who has this encounter experience
is taken against his or her will like an abduction in human terms; It also
implies that each person who has an experience is physically taken, the
whole body is taken up into a craft, which is also not true in all
instances.
Another aspect of contact is transferring information to humans
telepathically or showing us images. A lot of this information has had to do
with what our species are doing that is destructive to our planet. It is as
if what we are doing ecologically with the planet is creating some kind of
larger problem in the Galaxy.
Also "the Experiencers" are given certain
skills, certain capabilities that they were not given in their schooling.
For instance, they may discover that they may have a great artistic ability
that comes from this contact. Also they may have been given important
mathematical and scientific knowledge that goes way beyond anything they
learned in school and yet they are downloaded the most complicated
mathematical formulas. And when the scientist and physicist recognize that
there is truth coming from these individuals and sometimes more than the
physicists themselves know, they recognize it as genuine. I have personally
seen many examples of these.
I'd also like to speak about the question of evidence: how do we know that
this experience is true? How do we evaluate these reports and how do we
determine truthfulness? For example, when I evaluate, I become clear that
people of sound mind have no reason for making up this story. It is sure
that they did not get it from the media because often they know more than
the media.
But there is something missing in what we have to evaluate or
determine when a person tells us a story so bizarre whether he/she is
telling the truth and whether we should take them seriously. But as yet we
have had no criteria to evaluate the truth of such encounters. So I am
working on just this and I'm just beginning to establish a science of Human
Experience.
Now in traditional science when we observe certain phenomenon, we bring some
objectivity to what we have studied. But when you are trying to understand
something so profound and important to a person you can not stand back but
you must enter into the consciousness of that person. So what the critics
will say "what you are learning is too subjective" here is the problem: if
you are going to learn about something this profound, then the learning
needs to be "intersubjuctive."
So still there is the problem of discovering the truth. If I say it just
feels like they are telling the truth, then this is not enough. So we have
to start with the "holistic way of knowing". This is close to what we know
as intuitive knowing. It is like a knowing of the heart and a knowing of the
spirit that has been part of traditional cultures for hundreds and thousands
of years but has been lost in the west.
I received some help in this matter
from Vatican representative Monsignor Corrado Balducci who says "we in the
church take this UFO Encounter Phenomena very seriously and the reason for
that is that there seem to be so many reliable witnesses. In the church, we
have had centuries of having to evaluate miraculous reports by some kind of
criteria and so they had to develop the notion of the "reliable witnesses."
So I began to apply this idea of the reliable witness to these cases. How do
we know who is a reliable witness? For my cases, it not only had to do with
the fact just that these people who were trustworthy reported something, but
it had to do with the power of their communication that came across to me. I
would experience with these people when they would be reliving their
experience, the most powerful vibration. I was in the presence of something
awesome in its intensity. The experiencers themselves would give language to
that. They would say something like "every cell in my body was vibrating"!
When you are in the presence of that, it passes your judging mind and you
feel it in your whole being.
Going back to "What is a reliable witness?", it has to do with a resonance
between the person who is reporting or sharing the experience and the
clinician. It might be called "a direct knowing". You just know that with
your whole being that this person is telling the truth. There are other
examples of this "direct knowing" as demonstrated when the Tribunal that was
hearing testimony of the torture in Bosnia questioned witnesses. The Judge
said after hearing the testimony of a particular woman about how she was
tortured, "I do not need any more testimony". I can just tell that it is not
possible that she is not telling the truth. That is sufficient.
Now everyone knows torture exists. That is accepted. But it is not accepted
in our society that these UFO encounters exist. Therefore you need to have
evidence of a pattern of such similarities that is showing up in hundreds,
if not, thousands of cases. One of these experiencers is helping me out with
this statement she made about witnesses:
"When a witness speaks, all
recognize that they have been in another realm. Sincerity and truth and
power of spirit are just as measurable as inches and pounds but not in the
same way."
It is ironic that experiences like alien abduction encounters, UFOs, crop
circles, and near-death experiences are called anomalies. In another words,
in our culture, what lies outside the realm of the cultural agreement, about
what is real, is called anomalous. Therefore a huge amount of human
experience is called anomalous.
When I have discussed this with Native
Americans, and they say it is not an anomalous. We know about this. It is
part of the human experience.
Establishing a new "worldview"
In the last minutes, I want to talk about matter of a worldview and how it
works. It has always been referred to as a paradigm and it has more of a
scientific. But I prefer to call it "worldview" because it refers to
something bigger. A worldview is the way we organize reality. It is the way
we believe things work. In a way it is like an instrument of navigation. Our
worldviews is what holds the human psyche together. What I came to realize
with that Harvard Committee was that I was threatening the scientific
medical worldview by which they were living.
What has been the dominant
worldview in our society could be called Neutonian-Carticianism or
anthropocentric, humanist. It is a worldview that puts the human being as
top of the cosmic hierarchy of intelligence. The simplest term for this is,
is that which I call Scientific Materialism. In this worldview, matter and
energy is the primary reality and there is no larger intelligence in the
cosmos. The principle method of study is objective reality which
separates the investigator from the matter that is being investigated.
Now in recent years, this view, which has dominated our society, is failing.
It is failing in every important element that the worldview is supposed to
serve.
First, there is a huge amount of phenomena, which it can not explain
nor deal with. There is no method of study for many things that we are
talking about today.
Secondly, it leads to terrible destructiveness because
it treats the entire planet as simply physical resources to fight over by
who are the most powerful and most important countries.
Thirdly, scientific
materialism does not give human beings any real satisfaction. It leaves us
without spirit and it leaves us with an empty feeling because all it has to
offer are more and more material things.
Now we have new emerging worldviews that are different. In this worldview,
there is intelligence dwelling in the universe. That experience which
happens to my clients is one example of the intelligence dwelling in the
universe and the beings that have come to my clients are another example.
The crop formations are also evidence of this intelligence that is trying to
communicate with us. Also it is a model of the universe and us in it which
says that everything is connected with everything else and we know that
cutting edge physics is supporting this worldview. So it includes not only
new ways of knowing but it also involves a spiritual awakening.
This change which is happening around us is met with enmity and a great deal
of resistance because there's a huge psychological economic and political
investment in maintaining the old worldview.
I will give you one example of the UFO resistance because books being
written which discuss this new paradigm are being called "new age,
psudoscientific, psychcentric in order to dismiss them as out of hand
because some people who write such books do not hold themselves responsible
to any scientific standards whatsoever.
I will conclude by speaking about the implications of this new worldview.
We see around us all kinds of forces which are supporting the emergence of
this way of thinking. People around the planet are opening up to new ways of
thinking. Groups, like the GAUS (GRUPPO ACADEMICO UFOLOGICO SCANDICCI), are
committed to the new emerging paradigm.
How would this planet be different
if the emerging worldview became be the dominant worldview?
We would be
connected to all living beings not just those around us, and with all nature
and spirit, which would make it impossible for us to treat nature in such a
exploitative way. For example, we would be able to identify with other
peoples, other religions and with all animals so we would not treat them
just as products to consume. With this deeper reality, we could appreciate
that we are connected to the Divine, the creative principle which would be
more fulfilling than the material focus that has been so dominant today. So
it would be global like a "global awakening of the heart", instead of global
exploitation, a word that is has that connotation today.
I might add "opening of the heart " has been a fundamental aspect of alien
encounter experience I learned from my dealing with experiencers. Sometimes
experiencers get information from these beings that we are not just a menace
to the Earth but we are a menace to the Galaxy.
In conclusion, as this emerging paradigm, this emerging worldview takes
hold, we might become more responsible citizens of a galaxy instead of
becoming the eminent menace we appear to be!
* Please link to this page by using ~ http://www.paulapeterson.com/NewWorldViewUFO.html ~ Thank you!
............
John Mack - Pulitzer Prize winner - One of the few members from science and academia to cross the boundary into the study of UFOs and aliens, and the spiritual or transformational affects of alleged alien encounter experiences - a courageous move for which he received peer criticism and even censure.
Mack made a massive impact on Ufological research with his study, and the publication of his first book on the subject, Abduction, in 1994, and the influence of this study is still felt today. Mack published his second and last book on the subject, Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters, in 1999.
Dr Mack had spoken at the Oxford Symposium on Sunday. He had returned to London to visit friends, and had been out to dinner with friends on Monday evening. As he was walking to the home where he was staying, he was struck on the pavement by a car driven by an intoxicated driver, suffering fatal injuries, and he tragically died at the scene. Thousands mourn the passing of a great man.
More on Dr. John Mack
Click here: http://www.spiuk.net/news/2004/john_mack_obit.htm
The John E Mack Institute
Click here: http://www.centerchange.org/center/releases.asp
Got comments or suggestions???
You can send one by clicking Here
 Like this website? Donations help keep it going! Click on the dolphin below for instructions. Thank you !
make a donation
|
|
|
