Limbo is in himself for a while (gender assumption acknowledged) but I'm going to reply anyway while the discussion is fresh in my mind.
Glad you did! No doubt the discussion is a little stale by now, and so if you chose not to respond to this post I'll be disappointed but I will understand.
Good. I'm glad you can see that.
I, in turn, can see how it might look otherwise to an initiate.
I appreciate that! I would like to help you to see through my perspective, which I must admit is that of a mere novice initiate, and maybe not a very good one at that. I am still recovering from the aftereffects of the "Red Pill". When you "take the red pill", that is to say become an initiate, you endure a kind of 'Holy Madness'. Derealization, depersonalization, veridical hallucinations, ecstatic rapture, dissociation, OBEs, internal lights and sounds, UFOs and aliens and angels and the whole nine yards. If you're lucky, as I am, you find yourself outside of time and space looking in and back in one piece to talk about it.
So, if you can imagine living a life that gradually leads up to and through crap like that, and coming out the other side alive and somewhat sane, then you are a step closer to understanding how things look to an initiate who has seen past the veil of Maya. Things look pretty damn crazy.
Maybe you figure, well things look crazy to them because
they are crazy. Nope, they are crazy because they've seen too much. So hopefully that will help you to use a little sympathetic participatory imagination.
That last point is confusing. Close Encounters of the Third Kind hits most of the mythic archetypes on your list (except for the return stage) and then some; its protagonist receives visions, goes searching for explanations of them, rejects (and is rejected by) mundane society in the process, is assisted by sympathetic helpers and hindered by the lies and machinations of tricksters, and eventually reaches a liminal sacred place where he has a final transformative experience that removes him from the earthly life and limitations he's no longer concerned with.
There is a return stage, actually. The protagonist had a choice, and chose to refuse. That's called 'refusal of the call to return'. Other characters emerged from the UFO which was kind of a foreshadowing of the protagonists eventual return, perhaps.
Close Encounters not only hits on most of the mythic archetypes, it hits on the
commonalities among UFO contactees. It drew on the work of Jacques Vallee, I don't know if you're familiar with his work or not but I would recommend checking it out.
That is a crucial point for me to get across, if you are going to understand where I'm coming from. I experienced something very similar to the protagonist in my own life as a UFO contactee.
The commonalities among UFO contactees and the commonalities among shamans means that shamanic initiation and UFO abduction are different mythologizations of the same paranormal anomaly. The commonalities give rise to the strongest iterations of the monomyth, because the common denominators are hard-wired into our psyche by tens of thousands of years of initiation-by-UFO. So they come out in our lives and in our art and in science because it's a very big part of what we are.
The literal narrative, though, concerns biological aliens that have evolved on some distant physical planet, and come to earth in advanced technological machines, abducting humans for study with the intent of eventually establishing contact, and finally accepting the protagonist as human ambassador/guest/specimen to board their big machine and fly away with them.
You seem to be saying that those who prefer that latter (and perfectly valid) interpretation of the story, the ones who focus on the literal plot, are the ones making it into religion. Honestly, what sense does that claim make?
There are two ways for a culture to read the dominant myth. They can read it on the exoteric level, or on the esoteric level. The people who function on the exoteric level take it at face value. The read only the narrative. In a traditional culture, that might translate into ritual, holidays, and models of behavior. In our culture, sci-fi too has dabbled in ritual and holidays, and we like to teach kids how to be a good-guy by pointing to superheroes. That's religion.
The people who function on the esoteric level read past the face value. They read the infranarrative, and make it part of an esoteric process of development. That is mysticism.
So mystics are to religion as scientists are to sci-fi, because today it is our scientists who use a process of development to make something out of the dominant myth. They undergo training and use a specialized environment, just like a mystic in a traditional society.
The difference is the direction they look, and the tools that those directions necessitate. A mystic explores inner space, a scientist explores outer space. Each inheriting a mythological legacy and being guided by it. And at the root of each of those mythological legacies is the same mystery paranormal source, whether we call it UFOs or tribal gods or fairies or pink unicorns. Doesn't matter... the archetypes change form all the time as culture evolves.
There's the crux of where we disagree.
[...]
What differences does it make to them whether their shaman is paranormally remote viewing or not? What differences does it make to us whether their shaman is paranormally remote viewing or not?
Because over the long run, they will be more productive. The shaman actually is reaching out with his mind and altering probability itself. But if you push probability too far, you could end up with a paradox.
Whether the shaman is reaching out to alter proability or reaching out to heal a sick tribe member, the paranormal power of the human mind is making a difference. Science can detect the correlations between the brain of the distant psychic healer and the brain of the patient. There is no telling where humanity would be if we didn't have a balance between too little psi and so much psi that we cause paradox.
So the connections between the UFO phenomenon, paranormal phenomena, and shamanism are plain. The life-experiences of both shamans and UFO contactees are living monomyths, and they inspire myth and art. The UFO is the paranormal mythologem of the space-age and of the stone-age, only the costume has changed.
