Stale? Not at all; we were just getting to the point of communicating well enough to discuss the interesting stuff.
I'm glad to hear you say that! I find a lot to agree with in your post.
I tend to leave questions of sanity off the table, for various reasons including self-interest. Derealization, visions, etc. can be symptoms of mental illness, especially if chronic and unwelcome, but they're not necessarily so. (By analogy, shortness of breath, muscle pain, and profuse sweating can be symptoms of serious physical illness, but they also happen to me when I exercise.)
I'm glad to see you realize that! It's not chronic and unwelcome, but it sure wasn't easy. There is a reason Neo puked after leaving The Matrix.
If you'll forgive my prying, now that you've described the experience I'm interested in the circumstances. Two questions specifically: one, was this initiation ceremonial, or otherwise planned or triggered by others, or was it a spontaneous occurrence? And two, what if any physiological influences contributed to causing it to happen? (Examples of what I mean by physiological influences include sleep deprivation, fasting, dehydration, sensory deprivation, sensory overload, hypoxia, hyperthermia, fatigue, pain, and [ahem] ingested chemical substances. For reasons of forum rules, please don't be specific about the latter.)
You're not prying. Actually I find it helpful to talk about, especially with skeptics. Religious fundamentalists are too quick to judge. But you guys make me laugh and make me think.
So about question one. I was the only person involved in my initiation, and I didn't plan it. It happened on the winter solstice lunar eclipse of 2010. I had a feeling there was something special about that occurance, and so I made a thread about it here, titled
The Initiation of Scrooge, just in case any JREFer wanted to take advantage of the occasion. I guess I was the only one.
So about question two. There were no physiological influences. I occasionally fast to assist me in meditation, but I wasn't fasting at that time and I was sober as a judge.
The one common element that's evident is extreme emotions, but not always the same emotions. What else might they have in common? How do the effects differ? Could these all be variations of the NDE?
(The question remains valid, note, whether or not we accept any supernatural connection or agency in the process.)
They are all altered states of consciousness, transpersonal psychology studies those. I believe that ASCs span a spectrum, with profound rare occurances such as NDEs on one end, and common occurances such as a 'gut-feeling' on the other end.
I agree that the commonalities are revealing, whether or not the anomaly involved here is truly paranormal or not. (I hope you don't mind me remaining stubbornly agnostic on that; to do otherwise leads to begging the question.) However, I fear that your characterization of "strongest" makes the common error of over-generalizing from one's own experiences. How much consistency, for instance, remains in accounts of these experiences when you look outside of the U.S. or outside the Western industrialized world?
I do see a great deal of cross-cultural consistency.
The point is, there may very well be one fundamental mystical experience that has left its mark on all such narratives, but the individual narratives we know and tell certainly does also strongly influence our experiences. For example, the details of contactee accounts, from the forms of the "spacecraft" to the attitudes and facial features of the "aliens," undergo mimesis and evolution, changing with each passing decade or two.
Yes, it used to take myth much longer to change. We are seeing the same process of evolution but at a much faster pace. It is very revealing to me on an intuitive level. These aren't your grandpas little green men from Mars and hotties from Venus.
Mystical experience and art have a deep feedback loop going on. Each new generation of mystics inherits a mythological legacy, is partly shaped by it, and then interprets it in terms of his time and place. Those terms change rapidly these days.
So what we're doing is, we are projecting ancient archetypes of the collective unconscious in new mythological forms, and we are projecting them out into objective reality, or projecting them onto objects which then take on a meaning consistent with the over-all meanings of a system. That means we end up with living myths in the skies which are solid enough for radar to bounce off of - UFOs.
Those living myths interact with mystics during altered states of consciousness, who then produce art. That art has an esoteric infranarrative and an exoteric narrative. When you dig deeply into the esoterica of world religion and myth, you find a kind of cross-cultural picture comes together. It's from there that the monomyth formula emerges.
I'm not familiar with Vallee. I'll check it out.
Some of his books are hard to find so I would recommend starting with his latest book,
Wonders in the Sky.
Okay, I finally understand the idea you're getting at here. I think that from a communication standpoint, the problem your facing is that rationalists don't make such a strong or clear distinction between religion and mysticism, or when they do, don't make it along the axis you do.
Yep, that makes a lot of sense.
Also, you'll have a hard time making a strong case that mystical experiences really underlie the scientific endeavor.
Yes, I have a idea about how to approach that. Even so, I might have to settle for a mediocre case. More on that later.
It sounds good when you talk about, for example, UFO narratives and SETI. But SETI is a tiny area of science. More scientists study bird parasites than search for ETIs. More scientists research cancer than perform aerospace exploration. Is there some universal mythic archetype driving scientific interest in bird parasites and cancer cures? It seems unlikely. Consider the possibility that most scientists are motivated by wanting to figure something out or solve some problem about some aspect of the natural or human worlds.
I'm sure you're right, most scientists are working in down-to-earth ways. But that's ok. The important thing is that science is performing functions for society that until now were the job of mythology, and those functions include the same universal mythologem (ET) but in different cultural form. A materialistic, secular form.
Tying ET to world religion and myth is easy, and it makes a start of tying science to mystical experience, in a wide sense, because tying ET to shamanic initiation is easy.
Then, to tie science and mystical experience together on a personal sense, I use a parapsychological discovery from the 40s called the speep-goat effect. I then tie the cultural and pesonal elements together under the conceptual umbrella of the archetype of the trickster, thus coming full circle.
Then, I wrap it all up in a nice little bow by putting it all in terms of Piscean synchronicity and the Jesus narrative.
The ability to remote view, and the ability to alter probability, can be tested. My belief that there is nothing paranormal involved is consistent with both the shaman's established ability to help the tribe, and his lack of ability to score above chance expectations in controlled tests of remote viewing, healing, and so forth.
In principle they can be tested. But suppose for a moment what it means if psi is real. It means that everyone is psychic, even those people who don't realize it, because psi is an archetype and all archetypes are in all people.
That means that whoever you are, if you are testing for psi then you are bringing your own unconscious but active psi to the lab, in addition to that of the test subjects. Think about what that means, especially in light of the trickster archetype. Remember, all archetypes are in all people.
The trickster archetype is like a knee-jerk reflex in the collective unconscious, and part of what it does is keep psi marginalized. The trickster is anti-structure, and what we are really doing when we test for psi is we are trying to build a solid conceptual structure to place the anomaly in. But what if it
can't be structured? What if psi must be marginalized, or it would drive us nuts? Maybe we aren't enlightened enough to handle it. Maybe that is where trickster-figures like Randi come in, and their deceptions and publicity stunts. The trickster works from both sides.
So eliciting psi is a lab is the easy part. If it was just a matter of evidence, the issue would have been settled long ago because there is a ton of it. Overcoming the knee-jerk responses of the unconscious i.e. the trickster is the hard part. Science isn't deft enough for that. The rules of science are like a catch-22 that keeps psi marginalized, on the threshold, exactly where the trickster 'wants' it.
Science can and does produce much evidence of an anomaly we call psi. But that doesn't mean that science can make it fit inside a structural framework, especially when scientists are unconscious of their own inner anti-structure trickster operating through them.
