An interesting experience while writing...

A few very brief notes as I watch the Olympics and waste a bit of time idly surfing on-line.
I spent the whole day plinking away on Children of the Stars - writing a lot of little pieces of the story: scenes and sideplots that will eventually weave into the main story.

An interesting thing happened as I was writing. One of the characters suddenly "decided" she was going to do something different. Suddenly as I was writing a piece of action drama, I found her doing something completely unanticipated. It was almost as if she had come up with the idea on her own. As I read back what I had written, I was "surprised" by how she had gotten through the particular challenge in the story.

Several experienced writers have told me that this happens, but I hadn't experienced it before now. It's an interesting experience.

In the last couple of days I've been getting into the story. Looking forward to getting into it tomorrow, too...

Twists and Turns, perspectives and a few days of hindsight

This week has started out rough. We have upcoming performance reviews at work (the day job). They say that in a well-run company, there should never be a surprise on your review. However, in our company, nearly everyone I know has had something appear on their review from somewhere out in left field. Many times, it's a surprise. But enough of that. And - oh yes - I almost forgot - they're going to have a layoff some time in late March - but still - keep up the good work...

I am also eagerly waiting to see whether my proposal to the National Guild of Hypnotists to teach a class at the 2010 convention has been accepted. That info is supposed to come back this week.
Furthermore, I have sent about a baker's dozen new query letters out to literary agents - the next round in my endeavor to get The Fifth Key published. So recent times have had a lot of things up in the air - lots of questions and lots of ways that the Universe has presented me with unknown future outcomes.

In many ways, the future is a roll of the dice - at least at the moment. So this week has been a true study in living in the present. It is one of those never-ending lessons about how important it is to focus on intentions, which you can control - rather than on outcomes, which you cannot.

Perspective is important, and nothing teaches that more than some of the events of the last few weeks. One of these is that a friend of our family recently learned that her cancer has returned. Another perspective changer is learning that at work, some folks in our building (possibly including me) are going to lose their jobs. All of these are simply reminders of how tenuous life can be. They reminds us that we are souls living a human existence and at any moment, that existence can change abruptly - or even come to an end.

Still another perspective shaker occurred when I received a set of e-mail diatribes against another UFO researcher - quite serious accusations. I know the researcher but am unfamiliar with the particulars of the case, so I won't go into detail on it . Yet I have found the whole matter to be disconcerting. Suffice it to say that it is another illustration of how tenuous our world can be. At any moment, something out of the blue can happen - something we don't expect - be it an interpersonal falling-out or something else.

On Saturday I attended a talk that I wish I had skipped. It was part of the regular MN MUFON meeting and at the time, I found myself feeling quite annoyed about it. To me the topic seemed (and still seems) like a waste of time. I wrote about this whole affair in an earlier post when I talked about the 'Moon Hoax' theory - that we didn't go to the moon, and all of the history of the Apollo project was faked.

The presentation supposedly showed that the radiation within the Van Allen radiation belts is too intense to permit human spaceflight beyond low earth orbit. I may talk about this presentation in more detail in a different post, but for now, suffice it to say that I found the whole argument bogus. Yet it was presented in an annoyingly credible way. Rather than the emperor having no clothes, in this case, a rather impressive set of clothes had no emperor within them. The talk was well done, presented professionally and made to look very credible - while all of the time, the content of that talk was worthless.

I have seen this same thing on a number of other occasions and it is really spooky how something completely off the wall can sound quite believable. This is how cults get going, how dictators like Hitler come to power, how scams succeed, and how world history has become checkered with economic, political and military fiascoes.

Both joys and disasters have dotted our past and our present - and certainly lay in our future. Some times things work out well; outcomes are positive. Yet at other times we see just how easily things can go wrong. If it is that easy to convince a significant segment of our population that events they lived through - Apollo 11, for example - never occurred, or that one particular ethnic group is responsible for all of the world's troubles, then the peril is real, indeed...

So once again, I am reminded how fragile life can be. It may be the day-to-day existence of each of us - threatened by job loss, sickness, or worse. It may be the fate of whole peoples and nations as seen in some current events. Or it may be the talk I attended on Saturday and the idea that some people actually believed it. In short, the twists and turns of the last few days, coupled with a few days of hindsight, have provided tremendous food for thought - and powerful lessons about perspective on life in an uncertain world.

Can we understand both sides?

Recently, I have had several experiencer clients describe events (apparently) involving military-related abduction encounters. While I certainly can't say that I understand the nature of their encounters, it does give me pause to think. What might be going on? We hear so much over the years about the cover-up, the shadow government, and how the powers-that-be know far more than they are letting on about the visitor phenomenon. So I often wonder, what are the motivations behind the actions of these human authorities? What drives them and what might their objectives be.

In The Cosmic Bridge, I talk about possible motivations of the Visitors described by so many UFO witnesses and encounter experiencers. From the perspective of the Visitors, humans are probably a wild card in our part of the cosmos. From their point of view:

• The biggest single human endeavor (by far) is war. We spend far more on killing eachother than we do on any other activity (except for sex).
• We have developed the capability to destroy an entire planet, deliberately or otherwise. At the moment this capability is limited to our own world, but one could imagine our massive nuclear arsenal - plus a few hundred years of development - applied to another world in the cosmos.
• We are probably within one to two hundred years of a working stardrive. As I point out in The Cosmic Bridge, little known advances in electrogravitics, gravity modification and zero-point physics suggest that we are near a breakthrough, perhaps enabling starflight far sooner than most of us imagine.

For the visitors, the spectre of a warlike humanity spilling out into the cosmos represents an urgent challenge - perhaps motivating a massive-but-stealthy intervention in the evolution of our world. Thus, from this point of view, the motivation of the visitors would be something like self-interest-driven benevolence - somehow 'civilizing' we 'barbarian' humans of this tiny blue world.

So what are the intentions of our visitors? If some such as Dr. Steven Greer are to be believed, all of the visitors are both civilized and benevolent. On the other hand, if Dr. David Jacobs is correct in his book, The Threat, the entire purpose of the alien abduction phenomenon is to eventually overtake Earth and somehow subjugate or replace humanity with a hybrid human-alien race. Most likely, in my view, the motivation(s) of whomever/whatever are visiting our world must be many. If there is one group of visitors, then there are most likely many of them; thus there are probably many motivations, some benevolent, others less so. Thus, we are confronted with unpredictable visitors with advanced technology far beyond our own.

There are many actions humans could take in response to the visitor presence. We could either join them - as suggested by some contactees and others with a positive view of the visitors. We can accept their teachings, assume they are benevolent and follow their lead, etc. Alternatively, we can resist them, somehow trying to maintain human sovereignty over our world using some form of either technological or spiritual/paranormal means. Indeed, there are many variations of each of these views, with far more variety than I have even begun to suggest here.

The history of our own world is replete with examples of how a lower technology civilization fares when faced with one of higher technology and military might. Suffice it to say that these lessons are most likely not lost upon our own planetary authorities. While the visitors might be worried about warlike humans spilling out into the galaxy, our own collective leaders may well be worried about less benevolent beings from the stars overtaking our own world. The spectre of visitors bringing to humanity the same fate that indigenous peoples all over the world have suffered at the hands of westerners probably brings nightmares to those in the know.

I often wonder what kind of debates must go on behind closed doors in the halls of power. Behind the walls of the pentagon, I can well imagine questions, debates and more; how are we to proceed against superior technology from beyond Earth. If even one of the accounts of military encounters with unexplained aerial objects are to be believed, then our military - and probably that of every other major power - has been confronted with capabilities far beyond its own.

The 1980 Bentwaters encounter, the numerous nuclear facility encounters in both the USA and the USSR punctuating the nuclear faceoff of the cold war are just a few examples of how the visitors seem to act at will in our airspace. In addition, several witnesses in Minnesota MUFON sighting/encounter cases, particularly several with military aviation experience, have described how UFOs played cat and mouse with our finest aviation technology - with the UFOs clearly having the edge. The message is clear - if it were to come to a military confrontation between one or more of the Earth militaries and our visitors, the visitors would be the winners. Thus, the obvious challenge to the Military leaders of Earth:

• Maintain the illusion of control over the human population of Earth in the face of visitors' extraordinary capabilities
• Enhance our own capability to the point where humans could credibly maintain their own sovereignty in the face of whoever might come here from out there. This would involve capturing and reverse-engineering alien technology, understanding alien physics, etc.
• Deal with whomever is visiting us while keeping the lid on overall contact between humans and the visitors - presumably to prevent cataclysmic destabilization of our own social (and power) structures.

In short, the question is how to somehow engage the visitors from the cosmos while preventing unpredictable damage to our own social fabric - the kind of damage experienced by the Aztecs, the Incas, the Chinese, and so many others peoples of the non-western world. While there is most likely a high degree of self-interest in maintaining the current structures of power in Earth society, I suspect that our various human authorities take their (self?)appointed responsibilities seriously - to protect and defend the sovereignty of our world - or more specifically, their particlar nation(s) and power structures within our world.

So meanwhile the visitors seem to be contacting us from the bottom up, one experiencer at a time. At the same time, our leaders (those overtly elected and perhaps others with their hands on more deeply hidden levers of power) seem to be trying to build our capability to assert our own sovereignty.

I am certainly not sympathetic with any usurpation of the democratic process, constitutional checks and balances, and/or individual human rights. We often hear allegations of these very problems as we learn more about the UFO coverup. There seem to be many excesses and miscues in this human effort. At the same time, we can also understand those who wish to see humanity expand our collective consciousness and join the Cosmic Community, embracing the very presence that so frightens our leaders. Yet, in light of our own history, I wonder if we can imagine the nightmares of those leaders, facing the possibility of humanity at the mercy of beings from out there.

In every issue there are two sides. In this case, while some embrace the presence of the visitors, others fear the effects of open contact and disclosure of the visitor presence. Who is right? Maybe both. I don't condone the alleged actions of the authorities (both the overt and the shadow governments), but maybe we can begin to understand why such might be occurring. I wonder if, given the prescedents of our own history and the vast disparity in capabilities between the visitors and ourselves, we can understand both sides of this complex question.