Draft of my new article in The CE4 Corner
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This week I've had a number of very interesting - and very heart wrenching - calls from experiencers out there in various parts of the USA. Several called me at rather odd hours, either late at night or early in the morning (at least early for me...). In either case, when my cell phone rings at that time of night I can tell it's important. Few people would call late at night unless they had a compelling reason to do so. In several cases, the reason was that the person was alone and scared. They had no idea who to turn to, and then somehow, they found my (or another CE4 researcher/worker's) contact info.
More than one person has described how the phenomenon has left them almost completely isolated. It has wrecked their family life, driving a wedge between them and their spouse, alienating (literally) parents, children, friends, etc. It has left them isolated to face the reality of their experiences alone and vulnerable. It once again drives home to me the impact of the encounter on the experiencer and the resulting impact on the lives of those closest to them. I call this the impact of the impact.
For a "typical" experiencer (if anybody could be called "typical"), somewhere out there in the human world, the biggest question becomes, who can they tell? Who will believe them? The CE4 experience shatters the concepts our society holds as being real -we live in a human-dominated world and a technological society. We associate with other humans in a particular culture (one we have been raised within, or have become acclimated to). Yet suddenly the experiencer finds him/herself becoming somewhat like an experimental animal, no loner at the top of the heap. In the realm of the visitors, humans appear not to hold all that high a standing. Thus, the homo-sapien-centric world we live in is suddenly turned upside down, and the experiencer is left with a powerful and often-traumatic experience. Some aspects of the CE4 event they may be able to remember. Other aspects of it just present as an intractable mystery - missing time, reality paradoxes, paranormal events, etc... And for many experiencers, there is no one they can tell.
One person, several years ago was scheduled for regression work for a series of encounters that had been bothering her for years. A few hours beforehand, she called me up, telling me she needed to cancel. Her fiance's mother had read something on a Christian website about how hypnosis was evil. On the same site, it talked about the demonic nature of the close encounter. As a result, her fiancee was suddenly opposed to her doing hypnotic work with me, or even to speak with me about his encounters. Much more could be said about this case, and indeed I have spoken about similar ones in previous articles. However, the key point here is that the experiencer was effectively cut off from any help. She couldn't share her account with anyone among her family and friends (all conservative Christian) without frightening them of possible diabolical influences, etc. Ultimately, her sharing with someone who would listen to her without judgement or jumping to conclusions (I believe that no one knows enough about the phenomenon to draw a conclusion) was truly the first step in the process of coming to terms with her encounters. (I have no idea whether she ended up marrying the man who was so opposed to her work with me - whichever way she went, I wish her the best).
Another experiencer called me from somewhere in Heartland USA, telling me that she had seen some strange lights in her backyard She had also experienced power failures, missing time, poltergeist activity, etc. Again, no one would listen to her; no one would believe her. Long-since divorced, she lived alone. Her children had moved on and she lived out in the boonies, having no neighbors. Thus she felt alone and exposed to whatever experience the phenomenon might bring her.
My first question to her was whether she felt physically threatened. (If this should be the case, I usually recommend the person call 911, even for something like a UFO encounter.) But now, she seemed to be OK for the moment, just confused about recent events - and, again, no one to share her experiences with. Thus, she bent my ear for hours, telling me of event after event...
Researchers have noted how the experience seems to propagate down family lines - usually, I find, down the maternal family line from mother to daughter. This was certainly true of this particular exeriencer, who told me about her mother being a healer, her grandmother a witch, etc...
Yet while even experiencing the unexplained themselves, many in the family are often in denial of the phenomenon. Thus, the experience seems to tear apart families at an alarming rate. Like most aspects of the experiencer phenomenon, there is very little data to make anything but a wild guess, but my guesstimate is that the divorce rate among experiencers is probably twice what it is in the general population. Thus, once again, the experiencer is isolated from her (most experieners I have heard from seem to be female) otherwise-supportive family and friends, leaving her alone to face the challenges of a shattered reality.
How can we help heal the pain that so many experiencers describe? Probably the best healing tool for the experiencer is the ear. Most of the time, the experiencer just needs someone to listen. The next healing tool is the shoulder - a place to cry, to let out the trauma and loneliness that come with a shattered reality. Finally, understanding and forgiveness can help - but only when the experiencer is ready (that's another story).
Meanwhile, finding others who have experienced the phenomenon first hand can be a great help - like minded souls with whom one can share their experiences.
Several times, experiencers have asked me to help them save their marriage or other close relationships. While there is little I can do for their marriage (I'm not a marriage & family counselor), perhaps better understanding of the phenomenon can help the spouse come to terms with their loved-ones experiences. Often both the experiencer and the spouse need to come to terms with the shattered reality of close encounters - a double challenge...
Thus, the close encounter affects all of society, not just those who experience it directly. For each experiencer, there is usually a family and/or a circle of friends. All of them feel the secondary impact of the encounters. It is the hidden effect of encounters I call the impact of the impact.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Six Sigma and Feeding Starving Children
This morning I had a rather unique (at least to me) experience. I got to get the feel of what it's like to work on a manufacturing fooor, while at the same time I was able to donate a few hours to Feed My Starving Childrenm (FMSC). Both were enlightening experiences.
FMSC packages a large amount of a special high-nutrition mixture of food specifically designed to bring severely malnourished young children back to health. It's vegetarian and contains natural grains (though not organic), in a balanced and high-calorie mixture that provides the right base to bring these kids back to health. I'm not enough of an expert in food science, but from what I know it seem like the process is sound and it feeds a lot of starving children very inexpensively.
Working on a project like this is very heartwarming. When I first woke up this morning, I was wondering why I had gotten myself into this. But then, an hour into it, I realized that it was a truly rewarding experience.
We ended up partitioning up jobs with Gwyn being part of a packaging station and I working in the warehouse area, providing the grain and the raw materials to the stations. It was fascinating to see how the process sorted itself out, as each person on the team tended to find the area they were best at. I found that I tended to work as a float-picking up the slack when one of the team members got behind, and as a runner-taking materials where they were needed. And as I did all of this, I got to see how each process worked: building cardboard shipping boxes, filling grain bins, taking grain bins out to the packaging stations, etc...
The number of manufacturing processes helped me get a real feeling for what manufacturing engineering is like. I found myself thinking in terms of process optimization, six-sigma and lean theory (lean takes on new meaning when we're talking about poverty and starvation), etc... It's tough being an engineer when doing things like this... :-)
I found that there were a number of ways that we could improve, plus ways that in a real manufacturing line, we could measure and optimize. If this were in the companies I have worked for over the last 30 years (mostly medical electronics), then these processes would all have had to be documented, validated, etc. Thus a whole group of engineers would be working them out, applying lean and six-sigma principles, etc. All of these to make the process go smoother.
For us, things seemed to fall into place. We were only there about three hours, but we managed to get enough food packaged and stacked on the shipping pallet to feed about 95 kids for a year. It was about $5000 worth of raw material, plus about 30 people * 3 hours each to package it. It felt great and, I realized, being a manufacturing runner is a lot of work. My heart really goes out to people on the production floor of any organization even remotely resembling what we did today.
So, at last I got to learn something about how another part of Corporate America works - the production floor and the warehouse - very different from the design and development engineering work I have done most of my career. It gave me a somewhat new perspective, and helped me understand how the various industrial models, such as Six-Sigma came into being. It also fed a lot of hungry little mouths. All in all, a rewarding and revealing morning's work...
FMSC packages a large amount of a special high-nutrition mixture of food specifically designed to bring severely malnourished young children back to health. It's vegetarian and contains natural grains (though not organic), in a balanced and high-calorie mixture that provides the right base to bring these kids back to health. I'm not enough of an expert in food science, but from what I know it seem like the process is sound and it feeds a lot of starving children very inexpensively.
Working on a project like this is very heartwarming. When I first woke up this morning, I was wondering why I had gotten myself into this. But then, an hour into it, I realized that it was a truly rewarding experience.
We ended up partitioning up jobs with Gwyn being part of a packaging station and I working in the warehouse area, providing the grain and the raw materials to the stations. It was fascinating to see how the process sorted itself out, as each person on the team tended to find the area they were best at. I found that I tended to work as a float-picking up the slack when one of the team members got behind, and as a runner-taking materials where they were needed. And as I did all of this, I got to see how each process worked: building cardboard shipping boxes, filling grain bins, taking grain bins out to the packaging stations, etc...
The number of manufacturing processes helped me get a real feeling for what manufacturing engineering is like. I found myself thinking in terms of process optimization, six-sigma and lean theory (lean takes on new meaning when we're talking about poverty and starvation), etc... It's tough being an engineer when doing things like this... :-)
I found that there were a number of ways that we could improve, plus ways that in a real manufacturing line, we could measure and optimize. If this were in the companies I have worked for over the last 30 years (mostly medical electronics), then these processes would all have had to be documented, validated, etc. Thus a whole group of engineers would be working them out, applying lean and six-sigma principles, etc. All of these to make the process go smoother.
For us, things seemed to fall into place. We were only there about three hours, but we managed to get enough food packaged and stacked on the shipping pallet to feed about 95 kids for a year. It was about $5000 worth of raw material, plus about 30 people * 3 hours each to package it. It felt great and, I realized, being a manufacturing runner is a lot of work. My heart really goes out to people on the production floor of any organization even remotely resembling what we did today.
So, at last I got to learn something about how another part of Corporate America works - the production floor and the warehouse - very different from the design and development engineering work I have done most of my career. It gave me a somewhat new perspective, and helped me understand how the various industrial models, such as Six-Sigma came into being. It also fed a lot of hungry little mouths. All in all, a rewarding and revealing morning's work...
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
The fun never ends...
Well, the fun never ends...
After we got back from the Black Hills, I set to work on my next task, updating my website. Normally, this isn't a big deal; just open Frontpage and make the change. However, there was one little hitch. My old computer died and I am now using Windows 7 (64 bit) on a new laptop. What I found was that Frontpage 2003 doesn't work (at least not very well) on Win7. No problem, I'l just upgrade to the Office 2009/2010 version, right?
Wrong...
It appears that Frontpage is no longer supported. In short, when it comes to Windows 7, there ain't none... So for the time being, my website remains unmaintained as I research - and finally switch over to - a new web software package. Since this is most likely very different from Frontpage - different file structures, templates, etc., it is very likely that in a few weeks my websites will look very different.
Actually, this is a probably a blessing in disguise. I have needed to do some big-time maintenance on my site for some time. I need to bring my site up to Web 2.0 standards, Add some additional features, etc. So it's time to do some major re-architecing.
In the mean time, I've had a few health adventures - nothing I'm going to go into here, save to say that it takes a lot of focus away from what has already stretched my focus a bit thin. It's nothing major, but in between the regular job, a business, updating my novel, etc., having a minor health surprise makes was simply not in the budget.
Where this all goes, I certainly can't predict. All I can say is that the fun never ends...
After we got back from the Black Hills, I set to work on my next task, updating my website. Normally, this isn't a big deal; just open Frontpage and make the change. However, there was one little hitch. My old computer died and I am now using Windows 7 (64 bit) on a new laptop. What I found was that Frontpage 2003 doesn't work (at least not very well) on Win7. No problem, I'l just upgrade to the Office 2009/2010 version, right?
Wrong...
It appears that Frontpage is no longer supported. In short, when it comes to Windows 7, there ain't none... So for the time being, my website remains unmaintained as I research - and finally switch over to - a new web software package. Since this is most likely very different from Frontpage - different file structures, templates, etc., it is very likely that in a few weeks my websites will look very different.
Actually, this is a probably a blessing in disguise. I have needed to do some big-time maintenance on my site for some time. I need to bring my site up to Web 2.0 standards, Add some additional features, etc. So it's time to do some major re-architecing.
In the mean time, I've had a few health adventures - nothing I'm going to go into here, save to say that it takes a lot of focus away from what has already stretched my focus a bit thin. It's nothing major, but in between the regular job, a business, updating my novel, etc., having a minor health surprise makes was simply not in the budget.
Where this all goes, I certainly can't predict. All I can say is that the fun never ends...
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Another really wild week
It's been one helluva ride over the last week or two.
Most recently, I got away for a few days - spending some time out in the Black Hills, , getting away from the hustle and bustle of (mostly) the day job, plus rebuilding my computer, apps and data, etc.
To make a long story short, two weeks ago, my computer died, resulting in a whole lot of scrambling, rebuilding, etc. I still haven't gotten my website going. I talked a little bit about the 'festivities' of the last week or so in my last entry, so enough said... However, when I finally got back online, I found several rather annoyed e-mails from people, wondering why I hadn't written back to them.
A couple of the e-mails I received were rather pointed. So I wrote back apologizing for the delay, indicating that my computer had died. Believe me, people understand that. In our Internet Age, it's become one of those universal experiences - now it's just like taxes, car trouble, family emergencies, etc. - everybody experiences them and everybo0dy understands - once they know, that is...
Most of the messages in question were from experiencers - people who had contacted me earlier and with whom I had been dialoging when I went offline. I am continually amazed at the number of e-mails I get from people who have had anomaly experiences. As I read through them, if find a both a high-strangeness and an eerie sense of consistency among their messages. Among the most common things people describe are:
- Strange experiences they can't explain
- miussiung time
- sleep paralysis
- psychic experiences
- seeing/encountering anomalous beings
... and the list goes on...
Many describe the classic alien abduction experience - but many describe other types of encounters as well. As I describe in The Cosmic Bridge, there appears to be a core consistency - the classic Hopkins/Jacobs encounter, what I call the 'standard model'. But there also appear to be a lot of variations on a theme.
I'm just now starting to dig through messages from people who wrote or called while I was offline. It will be interesting to see whether what I find tomorrow will be consistent with info of the last few weeks.
In the process, I suspect that it will begin another really wild week...
Most recently, I got away for a few days - spending some time out in the Black Hills, , getting away from the hustle and bustle of (mostly) the day job, plus rebuilding my computer, apps and data, etc.
To make a long story short, two weeks ago, my computer died, resulting in a whole lot of scrambling, rebuilding, etc. I still haven't gotten my website going. I talked a little bit about the 'festivities' of the last week or so in my last entry, so enough said... However, when I finally got back online, I found several rather annoyed e-mails from people, wondering why I hadn't written back to them.
A couple of the e-mails I received were rather pointed. So I wrote back apologizing for the delay, indicating that my computer had died. Believe me, people understand that. In our Internet Age, it's become one of those universal experiences - now it's just like taxes, car trouble, family emergencies, etc. - everybody experiences them and everybo0dy understands - once they know, that is...
Most of the messages in question were from experiencers - people who had contacted me earlier and with whom I had been dialoging when I went offline. I am continually amazed at the number of e-mails I get from people who have had anomaly experiences. As I read through them, if find a both a high-strangeness and an eerie sense of consistency among their messages. Among the most common things people describe are:
- Strange experiences they can't explain
- miussiung time
- sleep paralysis
- psychic experiences
- seeing/encountering anomalous beings
... and the list goes on...
Many describe the classic alien abduction experience - but many describe other types of encounters as well. As I describe in The Cosmic Bridge, there appears to be a core consistency - the classic Hopkins/Jacobs encounter, what I call the 'standard model'. But there also appear to be a lot of variations on a theme.
I'm just now starting to dig through messages from people who wrote or called while I was offline. It will be interesting to see whether what I find tomorrow will be consistent with info of the last few weeks.
In the process, I suspect that it will begin another really wild week...
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