This particular interview was on my work with close encounter experiencers, and we got into some things that I had not thought about for a little while, principally some of the human-alien encounters, close encounters of the third kind in our everyday world, which we had investigated a few years ago. In cases like this, usually some time long after a particular close encounter, the experiencer subsequently encounters one or a couple of characters that - in a word - do not seem to be completely human.
In the case I talked about this evening, the experiencer involved in a close encounter a month or two earlier met a strange "Goth" couple while standing in the cashier line at a convenience store. To make a long story short, the couple knew a lot about the woman's experiences, and had uncanny insight into details of her life they could not have known. They seemed to be deeply attuned to the inner details of her life, her mind and her experiences.
As with many descriptions of men in black and other human-alien encounters, once the experiencer parted company with this couple, they abruptly and mysteriously vanished. When we interviewed her, she recalled how after the conversation ended, she took a few steps toward her car and suddenly realized she had forgotten to ask their names. She turned back to try to catch them before they left, but they were already gone - and there seemed to be no place where they could have gone that quickly. It was as if they had vanished into thin air.
Encounters like this bring an even-more-mysterious element to an already strange phenomenon. It adds a new layer of paradox and apparent illogic. As Carl Sagan stated on several occasions, "One thing we can be sure about aliens, they will be alien." Strange encounters such as those with 'human-aliens' graphically portray this. They present us with mystery, incomprehensibility and paradox. They confound our understanding of how we think the world works and make us look deeper into what we thought we knew.
Now, I will completely shift gears - Last night, I went to a fascinating talk by a spiritual teacher in the Twin Cities named James Ulness. James is a retired professor of psychology and theology, who has spent his life studying and teaching metaphysical insight. He is one of those people you could spend your entire life learning from, and this evening was no exception.
In this particular talk, he spoke about the theology of the mystery and grail legends and the difficulties of being a healer and peacemaker in these days of transition, tying the various topics together into a coherent lesson that knocked my socks off (actually, I was wearing sandals, but whatever...).
I wouldn't know where to begin to describe his talk, much less summarize the myriad of what he said in only a couple of hours. But like other events of the last few days, this too caused me to take a deep look at things I thought I knew, to question things I though I had understood.
Sometimes, if we're alert enough, we can get (see and accept) an invitation to pass through the wall blocking our path. Perhaps we thought we might have been the end of the journey, we had it all figured out and were finished now. Yet now this place turns out to be only a brief stopping point. There is a door in the wall, and that door leads to a whole new path, and that path leads us on far beyond our present horizon.
To me, a good show catches my interest, piques my curiosity and leads me to new paths. And like any good show, the events of the last few days have brought me information, curiosity, confusion and a new view of the path ahead. Whether it was a lecture, a radio interview, or unexpected events in the world around me, they have led me through a door I never noticed before. Yes, the last few days it's all been a good show.
