A moment of play

Some times it's important to step away and enjoy a few hours playing with the puppies and a night out with the better half. 

Life is too short to spend it all working, even though I love what I do. A change of pace is vital. Spend as much as we can having fun, playing in the Now

 

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A few shots of the family. 

Took this pic this evening while we were on Harriet Island about to see a play on the showboat. 

Gwyn in the garden on Harriet Island

 Some time earlier I got these pix of the pups. Some shots in a delightful candid moment. 

Stormy waiting for - not sure what. The ultimate photogenic Sheltie-poo

Libby on alert. Something moved in the front yard. The great hunter. 

Life is a lot of fun when these three ladies meet me at the door each evening as I come home from work.

'Now' on a summer day

It was a beautiful morning. As I awoke, songbirds chirped just outside the open window. A gentle breeze whispered through the screen as golden sunlight filtered through the curtains. It was the start of a beautiful summer day, yet on that day I felt oppressed. It felt as if I had gotten up on the wrong side of the bed. I was going to be traveling in the next few days. I was organizing a meeting, and realized I had double booked myself to be in two places at once - over a thousand miles from each other. As I stood up, stepped into the shower, dressed and got ready for the day, I felt the weight of things I needed to get done that day. Suddenly, I realized I was experiencing something universal. It's called challenge and it's part of life.

For so many people, including myself, many of my friends, clients, and probably much of humanity, life is in a perpetual transition. It is something I often feel and it's one of the reasons I got interested in stress management. And now, for me, it's a reminder to recall some of those subconscious triggers. At that moment, I needed to use my own inner programming to reduce the feeling of challenge, to get the stress monster back in its cage.

In this case, for me at this moment, the challenges were minor. I simply had a lot of things to get done (including this blog entry/article). Part of the busy pace of life over the last few months - it meant spending a lot of time working with new clients, meeting other professionals, traveling to conferences and writing. It meant Explore with Hypnosis (http://www.explorewithhypnosis.com) is growing and as a result, taking more time. This is the life I love and have wanted to move into for years. Yet now, as I began to find myself myself within it, I began to wonder - when I will be able to get all of the things done I need to do?

A couple of days ago, I donated some hypnotic session time to a Buddhist fundraising event. I got to know some of the people there a bit, deepening my curiosity about both Buddhism and mindfulness. And one of the things I admire most about their whole philosophy is the level of serenity it seems to bring. Having been involved in Meditation for a few years, I'm always curious to learn more. 

As I have travelled the path of TM, Mindfulness and Himalayan Tradition meditation, each has brought remarkable, rewarding experiences. Each has helped me center, explore the within and the beyond. Ultimately, each has shed new light on my age-old question - what is it all about? 

The road continues to the horizon and beyond, beckoning me to explore ever further. As I explore, and as I study more about mediation, I realize again and again that's not ABOUT anything. It simply is. It is being in the now, being here, being present. It is a big lesson, one that is taught to each of us again and again and one that is now, today, in my face.

When I think about what hypnotic trance really is, it is simply a selective focus along with a suspension of disbelief. That disbelief can be the rejection of untruth, but it can also be the discernment that protects us from untruth. The human condition is often dominated by fear of the future, and anger, regret and guilt from the past. Thus we can find ourselves blindly accepting fears and worries, focusing on them and letting them become the dominating factors of our world. They are become a type of de-facto trance. In the words of Steven Wolinski, these are the 'Trances People Live'. In fact, I often find that when I do hypnosis work with someone, rather than taking the person into trance, I am actually helping them to come OUT of trance. In effect, I am un-hypnotizing them. 

A couple of years ago, a client came to see me to help him with his problems around fear and anxiety. He had a lot on his plate, including difficulties at work, a difficult time in his marriage and a host of other issues. But as we began the pre-hypnotic interview, it became clear that he was fixed on the future. his issues were not with now, rather with how he was seeing the present day. 

He was seeing his present day through the lens of anger, regret and guild from the past and fear of the future. Like so many of us, his memories of past difficulties seemed endless and overwhelming. To him, it seemed like they would continue to intrude into his life forever. He was in a continuous hypnotic trance - spontaneous, unpleasant and seemingly without end.

At one point, as he worried aloud about his present day difficulties, I just said 'STOP.' My tone was abrupt and he looked at me with a startled, puzzled expression on his face. But he stopped. 

I asked him, 'look at the wall, what color is it?' - 'White,' he said.

'Wiggle your toes, what do they feel like?' I asked him.

He said nothing, but wiggled his toes (he was wearing sandals) and then his finger tips. He said nothing for another few seconds. Then his expression changed, as if he had experienced something brand new - and indeed he had. He had returned to the present moment.

We continued with this exercise for a time as I took him into hypnotic trance. When he was into hypnosis, I brought him back to this moment and we anchored it in his subconscious as he touched his finger to his thumb. It was a reminder to his inner mind that he could do this exercise at any moment. As we began deeper work in hypnotherapy, we intermittently re-activated this anchor, reminding him that regardless of what he was experiencing, whether in or out of hypnosis, he could bring himself back to the present. By simply touching his finger to his thumb, he could re-center himself in the here and now.

Now, back to the case of me vs my busy schedule. This is the momentary load I return to. Like the worried man in my studio, and probably like most of us in this day and age, I sometimes feel overwhelmed by the things on my plate. And like the worried man, I have to remember to stop, to return to the present moment. Touching my finger to my thumb, I can feel a moment of peace. As I wiggle my toes and feel the air on my face I can come out of trance and into the world of the Now.

Like the man in my studio, and probably like most of us, we need to remember to stop, to let in the summer morning, to include a little more "Now" in our day.

symbols and cryptology from close encounters

Several talks I attended this weekend have made reference to writing that experiencers have seen while within the alien realm (i.e. aboard a UFO, etc.). This has gotten me to thinking, and asking a lot of questions.

A few months ago, I posted on the MUFON Star Team facebook page, a copy of some script an experiener drew for me during a hypnotic regression.

Later, another researcher, Kathleen Marden, compared it with script that Budd Hopkins had collected from drawings made when he was conducting hypnotic regressions. It was very similar. The symbols were the same, etc.

This got me to thinking. We need to find a cryptologist, linguist, etc. We need to compare this with script in human history - heiroglyhics, cuneiform, etc. Does it match some kind of musical tones? Does it match some historical codes? Does it match anything we might already understand?

Would this symbology yield results from cryptographic analysis? 

Would linguistic analysis be able to shed light on what it is saying?

I have not yet found anything that conveys deep spiritual truths, metaphysical knowledge, etc., at least not in this class of script. In most cases, the script appears to be very work-a-day writing. One experiencer described it as being lettering on a machine. Another described some kind of a checklist or procedure. The list goes on but it appears to be basic in function - technical details and routine operation within the alien realm. 

Regardless if the function of writing within the alien ream, I believe the ability to read any writing from whatever realm experiencers go to during encounters of the fourth kind would be a tremendous breakthrough. It would bring us a quantum leap closer to understanding the phenomenon that we call alien abduction or the close encounter experience.

More notes on science and evidence

Some more observations about evidence, rejection of evidence and scientific paradigms.

The first talk I attended today was on UFO abduction evidence. The talk was by Dr Donald Donderie (not sure I have name spelled correct). He talked about the scientific attitude toward UFOs. Like several people at the conference, this was a theme. He asked why does science ignore anomalies? And he came up with some interesting answers.

One is the idea of competing theories. Some scientists consider themselves researchers trying to better understand the existing models - trying to solve mysteries, little gaps in the current understanding of conventional picture. Examples are astronomers working on star formation, rocket researchers refining space travel technology, etc. They work on expanding knowledge within the existing framework.

Others are rebels. These are the dark matter and dark energy theorists, high energy physics researchers, quantum physicists exploring teleportation and non-locality, some areas of consciousness studies, etc. Among these are the SETI community. They view themselves as pushing the envelope, developing a new paradigm, etc. According to this talk, they are developing new theories, stepping out of the box - into a bigger box. They are building a new theory.

When either team finds something that doesn't fit their paradigm, they have the same response. They either ignore it, reject it, or otherwise deny it. 

In addition, UFO studies have their own internal divisions - nuts and bolts, spirituality, advanced physics, disclosure, etc. How well does new-age, paranormal and psychic phenomena fit into the picture. To some conservative nuts & bolts researchers, this is all noise. Some view hypnosis in abduction research as being unscientific. Some view meditation and summoning in UFOs as the CE5 initiative is doing as being unscientific. And the beat goes on....  

As I said after the first talk yesterday, in the SETI/UFOlogy squabble, UFO researchers are not blameless. I move in both circles to some degree (much more in UFO research circles lately), and my comment was that SETI and UFO researchers basically use the same words. Only the pronouns are reversed. 

In the end, the issue is how well something fits into your own belief system. Is something you learn compatible with what you already "know" to be true? If not, your disbelief filters will kick in. You will find reasons to reject it. Maybe the person making the claim is not reputable. Maybe their methodology was flawed - the list of excuses is endless but the purpose is the same, to preserve the world view of you subscribe to.

Threats, Awakening and Disclosure

A short time ago, I attended a talk by Steven Greer, head of the Disclosure Project, CSETI and some other interesting stuff. While I have always treated both discosure and CSETI with a bit of discernment, I found his talk fascinating. He did a great job of tying together the topics of grassroots contact, disclosure, human-cosmic relations (exopolitics) and the CE5 initiative into a coherent train of thought. In doing so, he struck a cord with some of the points I describe in The Cosmic Bridge.

Shortly after that, I attended the evening lecture, presented by Dr. David Jacobs. Jacobs is the author of Secret Life, The Threat and The UFO Controversy in America. He advocates the position that the visitors (aliens, as he calls them), are in the process of taking over our world. In The Cosmic Bridge, I look at a few of his arguments and suggest that his numbers are a little high, to say the least. Still, he makes some very good, if disconcerting points.

While Greer claims that the ET community is enlightened, Jacobs claims that the process of alien abduction is malevolent. While Greer claims that there is a grass-roots awakening, Jacobs claims that there is a widening program of hybridization that will eventually encompass and take over our world. They are diametrically opposing claims and I truly hope that Greer is right, rather than Jacobs.

Jacobs relies on hypnotically recalled memories from abductees. He has a sizable database of regressions (about 1200, I believe), which is about approximately four times the size of my own case files. He claims that each abductee describes an identical process. He further claims that anything diverging from this is hypnotic confabulation. Anything recalled under non-hypnotic recall is confabulation. Anything that doesn't conform to the norm is suspect.

Hmmm, I guess that means that I am guilty of doing my hypnosis wrong, because I don't get anywhere near the consistency he does. I do get quite a few experiencers describing the process in similar terms to what he does. However, I also get quite a few variations from the theme as well. In the Cosmic Bridge, I talk about degrees of variation from what I call the "Standard Model" or Hopkins-Jacobs abduction narratives - which obviously I have now heard even more sharply defined.

In conversation with Dr. Jacobs, he asked me, how do I know that what I'm getting is accurate? I would ask him the exact same question (and I probably will when I can corner him again sometime this weekend). Hypnosis is not an exact process. The human mind is not a tape recorder. What you get is what is in the hypnotic client's subconscious.

Jacobs claims that abductees are abducted up to about 200 times. He also says that the number is greater than 5 times per year. He also claims that everyone in the family is an abductee if either of the parents are abductees. He claims that at the present time, up to about 5% of the population are abductees. 

So let's plug in some numbers. 5% of 8 billion people is 400 million people

If a person is abducted 5 times a year then we have 400 million people times 5 = 2 Billion abductions per year worldwide. This makes about 2 Billion / 365 = about 5.4 million abductions per 24 hour period. In The Cosmic Bridge, I talk about the air traffic control problem with muchmore conservative numbers. This is two orders of magnitude greater than what I had calculated earlier. It takes my idea of the "Air Traffic Control" problem and feeds it steriods.

In short, my "spidey sense" tells me that the Jacobs scenario is very much too high. While there may be a hybrid agenda, and I suspect there is, I don't see anything anywhere nearly that defined. And fortunately, I don't see anything anywhere that malevolent.

In The Cosmic Bridge, I talk about The Indigo Hypothesis - following the family lines of abductees through several generations. Contrary to the finding that the abduction phenomenon fans out in each generation, I find that the lineage of abductee families seems to pass from generation to generation along the maternal family line. My estimate is that the experiencer population is about 1% of the overall population - perhaps this is too conservative but I think it's a reasonable estimate.

The idea of a grass-roots conscious awakening is a a key element in Barbara Marx Hubbard's book Conscious Evolution. In it, she talks about spiritual awakening - a transition that reaches critical mass and takes on a life of its own. In my paper, The Indigo Hypothesis, I talk about how the close encounter phenomenon might just be a key part of that process (though not necessarily). The key is that the contact process is more a grass roots process.

In the present generation (as of about five years ago) of adolescent children of experiencer families, I find that the children - especially daughters - in the family is extremely empathic, psychic, etc. In short they are Indigo children, Millenium Children, New Children, etc. - they are bringing a psychic awakening to society. This seems to corrleate closely with Marx-Hubbard's ideas, bringing about a grass roots awakening across humanity.

If you look at the state of the world, our propensity for warfare, our advances in weaponry and the idea that we are not too far away from deep space (interstellar) travel, the idea that "They" might want to foster an awakening among humanity makes considerable sense.

It this true? Am I right? I don't know but we can better understand, verify and test this hypothesis. And in the end, given David Jacobs' scenario, I certainly hope The Indigo Hypothesis is closer to the truth.

What is science - Notes from MUFON conference July 20, 2013

Notes from the New Conference - What is Science?

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About half way through the Saturday talks at the MUFON 2013 conference.

At least so far, talks and discussions have focused on the relationship of science and anomalies. How does science really work, how much can we do hard science, and just exactly what does it mean to do science?

The first talk was by Ted Peters, MUFON consultant on religion, talking about the relationship between science, religion, UFOlogy and SETI. He talked about the relationship between UFO research community and the SETI community. The second talk was by Albert Harrison, on the relationship  between disclosure, science, and denial. It looked at why science, mainstream society and government all deny and avoid the UFO topic.

Peters, said that the UFO community and SETI community "should both be going to the same barbecue". 

Different paradigms over modern history: formation of life, evolution to higher forms, then to intelligence, eventually to scientific enlightenment. This is the pinnacle, the scientific paradigm: we are progressing from ignorance, through increasing science. Furthermore, science and thus, improved knowledge, will solve our problems and save humanity.

One philosophy is that humanity fell from a more enlightened state, into a sort of "dark ages." Scientific endeavor and increased knowledge will bring us back to an improved state of enlightenment - a rational awakening. Peters quoted Frank Drake and Jill Tartar in this regard, to the effect that the discovery of ETI (ET intelligent life) would bring us together and help us better accept our pace in the universe.

A more new-age variation of this idea is that that we are progressing through an awakening of some type - a similar view to scientific enlightenment but that rolls in parapsychology. This has been adopted by many UFO researchers and new age advocates. It is an idea I find intriguing, though as a researcher I need to keep an open mind. 

SETI - wants to form a "scientific" body of endeavor over many years to steadily search for alien signal - combing through large amounts of data.

UFOlogy - looks at individual cases, attempting to develop a bigger picture of how UFOs work.

We are both looking for the same thing, contact, but in different ways.

The issue is that the SETI community doesn't view the UFO community as being "Rational", thus it is not part of the scientific enlightenment. The UFO community view SETI as being elitist, and possibly even part of the coverup. There is a mutual suspicion between the two groups, yet they are basically seeking the same thing. In the words of Peters, they should both be at the same barbecue.

Albert Harrison (author of After Contact) talked more about the human reaction to ET contact. What would our reaction be. Would we panic, would it adversely - or positively - affect our belief systems. His conclusion was that a SETI discovery or other discovery of ET life would have little impact. Arrival of ETI would have an impact but probably not as negative as we think. It might, indeed, lead to new knowledge.

This is, to some degree, an extension of the idea that an extension of human growth and enlightenment is ET contact, and the bestowing upon humanity of a membership in the cosmic club... This admission to the "Cosmic Kindergarten" as Stanton Friedman phrased it, would be the next logical step in our evolution.

Somewhere in there, between talks, I got into a discussion of "what is science?" I have always thought in terms of development of UFOlogy according to the scientific paradigm - building a hypothesis that is testable, then making some sort of observations to verify or refute that hypothesis. I have used as a guide two books, The Art of Scientific Investigation, by William Beveridge, and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn.

One person - the speaker just after that, Dr. Ron Westrum, had an observation that there are really two scientific approaches - left brained, experimenting, etc. and right brained, theoreticians, etc. There are many styles of doing science, from purely theoretical (Einstein and other theoretical physicists) to experimental researchers (Tesla, etc. - often these are engineers or inventors as much as pure scientists). The typical scientist today, we think of as doing experiments or observations to test a hypothesis/theory. Yet the gist of his comments was that there are a wide variety of ways of study.

Shortly after that, Dr. Westrum did his own talk, focused on scientists' treatment of anomalies - or what he called "hidden events". In this case, he looked at the controversy in the mid to late 1700s about meteorites - the heretical idea that rocks could fall from the sky, and at the emergence of child abuse as a recognized phenomenon and problem during the 1950s and 1960s. He then looked at the scientific community's statements/actions regarding UFOs and found nearly the same level of resistance. 

He made a comment during the talk that there was really not one "scientific method" similar to what he stated in our discussion earlier.

So - what is science? 

And will the UFO phenomenon ever be accepted without ridicule by the scientific community? To me the jury is out. The best we can do at the moment is to carry on. We can only do our best, collecting data, doing research and eventually amassing enough knowledge to shift the paradigm. 

The CE4 Corner article preview for July/Aug '13 -- A Stadium full of mystery

Article draft for my upcoming newsletter, News from the Bridge. 

I invite you to sign up for my newsletter at my website, http://www.explore-with-hypnosis.com/MailingListForm.html. Meanwhile, please read on and let me know what you think.

 

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The CE4 Corner

July/August, 2013, A Stadium full of mystery

©2013 by Craig R. Lang, MS CHt

www.explorewithhypnosismn.com

This afternoon (on Sunday 6/30/2013, as I write this), while in the stands at a Twins game at Target field, I thought a bit about the number of people there. At any given game, there are probably on the order of about 30 thousand people in the stadium. Later, as we were waiting to get out of the parking ramp, the long line of cars again caused me to again consider some of those numbers. With a Twin Cities metro area of three million people this is about one percent of the metro population.

The number one percent rings a very loud bell to anyone who follows the close encounter phenomenon very closely. This is about the percentage of the population that seems to be affected by the close encounter phenomenon. Thus, the number of people in Target field on a typical Twins game is about the same as the number of experiencers in the Twin Cities metro area.

The immediate question to ask - Is the one percent figure accurate? This number is loosely based on the answers to several polls, including the Roper Poll of unusual experiences [http://www.viewzone.com/abduct.html] . Estimates by different researchers range from 1/10^th of a percent to as high as 10 percent. Many researchers suggest that it is about two percent, yet my own gut feel is that this number is a bit high. To me, the one percent figure rings true.

At least one poll done since the Roper polls seem to corroborate Roper's results [http://crab.rutgers.edu/~goertzel/UFO.htm], even though the numbers vary to some degree depending upon how one asks the questions. Yet the estimates remain about the same, roughly one to two percent of the population meet the criteria of being close encounter experiencers.

The numbers are staggering to think about. The population of abductees in the Twin Cities area would nearly fill a stadium the size of Target Field. Or put another way, imagine the entire attendance of the afternoon's baseball game being experiencers.

I recently finished reading the book, Children of the Grays, by Bret Oldham. In the book, Oldham describes in great detail what it is like to be an abductee. He describes the emotional ordeals and the physical challenges abductees go through. Most of all, he describes the isolation from his peers and family due to his burden of knowledge - the awareness of contact with beings from elsewhere.

His accounts offer us something else - they allow us to estimate how often he might have been abducted. From his descriptions, it appears it occurred something like once per week during some periods of his life. At other times, his interaction tapers off to zero, but if his experiences are typical, it would seem (a very arm-wavy estimate) to average out to 10 to 20 times per year during the reproductive years, lets say ages 13 to 45. this is about one third to one half of a person's life. So if a person is abducted about 20 times per year over half their life, we can average it out to 10 per year overall.

30 thousand people times 10 events per year yields 300 thousand events per year in the Twin Cities metro area, or about one thousand events per 24 hour period. One thousand abductions - that's one whopping huge amount of alien abduction activity. My own bet is that Bret Oldham's experiences were/are probably more frequent than the norm. From my own work with experiencers, it would appear that the average rate is more like once per year (1/10th the number described above), clustered in intense bursts of activity at "times of interest" in the experiencer's life. So if we divide the numbers above by 10, we get about 100 abductions per 24 hour period, still a lot of alien activity.  While these numbers involve a lot of guesswork, the bottom line is inescapable. The Grays are really busy little aliens.

In a number of cases, he describes seeing humans - some times a lot of them - in the alien realm. This is quite similar to what a number of abductees have told me. On a number of occasions, experiencers have described being taken to a learning hall, or to a large assembly area, in which a large number of people were present. It often seems that the majority of them are in a comatose level of trance, or otherwise oblivious to what is going on. They seem like some large group population experiment or manipulation.

Oldham also describes seeing human(oid) beings in the alien realm, apparently working with the visitors. Are these beings human or some humanoid life form? If they are indeed human, are they from Earth? Are they some of us, humans drafted by the aliens to help in the process of - well, whatever they are doing? Are these part of the abductee population? Do they figure into the one percent? More mysteries...

If there are one hundred to one thousand people being abducted per night, where are all these people being taken? Do they all meet each other, or does the abduction phenomenon focus on each person individually, in isolation? Many abductees describe seeing other abductees in the alien realm. Thus, at least to some extent, different peoples' encounters seem to occur in a common location.

Researchers often focus on the question of whether the phenomenon really is physical. Does it occupy physical space, occur during physical time and involve actual material beings that carry humans away into the night? Or is there another explanation?

Graham Hancock, John Mack, Jacques Vallee and many others have suggested that at least in part, there is a non-physical element to the UFO/close encounter phenomenon. Perhaps they exist primarily in a psychic (non-physical) reality, as Carl Jung suggested [Jung, Flying Saucers], manifesting in our reality only when needed.

But as a result of a number of investigations [see NW WI Experiencer case], we can conclude that at least some close encounters are real and leave physical traces. In addition, we know that to the experiencer, close encounters are very real, indeed. I think we can conclude that at some point, the phenomenon must enter the physical world. Perhaps as many as 100 to 1000 times per night, strange beings enter our physical reality and interact with humans.

The number of people involved could indeed fill Target field, and with each experiencer, each encounter brings us a myriad of questions. And in the end, we are left with an endless puzzle. It is the equivalent of a thirty-thousand person stadium full of mystery.