A few more guns? How do we cope with superior alien technology?

In Richard Dolan's books and lectures [particularly his book, After Disclosure], I have heard him advance the idea of a separate civilization forming - one behind the curtain of secrecy. I find this idea fascinating, even if I tend to remain a bit discerning about any specific source or leak from behind the curtain of secrecy. Yet If any of these anonymous sources are to be believed, the implications are truly profound. They imply that we have far more advanced technology at humanity's disposal than most of us have even imagined.

While secrecy itself makes me angry, the prospect that we might actually have some of the elements of technology similar to that of the visitors actually brings me a form of optimism. It means we have an effort to achieve military and technological parity with the uninvited guests in our skies. Perhaps we may even be on the road to asserting human authority over Earth by developing capabilities equivalent to the visitors.

This road is a risky one to travel. If we are indeed embarking on such a road, then does it mean we're considering tweaking the nose of the big boys? If so, we need to be prepared for what the big boys do in response. It raises some intriguing possibilities - and a whole lot of concerns for the rest of we humans...

During high school and college history classes, I studied quite a bit the history of many civilizations on Earth who came in contact with western society. The Native Americans and the Chinese, to name a few, found themselves at a military disadvantage when facing a technological superior western military. The result - the European conquest of North America, the fall of the Aztec and Inca empires, and the disintegration of the Chinese empire.

Each indigenous civilization found themselves at a disadvantage. Yet a great debate among historians, and very likely within the civilizations themselves, was, what was that disadvantage? Was it purely military, or was it a weakness in the society itself?

In China, in the late 1800's and early 1900's, the debate raged. Some within the Chinese imperial government argued that by strengthening the army and navy, they could defeat the western imperialists. What was needed was a purely military solution - maybe some more advanced tactics, technology, etc. Perhaps all they needed were a few more guns.

Others, on the other hand, argued that at its core, they needed to fundamentally restructure society, itself. Perhaps weaknesses in the way the society was built made them vulnerable to the outside. If so, then perhaps it was a weakness that no amount of augmented military would overcome. Perhaps ineffective leadership and a collapsing infrastructure made military victory impossible. Far more than a few more guns, perhaps the entire society needed to be rebuilt.

The result was the rise of Sunyat Sen, formation of  Kuomintang, and the attempts to form a western government. At the same time, another western philosophy took hold, that of Marxism, Mao and the communist movement. Far from a few more guns, the ultimate result was indeed, a fundamental restructuring of society, for better or for worse. Now, once again, China is rising as a global power, eclipsing the USA in economic and military strength and playing our own game of geopolitical ambition.

In the Americas, military conquest also resulted in a near-total remake of many of the indigenous societies. In this case, destruction was nearly total and the remake was vast. Today, we see an indigenous movement rising, with a very different focus from the life originally envisioned.

Militarily, in the case of the Native Americans, unless they had united early in the history of European conquest, they could never have repelled the invasion. The fundamental political and social structure of tribal North America would never have permitted this unity. Conquest by a unified technological enemy was the result and a few more guns would hardly have helped. The same could be said for nearly any other indigenous society that came to grief at the hands of the west.

So, what does this imply for humanity's relationship with the visitors? Is our relationship to the visitors analogous to that of the indigenous societies worldwide in the face of western colonization? Is human sovereignty over Earth in peril? According to Marshall Vian Summers, this is exactly the case. Similarly, Dr. David Jacobs builds the case that the alien abduction phenomenon is dedicated to somehow replacing or assimilating humanity - a kind of stealth conquest.

On a more immediate level, any interaction between the military and the visitors has shown that in the event of hostilities, humans wouldn't stand a chance. The visitors have far superior technology to anything humanity has. The Air Force "dogfights" of the 1950s with UFOs, and similar accounts from the Soviet Union, show that UFOs can far outfly anything humanity can put in the sky. UFO incursions over military bases have demonstrated that the visitors can pretty much do as they please, with little challenge from us.

We are lucky that the visitors are not overtly hostile. If they do bear us ill intent, it must be in a much more subtle way. Still, it is the job of any nation's military to assert that nation's sovereignty over its territory. Similarly, at a global level, we can imagine aggregate human military(ies) tasked with doing the same thing - maintaining human sovereignty over Earth. In the face of superior visitor technology, this would seem a hopeless task. Thus I can imagine one approach would probably be to try and achieve some degree of technological parity with the visitors.

In one view, perhaps we can develop "a few more guns" to help us face the visitors.
An approach to retaining sovereignty over Earth might be to match - or even exceed - the military ability of the visitors. Thus, we can imagine an urgent effort to develop the technology needed to police our own planet. If we are to somehow face down our visitors from the stars we will need a tremendous leap forward. In a way, we can think of this as an extreme case of "a few more guns."

Yet humanity is hardly united. We are largely a feudal world, broken up into countless nation states with different (often opposing) agendas. We humans pledge ourselves to individual nations, rather than to the world of humanity. Thus, any national effort to develop advanced technology would be seen by potential opponents as threatening. Given the political state of the world in the 20th and 21st centuries, we can probably understand the need for secrecy.

In addition, if as Marshall Summers and David Jacobs claim, we are already deeply infiltrated, it would be even more necessary to maintain secrecy. The last ones we would want to know about our effort would be our potential opponents, the visitors.

Thus, behind the curtain, we can imagine a crash development effort going on, trying to develop (very) advanced flight, star travel, telepathic communication, inter-dimensional shift capabilities, non-local technologies, and the list goes on. If what many disclosure advocates claim is true, we may already be well on the way to achieving much of this capability. Yet it would be hidden behind a deep curtain of secrecy - a civilization behind the curtain.

In a scenario of world disunity, are we any different from the diverse and non-unified tribes of North America facing the European onslaught? Furthermore, our focus is largely technological, rather than spiritual. Our society is focused in a 3D, materialistic paradigm. While we are in this mindset, will we ever be able to understand what makes the visitors tick?

Will we ever be able to do what they do unless we begin to think the way they think?Would our society as it is structured now, ever be able to cope with full contact with the visitors? Or do we risk ending up the same way as indigenous cultures at the hands of European imperialists? Like the indigenous cultures, as time progresses, perhaps we need to fully restructure society. Perhaps we need to fully change the way we think, to fully reorganize the way our world is built.

I just finished reading the book "The Akashic Age" by Irwin Laszlo, which talks about this very phenomenon. It looks at the Occupy movement, the various grassroots movements within 21st Century society, etc. It looks at life as we move from 2012 into the world of 2030 and builds the case that we are undergoing that very change.

In The Cosmic Bridge, we also examine the idea of spiritual emergence. I build on the ideas of Barbara Marx Hubbard, that we are in the process of a breakthrough in human consciousness. In my article, The Indigo Hypothesis, I propose that as part of the close encounter phenomenon, the family lines of experiencers are somehow injected with characteristics conducive to further emergence.

Perhaps rather than coming as invaders, a visitor agenda might be to prevent the very thing we most worry about, the disintegration of the lower-technology civilization on contact with the higher technology one. Perhaps the visitors recognize the change we need to make. If they are indeed a more benevolent society, perhaps they - or some faction within their society - wish to bring the necessary changes within our world before full contact occurs.

Yet I suspect that in the human world, hidden behind a veil of secrecy, frenzied technological work goes on. And in a way, perhaps we need both spiritual development and technological development. Yet ultimately we can wonder, are the two compatible? Or are they based upon mutually exclusive philosophies?

Like the indigenous societies of the 18th and 19th centuries facing the Western juggernaut, perhaps we need to fully remake ourselves. Or instead, like some of the more conservative advocates in those societies maintained, perhaps we need a only to boost our military strength? Maybe all we need are "a few more guns."

CE4 Corner Article Draft - January/February, 2014 - Asking the right questions

Draft of new article for my column, The CE4 Corner, on The Cosmic Bridge

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A few weeks ago, at Explore with Hypnosis, I did a past life regression with a client, who was in some ways, far more advanced than I may ever be. In the process of our work, we explored some of the depths of spirituality, things that I had touched on in the past, but had never gone all that deeply into. In the process, I got into a dialog with a spiritual side of her that definitely taught me a thing or two.

In effect she was channeling what she said was a higher spiritual being [my paraphrase, CL]. I always treat channeled information and any information behind it with a high degree of discernment. Still, the questions she raised were interesting ones. The result was for me, a fire bath of universal spirituality (please don't ask me to define that), as well as a lot of specific messages to the present-day anomaly research community.

One of these messages was that in the UFO research world, we are not asking the right questions. I asked her what she meant and she told me that our MUFON work is in pursuit of knowledge, the essence of the discipline of science, itself. But, she said, knowledge for its own sake is useless. She told me that instead, we should be seeking with the heart. Spirit is the essence and the greatest need our world has, and that our (specifically my) focus needed to be more on that.

In the weeks since that dialog, I have pondered this question. Is she right? Are we pursuing the wrong goals? Seeking the wrong answers? Are we asking the wrong questions?

One point often stressed in the spiritual/metaphysical community is that humanity has advanced in science and technology far beyond our spiritual and ethical boundaries. The result has been global war, runaway population, environmental peril, etc. i don't think I need to say much more on that.

Several experiencers who have subsequently begun to deeply study the UFO question have conveyed a similar message. Somehow, they are told (not sure by whom) that we are seeking the wrong goal. Rather than trying to figure out whether the aliens are from a nearby star system, inter-dimensional, etc., we should be focusing on our relationship with the cosmos. We should be trying to advance our own level of consciousness, rather than trying to figure out how the alien warp drive works.

So, in exploring the interactions with the phenomenon, I again need to ask, are we seeking the right answers? What do UFO studies seek to accomplish? The stated goal of MUFON is "the scientific understanding of the UFO phenomenon for the benefit of humanity." For many years, we have focused on the first half of the sentence, the scientific understanding. But what do we mean by "for the benefit of humanity"? And how can we bring the fruits of our research into the service of our world?

In UFO studies, there have generally been two camps. One is a purely nuts and bolts focus, studying the physics of the unexplained, seeking to understand UFO flight characteristics, ground traces, medical effects, field effects, and so forth. They stress solid, evidential, rigorous science. The other is much more metaphysical, seeking a deeply spiritual understanding and relationship with the phenomenon.

I began almost purely as the former. I was an engineer, trained in electronics and electrical engineering. As an UFO investigator, then abduction researcher, and then as a hypnotherapist, my path has led in a far different direction - much more toward the metaphysical, much more toward the idea of the phenomenon as a relationship. And indeed, that's one way to understand UFO interactions - as a relationship between the observer/experiencer and the phenomenon.

So where does that lead us? What do we do with that understanding? Can we understand and develop a relationship between humans and visitors? In The Cosmic Bridge (www.thecosmicbridge.com), we examine the close encounter scenario and look at ways to understand it. One aspect of this question is what I call the Indigo Hypothesis. The Indigo Hypothesis proposes that part of the Abduction phenomenon is focused on breeding some type of genomic changes, which the visitors are then infusing back into our own genetic makeup. Why? Perhaps it is to help foster an awakening of some form - resulting in a new generation of children, many of whom I have observed in the family lines of experiencers.

At least in part, perhaps the phenomenon is giving us a power assist in our own growth. For better or for worse, I suspect that at least one intent behind the abduction phenomenon is some sort of "human improvement project." Perhaps they are somehow trying to alter humanity to be better cosmic citizens. (It remains to be seen whether this would be better from our perspective, but from a cosmic perspective, it probably makes sense.)

One of my goals, especially when working with experiencers, is to bring healing to the relationship between humans and visitors. While healing needs to be defined in each case, and in some cases none is needed, in many cases there is a well-defined issue to be resolved - most often fear. Thus, one of my biggest endeavors in the last few years has been to find better ways to help people overcome the fear response to the phenomenon and level the playing field for we humans.

How can we best help experiencers come to terms with the phenomenon, asserting their own rights as sentient beings in a free-will universe? Can we begin to forge a "Cosmic Bridge" between humanity and cosmos, bridging gap between the two worlds in which experiencers find themselves? Can we also learn to do what the visitors can do, build craft that do what they do, etc.?

Personally, I don't see any of these goals as being mutually exclusive. Even though I have strong metaphysical interests, I'm as much of a nuts-and-bolts'er now as I ever was. I would dearly love to understand how the alien warp drive works. Yet we need to pursue many other goals besides intellectual/technical understanding.

My guess is that this is what the spiritual side of my client was advocating during our dialog. More than simply a scientific understanding of the phenomenon, we need to put that understanding to work for the betterment of humanity. We need to grow our own collective consciousness such that we can become part of the cosmic community. And to do that, we need to be sure we ask the right questions.

Graduation into a changing world

The end of December is the traditional time for taking stock of the previous year and looking ahead to the new. This year, my review list contains a whole lot of things to think about. The biggest of these is how life seems to be changing so fast for so many people, including myself. So many seem lost, yet so many also seem to be starting on new ventures, new changes, new growth.

At the Intuitive Forum,* the monthly gathering at which Katherine Harwig conducted channeling** of entities she referred to as The Light Collective (LC), this point came up repeatedly. I have commented on this in earlier blog posts as the theme seems to be deepening, change accelerating. So in this post, I am examining this at a more detailed level.

Several of the LC comments at the last forum were in response to questions about the results and the process which we referred to as 2012. The 2012 event, now nearly a year in the past, seemed for many to be a non-occurrence - at least on the surface. As far as I can tell, no global disasters occurred. I still had to pay my Visa bill, and lots of other bills as well. Yet beneath the veneer of non-occurrences, there was the sense that something fundamental had changed - but what?

The LC readings often referred to the 12/21/12 moment as a graduation. It was a point where many people (light workers) switched from preparation to implementation. While the fundamentals of life didn't seem to change much at first, somehow the course of events in peoples' lives seemed to alter in a powerful way. A lot of my hypnotherapy clients talk about how in the last year, they reached tremendous crossing points in their lives. More than one has referred to a "tipping point" or a "come to Jesus moment" - all vivid descriptions of that key defining instant when everything in life changes.

In a previous post, I described how several of my friends' marriages were falling apart. Several other friends of mine got engaged - roughly during that same time interval. A couple of other people - close friends of mine - have described how there seemed to be sudden, new life in their marriages, relationships, etc. Life shifts dramatically for some, while for others it remains the same, but maybe in a powerful new way.

At the healers' cooperative where I now have my office, we have had several new practitioners join us. Each of them has also come as the result of a sudden change in their lives, their business, etc. And in nearly every case, that change has turned out to be positive - though frequently masked by challenge.

So where is this change leading us? That was the fundamental question I asked about 2012 in the first place. The question is still there, the answers are as ambiguous as always, but the process - whatever it is - continues to accelerate. So many people I see around me appear to be waking up. The spiritual, mental and psychic dynamics I see in those around me seem to be deepening, growing. The work is proceeding - even if I don't even begin to understand it.

So perhaps 2012 never ended. Perhaps as the year after 2012 winds to a close, we can more clearly understand that the moment some thought would be the end of the world was really a beginning. It was a shift of awareness for some - but for so many, it was nothing more than graduation into a changing world.

School is over. Work has begun.

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* Unfortunately, Kathryn has had some very serious illness in her family. Thus she is not at the present time continuing her channeling of the LC. It is not clear what the future of the Intuitive Forum is. It is my fervent hope that Valerie will continue to run the forum, perhaps with other metaphysical help and sources.

** Some notes on channeling:
I have always been skeptical of channeled material, yet at the same time, I have always found such material intriguing. Anyone receiving channeled material needs to use their own discernment. Where does the material come from? Does it square with your own intuition, your own rational judgement?

The process of channeling is not at all understood. Is it actually allowing some non-corporeal beings to speak through a human channel, or is it more of a psychological (or parapsychological) phenomenon involving the channel's sub/super-conscious mind. To a certain extent, the answer to this question is unprovable. Each of us simply needs to use our own discernment and decide on the merits of the material.

Having said all of this, the ideas Catherine has brought out ideas that are powerful, intriguing, meaningful and as far as I can tell, very accurate.

Conspirators, Visitors and Vapors - a look at "chemtrails" and UFOencounters

Ever since the Paradigm Symposium in Saint Paul over a month ago, I've been thinking about this - what is real and what is not. In recent weeks, several things have provided some more bumps, twists and turns in that road.

During the symposium, I got into quite a public argument with PD Meyers, the skeptic who spoke there. One question I asked him when he offered his opinion on alien abduction (actually, I prefer the term close encounters) was "How many experiencers have you talked with?" His response was that he was familiar with David Jacobs work and that Jacobs had worked with thousands. My response was "Yes, but how many have YOU worked with?" His answer was "Two."

Meyers had apparently formed an opinion on a phenomenon based upon what I take to be a very cursory examination of the evidence. While I believe we don't know what the reality is behind close encounters, I do believe they are very real. Yet he largely appears to dismiss them as sleep paralysis, false memories impalnted by "evil hypnotists" and other such explain-away devices. To me, this whitewashes the whole phenomenon - there is something going on and we dare not overlook it.

Now let's look at another claimed phenomenon. That is "chemtrails." Are these real or are they simply an artifact of runaway belief, misidentification of an ordinary phenomenon and toxic memes. To me, the latter is most likely the case. Yet every argument I would make here is almost identical to the argument that PD meyers, Carl Sagan, Kevin Randle and other skeptics of alien abduction would make about close encounters. The structure and logic of the arguments are the same - you simply plug in different nouns. For one phenomenon I am an advocate (at least that it is unknown or non-understood) while for another I am quite a skeptic.

I have had a number of on-line go-rounds with chemtrail believers. I have challenged them at every turn to provide actual evidence showing a causal link of aircraft contrails to toxic chemical fallout - whatever that may be. So far, I have been pointed to a couple of YouTube videos on chemtrails, both advocacy films heavily laden with claims, and light on proof. 

In addition, I have followed the whole "chemtrails" idea from its inception, some time in the mid 1990s. it arose at about the same time as Richard Brodie's book "Virus of the Mind." This book discusses the idea of memes, ideas and beliefs that propogate through a population like viruses. Brody develops the the idea that they can be treated in a nearly identical way to biological viruses. We can treat the propogation of toxic memes in a way nearly identical to any viral epidemic.

Early on, I heard the statement that the toxic-contrail meme - that persistent contrauils were the result of deliberate chemical spraying by a conspiratorial agency - can be thought of as an unintentional test of Brodie's ideas. At first the meme began as a small scale conspiracy theory, then took on a life of its own and spread rapidly over the internet. [For a site tracking history of the chemtrail meme, see http://contrailscience.com/a-brief-history-of-chemtrails/.] The idea is intriguing. It brings up the idea that the fabric of society forms a defacto laboratory for an experiment testing the "toxic meme" model.

What made me question the whole "chemtrail" meme even further was when I was talking with someone during the break at a Minnesota MUFON meeting, back in the spring of 1999. One person at this particular meeting (his actual residence was in Washington state, I think), got up and told the story of how his whole family had been sickened by toxic spraying from the heavily chemtrail-laden skies over his part of the country. 

At that time, Minnesota MUFON was meeting at the Roseville community center, and on this nice day, we had stepped out into the parking lot. Suddenly, as I was talking with him, he looked up and said, "there's one spraying now." I looked up to see what looked like a commercial jet flying high overhead, leaving a short contrail behind. To me, it was indistinguishable from any other contrail. But to him, it was just one more example of how the "New World Order" is trying to - well, to do whatever they're doing - by spraying "something" in the atmosphere overhead.

I had just finished hypnotherapy certification training about six months prior, and had studied Brodie's work as part of my studies. This struck me as a powerful example of belief-driven illness - well, maybe...

In addition, I have been interested in meteorology most of my life, and have studied it as a hobby for many years. One thing I have noted is that how at the leading edge of warm fronts - about a day ahead of a weather change - a steadily thickening layer of cirrus clouds appears. During this time, contrails will be very prevalent as aircraft fly through the supercritical air of the high troposphere. It's part of the physics of the atmosphere and it's occurred ever since jet aircraft have been in our skies. Still, in our times, aircraft are much more prevalent and fly consitently at ciurrus-forming altitudes. Thus, we see more contrails. Many of the "absoute proof" pictures I've seen in recent months look to me like exactly this - contrails forming within the supercritical air high above a weather front. 

I've watched as over the space of a half-day, cirrus clouds have formed, large volumes of persistent contrails have crossed the skies, cirrus clouds have thickened into cirro-stratus clouds, and eventually into the cloud banks of an approaching warm front. Where some would see toxic spraying, I see a weather change, the physics of condensation in supercritical air. Yet conversely, where I look at alien abduction cases and see an extraordinary phenomenon intruding in peoples' lives, others see merely awareness during sleep paralysis. The analogy between controversies is extensive and detailed. The parallels are thought-provoking.

To be fair, I certainly cannot say that there is NO toxic spraying, NO artificial geo-engineering by spraying something in the air overhead, NO New World Order, etc. It is impossible to prove a negative. What if any just one of these ideas turns out to be true true? The implications are astounding. Yet the whole chemtrail question periodically forces me to step back and look once again at the UFO question. On the chemtrail phenomeon, am I actually being one of those people that I most complain about in the UFO controversy? How can I be an advocate of one phenomenon (UFOs and close encounters), while being a skeptic on the other? (Note: I try to remain very conservative on what I actually believe about the UFO and close encounter phenomenon - merely advocating that it presents us with significant unexplained mysteries. For the most part I try to avoid explanatory beliefs.)

To me, the whole dynamic on controversial phenomena is interesting indeed - belief, skepticism, investigation, eveidence, advocacy and proof. And in both cases above, the different perspectives force me to be both more open minded and more discerning. It helps me understand each side a little better. It also reminds me of how rigorously researchers of any phenomenon need to conduct investigations, and how standards of proof need to apply across the board - distinguishing between conspirators, visitors and vapors?

Challenges and Changes, Marriages and Mercury in Retrograde

This week was rough, by any standards, not so much for me as for a whole lot of people out there I have heard from. At least three friends of mine are considering ending their marriages. Several other people I know from the healer and hypnosis communities also recently bent my ear, telling me they were at that same point in their lives. Two other friends of mine just finalized their divorces in the last week or so.  It feels like all around me, long stable marriages are crumbling to dust. I can only wonder - what's going on?

Meanwhile, key individuals in a couple of other areas of life have hit the rocks as a result of emergencies in life. It especially begins to look like one activity may be on the verge of ending - the Intuitive Forum is run by Valerie Lis and Katherine Harwig, with Katherine being a key element as she channels the light collective. Unfortunately, she is facing some powerful challenges with illness in her family and thus has had to back off. So we really don't know where the forum is going. Will it be around after December? I don't know. 

At the forum this evening, several people in the audience asked questions about personal issues related to present-day stresses. In addition, I asked about the number of failing (or recently failed) marriages I see all around me. The answers were revealing, and seemed to reasonate with what I have been feeling. (Note: use your own discernment on the actuall process of channeling, etc. I am giving it the benefit of the doubt here, but I can certainlyunderstand anyone being skeptical of the process. All I can say is that the answers from the LC do seem to be uncannily accurate.)

Comments from the LC were roughly that we just went through a "graduation" called 2012. One can think of what was prior to that as being training and that following graduation, the journey really begins. And with the start of a journey is the start of instability, challenge and change. For many, old baggage is being laid by the wayside. As the new journey starts, the old one is left behind. And often, that includes old relationships.

In many other ways, life has been challenging, too. Two other friends of mine who were about to go great guns into the healing world, suddenly announced that instead, they were going to take day jobs. And in that same vein, I have felt very insecure about my own business. While my client load has steadily grown, so have the challenges associated with the business. Clients have come to me with increasingly difficult challenges. 

I have also found that technology aspects of my business - namely getting my self-hypnosis storefront upgraded - have met with some surprisingly interesting problems. Just today, I bought the domain name "www.thehypnosisstoreonline.com". When I tried to get that working with my existing storefront, I ran into a lot of problems. I also wrote on Facebook about the issues I had had trying to get a version control system going for my own software development, as well as for documents, etc. I keep wondering - why is this so complicated? Does it really need to be that way?

Several friends of mine - well versed in astrology - have told me that that's a symptom of Mercury in retrograde. I have to laugh as I think - yeah right. I think we can explain everything we're seeing as being due to Mercury in retrograde. But sometimes it seems to be stuck there.

Mercury is symbolic of communications and related technology. Marriages, business relationships, internet technology, all of these fall into this field. So maybe there is something to it. While I have always been somewhat skeptical of the scientific background behind astrology, the synchronicity is powerful. And as I - and just about everyone I know - go through challenges and life changes, the correspondence seems uncanny. 

According to the LC channelings this evening, the pace of change is accelerating. Like a balloon blowing up, it is approaching a critical (popping) point - maybe it's been there for a while now. Whatever the case, the winds of change are showing up in a lot of peoples' lives. Especially in peoples' marriages, there has been increasingly more turmoil, challenges and changes.

Moments of discernment

This is a draft of my November/December 2013 article for The CE4 Corner

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In nearly 20 years as a UFO investigator and over 15 years as a hypnotherapist, I've seen and heard a fair amount of interesting stuff. Some of it makes a lot of sense, while some of it is (at least to me) pure nonsense. I have seen claims taken at face value and many corresponding belief systems manifest in peoples' minds - sometimes uncritically. Most of all, I've seen the need to keep our critical thinking hat on. Especially, there are times when we need to question everything we are supposedly taught - key  critical moments of discernment.

One example of a moment where a lot of discernment was in order, I discussed in a posting within my blog, The Cosmic Bridge. While at a civic health fair, presenting information on hypnosis, a woman confronted me, telling me that my hypnosis work was evil - against her Christian faith. Unfortunately, she skittered off before I could ask her more about what she had said. I can only surmise that her beliefs about hypnosis were heavily influenced by some religious fundamentalist preacher, and she had uncritically accepted those claims.

Then, a few days later, I had a different view of discernment. At the Paradigm symposium in Saint Paul in mid-October, I heard an arch-skeptic speak. The Paradigm symposium had speakers on many fascinating topics from (very) ancient archaeology to the paranormal, to UFOs, etc. - and this time, the conference organizer decided that having a skeptic (more like an  arch-debunker) speak would make things even more interesting. The organizer was right.

The skeptic was a professor of genetics and biology. He gave a coherent, well-reasoned and thoroughly thought out talk. He presented an argument about how most of the material we had examined in the symposium the previous few days was untrue. To state it (overly) simply, aliens were not involved in any of our ancient constructions. Alien abduction does not exist. UFOs cannot be extraterrestrial, and are undoubtedly simply misidentified prosaic phenomena. Interstellar travel is impossible due to the laws of physics (as we currently understand them). There was no alien intervention in human evolution. I think you get the picture.

During the post-talk, I challenged him on some of his claims about alien abduction. And at one point, I think I backed him into a corner. He claimed that there was no evidence - a statement of absolute negative. I asked him to prove that. How did he know that there was NO evidence? He immediately assumed that I meant there was something hidden within some government coverup (maybe there is, or maybe not) and then said something else very interesting. When he hears about such conspiracy theories, he "loses interest." Does losing interest mean that something is invalid, or does it simply mean he is no longer interested in it (for reasons other than scientific). I leave that question to the reader...

But the biggest lesson in his talk was not whether or not alien abduction exists, how the pyramids were built, or any other such specific question. To me, the real question is how we decide what to believe - and conversely, what to reject as false. In this case, the speaker's claims amounted to a belief that our present body of knowledge is sufficiently advanced to "know" certain phenomena cannot (and therefore do not) occur. It is a belief at least as unsubstantiated by evidence as that which it opposes. In my view, there is no more evidence that there are no aliens present on Earth (and could not be any), than there is of present-day alien contact.

Switching gears - a few days later, I got into a discussion on line about toxic contrails. The person of on the other end of the dialog was totally sold on the idea that some conspiratorial organization is spraying toxic chemicals all over the globe. As we chatted on line, his ideas became increasingly far-fetched and vitriolic. His words indicated he was increasingly certain, increasingly dug in to his position.  

I asked the person for details of his chemtrail observation. Instead of any kind of objective description of the circumstances, aircraft, weather, etc., I got a lecture on how "they" are doing this to control the population, geoengineering in the face of global warming, etc. The person had an elaborate scenario built up involving secret government agencies, the New World Order, etc.

He noted how, following spraying the clouds thickened, the weather turned rainy, etc. But what was he actually describing? Perhaps he was describing an ordinary contrail left behind by a commercial jet flying through a region of supercritical air ahead of a cold front. In such weather conditions, contrails frequently persist, mixing with cirrus clouds as they thicken ahead of the approaching weather front. 

I have heard many people say that the difference between normal contrails and so-called chemtrails is that the latter will persist in the atmosphere, while the former will disperse almost immediately. So, returning to the scenario of the approaching cold front, the presence of cirrus clouds high in the atmosphere would thus indicate this persistence condition was present. 

Rather than a chemical spraying plot, could he have been observing a cold front, with the clouds thickening as a result? While yes, there were persistent contrails, might they be the result of an approaching weather system, rather than of a sinister New-World-Order conspiracy?

For me, it was an interesting switch of roles. Now I was the skeptic and the other person was the believer. Yet it did a lot to broaden my own perspective. My own skeptical view of chemtrail claims leads me to better understand the point of view of skeptics on UFOs and alien abduction. Yet in all cases, we need to be mindful of just what the evidence says, and doesn't say, about what does and does not exist

To be fair, I can't actually say that there are NO chemtrail conspiracies. One can't prove a negative. Furthermore, not being privy to meteorological or geoengineering inner circles, I don't actually know much about the details behind the controversy. I can only challenge the reporter to be aware of the weather conditions, consider all possible explanations, etc.

We can almost imagine that taking a typical lead edge of a cold front to be evidence of a massive ego-engineering campaign is the equivalent of seeing the planet Venus (a bright star) in the evening sky and concluding that the alien mother ship is about to land. It is a jumping-to-conclusions based upon an already formed belief. It is a lack of discernment - just like the skeptic at the Paradigm Symposium who announced that aliens would not look anything like us (i.e. having two arms and two legs) - and that there was no (valid) evidence for UFOs.

Runaway belief (both positive and negative) reminds us of the need for discernment when working with metaphysical topics, anomaly investigations, etc. For both the skeptic and the believer, events sometimes bring us a teachable moment. They teach those of us in the anomaly community to be ever mindful of the BS lurking just around the corner. What we thought we knew is sometimes wrong. 

These are the unexpected moments of discernment that keep us on our toes

The Christian and the Hypnotist

In one way or another, everyday brings us a lesson in life. The great teacher of the universe tries daily to open our eyes with some event or situation. Life confronts us with challenge, mystery, something interesting or maybe just an important but everyday detail for us to note. Such lessons would seem obvious to all of us - and indeed they are. But then again - Sometimes there are those cases that fall between the cracks of life, hiding in the shadows in ways that make it unclear - what did I just hear? Is it true? Or is it otherwise - and if so, why did the person want me to believe it?

During a recent health fair, I had an information table set up about hypnotherapy. People streamed by, picking up my literature, asking me all kinds of questions, etc. Then suddenly, a woman  challenged me, telling me that hypnosis was evil. It against her faith. I tried to ask her more about what she meant. However, she quickly shied away and wouldn't engage me in conversation. It was clear she was afraid. Far less clear was the reason why. Perhaps she feared that as a hypnotist, I might beguile her, trick her into believing something false, instead of the true faith. But, since she wouldn't talk with me, I will never know.

I assume she was Christian. I can only surmise that she had learned something (untrue) about hypnosis - probably from a conservative preacher who instilled fear in her about its dangers. In reality, I have many Christian clients. I am Christian myself, as are most of my clients , at least to some degree. Yet I sometimes hear from conservative Christians about how hypnosis is dangerous, how it lays you open to - well, whatever. And my question is - what exactly is that "whatever?"

I've been told that hypnosis can corrupt the soul. By doing hypnosis, I am laying the client open to beguiling by - who? By Satan? By me? I have to ask any person who believes that, why? Who told them that? And who is that person to them? Are Christians forbidden to think for themselves? Are we forbidden from using our own minds?

Anyone, whether they are Christian or non-Christian alike, has probably read a good novel. Have you ever found yourself getting into the story, identifying with the main character(s)? Have you ever shed a tear in a sad movie? Have you ever gotten so deeply into something (like a hobby) that you lost track of time? If so, then you were hypnotized.

Last I checked, even the most conservative Christian has experienced this. And yet, I would bet money that no demon possessed them as a result. In spite of their in-the-groove moment, their faith is intact - or maybe even stronger than it was before.

In addition, we live a certain percentage of our daily lives in hypnosis. Any time you have a daydream, you are in a spontaneous state of self-hypnosis. Each pass through the roughly 90-minute cycle of consciousness called the ultradian rhythm, the mind passes through a few moments of spontaneous hypnosis. Anytime you have an "aha" moment, you are in a momentary state of spontaneous hypnosis that allows your creative subconscious to come through.

In reality, hypnosis is nothing more than selective focus and the momentary suspension of disbelief - allowing yourself to get into the moment, to go with the flow.

We live much of our lives in a degree of light hypnosis, focusing on an idea and suspending our disbelief. As a result, we live nearly the entire day in a light state of trance. Indeed, the belief that hypnosis is evil is in itself, a trance. The foremost person to meet that description was probably the very person lecturing me about how hypnosis was evil. She had suspended her own disbelief and allowed some person to convince her that this process was somehow evil.

I often hear statements about how hypnosis is all about control - that the client is somehow surrendering control to the hypnotist. (I hear this from other religions besides Christianity. I often hear if from Islamic, Vedic, Buddhist believers, etc.) However, I have found that while I'm doing hypnotherapy work with someone, their discernment is quite intact. In fact, I have experienced at least one moment when something I said accidentally annoyed a person who was already in trance. In the particular case, she was quickly assured that I had no intent to offend her beliefs. Yet as a useful side effect, she also had a far greater understanding about how one's her own discernment remains intact while in hypnosis.

Back to the wellness fair - even though the woman confronting me was afraid of being controlled or beguiled by some hypnotist (me?), I was not the one she needed to beware of. In fact, as a follower of whatever teacher she was quoting, she was far more subject to manipulation by this person than she ever would be from someone like me. For her, the controller was the preacher who who she believed when he told her she should not trust the gift of the human mind that is hypnosis. Her suspension of disbelief allowed her to be inadvertently hypnotized, giving him direct access to her subconscious.

In almost everything we hear, we need to use at least some degree of discernment. There is a lot of garbage out there, and each of us needs to carefully choose what it is we wish to believe. In this case, the woman allowed herself to be beguiled into believing that I was a danger to her. In fact she was hypnotized, and was far more suggestible as a result of her beliefs in the the message of this preacher.

Inadvertently, she was playing out a chapter in her daily, unconscious trance journey. The more she denied hypnosis, the deeper she was into hypnosis and the more control she was ceding to the preacher. It was another round in her own private drama of The Christian and the Hypnotist.