On 11 February 1944, the 68-year-old Carl Gustav Jung – then the world’s most renowned living psychologist – slipped on some ice and broke his fibula. Ten days later, in hospital, he suffered a myocardial infarction caused by embolisms from his immobilised leg. Treated with oxygen and camphor, he lost consciousness and had what seems to have been a near-death and out-of-the-body experience – or, depending on your perspective, delirium. He found himself floating 1,000 miles above the Earth. Seas and continents shimmered in blue light and Jung could make out the Arabian desert and snow-tipped Himalayas. He felt he was about to leave orbit, but then, turning to the south, a huge black monolith came into view. It was a kind of temple, and at the entrance Jung saw a Hindu sitting in a lotus pos­ition. Within, innumerable candles flickered, and he felt that the “whole phantasmagoria of earthly existence” was being stripped away. It wasn’t pleasant, and what remained was an “essential Jung”, the core of his experiences.

He knew that inside the temple the mystery of his existence, of his purpose in life, would be answered. He was about to cross the threshold when he saw, rising up from Europe far below, the image of his doctor in the archetypal form of the King of Kos, the island site of the temple of Asclepius, Greek god of medicine. He told Jung that his departure was premature; many were demanding his return and he, the King, was there to ferry him back. When Jung heard this, he was immensely disappointed, and almost immediately the vision ended. He experienced the reluctance to live that many who have been ‘brought back’ encounter, but what troubled him most was seeing his doctor in his archetypal form. He knew this meant that the physician had sacrificed his own life to save Jung’s. On 4 April 1944 – a date numerologists can delight in – Jung sat up in bed for the first time since his heart attack. On the same day, his doctor came down with septicæmia and took to his bed. He never left it, and died a few days later.

© jritch for a robot, i am not, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: mysterious, spiritual experience

Supernatural by Graham Hancock (2007, Disinformation Company)

Graham Hancock is the king of speculation. His books will either convince you there’s a lot more to human history or make you scoff at his possibly outlandish ideas. Regardless, it is damn entertaining. One of the first books I ever bought was his Fingerprints of the Gods (1996) which discussed how anomalies associated with ancient monuments tend to indicate a wide-spread ancient advanced civilization. Even though I was intrigued by the way Hancock tied all those threads together I’m still deeply skeptical of his overall thesis. And yet, I’ve been completely hooked by his 2007 book Supernatural. This one is deeply convincing because anyone can follow his thesis with a little supplemental research. Using the bitterly accepted idea proposed by anthropologist David Lewis-Williams, that ancient art depicted what early humans saw in altered states of consciousness, Hancock weaves a story that gets at the very heart of what it means to be a member of our species. Where academics might be starting to accept Lewis-Williams’ idea, they are far from ready to use the same plants and rituals that produced these early trance states. This is where Hancock picks up, by starting taking the iboga vine, the plant that enables men to see the dead, and follows with the sacred ayahuasca brew of the Amazon.

Where I’m sure I would have been more sympathetic to Hancock’s other works if I had actually been to the monuments he describes, I can follow the writing here because of my own exposure to these ancient plants. Before I knew the themes and details in this book, my own experiences were eerily similar to those described in Supernatural. I’ve been the archetype of the wounded man and had interactions with serpents. Reading the story of someone thousands of years ago describing something that happened to me (along with its “mystical” significance) is a chilling synchronicity. Hancock’s sketch on p. 52 of the beings he encountered while doing his field research were exactly the same things I’ve seen, and as I learned by reading, have been seen for thousands of years by scattered native groups across the world accessing these same states through various means.

Hancock ties the similarities of the modern UFO/abduction phenomena to experiences that indigenous tribesmen have in altered states to the mythology of the medieval fairies. In doing so, he uncovers that throughout human history our species has been describing the same thing from different angles. Whatever this phenomena is, it appears to be changing over time, evolving and advancing. Hinting at a form of intelligence. All of these encounters have similar themes, particularly in encountering entities with an interest in human sexuality and reproduction mechanisms. That fairies allegedly impregnated and abducted women or danced around in circles to fly into the sky draws more than a few parallels to modern UFO lore. While the case Hancock lays for these similarities takes up the first half of the book, it is in the second half of Supernatural where the mind gems really shine through.

All human languages have a direct, exact, unvarying mathematical relationship between the rank of a word and the actual frequency of occurrence of that word. This relationship is known as Zipf’s Law, named after linguist George Zipf and has proved to hold true for every human language. Oddly enough, when the non-coding regions of DNA are analyzed according to Zipf’s Law a perfect linear Zipf Law linear plot emerges. In fact, the chemical “writing” of the non-coding regions of DNA appear to have all the features of a language, and may in fact be a language. Perhaps it is this language that ancient plant based sacrements tap into. Hancock brings to light the evidence that our interactions with ‘the other’ could be enabled by ancient plant substances because these chemicals allow us to access information encoded in the 97% of our DNA we currently think of as ‘junk DNA’. Further work in this area was done by Dr. Jeremy Narby in his book The Cosmic Serpent, which Hancock touches on briefly, specifically regarding the presence of snake constituted helixes in nearly every culture. That the snake in mythology is often a reference to DNA.

Since Hancock published Supernatural, the knowledge that Francis Crick discovered the shape of DNA while using LSD has become widely known. What is less well known is that Crick later published a book where he explains that DNA is so complex no mechanism of evolution could have produced it on this planet, concluding it must have originated elsewhere in the universe. Strangely, the mythology of many tribes in the Amazon tell the exact same story, of serpents falling from the sky and living inside us. While anthropologist Michael Harner ingested ayahuasca in 1961 he reported seeing, “dragon-like creatures that came to earth from deep in outer space after a journey that had lasted for eons.” These dragons explained that they hid in the multitudinous forms life and that humans were the receptacles for these creatures. Similar encounters have been described by other scientists ingesting these ceremonial brews and ancient cultures are inundated with related stories. Hancock hesitates from drawing any sort of conclusion other than that these ancient myths and timeless sacraments may be far more interesting than we could ever guess. Personally I agree.

Even stranger is that psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) is essentially orally active DMT, an indole compound with a phosphorylated functional group which exists nowhere else in nature. If this pattern exists nowhere else in nature, where could it have come from? What if the alien we’ve been searching for has been here inside us all along? A chilling prospect to consider, but after reading through Supernatural you’ll be forced to confront this possibility in all of its grandeur.

© jritch for a robot, i am not, 2010. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: ancient civilizations, ancient knowledge, extraterrestrials, humanity, mysterious, myth, psyche, psychedelics

Dark Lore volume 1 is the first entry in a fascinating series

I’ve always been the sort of person that sought out the books on Bigfoot, UFOs or Terrence McKenna before reading through The Kite Runner or various Grisham novels (you know… the mainstream stuff). Something about the weird and strange, no matter how implausible,  has always appealed to me. Partially this interest has developed from personal experiences with UFO sightings and other bizarre things outside normal explanations for reality. But the primary reason for my fascination is that deep inside I feel there is far more to be experienced than most people ever know. Cracks in the official explanations for reality show through on the fringes of society. We dull ourselves down through constant exposure to culture, but several hundred years ago we would have been thankful for visitations from our ancestors or discussions with plants. As the intelligence officer Major Murphy told Dr. Jacques Vallee on p.74 of Messengers of Deception regarding the failure for science to incorporate the price of information , “[In science] Suppose I gave you 95% of the data concerning a phenomenon. You’re happy because you know 95% of the data. I know that this is the cheap part of the information. I still need the other 5% but I will have to pay a much higher price to get it!”  Dark Lore is about that other 5%.

Dark Lore Volume 1 is the first of a now four volume series containing articles from the leading writers of fringe science. Edited by Greg Taylor, creator of the alternative news site The Daily Grail. In Dark Lore Volume 1, Greg has enlisted some of my favorite authors: Paul Devereux, Mitch Horowitz, John Higgs, Nick Redfern, Adam Gorightly Daniel Pinchbeck, Michael Prescott and Loren Coleman. If you follow the fields of heretical thought you’ll be familiar with these names. I would recommend this book as an antidote to someone that has been exposed to mostly bland explanations of reality.

I enjoyed all the essays in the book but I’ll provide a quick summary of the ones that really stood out, denoting my absolute favorites.

Michael Prescott analyzed how an obsession with the paranormal can drive people insane citing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, one of the most notable examples of a man driven mad by the etheric. Greg Taylor’s essay on the common audible experiences across various border phenomena was truly fascinating. Why do people reporting alien abductions, near death experiences, psychedelic experiences, OBEs, etc… all report similar sounds triggering the altered state of consciousness? Robert M. Schoch’s description of being a rogue Egyptologist was disheartening, why do academics reject  so much quantitative and archeological evidence towards an alternative approach to Egyptian history? Daniel Pinchbeck’s piece provided a fantastic history of Terrence and Dennis McKenna’s ingestion of psychedelic mushrooms and their contribution to the Timewave Zero phenomena and the 2012 hype. Susan B. Martinez challenged typical explanations of literary inspiration by relaying paranormal experiences from authors like Wilde, Poe, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Woolf, Tennison and more. Loren Coleman provided a coherent look at how any information about Bigfoot gets blown out of proportion by the mainstream media. John Higgs provided one of my favorite essays from the book, looking at similarities between Aliester Crowley and Dr. Timothy Leary. Michael E. Tymn recounted the fascinating encounters of linguist professor Neville Whymant with a medium that channeled ancient Chinese claiming to be the spirit of Confucius. Mitch Horowitz penned an entertaining history of Ouija in America. The Emperor laid out evidence that connects many Bigfoot experiences with UFOs (much more convincing than you might think). Mike Jay discussed the ritual use of psychedelic substances in ancient Peru using archeological evidence. My favorite essay was from Michael Grosso who provided some fascinating studies and personal accounts of how the moment of death points towards an afterlife (this one is worth the price of the book alone). To close out the collection, Adam Gorightly discussed the ritual magicians of the late 1800s/early 1900s and how their experiences parallel the beings contacted in UFO experiences… did they let something in?

Overall, the entire collection was incredibly strong. If you want to be bombarded with a world you never knew existed… or if you want to expand your knowledge of the unknown I would highly recommend this collection. I’ll look forward to the time when I can pick up Dark Lore Volume 2.

© jritch for a robot, i am not, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: border phenomena, fringe science, mysterious

The first podcast I subscribed to when I bought my Creative Zen Vision: M in 2006 was Mysterious Universe. One of the things that got me through the work week was listening to Ben Grundy’s reports on the mysterious and the paranormal.

After his mysterious exit from the podcasting world, pledging to record a final episode and then never recording it… he’s back!  The new podcast has has retained its slick production value and Australian accent. My favorite excerpt from this episode were the accounts of grinning man sightings.

I’m happy to have this show back in my weekly playlist.

© jritch for a robot, i am not, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: excitement, mysterious, paranormal, Podcasts