Hopedance

After seeing a review of this book in the latest issue of IONS magazine, I had to get a copy. Not only do I enjoy a good laugh (usually from the conspiriologist and comic Robert Anton Wilson who wrote the review) but since I put my interest in alien abductions and UFOs on hold for five years, I thought it would be interesting to see what the latest research has come up with.

John Mack, Harvard Medical School professor of psychiatry and writer of repute (he received a Pulitzer prize for his biography of T.E. Lawrence), is not necessarily doing this research to win friends and gain influence (already a team of his associates at Harvard have created a commission to study his research). Aliens is not a subject that a professional writers or academics would take lightly for their careers are often at stake.

The subject has been covered more and more by respected journalists and academics in the past five years but the subject is fraught with complications that are still an enigma for many and grounds for ridicule for many more.

John Mack dealt with what the abductions were all about in his very fat 432 pages in his work ABDUCTIONS. Five years later he returns to the subject to inform us of its meaning for the numerous "experiencers," to cull common themes from what they have experienced and learned and to inform us the public as to what might be going on.

Mack does not get into the physical dimensions of the phenomenon, nor does he try to prove anything. His purpose is to bring forth the messages and the experiencers’ transformations in a sincere and serious manner. Often times he will be moved by the experiencers reliving their various abduction experiences. Is this not real then? No longer do we find the word "hypnosis" in the text; we see the word "relaxed communication" interjected as to what mode they are in to tell their stories.

And the stories are indeed unbelievable. Humans traveling through windows, being tunneled into different dimensions, seeing documentary videos showing the destruction of the Earth, participating in a project where aliens and humans are cross-breeding to create a hybrid species to survive the coming collapse.... Three new insights I have received from this book: 1) these people are going through human transformational journeys quite similar to shamanic journeys (and more research is needed in this field); 2) in indigenous cultures they have accepted alien encounters (as well as an understanding of spirit/matter cross-overs) within their religio-culture whereas in the west, spirit and matter are diametrically opposed, so anything spiritual manifesting into matter is always suspect; and 3) that these purported aliens are no longer attempting to go trough the government avenues and are now relying on transforming individual citizens to take a stand against the destruction of the planet (i.e., many of the experiencers have become very active environmentalists).

A medicine man in South Africa, Credo Mutwa, tells John Mack bluntly what he learned in his abduction experience: "The entire Western civilization is based upon a blatant lie, the lie that we human beings are the cocks of the walk in the world, the lie that we human beings are the highest evolved forms in this world, and that we are alone and that beyond us there is nothing."

A provocative book, requiring an open mind to stretch us into becoming more familiar with the outrageous mysteries of reality and our peculiar time in it.

Bob Banner; reprinted from HopeDance #23