Once Upon A Time

A Meditation On Seeds

Kurt Vonnegut a favorite author of mine once used the invented word “karass” in his novel “Cat’s Cradle” to describe a group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner, even when superficial linkages are not evident and with some amount of dry humor applied to this theory I often wonder both looking back and in the present tense if myself as a writer of this blog and it’s readers have shared a certain “karass” as much as I consider the readers of this blog as acquaintances I have never met. Some I know better than others. Perhaps this is more evident in the friendships that develop in our lives over time. A long time reader of this blog asked me within the confines of an e-mail why I did not insert more of myself as a person into the content, which I thought I had done by the act of writing it whereas he was asking about myself as a person.

And so with having this “karass” term stuck in my head lately I thought an exception was due and this post resulted as I am writing it for the sake of ( as always) entertaining myself and hopefully in doing so, entertain others as a recess from other more pertinent realities. I think of this term of karass as revealing to oneself as to the friends one finds in life, accidentally or otherwise says more about ourselves than we could summon as a self description.

1957 was the year of the Civil War Centennial and on the playground between lessons, the boys reenacted that conflagration armed with their imaginations as well as the marketed toys intended to foster this role playing. A Johnny Reb cannon that shot plastic cannonballs was one I recall amongst other props such as hats, swords and rifles to name a few. On the playground you were either in the Grey or Blue camp andmock battalions, generals and foot soldiers raced from one end of the playground to the other. I was in the Grey camp not having a clue what the Confederacy stood for, and my choice was driven by a tv show called “The Grey Ghost” whom I thought was cool. Yah! We would charge back and forth and kids would pretend to die. Any kid who did not participate was fodder for recruitment and this is when I first encountered Ed.
In the heat of these “battles” I ran up to Ed and asked “What side are you on!?”
Ed smirked and non plussed and calmly said “I am a conscientious objector.”

After the thrall of battle wore off, Keith and myself would wander around the playground and played a role of disinterested observers commenting on this or that. Keith like myself were round pegs to the square holes of childhood, Whether it was winter or summer, he wore a tattered brown parka, white tee shirt and baggy pants and when something interesting caught his eye, he would pantomime using a hand ranked cinema camera as if he were capturing all on film. Perhaps not surprisingly Keith became a homicide detective and subsequently died of a heart attack or so I heard.

In fourth grade I encountered Ed once again when our class was summoned to the lunch room where all the tables had been put away. We were told that Ed was directing a Shakespeare play.
I could not make heads or tales of the plot or what the dialog meant and swords were brandished, speeches given and costumes made out of sheets were all a part of this extravaganza. A school day anomaly if you will.

At the same time having discovered reading I became a readaholic, having become immersed in poetry, dictionaries, encyclopedias..all of this new world dazzled me, more so than than even drawing which I had always obsessively produced as a sort of personality quirk. There must be twenty or so old photographs of me here or there always at a card table or a “tv table” scrawling away at making reproductions of this or that in my own crude way. This came to a tipping point when a teacher put a note in my report card and on my way home I opened it as I suspected it was some unimaginable kind of bad news. The note suggested to my parents that I be enrolled in an art school, although as I was told by them this expense could not be afforded.

It was then in fifth grade our class was assigned to split up into teams and write an illustrated story and Ed and I were selected to be one of the teams and I soon discovered that Poe was a shared taste and we set off to write the most macabre story we could summon between us.
I soon discovered Ed was a fellow “artist” and we soon began going over to his house to collaborate on our horrific project with glee.

This project soon evolved into nearly weekly cartooning sessions where we would each work on a strip and then reveal each others work with the suitable goofy voices and theatrics that accompanied the characters. His main protagonist was Uncle Snort, an alcoholic host of a kiddy show whereas mine was an alien character who always failed at human disguises always finding himself in a jam. His name was Fungus “Smith”.

These days I spend an hour or so off and on writing a blog about the anomalous and when the rare moment of ambition beyond this hobby surfaces, I contribute magazine articles here and there, or by request, bang out contributions to surrealist anthologies.
And Ed? One of our past times in that small Midwest town was to walk along the railroad tracks that divided the empty grasslands and vanished into the horizons to talk of the atypical goofy things kids talk about. One of our imaginary creations was a railroad named after ourselves that would take us on adventures, exotic places, and the great unknown beyond the confines of what we knew. A life of wandering and exploration. These days I explore inner worlds and Ed is now Hobo Ed the proprietor of a coffee house and an advocate of third world development through a respect of the natural ecology, via his other profession as a blender and roaster of those beans grown there.

All stories have a beginning a middle and an end, an arc some would say but like Vonnegut, I suspect such things are more like a continuum that lacks any definition other than the odd “karass”of circumstance, or better yet, a transit of contingencies meshed at the intersections of enfoldment yet like branches seeking out sustenance...we wonder as we wander.
Art as life or life as an art creating this or that as living threads...

Don't Mess Me Up: The Tao of Paranormality

 "Looking for a sign that the Universal Mind 
Has written you into the Passion Play"
-Jethro Tull -Skating Away On The Thin Ice of A New Day

A Comedy of Errant Contradictions As An Off Topic Focus

In my life experiences there is a thread of encountering resistance to overt or indirect open ended questions or for that matter open ended answers that more resemble placeholders than definitive and conclusive arguments. Established science and the paranormal community may have more in common than is recognized if one eye follows the trajectory of science and the other follows the same travails in the para-normal "community". One could say the difference between the two has been marked with what is considered taboo lunacy versus acceptable lunacy. In the end there may be placed a pox on both houses.
It may be a growing possibility that what constitutes evidence is becoming a moot point as we have defined it to date that both skeptics and believers who endlessly parse the details of which will find the cutting edge of science cuts both ways ...equally undercutting toward the rules of the dualistic game field that has postulates that perhaps don't have a footing as we define foundational postulates.
Now you see it, now you don't.
These leading edge scientific forays into undiscovered country fold into  Valle's "Theory of Everything"  covered previously which may be an implication that both skeptics and believers have lost their ping pong paddles. it may become a matter of "Which delusion do you prefer?"
The three little bears may face a philosophic conundrum in the near future when nothing fits but then again, did anything ever fit?

Further in this essay I provide an example of this specific hall of mirrors.
More times than I have the ambition to count there is a presumption that for every Yin there is a Yang for "every season under heaven". 
Often times this resistance to saying A. I don't know or B. Perhaps or C. I suspect....all this becomes a farce worthy of Abbott and Costello's routine of "Who's On First?"
Then again where does this proclivity to suspect there is more to the story of life than what appears on the surface originate? Is there a innate gene that is activated in the neurons upon birth that persistently second guesses any causation? Perhaps pragmatic optimism saves the would be cynic who insists upon repeatable and demonstrable material evidence to create just enough of a gap in self knowledge to consider alternative beginnings or endings should there be such things.
There is a strand of self obscuring fog in this....that is to say, the nature of whom is looking at the nature that one is contained in.  The rationality of logical causation has failed to decipher the para in normal, and so there is a ongoing turbulence of the skeptical applying a ruler to the illogical as a conclusive religiosity of abhorrence contrasted with the superimposition of imagination to create castles in the air and the middle ground of open ended questions and answers is set aside in a sort of tribal competition as if if interpretation was a soccer match rather than both sides recognizing there are limitations and weaknesses in each others strategies.
An electrical circuit of Yin and Yang.
One pulls while the other pushes as a dynamo to roll it in circles generating a great deal of heat without light.
This game theory applied to the field of the paranormal has it's roots in the paradox of human behavior that arises from our own shared nature of deconstructing the foundations of nature itself while creating architectures to control it in a sort of tool making frenzy without one pause to consider the why and wherefore we have positioned ourselves as bees in this hive, not having a clue as to where this leads.
That in of itself is an open ended question as one thing leads to another.

The Unimaginable Loss of Religion

There is one writer whom I personally like and consider a good friend from a distance who would get very upset when I mentioned such things as contradictions to rational logic and causality as being directly unobservable within comments I posted on his essays. He would label such comments as obtuse because they recognized they undercut and underscored the fallacies of not mixing physicality with the intangible as to say the former drove the latter. More Yin than Yang, or more accurately, everything can be attributed to one aspect without the attribution of the other.  As if the realities we inhabit could be captured on a Kodachrome slide.
Which is the more obtuse? The Yin or the Yang?
Then there is provocation in the paranormal field inserted as a barbed thrust to garner provocation which is a point without a point that perhaps could be considered either a heat sink or a attention getting magnet that eventually takes both sides of Yin and Yang to create the nullifying effect of a sort of perpetual motion in action...using rational causation to create chaos.
An engine mechanic would advise not stepping down hard on the gas while the transmission is in neutral. otherwise the engine will overheat and blow itself up. Call this an analogy to what was formerly called Ufology.
Oddly, this individual became so enraged on my commenting this way I gave up making any further inadvertent "upsetting" remarks while thinking how ridiculous some extreme behaviors are that are off topic to the subject at hand and so one could write an entire post on the emotional aspects of fixity of any sort and where they derive from.
In other words the experts become the phenomenon in a sleight of hand.
The contradictions of sociological postures are in the mirror of the paranormal field as if a slide has a negative image to produce the positive and recognizable and yet there is no duality in this....
That being said, the emotional reaction to contradictions and paradox could fill several volumes. Perhaps it's due to the context of the illusions and delusions of willing the disorganized into a recognizable pattern that could just be a paradox that we have critically assumed to be a normal state of affairs...it's own form of logic.

Consider that our lives are positioned within the tensioning between animal drives and instincts armed with technology while having a blank canvas as to the why and wherefore of existence as we define it ourselves for our own purposes. Science makes the claim of objectivity whilst in the midst of a tug of war. This situation is transparent enough to see that tool making as an existential purpose to self awareness is a shallow canal.
However, it is said that the former Ufology was a pseudo-science and yet in institutionalized science the same Yin-Yang phenomenon of ping pong takes place in the halls of objectivity.
From the below linked essay, an interesting commentary on the state of science is placed. An excerpt from that essay asks pertinent questions that apply to the potential fallacies of argumentaion in the paranormal "community"

..."If true, this would mean that “reality” as we understand it is an illusion, with the action actually going on at the cosmic horizon. Baggott ingeniously compares this to a sort of reverse Plato’s cave: it isn’t the three-dimensional world that is reflected in a pale way on the walls of a cave were people are chained and can only see shadows of the real thing; it is the three-dimensional world that is a (holographic) projection of the information stored at the cosmic horizon. "

 http://www.science20.com/rationally_speaking/information_physical_what_does_mean-130300

Broadcasting ability lacking the capability to receive seems to be a growing movement revolving around another duality of being sold or selling. Products with appealing packages whose axis is bias as a fundamental price point in a competitive marketplace. The universe of Versus.

Avoidance, Denial and Controls

Factoids versus rolling definitions. Yesterdays feeding of the Gods of earth by human sacrifice to avoid ecological damage to tommorrow's crops....accumulating massive armaments as a factoid to avoid conflict, wars on everything from drug usage to poverty..all having an axis of contingency, of making all this up as we go along pretending we have expertise in our back pockets, a magic formula of avoidance, rather than posing open ended questions in the face of predictive failures. The old stanzas of "not letting go of nurse to find in the bushes something ten times worse" comes to mind. Entrenchments versus reinvention.
Load up the crutches and bandages in advance of a demonstrable need.

The Parody of Normality

“Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.” 
-Lao Tze

An odd sort of arrangement.

The last subject I wrote about was the transience of coherence and chaos and so this entry seemed apt as a follow through as a view looking back through several frames, a proverbial workshop of telescopes and microscopes than begin with simplicity run through differentiation only to return in migration to simple questions. Rational logic need not apply beneath the surface, or more apt perhaps "human logic".
 Squares attempting to be round pegs end up as octagonal cubism.

The inbred animal instincts as the "Beasts" superimposed upon repeatability in the triad of 666 even divisible numbers of prediction within a pathology of presumptive control systems based on skewing surviveability in their favor whilst deconstructing reinvention...damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead.
I think that on the menu this could be called the combination platter.

Perhaps labels, terms of contract, familiarity, convenience as benign markers when fleshed become parasitic within the body politic in the face of the presumptive ensuing chaos in their absence, the fear of change, the fear of open ended questions and answers creates a pause, a gap that the anomalous drives through on a turnpike as through a  toll booth. The prosaic poses "the para-normal" as the "normal" is para which seems to be the Tao of the anomalous.

Transient Coherence and Chaos

In Memory of John Keel

John Keel and Jacques Vallee
Did John Keel notice a pattern in Unidentified Atmospheric Phenomenon that Jacques Vallee later provided the matrix for in his lecture on "The Theory of Everything"? Information as energy when combined with patterns between waves of UAP tied to "tipping points" in history as noted by Keel represent an intriguing matrix of probabilities lodged between chaos and coherence. Does this reflect the state of human affairs in a much deeper sense than is currently considered. Are we the "extraterrestrials"?

Simulations and Transpositions

The demarcation between our inner world and the environment as representing a spatial relationship is self evident. At the same time neither world exists in of itself and is subject to transception. John C Lilly’s experiments utilising isolation chambers was an attempt to create an artificial divide wherein the two were intentionally separated and the isolation of the mind from it’s environs was studied. Interestingly enough, this simulation of a physical divide in terms of it’s effects has some resemblance to Near Death Experience, which some have suggested that these experiential and naturally occurring events represent a spectrum that goes beyond the threshold of death onto a new environment and a subsequent return to the seeming root of the process which is a normal waking state.

What is interesting is that the mind itself creates simulations and the mind works in conjunction with the physical brain in that one informs the other. Again here is an example of transception.

Then there are dream states that are a simulation of a simulation process that occurs in this relationship of formulations derived from physicality without being centered within it, much like the isolation tank experiments conducted by Lilly.

If these simulations that are experiential then perhaps we could consider imaging through the imaginative process to be a intangible sensory organ much like the transception of  taste, smell and tactile simulations, and this processing also bridges the inner world as well as the outer environs of physicality.

Then after these considerations ( mind \ environment, near death \ normal waking state, physicality \ simulation of physicality) are placed as similarities of imaging as well as transception, then we come to differentiation.

Correlations and Consideration

No two dreams are alike, no two individuals experience the outer environment alike, no two individuals experience after death experiential reality alike and yet they appear to share the same processes. Does this represent the vicissitudes of memory in relation to a certain mobility of reality that has more than one point of references?

If we place the foregoing in the context of the attributions of this phenomenon, do we find correlations between these processes and the reported observations of witnesses?

We have a variety of craft, a variety of creatures, a variety of behaviors, a variety of contexts and yet do they have similarities that have been ignored that resemble in a strong sense our own fluid experiential reference points in terms of simulating, transception and projecting the facets of imaging when the inner world and our environment are placed in isolation from one another by  change in state?

Then, if we travel further down this line of reasoning, taking into consideration the concept of global consciousness which could be considered a network tied into individual processing units, do they cohere or become coherent as a consensus by way of imaging, simulation and projecting these shared forms without physicality onto a platform wherein the energetic atmosphere (that global consciousness theory suggests contains this network) that has as an effect of transception in of itself linked to witnesses, much like the spectrum of radio, microwave  radiating energy?

One considers energy as information which can be viewed by turning on your television as analogic to a network of another stripe. What is interesting is that what is witnessed beyond the astounding variety of imaged forms is the root of their contrivance which is our own environment.

What is witnessed are conceptual simulations that are joined at the hip to those witnesses themselves who are exposed to in a waking state to these forms, not from “elsewhere” yet we see individuation of a superimpositions..In other words, there are no extraterrestrials present we can form our imaging from and so we take the materials at hand and create what we would anticipate individually as what would be alien as one would in a waking dream state.

It may come then as no surprise that coherence and chaos are joined at the hip and the inner world becomes the environment as a imaging process that in of itself is based on simulations biologic and otherwise that share modality and yet have neither a set formulation or a repeatability except in a transient wave based on a equally transient input or consensus of anticipation both in a quantum and environmental coherence..it appears chaotic.

Might there be a transception of networks?

As Above, So Below?

Another words, on a more observable network that is our social environment based on the arrangements of communication as set patterns ( written and verbal) we have fluxes of consensus as well as events that some have labelled “tipping points” and so there was John Keel suggesting to us that our social and cultural coherence fluxes that creates waves of UAP activity in the global consciousness network as it’s sensory simulating component.

Whereas it may be the watchers anticipate and participate unknowingly to create parallel “tipping points” as transception in the global consciousness network.

One recalls his lecture on Fortents and Portents.

Then one examines the results from the global consciousness project that mirrors this same effect based on the distribution of information that creates a shared database resulting from events that are "tipping points" such as 9/11 or the unanticipated death of Princess Diana, While certainly dispartate in their origin or even any valuation we could apply to these shared events they have an impact on the force of energy through the width and breath of their distribution as well as being transient.

One considers that "UFO" flaps are also termed waves or another way to express the same image would be to say, they have a transient coherence.

One wonders while wandering...

Message From The Country

"Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth" - Ludwig Borne

This post began when I went down to the river of the internet to see what was either caught in a whirlpool or was floating by in these times and for a change of pace, like this river I was wandering with no particular goal in mind, which is unusual for yours truly.
After making a bonfire out of the prosaic goals and tripe of Ufology in order to ward off the winter of our cultural diaspora, I realized, like Laurel and Hardy in “Out West”, I was chopping up the train in order to fuel the locomotive, dismantling the architecture as kindling in order to move forward out of the bottom lands, the wetlands and soggy swamp of the American landfill. 
Lately, I have been reading comments in a variety of spots pronouncing the subject of UAP to be superfluous, without any pragmatic value, humorous, a trifle..that sort of thing. What is fascinating to observe is that they are commenting on the social movement rather than the totem of that movement which remains as cogently mysterious and provocative as it was as far back as most of us can recall.
http://tarnsitsandstations.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-social-movement-known-as-ufology.html
The channeling of an open ended question as it is evidenced in the once and future practice of Ufology begs the question if it has any message? 
The message may be more pertinent to the practitioners than to the phenomenon itself. Perhaps this calls for a further examination before the subject is relegated to a footnote.

"It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist. It is of first-class importance that our answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx should be in step with how we conduct our civilisation, and this should in turn be in step with the actual workings of living systems.

A major difficulty is that the answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx is partly a product of the answers that we already have given to the riddle in its various forms. Kurt Vonnegut gives us wary advice - that we should be careful what we pretend because we become what we pretend. And something like that, some sort of self-fulfilment, occurs in all organisations and human cultures. What people presume to be ‘human’ is what they will build in as premises of their social arrangements, and what they build in is sure to be learned, is sure to become a part of the character of those who participate.

And along with this self-validation of our answers, there goes something still more serious - namely, that any answer which we promote, as it becomes partly true through our promoting of it, becomes partly irreversible. There is a lag in these affairs."

Gregory Bateson - Innocence & Experience. 1987 - p.178 

The Archaeology of Ufology

Looking back on the subjects contained in this blog , there are several consistent themes threaded among several subjects. One of which is our habitation in several realities versus one consistent reality. One could substitute the plural noun of worlds for realities. All of this brings to mind Aldous Huxley’s metaphor of the human being as an amphibian. I suppose you could apply this theme to the past and make a comparison to the existence of geological time with it’s many layers and strata making up the surface and environment in which we dwell for a insubstantial space measured by time.
Those of a certain metaphysical bent compare this to the faceting of cut stone that has a geometric set of relationships but my own view is that there are no easy demarcations between these realities or worlds and that they fold into one another as a transception that also holds intermediary forms that defy categorization.
Another theme is immeasurabilty as compared to the process of imaging and it’s counterpart of imagination. Depending on what chair you occupy, you could view this as a barrier or a recognition that there are more questions than answers.
Further, all of this appears to suggest realities beyond our sensory systems and if we deconstruct what we consider the fabric of our environment, it seems that this recognition that Einstein described as the illusions of materiality suggest that while physicality is a facet of the realities much more exists, so then how do we approach this with any degree of pragmatism, while remaining optimistic?
Truth is always pliable.
One could protect one’s sense of the universe as a fine swiss watch by adopting a stoic approach or even becoming so worn as to become cynical and yet even these are psychological buffers against naturally occurring questions placed within a transient existence whose unanswered nature within both these geological layers within generations are as perennial as self seeding plants.
If you superimposes purpose beyond the safety of existentialism as simply another pose or reaction, this life appears to be set up where questioning certainly has a lot of fertiliser and one might say my harsh treatment of the Ufology social movement infers an overall stance that none of the above is worth pursuing. Nothing could be further invalidated or validated beyond this.
Personally, I suspect this is not so.
Any sort of mobility we have has a sort of pushing while being pulled when it comes to faddism, or more sober considerations.
After publishing my last post on the social movement of Ufology as an outgrowth of materialism, I found new evidence of this mindset as one author suggested that the extraterrestrials did not land because we are not ready for future shock. Another suggested we have microbial aliens living as biological parasites within us which harkens back to Scientology’s mythos of a similar stripe. Refuting this sort of thing is a fool’s errand in the sense that a better balance might be achieved by the excavation of the roots of where these linear explanatory story lines originate. 
There is a presumptive ownership of theory that becomes a territorial prerogative, something to be defended or oppressed as seen in the rancor that is exhibited in this movement that mirrors corporatism. Theories as proverbial brand names. Should we rid ourselves of expertise?

"The more oppressive is the presence of a pre-emptive outline to the conversation, the more the conversation is about controlling and predicting people and events. This is frequently seen in conversations for recriminations and attribution of blame. It is the main recurrent conversational form in many businesses. On the other hand, in the absence of a discernible outline and in the presence of the encouragement of active participation we see the emergence of a high level of genuine, spontaneous improvisations by the members of the conversation. This is sometimes seen in organisations which implement 'empowerment' and 'participation' properly." - Vincent Kenny

A Belief System Turned Strange

One can wonder about the dilution factor, the once clear aim regarding specifics becoming lost in the lines of transmission which is something the esoteric initiation process of ages ago attempted to ward off. This was the assurance that any knowledge gained would be preserved and not subject to innovations upon past advances in that regard. The would be student placing him or herself in the role of a teacher without knowing specifics regarding the pratfalls and tragicomedies of those who have passed along the same path long before our would be guru would make the first pronouncement ignorant of these realities.
One could even go so far as to say perhaps that the motivations change as a result of this.
Mistranslated by way of projections, bias and vested interest all seems to influence the core questions that through dilution become pseudo answers. It comes the the tipping point where the original aim is lost by the repetition of reading meanings within what is in effect simply gossip.
"...the older an automobile gets and the further it is from the engineer who designed it, the more complex it gets with multiple ‘pathologies’ and the more it takes on characteristics of a living thing - moods, caprice, etc. New cars are ‘it’ but an old car is ‘she’.
-Gregory Bateson
Whether you are referring to Democracy, or Ufology, its the same process. Which projection is the best or the most persuasive becomes the stuff of an proverbial epilogue to a lost aim.
All of this aforesaid commentary reminds me of Gurdjieff's purloined Biblical metaphor regarding the Tower of Babble which he represented as a international conference on life after death, the major issue is that none of the experts had experienced death. Perhaps this is a comment on expertise in this social movement.


The Aging of Ufology

One thing leads to another. Following the stream as it flows backward toward deconstruction of the present, I found myself in an obscure corner of this river Styx by rediscovering the archives of Robert Christgau as well as the seemingly lost art of the essayist and critic of popular musical culture. I randomly picked this or that essay to read and the more I read, the more I found a kinship with his aim, which was to go above and below the surface of appearances and attempt to assemble a perspective of this type of carnival or that..having in mind what he was writing about was his subject as a means rather than an end in of itself. The implications of a subject, it’s context, it’s possibilities and it’s flux.
Here is an atypical example of Chrisgau’s forensic examination of age poised against setting one’s self in a role that becomes a venus fly trap in order to catch the illusions of eternal youth which belongs not to age but to youth. A distinct aroma of American ballyhoo and tarted up fossilization..from skin cream to surgery, from erections that can last up to four hours to dying one’s beard to have that veneer of an ageless manikin. Its no wonder Christau took a page from Wilde’s “Portrait of Dorian Grey”...all using popular music as a foil, as a prop as a platform to see what holds up the stage scenery.
The aging of the Ufology crowd as contrasted to the aging of Rock and Roll.

http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/rock/mygen-93.php

Looking back at myself while looking back at him, I could see familiar and all too common themes of possibility as juxtaposed against play acting or the traps we fall into attempting to apply a banner to ourselves. Like the small elfin man I mentioned in my last posting who appeared at my shoulder at the grocery store to inform me that excess is a vapid counterpoint to the void, every so often there sounds a small bell that reverberates in the flurry of life, where existential reality ( one of many) strikes a zen pose as if to ask, what in the world are you doing here? Too busy building bridges to question where they lead?


The Parody of A Parody

Another aspect of Christgau’s essays is that he is one of the few critics who understand the fine line between sincerity and self satire. Of course then there is the playing against stereotypes in order to invent new forms, or reinvention of former poses or if you will, the art of portraiture in any popular medium whether it is the role of the essayist or a musician. Queen Elizabeth as a Grey Alien beneath the skin of a lizard according to a certain author, becomes a parody within a stereotype as portrayed by a painter known as an abduction "expert." Keep those cards and letters coming.
In this revisionism, the former hot dog vendors and pulp fiction writers of yore collectively known as Contactees become visionaries. Shoe prints become star maps.
More of my regular readers have an artistic proclivity than a die hard Ufologist dissecting immeasurable evidence and for that I am grateful and many an artist does not necessarily paint or create works as they are the work as Gurdjieff would suggest.
In going back through the musicology of my life following this reversed course of a river, I came back to The Move, just prior to their abandonment of power pop as navigated by a three legged dinosaur. In an astonishing act of precognition, there was the prophetic tune of “Cherry Blossom Clinic” that heralded the future advent of prescription drugs as a panacea for the panacea of the American Dream..the death tolls of overdose, the escape route that becomes a noose.
“Lock me up and throw away the key…”
Indeed.
One could stand atop the landfill and take a good look around at not only Ufology but at the nexus of the ink blot that is purpose that becomes a substitution anchored to productivity in churning out the deposits intangible and material that led to the social movement of Ufology
And it came back to me through The Move in that all of this is a “message from the country”, one that is disconcerting enough to make one look away and dismiss it in the cause of self absorption which might be equitable to self survival. None the less, it is there alongside of us everywhere we go or assume we are going as if carried away on a conveyor belt.
Is it overdue that Ufology reinvent itself? Or is silence a better alternative to nonsense?

The Social Movement Known As Ufology

I saw the advertisement pictured above that somehow remained with me as a illustration of the skeletal framework that lies beneath the veil of consumerism in the search to hang one's hat where there are no longer any coat racks that can stand up under their own weight as former beliefs that were foundational to a series of ideals, an idealism turned sour as it was imagined as a visionary nightmare by a William S Burroughs or the late Phillip K Dick. Or subsiquently as Mac Tonnies so elegantly fingered it .... as a "Post Human Blues"

Is this International Congress more of an effect than a cause? Is this an expression of a perverse idealism based on the society which created it?
The fingerprints of scientific materialism are all over this brand of what could best be described as a cargo cult of the American Dream.

Of course none of this has anything to do with the potential nature of the phenomenon itself and yet to this writer that is what makes it interesting with the additional impetus to write this being is that the cultural social movement that UAP\ UFO has inadvertently created is seldom commented upon.
As time progressed I realized that the social aspect of the phenomenon has very little to do with determining the nature of this anomaly and it simply reflects the society / cultural aspects of an unnamed shared anxiety..rightly or wrongly that frames it according to it's own history, past and present.

Let me explain..lets open up a portrait more illuminating to me than any minutia that any archivist can attribute to any sighting and endlessly debate without effect. More of a human condition than an extraterrestrial existentialism. More globally seen as an influenza lurking beneath all the protracted and abstracted theories any of us could muster on our best day to bedazzle ourselves to distract ourselves, to distance ourselves..but from what?  

Call it the new materialism, a sort of visionary mirror of the technological windshield we find ourselves perched as a mascot for anxiety roaring along at a breakneck speed admid blind curves and reactionary fundamentalists of every stripe.
Hand me the scalpel as I am about to dissect a corpse with pretense which has some resemblance that is lodged between Thomas Jefferson and Santa Claus that had crashed like a software error in a unidentified objectification that is also a projection of our own world. Something you won't witness at The 22nd Annual UFO Congress or for that matter, on cable television.

Seeking a new and improved materialism that will deliver us one way or another for what seemed like a fixed path of unpredictability akin to the survivalists death wish that expresses that the suspense is killing them. Either shoot me or save me as a didactic reaction to controlled chaos. Physicists pronouncing that we should hide under the brush and keep a low profile because the "other"might be us. in terms of sending signals off into the jungle, a sort of primeval instinct is at play among a dazzling array of technological magic tricks. Why?

The pared down question in this flurry of a miasma is one very basic question.
What will become of us? Or......What have we become?

In the open territory of youth it’s easy to imagine that you are not like everyone else and as you stubbornly stand like a rock in the midst of a torrent, the easy presumptions of innocence get worn away and through erosion ,the rough edges get smoothed over and one day you wake up and you realise that you have more in common with your suburban neighbors than you care to admit.

One could say that this is the story of what was once called Ufology, a science without measurement, more of a social movement than a methodology. From the prelude that was the onset of the atomic era wherein Allied bombers penetrated the territorial airspace of the Third Reich, to the mutated monsters that followed the horror of Hiroshima in theaters across America that were welded to the paranoia of the Cold War, the superimpositions of an evolution in the  consensus mindset  of Americans represented the naivete of a technology and science out of control that had taken on a life of it’s own, as well as a profound loss of innocence accompanied by the existentialists that heralded the death of God.

Former pulp fiction writers developed the science of Ufology as well as it’s mythology, all in the context of a social movement. Some went further and developed religions most notable was L Ron Hubbard and Scientology that incorporated alien engrams. A former hot dog vendor appropriately located next to Mount Palomar claimed to have contacted what later became commonly known as extraterrestrials, whether they were Venusian or otherwise.

A sort of semi-bourgeoisies stirs around in the midst of extreme weather, like a slow hydraulic leak of groundwater that seeps through the foundations of a house, flipping through one hundred channels of patented crap, you think back and begin to realise a great deal of recording time was devoted to back-filling what you thought you were…. versus what you are.   And this personal reflection perhaps mirrors Ufology as a social movement.

Today snowflakes the size of notebook paper drift down in such a dense fog that has followed a deep freeze, and in the background the dishwasher slogs away in a rhythmic pulsation, the dirt from yesterday’s meal.  You have no particular place you have to be and the ennui so familiar as a second skin is like an itch that cannot be scratched, a sort of 21st Century post atomic blues.

Eat what’s on your plate because there are kids starving in China who are would be grateful to have it. Remember that? I wonder at times about that. Perhaps in between navigating the aisles of a grocery store, remembering that ghost that suddenly appeared next to me several years ago in the same place while I was staring blankly at twenty different varieties of cereal pretending to myself that I gave a damn which one I would choose. Next to my shoulder was a spry elfin sort of elderly man and I said just as much to myself as to him, “There are too many choices..”

He looked me squarely in the eye in a sort of penetrating way and said, “Thats the point of it, isn’t it?” I chuckled and turned around thinking of some clever rejoinder when it was immediately apparent he had instantaneously vanished. Like an idiot I sped away with my little metal cart up and down the aisles trying to find him to no avail. No one simply vanishes like that.

Too many choices and too few choices, being expanded to be pared down  to be floating in a Sargasso Sea of cereal. Coco Puffs or Granola?  Ennui or satiation? Selling or be sold?

This is also the story of a land of plenty that at the same time had a spiritual emptiness at it’s core as 2,000 year old beliefs were suddenly prone to the science of a microscope and everything that was taken at face value became fair game for rethinking, all of this within the purview of an increasingly technological culture.

I was browsing away much like today with no particular aim in mind as the little voice in my head recorded long ago from a Sufi dialog, that said for some time is counted for others it is not. Some have things to accomplish due to their own volition in relation to their own cognisance of their being evaporated away imperceptibly like Frosty The Snowman while debating between a hot dog or a hamburger on some tangent of the moment only to find it’s difficult to recall what I did yesterday in any detail.

For a generation weaned on Marvel Comics, and The Blob from Outer Space, the idea or even the remote possibility that extraterrestrials have visited the earth seems as naive as the spiritual theologies that stood rigid against change, while the popular media and anyone wanting to make a paltry dollar from this social movement remains running on autopilot. Why is this so? Simply because nothing has come along to replace it as a technological religion buried in a social movement.

The physicality of being embedded in this American life is like walking uphill on a log flume and the very certainty, the predictability the increasing velocity of technological science in everyday life long since taken out of the context of smaller communities or a vote, has created a subculture of idealism that is as old as the concept of a savior and a devil alike. 

The grey aliens who paralyse their victims and intone “do as I say”, who have no eyes to look into, who steal the very nature from our bodies by way of abductees is a Jungian prescription for something that has gone terribly wrong in society represented in the images of colorless. clones who express empathy while their behavior reveals them to be sociopaths. Walk through this house of mirrors and you witness something that has been buried and yet takes an end run to appear as the "other" who are none other than what we most fear we as an aggregate sum have or will become.

Yet what is buried beyond this social movement, what is concealed behind ciphers behind the masks of that which we cannot admit to ourselves? Denial brings many sublimated desires to the foreground many of which have nothing to do with progress or productivity.

We want to have recognized within ourselves something we cannot see or touch, a sense of purpose beyond what car we drive or what cereal we eat.There is an emptiness under the chrome, a rudderless loud chatter, nervous and distracted in the software of Facebook, a hunger to be recognized in a culture that worships the obvious substitution of fame only to find it an addiction that leads to a marketplace cultivation of dead ends, empty bottles, discarded syringes.

This is the context of the social movement of Ufology.

The American Dream is suffused within Ufology along with the ballyhoo of Broadway.

Ray Davies said it all better than I ever could a long time ago. Have we found Shangri La only to have buried it under the refuse of satiation where the point of the exercise has become a empty running joke without a punchline in sight and the idealism of the Ufology movement in it's very materiality reflects that lost civilization, that lost kingdom? If it is found will it be in our own backyard?

The Psychology Of Anticipation

The Un-Haunted

The premier question of anomalous experiential anomalies is the question immediately posed in the observers mind, was it my imagination?  Images and imagination could be turned against perception by anticipation wherein what is anticipated is formulated as input that derives a expression of physicality, or, it may be a case of superimposing preconceptions upon prosaic events in a case of mistaken identity due to preconceived assumptions.  Which is it? It may be in the eye of the beholder than in circumspect may defy both measurement and the laboratory as they too, carry with them the weight of hypothesis to be affirmed or denied. Anticipation in relation to one's sense of probable outcomes is nearly impossible to avoid, whether it is biased from past experience or the question posed is an abstraction of a more subtle nature perhaps of a certain philosophic bent. 

On a deeply buried level we have Gertrude Stein saying much the same thing as Gregory Bateson, that a rose is a rose because we call it a rose, and what we imagine as our consciousness, our awareness of ourselves in relation to our environment and that very aspect of variability, accident versus intent, is incommensurable to statistical analysis because we have no idea what consciousness is... although we label it as a proverbial rose. 

In many ways a recent paper brought to mind the identification of the mind as an architecture while we have no means to determine what it is and by way of relations what even our most prosaic observations represent, especially if they resist repeat-ability beyond our daily habits or the apparent actions and reactions of physicality in of themselves. These are effects and not causation.

A case of biocentrism run amuck? Observable relations and un-observable relations seem to mirror the mind\brain relationship. We can eat an entire meal without ever having stepped foot in the kitchen or having gone to the farms where the ingredients and were grown and yet this metaphor seems apt where the prosaic and the paranormal walk hand in hand when it comes to the confounding aspects of attribution in relation to experiential cognizance.

An interesting paper published in the SPR regarding psychological anticipation or what the author, Chris Romer termed  a psychological contagion case. That being said, this study is too small a sampling to provide anything definitive one way or another, although the report carries a patina by it's form, that it is scientific, but to this writer the results while in a scientific format do not represent an accurate survey.
On one hand, attribution to paranormal causation by the respondents are absent while the suggestion is that one should focus on such events and keep a diary of such events in a format that is well..self referential. 
The concept was to send a survey to those who have never experienced anything they would consider an experiential anomaly to determine if a survey constructed to indicate a "difference" in paranormal terms would have an influence on their observations. 
None of this proves any theory in particular which is interesting as I suspect a larger survey in scope would be just as inconclusive. Did they observe genuine events because they were more attenuated to observation? Did the events not occur and were the result of suggestion? The author seems to make a peremptory conclusive argument in favor of the presentation of the survey skewed the results of the survey in of itself.
A good example of the extreme difficulties in science while in my opinion, it is not scientific, it illustrates the gaping holes in the measurement of observation as a process of abstractions created from statistical models.

http://jerome23.wordpress.com/2013/01/23/re-investigating-un-haunted-houses/

One aspect of this paper brings to mind that lately I have been unintentionally bridging the gap between my past and present as in the last post here entitled something like "Who Throws The Ball?" made me realize how utterly simplistically I once viewed the realities I inhabited and that this may serve me to comprehend how my current conjectures may be made of the same imaginary lego blocks of presumed rationality in the present and yet that keeps the ball in play, in mid court I suppose the medium is the message as far as not encasing myself in amber or a box.
What do I anticipate?
I would say that anything I have contributed is neither worthy of a heaven or a hell as a presumptive and conclusive epilogue as I suspect taking my own ego in check I have done nothing that is so important as to warrant either alternative, but then one never knows....in relation to a butterfly effect and yet I plod on machete in hand cutting a swath with no particular destination in mind.

Who Throws The Ball?

UAP As State(s) Without Intent

We take our machetes into the swamp of considerations and seek new tea leaves with which to read portents, that in turn would supply us with a context to formulate basic questions....

Several years ago I pushed my way into the dense cosmology of Ibn Al Arabi's equally dense materials whose contextual positioning of essential question were positioned in the relations of his philosophic stance of One and that his exploration of our orientations was based upon "God" and "Not God" which then led into a formulation of a question related to human existence..Who throws the ball?"

Indeed.

One of the chief features of this life has been the disconnection and deconstruction of my personal intent(s) from what events have occurred as a result of them. Then in a dark moment of reviewing my own lapses of judgement I realized there is a connection of self deconstruction between the personal and historical worlds in the mistranslations of intent and effect.  

More specifically the allusions and illusions of steering outcomes that seemingly cancel outcomes from intent, or worse, make situations unmanageable and more complex

I was watching a brilliantly portrayed biography of Henry Ford on the PBS program “American Experience “the other night and was struck by the extent he was repelled in his later years by his creation of the mass produced automobile that became an uncontrollable agent in the destruction of his own universe, anchored in a lost world that he played a major role in burying.

At the end of his life, he was in full retreat, hiding in a 19th Century Disneyland he named Greenfield Village, while the monstrous Ford River Rouge plant pounded out a never ending stream of automobiles bearing his name.

A Soft Machine lyric from decades ago came to mind:

“It begins with a blessing and ends with a curse, making things better by making them worse.”

Perhaps the weaknesses of human psychology (which is also my own) is the deconstruction of intent, and then we must ask what do we intend and to what purpose are our efforts to create the physicality of outcomes is sought?  

All issues, problematic considerations seem to have intent behind them as I noted in a previous post regarding the deconstruction of mathematics as applied the universe being portrayed as a variant of a control system beginning with the desert religions of 2,000 years ago that are now prevalent in physics in the endless search for a “god particle” or as it is reflected in prevailing theories of UAP. The critical assumptions of what is “I” versus “Not  I” on a metaphysical basis lead to questions of purpose and this is reflected in us and without us toward the exteriorised universe of our environment.

Then it comes down to our situation as an isthmus between two sides of a mirror. The very local that we inhabit versus the non local we navigate. The adaptation we note as personality versus the transpersonal, all of which as a matter of baggage has been superimposed on the UAP phenomenon. Call this anthropomorphism or projection bias.

Perhaps crib blindness is apt as we are so embedded in our orientation that it is impossible to determine any comparative basis to analyse any portent or outcome. Again, this is the seldom commented upon theme buried in UAP.

The enormous temptation to simplify our universe is deconstructed with a wave of a seeming magic wand in this and that may be an answer onto itself.

The domestication by familiar terms of the unfamiliar leads to hybridised images, events that defy physics.  Instead of recognising our own intent as a contingency of necessity we deconstruct our own parameters by the placing of markers.

At the crux of this conundrum is the approach, do we approach this or ignore this situation? And if we approach this situation ( which also applies to UAP amongst an endless listing) we see that recognition that we imagine we are conscious in the fullest sense, does not equate or is transferable to any foreseeable outcome in the form of an answer and yet we have an entire menu of extreme reactions in the form of petrified opinions as if  a good offense was a good defense but what is being defended? Our own deconstruction of intent?

Behind every pronouncement we have philosophical issues that most walk away from as if one could have a state of disassociation from their own embedded position between “I” and “Not I “..that suggests very strongly on a subliminal basis that most research into UAP and it’s associated issues  act as a form of denial that there are no control systems in place that are modelled on human prototypes of intent. The very word intent must be forensically examined.

I recall a correspondence with a well known researcher who worked for Robert Bigelow and I asked him “What would you ask a extraterrestrial?”  He surprised me with his sincerity in that he related the question had never occurred to him.

Has this occurred also to NASA?

The formulation not a question always contains postulates. In computing this reality is expressed by garbage in, garbage out. I suspect if there were set and subset, the signifier and the signified it would lead to our own landing on this planet as an adaptation of self awareness however we define self that is running as fast as it’s velocity would carry it, to prelinguistic states long before the formulation of the desert religions, and so when Vallee suggests the markers have been moved by UAP, the answer is far from clear.  

The best suspicion I have is a rebellion not by intent but by state that the UAP expresses and it is our state versus “Not I” that it is communicating and so pushes back at every opportunity to suggest either blatantly or subtly that our own orientation is amiss.

To this writer, this is what is intriguing..Not extraterrestrials, not conspiracies earthbound or otherwise but what is missing, what is so close to us and yet so patently unidentifiable and so I perhaps am best suited to be a companion to our forebears to sit ignorantly in the face of the inexplicable and wonder as I wander.  
In conclusion perhaps pantheism is a batter match for the UAP phenomenon as an approach inasmuch we could apply UAP to the intent of weather.