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Reply To: UFO: A Living Myth of Transformation,” with mythologist Norland Têllez”

#74168
mythistorian
Participant

    “My Mother (an Astronomer) saw some unusual “phenomena” both naked eye and through telescope but could only describe what she observed. She never pinned it down beyond referencing her viewings as unidentified. A big round light going behind a mountain (not the sun)…and…
    I remember seeing a line of lights that stayed in one place for about 30 mins before moving in night sky. That one peaked my Mother’s interest.”

    So you have seen them, Sunbug! You have! I am so glad you decided to join our COHO! I myself have never had such privilege but I am still hopeful that one day I’ll get my chance. My son and his friend reported seeing three hovering lights that suddenly flashed away from sight.
    And I am glad you picked up on this, always overlooked quality of their phenomenality. Not just the way they appear but also how they disappear speaks to the essence of their non-essence.* (This notion of the non-essence is actually not my own invention but a formulation by Martin Heidegger) But as I said above:

    If the emphasis of UFO literature tends to be on their phenomenal appearance, a truly mythic perspective would underline the fact of their disappearance as well. As a quality of their transcendence, their continued disappearance is a positive sign of their mythic [non-]essence. It indicates a certain negation, the registration of a void or fundamental lack—the “un” of the unconscious—as it “appears” within the order of conscious knowledge. This lack of substantial identity is an essential part of their phenomenology. In their very designation as “Unidentified,” the shape of the unknown is made manifest dream. As Jung pointed to the basic structure of our [lack of] knowledge about them, it consists in the simple fact that “something is seen, but one doesn’t know what.” (CW10: ¶591)

    And you are absolutely right that it is this sense of hovering between the real and unreal, between being and nothingness, that may be what Jung, like the rest of us mythophiles, enjoy about the visionary flight of mythic consciousness, which takes place in the in-between spaces of our phenomenological experience of being in the world.