[Shaahayda Rizvi]

Such a fascinating essay dear Norland,

There is much to read and absorb,  plus the thread is enhanced by Stephen and Sunbug with their own perspectives and their own little gems.

I’ll begin with this line, “. . the fact that they are both real and unreal, here and not-here, manifestly self-evident and suddenly gone.” This  fits well with my personal UFO story.

My Story

One day, almost 40 years ago, while driving back from work, I spotted a circular light up in the sky. It was dark, and not much traffic on the highway either. The circular light followed my car, even after the the exit from the highway, and down a few country roads, and right down into my driveway. It became larger, larger than any light I had ever ever seen, a light from nowhere, that is, not plugged into a transmission line, a light pole, an electric outlet, none, just hanging onto the driveway. Not knowing a thing about it, was quite scary, and I openly pleaded with the light to go away, which it did!!

Next day, I spoke with a neighbor about the light that followed me, and the neighbor appeared unconvinced, as if to say, you might be hallucinating, a bit tired I suppose. I left it at that. But that one incident became a very memorable event and still plays back, as if it was just yesterday.

Forty years forward, with geo-stationary-satellites up in the sky, monitoring our cell telephones, guiding the GPS systems, working as eyes and ears of this earth, as they look no different than the celestial stars up in the sky, I have a different view of that light. On that later.

Years later, after having read various stories and reports released by the Pentagon,  I think UFOs are scientific objects produced by scientists who are researching at a level with a field that not many know about, or use yet, or have seen, and its a privilege when the Shamans of space technology, point that light upon you. They chose to say, “hello, there”.  What for? For what reason? That is indeed a mystery, and maybe they want it to be that way.

As you so beautifully express, “In its very elusive aspect, UFOs represent the alternating logic of being and nothingness which structures the process of becoming, the processes of change and metamorphosis. As a modern symbol of transcendence, UFOs stand for the process of total transformation and self-creation in the noumenality of space-time.”

Thank You Norland

Shaahayda

[Shaahayda Rizvi]

Sunbug

I can relate to your mother’s story completely because something similar happened to me, and the light stayed with me, or followed me for a very long time.

You wrote, “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.

My UFO story

One day, almost 40 years ago, while driving back from work, I spotted a circular light up in the sky. It was dark, and not much traffic on the highway either. The circular light followed my car, even after the the exit from the highway, and down a few country roads, and right down into my driveway. It became larger, larger than any light I had ever ever seen, a light from nowhere, that is, not plugged into a transmission line, a light pole, an electric outlet, none, just hanging onto the driveway. Not knowing a thing about it, was quite scary, and I openly pleaded with the light to go away, which it did!!

Next day, I spoke with a neighbor about the light that followed me, and the neighbor appeared unconvinced, as if to say, you might be hallucinating, a bit tired I suppose. I left it at that. But that one incident became a very memorable event and still plays back, as if it was just yesterday.

Forty years forward, with geo-stationary-satellites up in the sky, monitoring our cell telephones, guiding the GPS systems, working as eyes and ears of this earth, as they look no different than the celestial stars up in the sky, I have a different view of that light. On that later.

Years later, after having read various stories and reports released by the Pentagon,  I think UFOs are scientific objects produced by scientists who are researching at a level with a field that not many know about, or use yet, or have seen, and its a privilege when the Shamans of space technology, point that light upon you. They choose to say, “hello, there”.  What for? For what reason? That is indeed a mystery, and maybe they want it to be that way.

Sunbug, I think UFOs are lights that our Shamans in space technology (like your mother) are working with, and once in a while, they let us peek into their world, because explaining the whole mystery would be much too difficult. It would be like Apple trying to explain how all the information that is on the iphone is also connected to those shining stars (geo-stationary-satellites) up in the sky.

As Joe Campbell wrote in Myths to Live By:  “Our mythology now, therefore, is to be of infinite space and its light, which is without as well as within. Like moths, we are caught in the spell of its allure, flying to it outward, to the moon and beyond, and flying to it, also, inward. On our planet itself all dividing horizons have been shattered. ”

Shaahayda

[mythistorian]

Thank you Shaahayda, thank you so much for your contribution and wonderful UFO story (I was secretly hoping of coaxing such testimonials from our mythophiles), it is a wonderful read and indeed brings to mind precisely the passage you cited on the logic of becoming in the negativity of their disappearance.

This act of disappearance is an archetypal quality of a certain underworld experience. In the context of Greek mythology, it is the realm of Hades and Persephone, a realm of invisibility. In the context of Maya mythology, it is the quality of Xibalba, the turning away from life, the power of making invisible, of invisibilizing all reality.

Xibalba is a movement into the underworld, a turning away from visibility and phenomenality, in the mysterious pulsations of death-drive. In a strange way, stepping into a realm beyond the pleasure principle, we are entering a terrain beyond phenomenology as well, beyond the shinning essence, into a kind of anti-phenomenology which is caught in the play between the visible and the invisible. This process of de-phenomenalization is what Jungian analyst Wolfgang Giegerich might have called the process of “absolute negative interiorization.” Rather than a transcendental phenomenology of the essence, the disappearing UFO points to a descendental process of the non-essence. In its miraculous self-vanishing, UFO follows the unconscious movement of myth as a movement into the mythic unconscious. In my own work with Maya mythology I have described this movement as a descendental journey of Xibalban depth-interiorization.

The other part of my statement about the UFO being a symbol of total transformation and self-creation, is a little easier to explain. For it is generally acknowledged that if UFOs turned out to be real, if they really came forth to establish their presence, it would “change everything.” Our religious dogmas and scientific convictions would all have to be revised; our place in the universe would undergo a new kind of Copernican revolution in the discovery that “we are not alone,” etc…

[mythistorian]

Of course, we should also pay our dues to Erik Von Daniken, who seems to be in line with the phenomenological approach we are taking here—except that he is not. Nevertheless, he deserves credit for attempting to set the ground of speculation about mythic beings throughout history on a positivistic fantasy, a kind of literalism which is the exact opposite of the Jungian approach. One could wonder why Daniken ignores Jung and his postulate of the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Although you could easily see what the notion of psychic archetypes would do to Daniken’s theory: it would tear it to pieces.

The approach I would like to take is not exactly the road of transcendental phenomenology. But neither is it the existential road of subjective experience and faith—although these two belong to the full complexity of my theory. And obviously, I wouldn’t take the Danikenean pseudo-scientific approach either. Like the Twins from the Popol-Vuh, my road leads to Xibalba and relates to a descendental journey of interpretation into the depths of being.

[Shaahayda Rizvi]

Thank you Dear Norland,

Just fascinating and mind boggling and to be honest, lot of what you write is well above my head. My experience falls in the subjective category, no doubt.

I did some reading on the Maya Twin Heros, and on Xibalban to understand some of your references, but it’s going to be along road. You write, “UFO follows the unconscious movement of myth as a movement into the mythic unconscious. In my own work with Maya mythology I have described this movement as a descendental journey of Xibalban depth-interiorization.” I can relate to depth-interiorization, post UFO disappearance, into the realm of Hades and Persephone, a realm of invisibility.  I’d love to read this research, perchance understand a bit.

Thank you Norland

Shaahayda.

[sunbug]

Shaahayda,

What an experience you had! Close-up!

Exciting, eerie and perhaps a little frightening. But you were left with wonder.
The feeling I gather from your description is the light had a non-solid quality, which definitely would give it that numinous aspect that Norland is suggesting. Maybe your experience was more like a feeling/vision of energy…glowing in light. Wow!
Did you feel any heat? Or hairs rising on neck? Fascinating!!

Sometimes my imagination has toyed with the flickering thought that some of those “tech shamans,” you describe, may be graphic artists and mathematicians and every once in a while they have the inclination to make those more complex doodles in some crop to while the time. Just an amusing fancy.
I think the reason that sometimes humans gravitate towards the more “solid” side of “imagination/conjecture,” might be related to boundaries. Whenever there is a boundary set no matter how valid/credible, it seems like there is some kind of psyche urge to cross it…and to see if there is anything beyond. (Alas part of the human mythic nature?)

If the boundary represents what cannot be…maybe it feels like a call “to put away childish things.” But that wonder is still searching or waiting for an experience for something. And sometimes a conjecture work like Daniken’s or others grabs attention and becomes a something. Perhaps in “defiance” of that Other Boundary Set.
YET what you suggest Norland is an in-between, where both the insubstantiality of a phenomena, which also has a physical effect beckons the Wonder back to more open spaces.
After all, when you mention seeing these type of phenomena, there is no foregone conclusion the phenomena must be Extraterrestrial even if that idea fancies with our imagination.
I sense that you are approaching the phenomena without a direct definition, which would be the mythic and transcendent way: to experience them and appreciate them “as is.”
And this open approach does not judge those who have experienced these happenings, or seeings, nor does it discount these experiences, because it is looking at experience and definition in a more mythic manner.
Speaking of this phenomenology, it occurs that the beings of Every “Dream Time,” from Down Under to the British Isles were always “Beings of In-between.”

When the more direct physical  “alien” approach was applied from Roswell onward…then the story was re-invented…interpreted…maybe they were aliens instead.

You have come at the story from a right angle…looking from a different perspective that is not fully expected.
The appearance and disappearance of the UFOs does indeed resemble the rise of a “sun,” and descent or setting with these phenomena. The lights for certain! (Which from Shaahayda’s story feels like less of a “ship aspect,” and more of a phenomenal aspect.
But even with the more solid viewings

They come in various shapes…and shapes are very interconnected with myths and the psyche but I’m talking to the head choirs on this!

And those images/phenomena  have evolved up from the saucer…to coming to place or shape of transparent light…going from solid to transcendent? Coming and going in the field of space time or eternally outside of it? Resting in the underworld before rising to reclaim our imagination on another night, leaving an image imprinted in our minds like Walter De la Mare’s “silence surging softly backwards when the plunging hooves were gone.” (“The Traveler.”)

De la Mare also leaves his poem in the in-between. There is no definition or form for “They,” in the house. Only the form of shadows…which are both a wavering imagination of “something,”but also remain insubstantial. Waiting for the next Traveler to discover, while they rest in their underworld of uncertainty.
And perhaps it’s the same with the UFOs…waiting to be discovered, manifesting before us, tugging at our wonder and uncertainty…drawing us back once more to the Mythic Mind.

 

[Robert Juliano]

Jung, UFOs, and the Mundus Imaginalis

I wrote this note a couple of years ago, the content of which I think is relevant to this thread. Recently, there have been more and more stories in the mainstream media about sightings of UFOs by US Navy pilots, some of which have been recorded on the aircrafts’ imaging devices. Unfortunately, the conversation about this subject quickly degrades into the profoundly unhealthy dichotomy of “are they real or not real.” The approach that Jung took with respect to this phenomena constitutes a middle way between real and not real that is ontologically justified.

Jung published Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (in Collected Works, Volume 10) in 1958, one of his last works. In that work, Jung gave three categories of UFO experiences based on all of the data he had reviewed:

• Internal only (unconscious fantasy emerges about the UFO, possibly due to primary perception)
• External only (radar detection only but UFO invisible to the human eye)
• Internal/External (primary perception + radar/photograph corroboration of the UFO)

From this, he concluded in paragraph 591 that “something is seen, but one doesn’t know what.” That these experiences are tremendously important cannot be overstated. In paragraph 608, Jung wrote that the mass sightings and other experiences of UFOs indicates “a psychological situation common to all mankind” where its basis is “an emotional tension having its cause in a situation of collective distress or danger, or in a vital psychic need.” And, in paragraph 789, he writes “The psychic situation of mankind and the UFO phenomenon as a physical reality bear no recognizable causal relationship to one another, but they seem to coincide in a meaningful manner.”

The question is how can one look at the UFO phenomenon in such a way that intelligent and meaningful dialogue can occur. Jung’s work in active imagination, alchemy, synchronicity, and his use of depth psychological amplification and analysis of the UFO experience data gives us a way to do that.

In Psychoid, Psychophysical, P-subtle! Alchemy and a New Worldview by Dr Veronica Goodchild, she describes a psychic realm that lies in between psyche and matter accessible by the imagination, the vehicle used by Jung in his experiments with the unconscious resulting in Red Book and which was used by the alchemists in their opus. This realm goes by a number of different names – the unity of the psychophysical background world, the unus mundus, and the mundus imaginalis (from Dr. Henry Corbin’s Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal) to name a few. This is the realm of the subtle bodies with which Jung interacted in the Red Book. Crucially, this realm is argued to be ontologically real by Dr. Corbin instead of just metaphorical and symbolic.

It’s important to note that Jung himself saw the process of individuation as creating the subtle body, one made of matter and spirit and which overcomes the split between body and psyche. Dr. Goodchild writes “individuation is the creation of this subtle body … here in this life.” This subtle body was “thought to survive physical death, and it would be the body—a kind of psychic body that nevertheless had ‘substance’ and contained your essence, or quintessence … that you would take with you when you sloughed off your earthly form.”

Instead of seeing the UFO phenomenon via the dichotomy of real or not real, we can, instead, see it as a manifestation of this in-between realm. And, instead of expending massive amounts of energy trying to answer this question of real/not-real, we can try to understand what such experiences mean. To do this, we can employ the methods available to us in depth psychology when working with the manifestations of the unconscious. This is what Jung did in his essay on UFOs – he looked at the experiences of UFOs in dreams, art, and real life through a depth psychological lens and tried to find its underlying meaning. This, in my opinion, can be an approach which can lead to intelligent and meaningful dialogue. For, far more important than whether UFOs are real or not real is what these experiences are trying to tell us about the psychic situation of human beings.

An illustration of this last point is in order, but it comes from outside the field of depth psychology. The late Dr. John Mack was head of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School (he later collaborated with Dr. Goodchild in a number of areas including UFOs). He was asked by a friend to look into the experiences of those who claimed to have been repeatedly abducted by aliens. In all, he worked with 200+ such cases, recording their experiences as carefully as he could and then analyzing the complete corpus of information. It should be noted that many of those experiencers were so traumatized by their ordeal that they required hypnosis to aid in their conscious recall of their experiences.

From these records, Dr. Mack was able to piece together a larger pattern which he called the “Alien Abduction Phenomenon.” Though these 200+ experiencers did not know one another, their descriptions in a number of areas were mutually corroborative. But, one part of their experience seems to me to be absolutely critical and may give us clues about the psychic situation of human beings. The experiencers state that one part of their experience was where the aliens show them two images side-by-side. The first image is of Earth as it was very long ago. The second image is of Earth as it is now. The sight of this is so profoundly disturbing to them that some have dedicated their lives toward improving this planet. Perhaps this is part of the psychic situation of human beings we urgently need to become aware of.

[mythistorian]

“One day, almost 40 years ago, while driving back from work, I spotted a circular light up in the sky. It was dark, and not much traffic on the highway either. The circular light followed my car, even after the the exit from the highway, and down a few country roads, and right down into my driveway. It became larger, larger than any light I had ever ever seen, a light from nowhere, that is, not plugged into a transmission line, a light pole, an electric outlet, none, just hanging onto the driveway. Not knowing a thing about it, was quite scary, and I openly pleaded with the light to go away, which it did!!”

Thank you Shaahayda, and also Sunbug for bringing our attention back to your remarkable experience, quoted above. I am not sure what any of us would have done if we were followed—not to say targeted—so particularly by a circular light capable of shifting sizes. I am sure your neighbor was not prepared to corroborate any such encounter as it defies our “normal” understanding of everyday reality. Nothing prevents us from granting the status of “paranormal experience” to such close encounters of the unidentified kind. If you’re neighbor would have been a standard psychiatrist he would have instantly thought: “paranoic-schizophrenic delusion.” But that is again the positivistic approach which thinks it “knows” the psychic being. If we stick with the phenomenological approach, on the other hand, we stick with the vanishing image as it pulls us into the depths of being.

As Sunbug remarked, your description of the phenomenon as a radiating light and not a spherical solid does suggest the translucent quality of a numinous experience, an encounter with a subtle body inhabiting that in-between space. As Sunbug wrote so beautifully and Robert Juliano elaborated so thoughtfully in his contribution with the concept of the mundus imaginalis, it is in this liminal space where the mythic imagination comes most alive.
I am very pleased that we have all arrived at the perspective of the in-between, as Robert Juliano wrote:

“Instead of seeing the UFO phenomenon via the dichotomy of real or not real, we can, instead, see it as a manifestation of this in-between realm.”

And of course, this liminality of the numinous encounter is an archetypal quality of mythic beings as such. This is what I opened with in my Mythblast, the noumenous liminality which Sunbug also developed:

“And this open approach does not judge those who have experienced these happenings, or seeings, nor does it discount these experiences, because it is looking at experience and definition in a more mythic manner. / Speaking of this phenomenology, it occurs that the beings of Every “Dream Time,” from Down Under to the British Isles were always “Beings of In-between.” […] The appearance and disappearance of the UFOs does indeed resemble the rise of a “sun,” and descent or setting with these phenomena. The lights for certain! (Which from Shaahayda’s story feels like less of a “ship aspect,” and more of a phenomenal aspect. / But even with the more solid viewings / They come in various shapes…and shapes are very interconnected with myths and the psyche but I’m talking to the head choirs on this!”

So I welcome Robert Juliano to the choir! What wonderful voices have come to join and grace us with their insights! I am deeply grateful to you all, not only for allowing me the pleasure any writer feels at being “understood” by his audience but also at the way you have all helped me expand my own understanding of this topic! My sincere thanks to all!

I do find intriguing Robert’s reminder of the alchemical framework of interpretation with the good work of Veronica Goodchild. She developed this approach with her husband Robert Romanyshyn as what they called an “alchemical hermeneutics.” I still have a small unpublished monograph which was disseminated at Pacifica Graduate Institute in the first decade of the 2000s entiled: Doing Research with Soul in Mind: The Alchemical Hermeneutic Method.

And indeed, the ability to hover in this in-between psyche and matter takes place within the psyche itself as the total space of the symbolic order of the collective mind. This in-between space is where the play of imagination enters in, shaping and creating an individual order of creation. Let us recall Corbin’s own words from his famous essay on the Mundus Imaginalis where he uses the notion of “images in suspense” recalling in our context the hovering UFOs:

“Technically, again, our thinkers designate it as the world of “Images in suspense” (mothol mo’allaqa). Sohravardī and his school mean by this a mode of being proper to the realities of that intermediate world, which we designate as Imaginalia. The precise nature of this ontological status results from vision any spiritual experiences, on which Sohravardi asks that we rely fully, exactly as we rely in astronomy on the observations of Hipparchus or Ptolemy. It should be acknowledged that forms and shapes in the mundus imaginalis do not subsist in the same manner as empirical realities in the physical world; otherwise anyone could perceive them. It should also be noted that the) cannot subsist in the pure intelligible world, since they have extension and dimension, an “immaterial” materiality, certainly, in relation to that of the sensory world, but, in fact, their own “corporeality” and spatiality (one might think here of the expression used by Henry More, a Cambridge Platonist, spissitudo spiritualis, an expression that has its exact equivalent in the work of Sadra Shirazi, a Persian Platonist). For the same reason, that they could have only our thought as a substratum would be excluded, as it would, at the same time, that they might be unreal, nothing; otherwise, we could not discern them, classify them into hierarchies, or make judgments about them. The existence of this intermediate world, mundus imaginalis, thus appears metaphysically necessary; the cognitive function of the Imagination is ordered to it; it is a world whose ontological level is above the world of the senses and below the pure intelligible world; it is more immaterial than the former and less immaterial than the latter.”

[Dennis Slattery]

Just a wonderful series of musings, quotes and deep insights on this topic that is sure to register close to 100 on the imagination meter. I love the exchanges thus far. I want to add just a few notes, perhaps even footnotes to what has been written. My own work this past year has been on what I am calling “The Mythology of Belief.” I have offered a few lectures and writing retreats on zoom to Jung groups in the US. I am tempted to call UFOs “Ultimate Fact Oppositions” in our current climate and wonder if the following might find a place under the umbrella of UFOs. My explorations took me to a book by a Melville scholar and historian. H. Bruce Franklin: MIA or Mythmaking in America: How and why belief in live POWs has possessed a nation. 

Published in 1992, Franklin decided to study the phenomenon of MIA/POWs and their “being and nonbeing” in Southeast Asia. I am borrowing that phrase from an early post by Norland. In spite of deep and thorough studies on the existence of MIAs/POWs which showed that there were none in captivity, the BELIEF insisted on being relegated to the level of fact. These, if I can bend things a bit, become UFOs, those whose beingness, however proven not to exist, clung to a belief that that they in fact did. But here is where he caught my attention early on: “A good working definition of myth is a story that is the core of someone’s else’s religion. . . Indeed, any truly functional myth, or religion, must seem essentially implausible and nonrational to nonbelievers, for its powers derive from its defiance and transcendence of perceived reality and ordinary thinking. That is, all myths require faith” (8).

Soon thereafter, Franklin cites a conservative Representative, Gillespie “Sonny” Montgomery of Mississippi, who was recognized at the time as more convinced and outspoken about this belief than any other member of Congress. His fervor convinced the House in 1975 to create the Select Committee on Missing Personal in Southeast Asia and to name him as its chair.” After many months of investigation the Committee concluded that there were no such individuals in camps in Southeast Asia. Here is the kicker: “Confronted with such overwhelming evidence, Montgomery ruefully confessed that his now shattered BELIEF (my emphasis) in live prisoners had been “based more on hope that fact and more on rumors than hard evidence, for like so many others I wanted to believe they were alive, so I did” (15).

Hope and fervor are the two watchwords that I wanted to highlight here. Now, how much or little this story is a convincing or possible analogy to the UFO sightings and the belief in them is open to comment. But I find that fervor and a conviction of a belief based on nothing more than DESIRE is where swaths of our current cultural psyche have taken hold and gripped hard.

Thanks for allowing me to play the UFO into another form of MIAs. And for all of your remarks above that took me back to Franklin’s insightful study on Belief and Myth. I sense that our beliefs often provide an infrastructure for our Myths.

[Stephen Gerringer]

Robert Juliano

I have long looked at these phenomena (not just UFO sightings, but alien abductions, sightings of the Virgin, as well as “ladies in white,” Black Dogs, fairy encounters, Yetis, Bigfoot, ghosts, and such) as occupying the imaginal realm, a’ la Henry Corbin, but had not yet had the time to compose a post on the subject; fortunately you covered that ground better than I could.

Thanks for your contribution to the conversation!

[mythistorian]

I welcome Robert Juliano to the choir! What wonderful voices have come to join and grace us with their insights! I am deeply grateful to you all, not only for allowing me the pleasure any writer feels at being “understood” by his audience but also at the way you have all helped me expand my own understanding of this topic! My sincere thanks to all!

I do find intriguing Robert’s reminder of the alchemical framework of interpretation with the good work of Veronica Goodchild. She developed this approach with her husband Robert Romanyshyn as what they called an “alchemical hermeneutics.” I still have a small unpublished monograph which was disseminated at Pacifica Graduate Institute in the first decade of the 2000s entiled: Doing Research with Soul in Mind: The Alchemical Hermeneutic Method.

And indeed, the ability to hover in this in-between psyche and matter takes place within the psyche itself as the total space of the symbolic order of the collective mind. This in-between space is where the play of imagination enters in, shaping and creating an individual order of creation. Let us recall Corbin’s own words from his famous essay on the Mundus Imaginalis where he uses the notion of “images in suspense” recalling in our context the hovering UFOs:

“Technically, again, our thinkers designate it as the world of “Images in suspense” (mothol mo’allaqa). Sohravardī and his school mean by this a mode of being proper to the realities of that intermediate world, which we designate as Imaginalia. The precise nature of this ontological status results from vision any spiritual experiences, on which Sohravardi asks that we rely fully, exactly as we rely in astronomy on the observations of Hipparchus or Ptolemy. It should be acknowledged that forms and shapes in the mundus imaginalis do not subsist in the same manner as empirical realities in the physical world; otherwise anyone could perceive them. It should also be noted that the) cannot subsist in the pure intelligible world, since they have extension and dimension, an “immaterial” materiality, certainly, in relation to that of the sensory world, but, in fact, their own “corporeality” and spatiality (one might think here of the expression used by Henry More, a Cambridge Platonist, spissitudo spiritualis, an expression that has its exact equivalent in the work of Sadra Shirazi, a Persian Platonist). For the same reason, that they could have only our thought as a substratum would be excluded, as it would, at the same time, that they might be unreal, nothing; otherwise, we could not discern them, classify them into hierarchies, or make judgments about them. The existence of this intermediate world, mundus imaginalis, thus appears metaphysically necessary; the cognitive function of the Imagination is ordered to it; it is a world whose ontological level is above the world of the senses and below the pure intelligible world; it is more immaterial than the former and less immaterial than the latter.”

[Shaahayda Rizvi]

Sunbug

No it was not a solid light as in stars or the moon, or the sun or the GPS. In the sky and all along as the light followed me, it looked like a dimly illuminated cloud.  This dim cloud became strong and bright in the driveway, about a few feet away, it was large, bright  and numinous…if you can imagine some invisible person holding a flash light high above, you can’t see the flash light, you can’t see the person, just the light on the grass, and wherever else it follows. As if it has eyes and ears too, but no smell, no heat. It had eyes because it followed my car and later me, and ears, because it heard me when I pleaded for it to leave me alone..….more like our wi-fi, that can pick up and transmit sound but has no smell nor heat, but add another dimension to the wi-fi, that of laser beams.

Norland writes, “So rather than determining the literal definition of the concrete in opposition to the metaphoric, we must learn to see in the symbolic order the literal and concrete meaning of our lives. There is neither the symbolic nor the literal but only the becoming-symbolic of the literal. Time is the thing that melts them both within..” Indeed so true Norland, time has dissolved and de-concretized  my particular experience.

Also, with  time,  advances in astronomy and cosmology have given us new eyes and ears and perhaps reason to interpret things that are directly in front of us. How different our world is today. For  now reading Campbell’s aeroplane to moon walk stories seem to talk about our changing cosmology.

Quoting from Myths to live by.   “I remember when I was a very small boy my uncle one evening brought me down to Riverside Drive to see “a man,” as he told me, “flying in an aeroplane [as they called them in those days] from Albany to New York.” That was Glenn Curtis, 1910, in a sort of motorized box-kite he had built. There were people lined along the low wall at the westward margin of the city, watching, waiting, facing into the sunset. All the nearby rooftops, too, were crowded. Twilight fell. And then suddenly everybody was pointing, shouting, “There he comes!” And what I saw was like the shadow of a dark bird, soaring in the fading light some hundred feet above the river. Seventeen years later, the year I left Columbia, Lindbergh flew the Atlantic. And this year, on our television sets, we have seen two landings on the moon.” (Campbell, Joseph. Myths to Live By: The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell (p. 248). Joseph Campbell Foundation.)

“All humanity,” Buckminster Fuller once said, in prophecy of these transforming forces working now upon our senses, “is about to be born in an entirely new relationship to the universe.” Campbell, Joseph. Myths to Live By: The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell (p. 249). Joseph Campbell Foundation. Kindle Edition.

I just picked a few gems from Dennis Slattery’s Mythblast, “The Inner Reaches of Outer Space is Within Reach” The following two paragraphs are so relevant to the way we establish a sense of identity  to the images.

Quoting from Dennis Slattery’s Mythblast:  “Interpretation is a fundamental act in learning. As he creates a unique form of such meaning-making, Campbell uncovers “an implicit connotation through all its metaphorical imagery of a sense of identity of some kind, transcendent of appearances, which unites behind the scenes the opposed actors on the world stage” (81). Life itself is dramatic, but to miss the experience because of an obsession with meaning is to miss the action that is before us and within us. “

Dennis, I think I missed the experience because I was lost in the reification of the object.
From Dennis’ MythBlast “A brief example may suffice to unfold such a distinction. In their book Your Mythic Journey, Sam Keen and Anne Valley-Fox offer that “a myth can make a cow sacred in one culture and hamburger meat in another” (xi). Same animal. One cultural myth perceives it as sacred, the other reaches for it in an act of consumption”

Sunbug, the above paragraph  resonates with me, at the time of that particular experience, I was clinging to the idea of REAL UFO objects, and forty years forward, this new mythic perspective and our new cosmic reality with a million more stars blinking in the sky, has made that experience  very SACRED! And to borrow your words, like “Sacred doodling”.

Shaahayda (in gratitude to Joseph Campbell, to jcf, to all the members)

[sunbug]

Excellent to see more participants in this discussion including other Myth Blast writers!

Dennis Slattery, when you mention “hope,” and “fervor,” I have wondered if  there are two different camps of “UFO,” “experiencers” or “wonderers?”

You write: Hope and fervor are the two watchwords that I wanted to highlight here. Now, how much or little this story is a convincing or possible analogy to the UFO sightings and the belief in them is open to comment. But I find that fervor and a conviction of a belief based on nothing more than DESIRE is where swaths of our current cultural psyche have taken hold and gripped hard.

I perceive there is this One Camp of “ufology,” Deep-in… “Roswell” (just using that as an umbrella heading)

This “Roswell Club”  has very strong fervor, belief and very concrete perceptions. And other ufo clubs fall under that ALSO with very strong belief, fervor and perception!!

Then there is this Other non-formatted experience shared by regular people? (teachers, astronomers, cab drivers to military pilots?) And these people don’t necessarily belong to the “Roswell Club of belief.”

Some of these people might wonder when they have an experience of a “phenomena,” but it also might be an experience without a definite definition. And yes it might be easy to think of ETs/UFOs subconsciously since that has such a strong presence in the modern mythic consciousness as you point out. That our thoughts automatically go there as Shaahayda pointed out with her experience at first.
But not everyone after such experiences signs up for Roswell membership. What my Mother saw and I saw Made us go “hmm, isn’t THAT interesting?”
So I think Norland is right about dealing from a place of experience that is not clouded by belief or the fights over “what is,” and “what is not,”     THEN at least there is opening to conversation on the subject.
And you are definitely right Dennis about the “Roswell Club…and others,” they are deep-in and have already decided what is being seen or experienced. (Grin)

I did want to ask one question in regards to “The Mythology of Belief?”
Could “Trust,” be another side of that?
Or occasionally blended into that?

Belief=Trust?

Trust=Belief?

[sunbug]

Robert Juliano,

I had a thought in reference to your references of Dr. Veronica Goodchild, Carl Jung and The Red Book.

You write: In Psychoid, Psychophysical, P-subtle! Alchemy and a New Worldview by Dr Veronica Goodchild, she describes a psychic realm that lies in between psyche and matter accessible by the imagination, the vehicle used by Jung in his experiments with the unconscious resulting in Red Book and which was used by the alchemists in their opus.

I have noticed that even some of the “ufology clubs,” are also leaning more towards the subtle and in-between in regards to descriptions of “encounters.”
What Jung references as the “realm of subtle bodies,” has gained a new evolution in the mythology of ufology.
The term “thrown around,” is “inter-dimensionals.” Well of course I’m sure it probably stirred up debates even within “ufology clubs.” But this “take,” is more open to seeing the phenomena whether UFO or ET as an “in between realm.”
The only place where this perception becomes more concrete probably is the perception of “Visitors,” or “Visitation.”
So even though something could be perceived as in-between and even transparent…there is still a definition of What the experience Is.

And I wonder if you had heard of “Noetic Science?” It seems to go right along with what you write about “individuation,” creating the “subtle body,” according to Jung.

You write: It’s important to note that Jung himself saw the process of individuation as creating the subtle body, one made of matter and spirit and which overcomes the split between body and psyche. Dr. Goodchild writes “individuation is the creation of this subtle body … here in this life.” This subtle body was “thought to survive physical death, and it would be the body—a kind of psychic body that nevertheless had ‘substance’ and contained your essence, or quintessence … that you would take with you when you sloughed off your earthly form.”

Noetic Science has claimed to measure a weight difference after someone dies, which is unrelated to the the natural occurrences which accompany a person passing. And this difference is related to the “weight of the soul,” or what Jung would call the “subtle body.”
But I suppose measuring insubstantial things would still be considered “concretization,” by Joe Campbell? Heh heh.

Thanks for bringing another angle to this subject!! Robert!

 

[sunbug]

Norland and Stephen,

I have sometimes wondered if part of what has given the UFO/Public/Myth Dream such elevation *chuckle* is the perception of an indeterminate PAUSE in “manned” (woman/human) space flights/missions beyond coming and going to Space Stations?

When the space shuttles were retired I felt the same look in Mother’s eyes…a sad wistfulness.
To be sure we have the X-rockets from the Private Sector and have cheered the landings of various rovers.

But I still remember crying over Challenger as a young kid. Remember how we would stop and watch the build up to other launches (which always felt like a wonderful mythic event but Real! And scary!) This much I can say aside to Shaahayda: one of the earliest memories I have is a photo of a Saturn Rocket in stark black and white…towering into the sky. As a kid it scared me…but not like monsters under the bed…it wasn’t evil…but what it was was powerful. And it demanded respect. I wouldn’t “look directly at it,” kids y’know ha ha. As a very young child I didn’t understand why it scared me. But now in reflection perhaps something deep in my psyche was responding to that image. Hm.

But I’m off on a tangent sorry…

I do understand funding was and always has been an issue with the space programs as we know them…

And we All are thankful for Hubble blazing brightly in our minds or the beauty we glimpse through our own telescopes or even with our naked eyes.
With or without wonders of ETs and UFOS, I know the starry heavens were glorious to my Mom (and Dad too…and Grandmother who all saw those sights of nebulae and galaxies and the planetary bodies)

I think about how far we came…until humans were walking on the moon!!
It remains mind blowing to so many of all ages (even though iPhones have demanded the next generations undivided attention)

From my own perspective growing up back in the 80s and 90s when one talked to their friends about space we all knew by The Millennium not only would there be flying cars…but we would take flight shuttle taxis up to Space Stations where our space ships were docked…and we would be on Mars! We just knew!

Because 50 years before Man walked on the Moon… “horseless carriages,” were the new fangled transportation of 1919!

What would another 50 years bring?!!

Ok so yes some of us grew up seeing old Star Trek reruns and Watching The Next Generation. The imagination was ready!

But instead The Shuttles were retired with no replacements except X-rocket/planes and we got the mini-pocket computers known as smart phones. The computers at least shrank from refrigerator size.
But it is kind of cool to see the iPad touch screens inside of rocket ships.
“Scotty” would approve Grin.
Part of what made the Moon Missions so wonderous and the shuttles was not only the Mythic feeling…but it was Us! We were all a part of this as the Human race! We were with those men and women looking into the Horizon calling us on and calling us to look back to our beautiful home planet earth and know the value of Her!
We are participating in the new discoveries made now perhaps a bit more long distance but computers along with photography are bringing us images in new ways…that’s still inspiring Rovers included! I thought the latest Mars rover looked just like a Drone! So that’s new!
And there is something to be said for not obsessing on Space Travel at the expense of Spaceship Earth. For sure!!
When we had manned missions it’s interesting to note, the Story is About Us and Our Planet…the journey has nothing to do with Aliens/ETs it is Us!
We are the heroes and heroines of those journeys! Both in bravery and tragedy.
This was the next Myth that Campbell envisioned bringing us back to the outer reaches of inner space!
Yet there is a sense of a PAUSE on those kind of journeys or the build-up to them. There are so many channels now and streaming services that unless one is focused, the lift off of an X rocket  or the Mars Rover is relegated to an “internet viewing,” or if one is diligent a video on NASA or Space.com etc.

Or signs in first to Stream the Live Feed.

There is no longer that feeling of a “Live Event!” “A Happening!” “A Real Human Endeavor!”
These events used to be covered that way on our TVs but unless my perception is off…not as much.
Or perhaps it’s just been so long since those manned missions. Except astronauts have been doing some interesting endeavors concerning the Space Station.

Maybe the Artemis Mission with a Woman journeying to the Moon will inspire us once more!

Have other thoughts on this in continuation but will return to those later…concerning UFO myth…

[Author]

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