Opening the Stephen Box
Long and wide eternity from side to side
Lead me through the rapids, guide me to the shore
There's a place that's far beyond this time and space
When each of us comes face to face with something more
If I open up the channel will you send me information
If you tune me to your station I'll receive
If I navigate the river would you take me to your island
Sing a siren song so I could never leave
Alan Parsons, Siren Song
It's been about two years now since I read The Stephen Experience, and in that time I've collected a whole bunch of similar documents in the after-life communication, near-death-experience and 'inspired writing' spectrum. I think it's time to try to somehow put the pieces together, such as they are.
I grew up in a non-denominational fundamentalist Pentecostal church which had withdrawn largely from society and had a fairly standard-for-the-milieu view of an approaching End Times, though we were vague on the details. (That's an oversimplification, because there were a lot of interesting spiritual influences on my life which I keep rediscovering, but it will do for now.)
The Pentecostal faith cluster is not at all the same thing as 'fundamentalism', which is usually narrowly defined by a baffled and uncomprehending secular world as a sort of rigid rejection of modernity. There's that in the mix, certainly, but it's not the main point; and the Pentecostals were deeply at odds with the Fundamentalists in the early 20th century even as their theologies later came to overlap. No, the defining characteristic of Pentecostalism is not what it rejects but what it stands for: the belief in the present power of the Holy Spirit in the world. It was not a rejection of modernity but a faith founded on the direct experience of the mystical and the miraculous in the midst of modernity, and in direct contradiction of the established teachings of early 20th-century science and theology. This conflict did create a darker side, of isolation and psychological coercion, but that was not the primary point of the movement; the direct experience of spiritual power was.
Because theirs was an experience-driven faith, often with working-class origins, and there was not a language for what they were doing, the early Pentecostals tended to create their own jargon or argot drawn from semi-random Bible quotations which persists today, and to outsiders often sounds like meaningless babble: phrases like 'the Annointing', 'slain in the Spirit', 'speaking in tongues', 'open heaven', 'word of knowledge' refer to real phenomena, but are frustratingly difficult to correlate with the terminology of science. And the Pentecostal hostility toward both science, psychic research, and organised religion did not help.
Growing up with the terminology of Pentecostalism, but not its power, it was not actually until I left that particular church and joined other groups that I actually discovered what some of those words were referring to. In Pentecostal and Charismatic services in the early 1990s, I witnessed what is called 'the baptism of the Holy Spirit', which is something that is very difficult to describe clearly but was extremely real.
When dealing with Pentecostal spiritual phenomena, a couple of metaphors come to mind. The experience is partly tangible and partly mental; it feels like a flowing liquid, light, or a magnetic field. It can be either intensely calm or vibrant; in its 'calm' mode it can cause something like an instantaneous light trance state; such a state can cause rapid loss of muscle coordination, which is what lies behind the (in)famous 'slaying in the Spirit' experience where a 'fired up' Pentecostal preacher touches someone lightly on the head and they fall to the floor. There is a space/time component to the experience; on the long term it manifests in global 'waves' or 'flaps' which can last for months at a time, but tends to fade over longer periods; on the short term, it can manifest either in a single person or in groups and can have very strongly varying intensies, which is why Pentecostals talk about 'the Spirit moving' or not and 'breaking through to the Glory'; it can be 'transferred' or 'caught' from one person to another; it can be carried by text or even thought.
There's also the experience of glossalalia, or 'speaking in tongues', which is deeply linked to the whole Pentecostal phenomena cluster, and feels similar to a light trance state but one that allows full conscious functioning (if not conscious parsing of the 'language' that is being spoken; in my experience, it has the feel of a mantra or liturgy, with sets of specific repeated phrases).
The 'word of knowledge' is a kind of psychic reading function where symbols or words or physical sensations are sensed internally (asking practitioners how they do this gets very frustrating answers like 'it's just there' or 'I feel them') describing a person's psychological state or physical symptoms that require miraculous healing. Some practitioners describe the purpose of the 'word of knowledge' as to create faith in the listener who can then access the healing power themselves. When this 'gift of the Spirit' is operating, it can be a very startling experience, and can rapidly break down psychological barriers in people who see this happening. 'How did they read my mind?'
Pentecostals speak of the sort of 'energy field' that seems to 'power' these abilities (when present; as confusingly, it's not always there) as 'the Annointing', but beyond a fairly immediate practical working knowledge of how to summon and work with this energy (ascribed to Jesus Christ) there is not much in the way of deeper understanding. Most Pentecostal and Charismatic training in 'moving in the Spirit' is on an apprenticeship system and there is little encouragement (in fact much active discouragement) of investigating how these 'powers' work and comparing with other psychic experiences. What knowledge exists is mostly scattered and in the form of in-house 'folklore' and rules-of-thumb, encoded in various churches' oral histories, the structure of their services, lyrics to hymns, and the personal patter and mannerisms of individual preachers. The Pentecostal tradition and habit of taking a 'showbiz' approach and being fascinated by strong (small-c) charismatic leaders has tended to hurt the movement badly; these are skills that desperately need to be taught and studied, but as even the practitioners often don't understand how they're doing these things, it can be difficult to penetrate the sense of confusion and 'insider talk' that surrounds them.
The interesting thing is that while being strongly open to this particular set of spiritual experiences, most mainstream Pentecostals and Charismatics today maintain a strong guard against other aspects of psychic functioning, such as channelling, generalised clairvoyance, and any form of communication with the dead (other than Jesus). Being Protestant in their outlook, communication with Christian saints, including Mary, is also forbidden.
It is against this backdrop that I discovered the Stephen book and found myself confronting the existence of another aspect of what appeared to be authentic Christian spirituality that lay next to but outside the Pentecostal framework: the literal existence of the Communion of the Saints - in other words, speaking with the dead.
And what I have found so far as the the experiences reported by generalised clairvoyants, mediums, and channellers, and the Pentecostal equivalents, seem to be very similar; in that they seem to share the same mental or spiritual mechanisms. And not only that, but as ESP and paranormal researchers are discovering, these experiences can be mapped out to some degree (though they are notoriously difficult to replicate in a laboratory setting with no emotional connection).
The question in my mind then is where do these phenomena connect, and are there two kinds of spiritual force or power that both acknowledge Jesus Christ as the source, that are indistinguishable in their effects, or is there as the Apostle Paul said, 'many manifestations but one Spirit'? And if the latter - then it seems to me that Christian Spiritualism and Pentecostalism, for example, are not two completely separate religious movements as has been believed, but two branches of one movement which need to find each other to be complete. Add a third stream of Christian Science / New Thought into the mix, and the picture seems to get even clearer.
The first step, though, for me, is to come to terms with the role of saints in my Christian cosmology, and what opening up such a huge channel of communication might mean for personal prayer and meditation practices.
It's kind of an overwhelming thought if you accept the idea that we may all be literally in communication with real people who are 'in Spirit' and have assignments to guard, advise and protect us. It's not something that you can come to terms with all at once; and even rationally believing that it is true doesn't make it emotionally any easier. If the mental universe is so huge and so closely-connected, what happens to privacy? How do we learn to differentiate the 'good' voices from distracting or 'bad' ones? What rights and duties do we have when dealing with non-physical friends and strangers? More importantly, if we accept that telepathic communication can be literally real, what does that then do to the modern idea of madness as being the belief in internal voices? Have we as a society mislabelled people as having 'brain chemical imbalances' who literally are, as older and simpler cultures would have said, troubled by spirits? Is the ancient idea of a 'muse' perhaps literally true? Are many of the great artistic and technical works of 'genius' actually partnerships between a living person and one or more spirit mentors - and if so, what does that do to the idea of intellectual property?
These are the sorts of valid questions that lie inside the Stephen box (and of course it's not just Stephen, there's been a steady stream of after-life communication material for the last century). Once we open that box, for real, it's going to be increasingly difficult to put all the pieces back together the same way the world was.
(Edit: updated to be a little more descriptive of about our church's theology)
Near Death Experiences
For comparison with my last post, an interesting website summarising the insights reported during near death experiences.
Review: The New Dispensation
The New Dispensation, As Presented by THE SPIRIT WORLD Through the Automatic Writings of FRANCES BIRD
Sometimes I have to pinch myself to remind that I am actually awake.
I have been collecting a small pile of 'interesting' spiritual books in the last couple of years, which are fitting together in a rather startling way. This is one of them. (I'm now reading a 2002 book by Mary - yes, the Mary, as far as I can tell, or at least a very similar Mary to the Mary of Medjugorje - which is even more exciting, but I'll write that one up when I'm done).
Frances Bird is a lady I have been able to find little about on the Internet, which in itself is surprising. There seem to be a set of four fairly large books written by her, of which The New Dispensation is one; I found it in the New Age section of a local second-hand bookstore. This edition is 'Copyright 1988 by LC Publishing Company, California', but the actual text has to date to the World War I era, so I am confused as to why there's not an out-of-copyright edition up on Gutenberg somewhere. There is an 'Editor's Note' from Walter F Prince from the American Society for Psychical Research claiming that the ASPR was very impressed and had requested a copy for their archives.
The book has a curiously old-fashioned, scholarly tone to it, which can make it somewhat dense reading, but it's divided into short essay-like chapters. The general theme is 'the end of the age', and gives what appears to be an overview of a time of increasing change on Earth, starting from World War I. There are a number of theological threads which really need more in-depth examination, but what struck me most is the deep parallels between this, a 'channeled' book, and the Pentecostal 'prophecy' The Harvest.
What keeps being repeated is that this era is a time of transition, a time of increasing personal freedom and individual ethical choice/responsibility, and of increasing connection between the physical and spiritual worlds. As well, the idea that wars and natural disasters are not 'sent from God' so much as created by human intention; that 'everything grows from seeds' and that what happens 'legally' is allowed to exist; but that 'what is visible is ended' in the sense that creative power only happens in the invisible, interpersonal realm of mind; when a war happens, it is because a large number of people have decided to have a war; but at the same time, the physical manifestation of that war is also the end of the matter - the devastation being revealed brings us a chance to change our ideas and decide not to do that in future. This follows on from the idea that we should forgive and hold our pasts lightly because nothing in the physical world 'really exists' in the same sense that mental intentions do; the present is already history, and we do not have to be tied to our history, at every moment we have a chance to 'decide again' and change our plans.
There's a lot more, and I feel like I'm babbling a bit, because putting all this stuff into simple words is difficult, even though the ideas feel enormously simple. Basically what I am looking at here is the sort of 'unified God theory' I have been searching for for years; a map and outline of the spiritual territories describing how things fit together and what the purpose of life on Earth is. It turns out that the common understanding of the Christian gospel is, by and large, correct, but there are a few mistakes that have been picked up by various sects over the years which aren't necessarily helpful; the important issues are love, mercy, kindness and forgiveness rather than religious observance as such; the 'dead' really do watch and interact with the 'living' on Earth, and the whole spectrum of saints/angels watching over us is literally true; while the Christians are right about Jesus being 'the Saviour' (though we don't yet really understand even that bit), God looks at our hearts and is more interested in our attitudes to other people, so it's not about religion per se but about love; the Eastern concepts of 'karma' and 'maya' are also pretty much on the ball, but karma can be shifted (which is where prayer for others, and especially prayer for our enemies, comes in); there is One God, so yay for the montheists, and in some sense that is hard to articulate He is both separate from us *and* a part of us (and we are a part of Him); but there also are a whole lot of saints/ancestors/angels, so yay sort of for the polytheists/pagans; reincarnation in some sense may be true, though again whatever happens there is difficult to map onto existing physical ideas; the spiritual universe is composed of intentionality rather than matter, so time and space are fluid where saints are concerned; the purpose of life is to grow and develop our spiritual capacities, of which love/compassion/kindness is the key; even in Heaven there is regret if we fail to accomplish our personal 'mission' in life; everyone is going to be saved eventually, but there does exist a Hell-like place, which is created by our dark impulses, and you really don't want to spend any time there, so all the stuff about 'saving souls from Hell' is also literally true; 'eternal damnation' is only as eternal as we want it to be; you can repent or grow spiritually after death but it's a lot slower than doing it on Earth; everyone is here because they chose to be, literally, and we also choose our experiences; all suffering is karma (caused by human choice) but not necessarily by our choice; we may have chosen to endure someone else's pain in order to become more compassionate; the glib Evangelical Christian slogan of 'God has a wonderful plan for your life' is in fact literally true; basically relax, we are all living in The Matrix, but it's not run by evil machines but by a loving Father.
Oh yes, and a whole planet-load of trouble is heading our way (like we didn't already know that) - but some of it can be averted if we have compassionate intentions and actions, and what remains is an opportunity to learn new skills and basically buff our stats and level-up.
Review: The Essential Alan Parsons Project
CD: The Essential Alan Parsons Project
I've listened to a fair bit of post-Dark Side of the Moon Pink Floyd (and Roger Waters after he split), but other than hearing the radio single for Eye In The Sky, I've never really heard any Alan Parsons Project, despite knowing that Parsons was a sound engineer for DSotM and that they'd done a whole bunch of concept albums with vaguely science fiction/fantasy themes. So when I found a retrospective double CD with 34 tracks in the bargain bin for $15, it seemed like a good deal.
Listening to APP is like vicariously reliving chunks of the 1980s, and I mean that in a good way. I have a thing for treacly synth-pop with lush vocals and spacey orchestral arrangements. I will put this alongside my Vangelis and Electric Light Orchestra.
Favourite songs so far: Some Other Time, Old And Wise, Ammonia Avenue, La Sagrada Familia.
Review: The UFO Experience
Book: The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry by J. Allen Hynek (1972)
I saw a UFO and nobody believes me
I was sixteen miles from home and nobody in sight
I saw a UFO and nobody believes me
And what's it gonna take to be back home tonight?
Sneaky Sound System, UFO
Hynek (who died in 1986) is one of the key figures in scientific UFO investigation. An astronomer employed as science consultant for the US Air Force Sign / Grudge / Blue Book investigations, he started out as a debunker but by the end of the 1960s had become a believer in the reality of UFOs as a 'real' phenomenon. This book, his first after the end of Blue Book, is the origin of the term 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' later made famous by the Steven Spielberg movie - as well as 'high strangeness' which often occurs in discussions of UFOs and the paranormal.
The book is probably one of the best of the genre in my opinion. It is basically a statistical analysis of the Blue Book case data (UFO observations from the 1940s-1960s) and breaks them down into categories: Nocturnal Lights (moving points of light at night), Daylight Discs (saucer-shaped objects seen in the daylight), and the three types of Close Encounter (objects seen at less than a couple hundred feet, interference with vehicle ignitions, and 'occupants'). Hynek also assigns a simple two-axis scale of 'probability' (based on number and character of witnesses) and 'strangeness' (number of elements not consistent with known science) for each of these typical cases.
Regardless what you think of the UFO phenomenon itself, Hynek's approach is very careful and instructive for any kind of paranormal investigation. He confines himself to the data, he focuses on the most solid and interesting cases rather than the noise, and he does a minimum of speculation as to causes, merely reporting *what* he believes the phenomenon to be - which is hardly talked about today, compared to the deluge of popular science-fiction *interpretations* of UFOs, and the 'Majestic' and 'Roswell' mythologies. Hynek does not appear to believe there is evidence for any particular 'conspiracy' theory - rather he feels that the US military staff he dealt with were simply psychologically unprepared to deal with a phenomenon that they could not understand, could not control, and wished would disappear - but he is also rather precise in how he uses words, leaving the impression that there is evidence that *could* support the existence of a separate, more highly secret UFO investigation unit than the Blue Book team. He merely says that as far as he knows, *he* wasn't aware of any such unit.
At no time, however, did I encounter any evidence that could be presented as valid proof that Blue Book was indeed a cover-up operation. However, many indications, bits of information, and scraps of conversation could be force-fitted into a yes for the cover-up thesis. Thus, for instance, one time when I inquired into the specifics of a certain case, I was told by the Pentagon's chief scientist that he had been advised by those at a much higher level to tell me 'not to pursue the matter further'. One can make of that what one will.
Hynek however does describe the existence of several 'factions' within Sign - the believers and the skeptics - and he also points at the shift from Sign to Grudge (February 11, 1949) as being the point where he believed the project moved into full-on debunking mode. If one were to speculate about the 'UFO believers' within USAF setting up a shadow group, it would seem that the interesting decisions would have been made in 1948. (But of course even if there *were* classified UFO investigations, it does not follow that they necessarily were any more successful at making sense of the puzzle.)
I was interested to notice that Hynek also outright admits that there were 'UFO simulation' exercises conducted in order to track public UFO reports; he considers the failure of these to generate large number of false UFO reports very strong evidence for the UFO.
It is interesting to note, as substantiation of the theory of the credibility of reliable witnesses, that in those instances in which 'fake' UFOs have been deliberately contrived to test public reaction - hot air balloons and flares dropped from airplanes are examples - the resulting UFO reports were not only invariably far fewer than the experimenter expected but of interest more for what they did not report than what they did. Occasionally a fanciful UFO report is generated as a result of such a test, but it fails to meet the test of acceptance because it does not square with what others have reported about the same event - often solely because of its internal inconsistency and incoherence.
This seems to be something confirmed by Jacques Valee's 1993 'Pentacle Memorandum', but I don't see why he is so angry with Hynek about this given the admission above - Hynek gives the impression of always being careful about what he discusses, and respectful of confidentiality agreements, but doesn't ever seem to outright lie or even wilfully misdirect. On the whole, of the whole UFO scene, Hynek still comes out as being the most honest, up-front and frankly scientific of anyone, and I think the attitude of a particular researcher toward him is a good touchstone for how sane they are (or whether they have a hidden agenda).
Dreamlog: China
Strange tense dreams last night.
I am travelling at short notice, on the invitation of others, to a dangerous country. I think of it as China though there is nothing actually Chinese about it; more Eastern European. I am meeting with members of an underground movement. The journey is by train. Something goes wrong; there is an informer or we are discovered. I am in a hotel or a prison or a mental asylum, a place of corridors, running and hiding like a spy. Suspense, but I am not actually caught.
I wake up late and blurry with a headache.
