The Revelation of St John: 5. Opening the Fifth and Sixth Seals

"Oh," she said, "it’s just so beautiful! Something in it keeps on moving ... "

We have met the aliens and they is us..!

Large Silver Disk, Kustavi, Finland, 2004

The Disc

I had pulled over into an empty field, to rest from a long drive, when I noticed something moving about in the air, a dragonfly I thought, at first; but the object seemed to be under some sort of  intelligent control.  It had landed on the ground, not far away, looking instead like a disc; I could still see it, the size of a silver dollar, smooth and silvery, it was just that shape.

I had to sneak up on it, expecting it would take off any moment, but was able to snatch it up before it could get away.  I had proof of something really extraordinary.  I couldn’t believe it!  Nobody would believe it!

It was vibrating in my hand…  I knew it wanted to escape, getaway, but I held it tightly, wondering what to do, where- or how- to keep it.  I secured it, for the time being, inside my shirt pocket.

Soon it was trying to get out again…  I can’t remember now everything that had happened back then.  I had checked into a hotel room and spent several hours trying to decide what to do now that everything had changed… Really nothing was the same anymore.

It got away from me in the room but somehow I managed to get hold of it again.  It didn’t seem to have much power- or it was building up quietly in some way- and I noticed in flight it actually seemed to be spinning.  It moved slowly… but at the same time seemed to drift about on the slightest currents of air.  I had thought about putting it in a glass cylinder, on a table in the room, but found I couldn’t let go of it- afraid if I put it anywhere else it would get away.

I suspected then, not knowing why, there were people that already knew I had found the disc.  I had dinner with friends, not planning to share the experience, but still, in spite of myself, began telling them about something I had found, without giving it away; I knew they wouldn’t believe me.

One of them noticed a sort of bulge in my shirt, it was trying to escape again, so I reached inside to grab it in my hand and hold it close.  “It’s like Bilbo and that ring…”  I had been holding the disc in my hand as I tried to explain what was happening and remembering, at the same time, other sightings of saucers, explaining how I had seen them before but now I have proof.

Waking up I had this palpable sense of having held it in my right hand but it was gone..!  It finally got away…  I realized then I probably would not find it again.  And it came to me only then it was all a dream.

The Bell

It was late at night, past my bedtime, but really I always go to bed past my bedtime, and I was reading, a habit I haven’t indulged in for quite a long time until very recently.

“…  A feeling of calm & profound peace would flood over the two girls, and at some point a cylinder of pale blue light six inches long would appear in the middle of the playhouse.  Although JoAnn cannot remember seeing an actual figure within the cylinder, she refers to it as her ‘Tinker Bell’, and she knew that its consciousness was female…”  (from The Secret Life of Kids)

Well about the time I get to the end of this paragraph I hear the clear distinct sound of a bell, from the other side of the room, on my left… I didn’t immediately connect what I read with the sound; they seemed completely different things to me.  The sound was quite a distraction.  I was alone in the apartment, surrounded by silence.

When I did return my attention to the book and realized what I had just read a kind of chill went thru me.  I had the weird feeling I might not be alone…  and then I laughed out loud!

Not because I believed this, or didn’t believe it, but was struck by the nature of the situation, that it was a rather funny thing to happen; as if the ‘spirit’ or whatever had caused this noise had a sense of humor.  Of course, rationally, I thought the sound must have come from a nearby apartment.  And had no relation at all to the book I was reading.

It was a wee bit scary; though, perhaps, on second thought uncanny would probably be a much better choice of words.  I quickly began to think of it as comforting in some strange way- to think I was being watched or ‘watched over’ perhaps- and something or someone chose this humorous way of letting me in on it.  I didn’t hear it again.

MUFON Case # 25273

He went to bed at 12:30 AM this morning and was awakened by a bright flash in the room like a camera flash. He opened his eyes and saw a small disc-like UFO in the corner of the room with a large dome on top of it with windows all around the dome. The disk was a light grey metallic color with black around the windows, it was lighted on the inside and there were no lights on the outside, except the one the kept flashing from the front of the vehicle. The witness watched the 12″ diameter craft move about the room from corner to corner, flashing the strobe-like light (he believes it is a camera of some sort), then it hoovered over his bed. 

He tried to remain as still as possible while shaking his wife and getting her to wake up. She also saw the craft just as it moved into postion near the foot of their bed. He noticed a very low humming sound. It then moved slowly forward and that is when they saw the tiny beings inside the craft looking out at them – they both sat up in bed and the beings looked surprised, then the craft took off very quickly towards the closet/chimney area and dissappeared. They could not get a good look at the beings inside the craft, but the witness claims that they had large heads for their small bodies, and they looked humanoid. All he could see was a kind of grey skin color and he thinks the eyes looked more like human eyes, not large almond shaped eyes that are like the typical greys. 

Later, after they had fallen asleep again, the witness again woke up and saw a white-gloved hand floating approximately 10″ above his head. He only saw this for a couple of seconds, then it dissappeared. He jumped out of bed to investigate but could find nothing in the room. 

Find the case here.

Another Cylinder

One evening in 1977, in a small apartment building in Hanna City, Illinois, I as a 5 yr old child, had been awoken to something that was incomprehensible and terrifying. This particular night, I went into my Mother’s bed to sleep which was not routine for me.

Sometime during the night, I was awoken by a strange cylindrical, machine-like object. It was approximately the size of a coffee can, maybe a little bigger. It hovered 3 to 4 inches off the floor and spun silently as it moved around the bedroom. There was a slight glow around this object and it seemed to almost have intelligence about it.

How it got into the building, I don’t know. I was positioned on the right side of my Mother’s queen-sized bed, and she was asleep on the left. She never awoke during my witnessing of this object. I first noticed it as it entered through the bedroom door on the right hand side of the room. It was metallic and appeared to have sharp edges. After it made its entrance into the bedroom, it hovered in front of the foot of the bed going right to left. I could see its glow cast just below the foot before it had emerged into sight. It then proceeded to come back and make a turn around the right front portion of the bed and slowly approached me along the right side of the bed still hovering/spinning approximately 3 to 4 inches off the floor. As it made its way to just below where I was sitting watching it, it ascended up to my level.

At this point I was paralyzed with terror, I could not scream or move. I lost all consciousness and never had another experience like it again. I have no memory of what occurred after that, what it was, or why it was there.

Details here.

Exegesis

What do we do with these odds and ends?  They seem to be pieces of a puzzle… but what would that image be if we could at last put it together?

Earthquakes, floods and tsunamis make mockery of our technological pretenses. The same great scientific minds who claim dominion over the planet would wilt in panic like frail flowers in a half-decent thunderstorm, never mind a typhoon. Though we try to ignore them, the nuclear flames of Fukushima are nothing less than a slap in the face of our Technocracy.  From The Secret Sun here.

Perhaps we have too much faith in our technology…  Now Chris @ The Secret Sun makes some related points:

We see the world through an extremely limited band of the electromagnetic spectrum. The same goes for our hearing. We consciously process a remarkably tiny proportion of the limited sensory input we receive. We are only able to measure that which can perceive. And we still don’t understand exactly how or why we process anything, other than to facilitate our survival on a purely reptilian level.

There are millions of square miles of land we’ve never stepped foot in. There are many millions more we have only the faintest experience in. The same goes for our oceans- we’re still struggling to explore the endless depths- 71% of the surface of the world is water- and are physically limited in our ability to do so. And we’ve barely touched the unimaginably vast network of caverns beneath the Earth.

We think we know a lot but I think Chris has tried to put us in our place.  My estimation would be even lower in the sense I think our technology is not much more than a crutch for human beings; the Hubble telescope, and the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider notwithstanding.  I think cell-phones rather than improving communications have more likely complicated the process of communication for the species.  The words from How He Loves seem much more appropriate to me:

We are His portion
And He is our prize
Drawn to redemption by the grace in his eyes
If grace is an ocean we’re all sinking
So heaven meets earth like a sloppy wet kiss
And my heart burns violently inside of my chest
I don’t have time to maintain these regrets
When I think about the way
He loves us

It seems much more to the point to me that without His grace we would not even have this small portion of the universe carved out for us; a balance, which we have no deep understanding of, sustains and nourishes us.  They are undoubtedly part of this balance.

I have never seen or communicated with a fairy… or an alien… as far as I know.  Still I did hear that bell… was this simply a synchronicity?  The sound of the bell traveling from another apartment… what kind of synchronicity is this meant to be?  Maybe I was simply hearing things.

Still what if indeed it was meant to be a real communication, at some level, what sort of communication is it?  What would be the message?  It seems a strangely mischievous message; a simple communication, yet perhaps echoing on more than one level.  Of course anyone familiar with the breadth of so-called communications from the so-called aliens etc. in UFO lore knows this is part and parcel of that same lore.  Not to mention fairy lore.

Without a doubt it was a bit scary; and disturbing.  Beyond that, beyond saying something like ‘here I am catch me if you can..’ it would seem like an exclamation point saying nothing is like you think it is…  if I am here everything you think you ‘grok’ is off the mark.  Way off the mark?!  Further I am indeed here but just where am I… it makes no sense!

Indeed the communication itself seems underlined by its nonsensical nature with that exclamation point to drive the point home.  Another dimension…?  Well really I don’t quite know exactly what that means… a parallel world?  Are they the same thing?

Yet given all of this there is a strange beauty in the succinct quality of the communication; to awaken so much with a single sound.  The sound suggests a whole other world…  and where does that suggestion take us?

The miniature UFO’s from the other stories suffer some of the same problems…  they can’t be real can they? Of course they can’t! Dreams…  how could they be anything else?

Talking Dogs, Fermat’s Last Theorem

Often it is in trivial or quite commonplace ways and circumstances that such things manifest; not unusually they seem quite brief, sometimes bordering on the edge of being meaningless when there seems to be meaning at all…  why is that?

Major intrusions, even when they occur, also seem to leave no real tangible evidence that can lead us back to anything.  Has  Ariadne forgotten her thread…?

Roswell is a case in point.  We have all sorts of tempting leads, suggestions, etc., yet still no true artifact of any kind.  Nothing that points to its substantial reality, beyond doubt.  Well perhaps beyond doubt is more than we might expect…

What is going on with this cat-and-mouse game..?  Is the real nature of whatever this is so far beyond our realm that all of these things represent only the faintest traces of …  what?  Is it the so-called ‘incommensurability problem’?  That we are so different any kind of communication is at most impossible..  at least confusing beyond belief..?

{Of course the alternatives may be beyond imagining…  we may have no idea what is really going on.  If indeed some of us have been contacted, and the contact and its consequences veiled in secrecy by certain echelons within a government ‘elite’,  the knowledge kept from us by this black world would be a mirror reflecting our own image…  this option, tantalizing and confusing at best, impossible and impenetrable at worst, has become the elephant in the room, or more appropriately a Trojan horse ushering in our downfall.}

And there must be no real interest in real communication..?!  Wouldn’t we have books of substance, not Urantia or the UMMO affair, all the strange documents that have poured from that, even Scientology, well that does seem a little bit of a joke, but something leading us somewhere real and definite…  Is the Seth material & Telka, to pick two disparate examples, Urantia as well,  all that one can expect..?

What about a talking dog, or proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, even a communications device a la Contact, 2001, or This Island Earth… ??  Or that book Betty Hill wanted to take with her…  hmm.  Of course that got left behind…  what if the ‘leader’ hadnt changed his mind?  Would we now have a book, or Betty rather, that could or would change humankind’s destiny..?  Judging from past history that is unlikely in the extreme.

(An aside re talking dogs and the last theorem of Fermat.  Andrew Wiles, nor his assistant Richard Taylor, walked out of a flying saucer; we do have, thanks to them, the long awaited proof of this assertion.  But Fermat’s ‘truly marvelous demonstration’ of his theorem, if it ever really existed, has not been rediscovered.  That would be a new chunk of knowledge!  Wiles’ proof, to the contrary, is over 100 pages of reasoning and requires some patience to wade through.  Details from Wikipedia here.

Talking dogs of course are another way of intervening in human affairs that might demonstrate the alien’s possession of a knowledge, not simply different from ours but able to transcend our own.  Again in our own human sphere this possibility has a rather strange history.  Fort himself commented on the possibility in Wild Talents…  there is also the following:

Bondeson writes that in Germany in the early 20th century, some people had a strong belief in the potential of super-intelligent animals. He said that along with Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse, an Airedale terrier named Rolf was considered one of the leading German intellectuals of the time. Rolf’s owner said she taught him his own alphabet with a system of taps of his paw on a board and, Bondeson notes drolly, “he successfully dabbled in mathematics, ethics, religion and philosophy.”

See the article here.  Of course Nazis and flying saucers have an intimate association so to speak; a review of The Hunt for Zero Point can be found here.

Of course the idea being pointed to is the aliens’ superior knowledge.  Simply demonstrating said knowledge would provide some substance to their communication(s) that none of the so-called communications the human race may have had with them, so far, has included.  Simply one among many reasons to doubt the reality of such communication.  Still there is the idea that their knowledge may not be so much superior but simply different but different in a way that may be very difficult to communicate… )

The dream above seems to address this conundrum in some weird fashion. We are only going to have memories, not the real thing itself…

The thing is that as I came up to this place where the thing came out of the ground, and I could see no evidence of there being a hole or anything, it just looked like a solid.. just a clearing in the woods, like a clear cut. And the MIBs are standing on the edge of it, and they came towards me and, here’s where we get totally “out there”.. I got the telepathic message from the MIBs that, “You don’t belong here.” That was the message I got from them. they were still probably 20’ away, but they were walking towards me, and I was looking at these two guys, and there was a woman in red. It was just like some of these experiences that you read about. I read about them later. After running into the MIBs, I learned about them on the internet! (laughing) I was like, no, the men in black aren’t real too, are they? But there was a woman in red, who had blonde hair, bright red dress, and white skin, and she was wearing sun glasses. They were all wearing the same sun glasses. They really had the same sort of oriental look, sort of asian look, really thin, same hair, shiny black shoes in the middle of the Cascade mountains.

From here…  the experience of Henry Franzoni… and here is where he is at now:

I realized that all these stories I was making public-sightings going back hundreds of years-were like recipes on how to find Bigfoot,” Franzoni says. “And I came to the conclusion that that wouldn’t be a good thing. So now I cover my tracks. I don’t mention details. If I saw a Bigfoot picnicking at Champoeg Park, I’d probably come home and tell my wife, and that would be the end of it.”

It seems, for Henry Franzoni, Bigfoot isn’t really about Bigfoot, anyway. “If I were going to write a book about my Bigfoot research, Bigfoot itself would be a tiny footnote in the appendix,” he says. “It’s all the other stuff that I learned that I find much more interesting. I gained a real appreciation for how fragile the natural balance is. I learned a hell of a lot about Indian myths and Indian societies. I learned how to do good science, and that sometimes good science isn’t good enough. And all this led me to doing what I’m doing now.

So it goes.

There is, on the net and elsewhere, in the media in general, and the world at large, a Kilimanjaro of information on the Shroud of Turin.  The effort of climbing this mountain of information is more than simply daunting, it leaves you breathless, and in a state of mind probably outside the one you are used to…  in short, to paraphrase Dorothy, we will not be in Kansas anymore.  Whether or not you are Christian it is a tantalizing and ultimately inspiring climb.

Cathedral of St. John the Baptist.Current resting place of the Shroud.

We will talk a little about the climb here, some of the sights along the way, the mystery of the Shroud will not be removed, indeed we may end up a little lost, and the descent may be something different than intended, and perhaps something we will not be quite looking forward to or ready to complete.

The Shroud of Turin is kept in the Royal Chapel of the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in Turin, in northern Italy.  It has been a home now for the Shroud since 1578 when it arrived in Turin, heralded by a gun salute courtesy of the local artillery.

The so-called ‘undisputed’ or documented history can be traced back to about 1350.  Its whereabouts and exhibitions since that date are generally agreed upon but before that time, well before that time even its existence remains in question.

The Shroud has been around a long time… and it isn’t too difficult to trace back to the 14th century.  The documentary trail doesn’t come to an abrupt halt but peters out, fades away slowly in the sands of time.  We find hints and guesses about its travels, and less and less certainty the further back we go.  Is it the Cloth of Edessa, the Mandylion..?  These may very well be other names for the Shroud of Turin and are indicatvie of  some of the hurdles in trying to establish a provenance for the Shroud.

The Trail

We could begin with a quote from the Bible:

And he bought fine linen, and took him down, and wrapped him in the linen, and laid him in a sepulchre which was hewn out of a rock, and rolled a stone unto the door of the sepulchre. (Mark 15:46)

Churchgoer prays in front of Holy Shroud.

And there came also Nicodemus, which at the first came to Jesus by night, and brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about an hundred pound [weight]. Then took they the body of Jesus, and wound it in linen clothes with the spices, as the manner of the Jews is to bury.  (John 19:39-40)

The story that has been handed down with the Shroud of Turin is that it is this same linen cloth(s) that wrapped the Christ.

The Shroud now belongs to the Holy See, bequeathed to them by the House of Savoy rather recently; the year was 1983.  The House of Savoy guarded this treasure for hundreds of years before that.  And it was moved to Turin, Italy back in 1583, still under the protection of the House of Savoy.

The occasion of the move to Turin was to offer the Archbishop of Milan, Carlo Borromeo, an opportunity for worship, so sparing him a long journey to Savoy where it had resided until that time.

Duke Louis I of Savoy agreed to pay the canons of Lirey an annual rent in return for ownership of the Shroud.  The Savoys can date their ownership from that time, the year 1464 to be exact.  And before that, the earliest unquestioned possessor, from the year 1349,  is the famed knight Geoffroi de Charnay, Seigneur de Lirey; the Shroud remained in his family until the accord with the House of Savoy.  It is the time before 1349 that becomes murky, and speculation has placed it with the Templars for an uncertain period.

Now it is kept in one of two reliquaries.  One reliquary, when not on exhibition, keeps the Shroud flat and horizontal, in an inert atmosphere, behind a multi-layered ‘sarcophogus’ to protect it from fire.  The other reliquary used when on exhibition is a parallelepiped able to rotate from a horizontal to vertical position.  The upper surface of both is bullet-proof laminated glass.  See the photo at right.  The official site is here.

How Old is the Shroud?

Most of the relevant information re the Shroud is available, in one form or another, via the internet.  Though this article isn’t a summary of the various results about the Shroud it is still necessary to be able to say something about what it is as opposed to what it isn’t.  The age of the Shroud is illustrative of the treatment it has received in microcosm.

Container of Shroud contents with papal seal.

The only Carbon 14 test that was done dated the Shroud to the 14^th century.  After this test was published the consensus was the Shroud was not what it pretended to be; that it was indeed a fake, probably one of the many ‘manufactured’ religious relics from the Middle Ages…   The Middle Ages invited an atmosphere conducive to trafficking in these relics and it could be a lucrative business in those days.

There is little doubt this test was not the whole story.  And in fact as far as dating the Shroud itself was more misleading than anything else.  From a copy of a report re the Carbon 14 tests in Thermochemica Acta:

Damon et al. reported that “The age of the shroud is obtained as a.d. 1260–1390, with at least 95% confidence.” However, that date does not agree with observations on the linen-production technology nor the chemistry of fibers obtained directly from the main part of the clothin 1978.

Without going into the twists and turns of the story that is the Carbon 14 ‘scandal’ the fact of the matter now rests in the possibility the linen may indeed have an age that reaches back 2000 years.

Sindonology?

The more one follows the arguments and evidence for and against the Shroud the more one notices the number of contradictions in the ‘vast’ literature; in concert with this one also notices the number of people with an ax to grind, not always obvious.

Staying neutral is a difficult stratagem in this arena.  And indeed it is now a study all to itself- Sindonology.  Courtesy of Wikipedia: Sindonology is from the Greek σινδών—sindon, the word used in the Gospel of Mark to describe the type of the burial cloth of Jesus.

Jewish Burial Customs

The question of Jewish burial practices in the 1^st century and whether or not the Shroud is evidence of same is a case in point.  Many sources claim the Shroud to be consonant with such customs.  And several, often quoting the Bible, say just the opposite.

These opposing standpoints are typical of many facets of the Shroud; getting to the bottom of them isn’t always easy or possible.  It would seem the Shroud itself however is not in accord with typical customs.  The body in most cases was not wrapped with but a single shroud but several strips of linen according to Jewish customs, generally.  So either this particular instance of a burial shroud is rather unique, or it’s simply not the real thing…  or is it?

Here from shroud2000.com is a comment about this issue:

One of the points of confusion with the Shroud is that it was a custom to wash the body before burial. Yet the Shroud seems to depict a man whose wounds were never cleaned. However there appears to be an exception to this custom for those who have died a violent death. Here is an excerpt from The Jewish Way of Death and Mourning by Maurice Lamm (1969):

“The blood that flows at the time of death may not be washed away. When there is other blood on the body that flowed during lifetime (while alive), from wounds or as a result of an operation, the washing and taharah (purification) are performed in the usual manner.”

“Where the deceased died instantaneously through violence or accident, and his body and garments are completely spattered with blood, no washing or taharah is performed. The body is placed in the casket without the clothes being removed. Only a sheet is wrapped around it, over the clothes. The blood is part of the body and may not be separated from it in death.”

“Where blood flows continually after death, the source of the flow is covered and not washed. The clothes which contain the blood that flowed after death are placed in the casket at the feet.”

Notice how only a single sheet is used. Also, the man on the Shroud is naked because they cast lots for his garments. The reason for this unusual custom was due to the belief that “life is in the blood”. Leviticus 17:11 says, “For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life.”

In other words the Shroud doesn’t appear to be inconsistent with these practices.  Their practices covered many possibilities and changed depending on certain characterisics of the body: if they died through violence or accident leaving the body covered in blood they were treated differently.

So it goes with many aspects of the Shroud.  You can find people on both sides of the fence making contradictory claims about the Shroud.  Yet the truth here seems obvious once we have studied the complete picture.

The Image

The image on the cloth is…  unusual.  Now it has a subtle, almost ghost-like quality, but whether it has always been just so isnt really known with any certainty.

The discovery of the three dimensional aspect of the Shroud by Dr. John Jackson in 1976 using the VP-8 analyzer is still a source of wonder.  That in some way the image on the Shroud is a negative, in a photographic sense, as uncovered by Secondo Pia at the beginning of the last century, and additionally has encoded in it information that allows a three dimensional version of the image to be reconstructed, these characteristics by themselves make the image unusual enough.

Still beyond that the image has a quality, not done complete justice to online, that is hard to put into words, a new experience, as the following comments show.  You can examine the Shroud for yourself here, on shroud.com.

Chemists now know the coloration for the images is superficial at the topmost fiber surfaces of the cloth. The fibers are coated with a thin film of impurities made up mostly of starch. It is in this coating that the image resides. The visible image is the result of a chemical change, in certain places, that results in an observable change of color.

The coating can be physically removed from the fibers with adhesive tape. In fact, flakes of color can be seen where it separated from the fiber and stuck to tape used to collect particulate samples from the Shroud. You can see the thin coat of color through a microscope and it is hard to imagine how an artist could have accomplished this.

The images on the Shroud look ghostlike. They look scorched into the cloth. But chemically they don’t resemble scorches. They don’t contain the chemical byproducts produced by scorching.

Sculpture by Luigi E. Mattei

More here.

While photography has the advantage of fixing an image in time and of concentrating it so that whicheverangle you look at it from it remains the same, with the Shroud itself that is not the case.

Moving around that table from a certain angle I saw this image  so faded as if to practically disappear, whilefrom others it seemed as if the figure were almost outside the sheet; it was, I repeat, an incredible emotion.At that moment I knew that this image was unique.

Let me tell you more.

I asked permission to photograph  some details of the face.  As I said previously, I thought I knew it well..

I approached the face placing my camera at a distance of about 20 – 30 cm, aimed the camera at the face andsaw ………… nothing in the viewfinder; “and yet” I said ” I know it by heart.”  I had to beg my friend topoint to the position of the eye, because from a distance of 30 cm I could not see it. I could only see it as Imoved away from it.

So it is a barely perceptible image, one which escapes you, which leaves you perplexed.  I am convinced thatif people could see it from close up they would not only feel great emotion, but would also realise the realconsistency of this image, which would dispel the many doubts surrounding the authenticity of this sheetwhich unquestionably enshrouded a corpse, and of this there is absolutely no doubt.

See here for complete article.

In order to correctly perceive what is actually on the Shroud, one must undand not only the nature of the images but also the physiology of visual perception. The retina of the human eye has the built-in characteristic of automatically suppressing images which are fuzzy or of very low contrast in order to sharpen what is finally perceived. This ordinarily helpful function creates a problem when viewing the Shroud, since one may not perceive images which are actually there. Various enhancement techniques are necessary to correctly discern some of the images. Also, most people are not accustomed to looking at partial, complex images in the negative, and hence miss much of what is actually there.  If one’s visual memory banks are not programmed with a large number and variety of images, one may simply overlook images that are there.

See here for details.

Tonal changes from light areas to dark areas are exceedingly smooth and gradual. Artists sometime describe this as lacking outline. We see this when the Shroud is viewed up close. When we look at the image from less than about a six-foot distance, the image seems to completely disappear. It does not disappear, but our visual senses cannot easily discern it. To many, this had seemed a most mysterious property. But there is nothing mysterious about it. It has to do with the way our brain interprets what our eyes see. Though we are not consciously aware of it, our minds automatically create the semblance of boundaries and shapes from changes in color and tone. So subtle are the gradual shifts of tone on the Shroud that if we get close enough, thus stretching our field of view, changes in tonality are imperceptible. Step back, and the tonal shifts become tolerably narrow enough for our brains to discern the pattern. Paintings, and other hand produced works of art, do not display this characteristic for the simple reason that the artist must stand close to apply his or her paint or colorant. Artists – because they must – consciously or unconsciously, create outlines. The Shroud has none. It is beyond imagination to think that an artist could apply colorants so precisely and so gradually as to be viewable only from a distance of more than six feet.

See here for more details.

If fashioned in the fourteenth century, then the facade it showed its intended audience was pretty unconvincing.  Seeing the Shroud with the naked eye is seeing it at its worst. Only five hundred years later, when modern science thoroughly penetrated this facade did the Shroud become really convincing.

See here for more.

Pantocrator

Just What Does the Shroud Mean?  A Fifth Gospel?

It is understandable that people on both sides of the debate, not re authenticity, but the debate that is underlying the formal debate about authenticity, the ‘debate’ between let’s say believers and atheists, this underlying difference of opinion that sharpens the axes of almost everyone involved in Sindonology, it is understandable how for both atheists and believers alike seeing the Shroud as a fake or imitation, an artifact of some kind, but not the real thing, would make the whole matter less difficult to swallow.  We would no longer need to give thought to this strange image.  Indeed many on both sides of this underlying issue agree it is not the real thing.

Still a great many have seemingly been persuaded to its authenticity.  The amount of material on the web seems disproportionately taken with the idea of its authenticity.  Of course there are plenty of skeptics out there… sometimes harder to find.  And their arguments often, as a matter of course, include the original results of the Carbon 14 tests, for instance, and just as the believers have found a way to stand these tests on their head the skeptics have ways of re-interpreting the so-called errors made. So we are involved in this perpetual game of interpretation as opposed to ‘truth’.

From Requiem for the Shroud of Turin:

Take, for instance, the appearance and anatomy of the figure on the Shroud. The first reaction of many who view it is that it resembles a Gothic — perhaps vaguely Byzantine — representation of Christ. Since, as Augustine lamented, the world has no idea what Jesus looked like, the conventionally medieval appearance of the image ought to be evidence for its being an artifact. But wait: if the Shroud is authentic, might it not be that the standard Gothic representations of Jesus are in fact derived from the Shroud, rather than vice versa? And that is precisely the argumentative strategy of most of the Shroud enthusiasts. “Where was the Shroud before the mid-fourteenth century?” ask Kenneth E. Stevenson and Gary R. Habermas in their book on the Shroud (Stevenson is a former STURP member, Haberrmas is on the faculty of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Baptist College). Clues come from Byzantine art. Before the sixth century Christ’s face was painted in many ways, but then artists began to render it in a way uncannily resembling the face of the man buried in the Shroud of Turin.” Uncanny!

This particular ‘see-saw’ is highlighted by Denis Dutton in his article but characterizes the entire dialogue re the Shroud.  Of course for this author these characteristics underline its artificial nature.  Finding the truth is like looking for a light at the end of the proverbial tunnel.  Hard to see! And if the Shroud is not His burial Shroud…  well just what is it?  An artifact from another time, meant to fill probably a slightly different purpose than it does today…  or was it meant to be a ‘prop’ to faith…  and is that all it is whether or not its real?

Believing the Shroud to be the real thing, to be His burial shroud, to have found at long last a face to put with the Man of Sorrows, is an amazing thing, indeed a miraculous gift.  How can everyone not realize He has left this evidence for us, it seems almost a kind of secret knowledge, literally millions have accepted its authenticity yet, to cross that line, to believe not only it could be true but is His Shroud…  beginning to live with that knowledge…  it becomes a very personal thing.  Is it just an old cloth, an ancient piece of linen with a strange image, or is it something from His life, something very personal left over from His time on Earth?

Strangely the final answer may elude us.  Even if the cloth itself is proven, and that word is used advisedly, to hail from His time period we may never be able to say with certainty if the image itself was formed back then.  And even if we can at some time take that step, well the fact of the matter is obvious.  Without the skeptics, if none existed, if it seemed opinion was unanimous, there would still be a measure of faith in accepting this truth.  There is a measure of faith in all science.  Absolute certainty belongs to another world.

The Faces of Jesus

This is from the History channel’s reconstruction based on the Shroud.  Details here.

Painting by Glenda Green…  see details here.

Richard Neave, from the University of Manchester in England, recreates an image based on forensic and archaeological evidence.  Article appeared in Popular Mechanics here.

By Ariel Aggemian in 1935.  Details here.

Pantocrator

Copies

There are many copies of the Shroud in existence.  Many of them were made in homage to the original and reside in various churches now.  From shroud.com:

Ever since the earliest days of Christendom, the Shroud of Christ has been a most precious relic, which “palladium” was safeguarding rulers, nations and cities….. The image on the Shroud has been copied by numerous artists on countless icons. Today more than 50 copies of the Shroud of Turin are guarded in churches, museums and private collections in Italy, Spain, Portugal, USA, Argentina and Belgium. Even non “connoisseurs” will not have any trouble at all, to see that these copies are certainly not “”acheiropopoties”" but works of art, made by human hands. The best “hand made” copies were made in 1898, by Ruffo and Cusseti, both guarded today in Turin. Today some excellent full size photographs of the Shroud are placed in churches all over the world.

Details here.

Of course there are many copies now made in effort to simulate the original Shroud, efforts to uncover the original process that led to its creation.  Such is the one by Luigi Garlaschelli.  See here for details.

Healing Powers

There have been healing properties associated with the Shroud as well:

From its earliest years, in legends and in art, there have been claims of miracles and healings through the shroud. Four credible witnesses reported that in 544 when Edessa was threatened with siege by a Persian army, the image was rushed to the top of the city wall and prominently displayed; the army turned and abandoned the attack. Eusebius and others state that King Agabar V of Edessa was mortally ill and was instantly healed when shown the face on the cloth. While the shroud was being carried to Constantinople in 944, it was said that a man possessed of demons was cleansed when he touched it.

See here for details.

Something more recent:

May 11, 1955- Cheshire receives letter from Mrs. Veronica Woollam of Gloucester, asking if her ten-year-old daughter Josephine, crippled with osteomyelitis in the hip and leg, ‘could be blessed with the relic of the Holy Shroud’. Unable to travel by air because of his lungs, Cheshire takes Josephine and her mother by train, first to Portugal, for ex-King Umberto’s permission, then to Turin in the hope of her being healed via the Shroud. The Shroud is taken out of its casket, its seals are broken and Josephine is allowed to put her hand in beneath the silk covering. But it is not unrolled. Although there was no immediate change in Josephine’s condition, she later recovers to lead a normal life, though she will die young.

DNA & the Shroud

Dr.Leoncio Garza-Valdes with the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, after his discovery of a bioplastic veneer coating some ancient Mayan artifacts, had speculated about the Shroud of Turin’s Carbon 14 dating that the veneer might have been partly responsible for an error in dating the Shroud.  This speculation eventually led not only to testing the Shroud for the veneer but also to DNA tests of the blood on the Shroud.

Dr.Victor V.Tryon, director of the University’s Center for Advanced DNA Technologies, is reported to have cloned extracts from these bloodstains and deposited them, for safe keeping, in the University of Texas’ bloodbank.

There are so many stories associated with the Shroud, not only those from its ‘legendary’ time, but obviously stories with the immediacy of so-called urban legends whose truth is obviously questionable.  Other reports re DNA and the Shroud indicate what little is there is hardly enough to generate much of anything substantial in the way of evidence, one way or another, beyond the mere existence of blood on the Shroud.  More details here.

The Violet Apple

The Shroud of Turin is not unlike the violet apple re-disovered in Lindsay’s novel The Violet Apple.  The parallel is interesting…  In the novel a seed from the Tree of Life in Genesis has somehow been protected against the vicissitudes of Time and found its way into our wondrous Modern Age.

The fact of the Shroud of Turin, that it has survived into our time, a fragile thing that, unlike so much of human culture from bygone ages, is somehow still around, it would seem miraculously, may betoken something in itself…  as if it has been protected against those same vicissitudes itself.

In The Violet Apple it is a glass, in the shape of a serpent, has carried the seed on its journey, and the story has wended its way along with it.  When the glass is broken, by accident, the seed is transplanted and a dimunitive tree grows and its fruit is the violet apple of the title.  Tasting this fruit is an experience beyond the ordinary and brings one to the beginning of a knowledge of their true being.  Is it impossible to suspect less of the Shroud of Turin?

From The Violet Apple:

I happen to be one of those queer folk who have faith in Eden or its equivalent.  The farther back you go the lovelier people seem to have been.  Somewhere, sometime there has been a very lofty chain of celestial mountains from wich the rivers have been flowing down ever since, to water our modern civilization, and should they ever run dry they can never, never be replenished.

The paling fence is significant as the term pale became to mean the area enclosed by such a fence and later just the figurative meaning of ‘the area that is enclosed and safe’. So, to be ‘beyond the pale’ was to be outside the area accepted as ‘home’.

Catherine the Great created a ‘Pale of Settlement’ in Russia in 1791. This was a western border region of the country in which Jews were allowed to live. The motivation behind this was to restrict trade between Jews and native Russians. Some Jews were allowed to live, as a concession, beyond the pale.

Pales were enforced in various other European countries for similar political reasons, notably in Ireland (the Pale of Dublin) and France (the Pale of Calais, which was formed as early as 1360).

The phrase itself comes later than that. The first printed reference comes from 1657 in John Harington’s lyric poem The History of Polindor and Flostella.

In that work, the character Ortheris withdraws with his beloved to a country lodge for ‘quiet, calm and ease’, but later venture further – ‘Both Dove-like roved forth beyond the pale to planted Myrtle-walk’. Such recklessness rarely meets with a good end in 17th century verse and before long they are attacked by armed men with ‘many a dire killing thrust’. The message is clearly, ‘if there is a pale, you should stay inside it’, which conveys exactly the meaning of the phrase as it is used today.

I think this goes a long way to defining this obsession.  But it may be a little too wide of the mark.  Forbidden or forgotten knowledge, ancient knowledge, future science, alien technology, UFO’s, the paranormal, supernatural, miraculous, ancient wisdom, the occult, science fiction, fantasy, symbolism… well I am not going to continue this list.  It can go on and on.

There are so many words and phrases to cover this area of ‘knowledge’ and initially trying to pick a phrase that would cover everything and a little bit more was difficult.  So I settled on ‘beyond the pale’.  Of course the average person, especially so those scientifically minded, would probably think most if not all of these categories are empty, or at the very least empty of anything worthwhile.

I do have, within this ill-defined realm, some particular obsessions.  Flying saucers, the paranormal, supernatural, or miraculous, and forgotten or forbidden knowledge, as well as ‘cryptids’, and Fortean phenomena in general.

Where does this obsession come from?  My first answer to this, and it is just an initial response, would have to do with a vision I had over 40 years ago now.  Now I rarely discuss this with anyone.  I can’t remember if I ever told my wife, I don’t think I have, but even if I did I know it’s not a subject we have ever talked about in detail.  I have mentioned it to few people and the few I have mentioned it to have not been very interested in details.

Now that is curious to me, because I am a very curious fellow, and if someone had talked to me about a vision they once had, well I probably would have all sorts of questions.  One thing I have learned over the years however is people, generally, are not very curious.  Of course that is a curiosity in itself.  Still, for our species on the whole, curiosity is a driving force.  Otherwise it probably would not have killed the cat!

This vision as I remember it did not last much longer than maybe a minute or two and the easiest way for me to describe it is that it was like someone had flipped a switch and turned a light bulb on inside my head and that light illuminated a scene.  At first the scene seemed like a painting but it had 3 dimensional qualities that no ordinary painting has yet it still had boundaries of some kind and what has stayed with me after all these years is a memory of a three dimensional ‘painting’.

The painting had a surreal quality.  In the foreground was a crater, perhaps a volcano, but I have always thought of it more as a sort of ‘caldera’, and ‘floating’ above this crater were hands and each hand held a lightning bolt.  The hands held them in such a way that the bolts crossed each other above the crater with their tips pointing downward into it.  The figure that held the bolts was obscured and could not be made out in the background.  The hands looked very real, having an unusual dimensional quality that made them stand out, the lightning bolts having that same quality.  Hanging above the crater, part of the background as well, were clouds mounting up to the heavens, in rainbow colors.  The entire scene was enlivened with color.

Slowly, as if the light bulb was going out, the scene faded away until the last vestige was gone.  I was dumbfounded.  I wanted to tell somebody but there was no one I could tell that would care.  I made a few half-hearted attempts to talk about this experience but soon gave up.

My parents were no longer together, we were living with our Mom and her family, but at that time in my life, really most of my life, my connection with them hasn’t been close.  Probably it crossed my mind to mention it to someone in my family, but crossed my thoughts very quickly, as soon leaving them as beginning.

Now visions are not so weird.  They are not an uncommon experience though many people have never had one.  Still beyond the experience itself I had a different kind of knowledge; that yes, there are things beyond what we might refer to as ‘ordinary’ experience.  Things do happen that not everyone would believe but are still true.

Now that indeed was no small piece of knowledge and without a doubt prepared some groundwork for my obsession.  Everything isn’t just as it seems…  Still I don’t think this is the root of my obsession.  Yet it was preparation of sorts, indoctrination into the no man’s land covered by these subjects.

One last comment about this vision.  When I had it, some time in high school, there was no reason I can think of I would have connected the primary components of this vision together- the lightning, crater or volcano, and colored clouds- strange to say but lightning in the vicinity of volcanoes is far from unusual and is actually part of what goes on in eruptions etc., and the colored clouds strangely are related to volcanic phenomena too- Krakatoa is a good example, and what happened after its eruption.

There were unusual sunsets, and sunrises, across the world in the wake of that event, strangely colored.  Now this is an interesting ‘coda’ to this vision…  but leaves me still bewildered at its real meaning.  As a matter of fact I have not the slightest idea what it means, and have, ever since the vision, wondered if or when I might in reality see some version of it, in a painting or photograph etc.

The vision struck me immediately as laden with significance, and a symbolism that seemed just beyond my powers of ‘decoding’…  I have since of course tried to uncover what meaning was meant for me in this vision but have never considered myself completely successful in the attempt.

Of course the lightning bolts remind me of Zeus, the word ‘crater’ in Greek has some significance, I remember a painting by William Blake that seems a very distant relation, and actually the content of the image has always seemed to almost bring to mind a painting I might have seen at one time, but never have seen since.

I did at the time this happened make an attempt at drawing the image- I am not much of a draughtsman and the hands turned into claws and the clouds were not much to look at.  The experience itself however left an indelible mark!

When I began this post it wasn’t with any glimpse of the Pandora’s box that it would open.  I have shied away from trying to define synchronicity…  instead throughout I have seemingly been running around it in circles.  I have kept adding bits and pieces to this post, not so much in the interest of summary, because the subject itself is a tangent to so many things that a true summary would have to include, well more information than it was ever my intent to include in this post, so not a summary but a sort of ad hoc schedule of indices, indicating take-offs and landings for some of these obvious tangents.

Before and After Science seems a perfect setting…  one of the essays I stumbled across in trying to understand this topic referred to the idea as a way of seeing the world, before the invasion of science.  Curiously in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, unlike the technical backdrop of the movie Blade Runner which is based on it, the setting is a dystopia.  The inner and outer cities are crumbling apart, there are wastelands… a post-apocalyptic nightmare… and really that setting is more appropriate to the basic ideas of the novel…  the human world is passing away, in front of our eyes.

This particular category of Koans and Cyphers I had never completed- though it was separated out some time ago- what was to fall into this category I couldnt quite work out.

Synchronicities do seem much like koans, they are puzzles of a sort, and their comings together and leave takings seem often completely inexplicable.  The teapots below offer such an example.  The following is from Max’s site:

On January 30th, 2006, I was suddenly compelled to explore the hidden crawlspace under my back stairs.

Now, I’m “Max Action – Urban Explorer” – a huge part of my life and self has been built up around my passion for exploring caves, tunnels, rooftops, basements – spaces between, spaces forgotten, spaces forbidden. And, of course, I LOVE crawlspaces.

Max found a teapot in that crawlspace.  Now just a couple weeks before he had been in California and had what he describes as a mystical experience, but by the time he found himself back home, a lot of that feeling had faded away.  He was still on the edges of it when he visited a Unique Thrift Store, having returned to Minneapolis, all this still before his teapot in the crawlspace.  And he couldn’t let go of one item. 

 “I don’t know – there’s just something satisfying about it –
 I like the materials, the construction maybe -
 the connotations are somehow pleasant to me.
 I don’t know. I just feel like I want this in my house.”

So he bought it.  It was a teapot.  And when he discovered the teapot in the crawlspace, days later, it was mind-boggling.  They seemed to be twins.

And his verdict…  “It seemed inescapable; I had asked the universe if I could really believe in intuition, in, essentially, magic … and the universe had answered with a resounding “yes” – in the form of “synchronicity.”

I cant quarrel with that.  His teapot generated the one comment to this post.  Really to me the teapots are a koan, and indeed I think he accessed, for him, if not its real ulterior- and interior- meaning, at least one of them.

Often synchronicities seem just like that; and on a different level codes or cyphers would be the perfect metaphor.  Something is hidden in the code.  The meaning can be tapped with a little extra effort.  Sometimes years of efforts as in the case of the Voynich manuscript…  although synchronicity and the Voynich manuscript probably dont make much sense in the same breath.

It is interesting that the original meaning of koan, a ‘public record’, points to an objective reality beyond the koan, as opposed to something personal and private.  Yet often synchronicites seem couched in such personal and private references that this seems almost contradictory.  Well synchronicities are that too.

Before and After Science 

Calling this post Before and After Science, at first thought after Eno’s luminous work, secondly to point to the idea of synchronicity as being independent of Science itself, but also, uh thirdly, to the idea being mired in a kind of timeless region, as if the meanings to draw from synchronicities are sideways glances at something missed, or to come, or well something else.  A well of inexhaustible energy that beckons just beyond our island of existence. 

Matthew Weiner imagines in his column in Stylus on Eno’s Before & After Science it is the perfect Desert Island disc, something to listen to when you are stranded on that island…

Thus began a search through nearly every record in my collection (Pet Sounds? Too whiny. Any reasonable person would want to choke Brian Wilson after about a month; plus, the “Why won’t you let me go home?” refrain of “Sloop John B” wouldn’t exactly get my mind off the fact that I’m stuck by myself on a rock). And somehow, the one that kept coming back to me was Before and After Science. In the decade-plus since I had first heard it, the album as a whole became clearer to me, while at the same time retaining the mysteries one hopes would endure over the long, hot months of nothingness. 

Eric Weiss in an essay on the subject refers to synchronicity as something of a ‘throwback’, a part of the world before Science etc.:

In this pre-modern world, synchronicities will seem perfectly natural. Theentire physical world will be imagined as a creation of the Divine, created precisely for the purpose of some drama that is taking place between the Divine and Its creatures. So we might, for example, imagine the physical world as a kind of school in which humans learn certain kinds of lessons. The general run of everyday reality is a sufficient school most of the time, but sometimes the teacher needs to intervene more forcefully. That he does by means of synchronicities – or in this context we might call them miracles. Synchronicities serve a divine purpose (final cause) and do so according to a divine plan (the archetype, formal cause).

Our lives abound with synchronicities, writ large and small, and often simply ignored by us as too trite, or ridiculous, or meaningless in this modern age. 

Voynich and Nostradamus

Does the subject matter of prophecy fall into some corridor of synchronicity- or not?  The Voynich Manuscript, the Lost Book of Nostradamus, the manifold interpretations of Centuries… 

Is it Revelation?

There is a scene in the movie Blade Runner that brings Deckard and Rachael into a strange confrontation.

Deckard: “You remember the spider that lived in a ‘bush outside your window’? ‘Orange body, green legs’? Watched her build a web all summer? Then one day, there’s a big egg in it. The egg hatched…”

Rachael finishes the sentence: “…and a hundred baby spiders came out. And they ate her.”

Deckard: “Implants! Those aren’t your memories. They’re somebody else’s. They’re Tyrell’s niece’s. (Pause) OK, bad joke. I made a bad joke. You’re not a replicant. Go home, OK? No really, I’m sorry. Go home. (Pause)”

The revelation is chilling. “Replicants aren’t supposed to be emotional, but because Rachael is ‘more human than human,’ tears well up in her heartbroken, watery eyes, and they liberally flow down her cheek. Her face melts after he pounds in the truth. When Deckard leaves the room to get Rachael a drink (lights turn on automatically as he enters his kitchen), she flees the apartment – devastated.”

Of course in the context of the film this revelation is not an example of telepathy, clairvoyance, or even synchronicity, but simple detective work. The exchange has a haunting quality that has stayed with me ever since.

Here is Jung’s classic example from Synchronicity:

“A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment.”

The images here all depict various synchronicities, absolutely meaningless without context to fill in the blanks. All synchronicities are multiple in some sense; it is that ‘multiple’ quality that is the synchronicity. The images, events, or simply ‘things’, whatever they are, are ‘reflections’ of each other and seem to provoke meaning without usually offering a simple translation.

The origins of, for instance, the two constellations of ‘dots’ below are very different, yet in a certain context they seem to be strangely incredible reflections of each other, however statistically improbable.

The picture on the folded twenty dollar bill seems to summon the image of the twin towers: is there a hidden agenda this peculiar likeness is meant, even ‘designed’, highlight? Or is it one of the many outcomes of chance?

The teapots have a history: the history of  bringing them together seems meaningless, hasn’t resulted in any discovery beyond the pots themselves really. It seems a pointless synchronicity yet that is what makes synchronicities: even in their pointlessness they seem to harbor some strange meaning we can’t easily decipher.

What is it about synchronicities?

It seems the pointlessness has something in common with that of a puzzle…  usually when we put a puzzle together we have an idea of the overall picture; without that picture putting the puzzle together would be difficult, though not impossible.  Synchronicities seem to operate similarly, not really in the reverse, but simply without that guiding image; we have the pieces, the various synchronicities, or steps toward their eventual occurrence, but the picture itself isn’t clear.

The puzzle offers its challenge in assembling the pieces but knowing the outcome; how do the pieces fit together?  The synchronicity on the other hand seems to offer us the pieces but asks of us something quite different, what is the real picture, and further the meaning beyond the pieces, as if we need to somehow put the picture together into a revelation of sorts. We have the idea this picture exists, if nothing else the synchronicity seems literally pregnant with its meaning, though often that real meaning seems unclear and indecipherable.

Here is another interesting example, astounding to say the least, of an improbable coincidence:

“All fifteen members of a church choir in Beatrice, Nebraska, due at practice at 7:20, were late on the evening of March 1, 1950. The minister and his wife and daughter had one reason (his wife delayed to iron the daughter’s dress) one girl waited to finish a geometry problem; one couldn’t start her car; two lingered to hear the end of an especially exciting radio program; one mother and daughter were late because the mother had to call the daughter twice to wake her from a nap; and so on. The reasons seemed rather ordinary. But there were ten separate and quite unconnected reasons for the lateness of the fifteen persons. It was rather fortunate that none of the fifteen arrived on time at 7:20, for at 7:25 the church building was destroyed in an explosion. The members of the choir, Life reported, wondered if their delay was “an act of God.”

See here for details.

Devil in the Details

Some of the details re the above images might be ‘illustrative’ or even interesting but what those details will not be is enlightening.

For instance:  we don’t really know how the image of the towers from a folded twenty dollar bill first came to light.  There are references, on the internet, to an email several years ago.  But that email doesn’t seem ‘extant’ now.  Who would have gotten the idea of folding it in just that way; though folding money into images like this seems to have a long history.  Is it even remotely possible that there is an intention in back of this..?  The twenty dollar bill was ‘re-designed’ before the Towers disaster.  Does that mean it was planned… well these questions aren’t answerable.  And they seem far removed from possibility.  And if we grant that it has even a hint at possibility why in the world would someone with that knowledge choose this way of revelation?

Something similar is true in the case of the Pleiades.   I can quote the origin of the coffee stains, and the process of trying to identify the pattern, but is there real meaning in this similarity, as striking as it is, or is it something simply totally absurd?

And the provenance of the teapots is equally plain, but is their any point in bringing them together… it seems not.

Small World

Are the ‘phenomena’ of synchronicity, the circumstances that bring about the multiverse of coincidences, byproducts perhaps of the ‘small world phenomenon’?  The notion of a small chain of acquaintances linking any two people on earth was first ‘popularized’ by Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy in Everything is Different.  From Everything is Different courtesy of Wikipedia :

A fascinating game grew out of this discussion. One of us suggested performing the following experiment to prove that the population of the Earth is closer together now than they have ever been before. We should select any person from the 1.5 billion inhabitants of the Earth—anyone, anywhere at all. He bet us that, using no more than five individuals, one of whom is a personal acquaintance, he could contact the selected individual using nothing except the network of personal acquaintances.

In other words does increasing the connections we have to one another increase the probability of some, or any, coincidences?  Without doing an extensive analysis (indeed there are mathematical studies of the idea), it might seem, especially so because of the internet, our ‘small world’ might be overrun with coincidences.  Of course drawing distinctions among coincidence, serendipity, and synchronicity might change this outlook.  Still there may be a real effect from the so-called ‘small world phenomenon’ on the varieties and occurrences of coincidence(s).

Chernobyl

There is also the example of Chernobyl.  The biblical version from the Book of Revelations:

And the third angel sounded the trumpet, and a great star fell from heaven, burning as it were a torch, and it fell on the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters: And the name of the star is called Wormwood. And the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.  

There has been some controversy whether or not Wormwood should be translated as Chernobyl…  whether the meaning is exact is hard to determine but it seems that even if not exact Chernobyl has been used to refer what is called Wormwood in English.

So what kind of synchronicity is this..?  Is this mere coincidence…    unlikely as it is- and maybe that is all it is- simply an unlikely coincidence with no meaning beyond ‘mere’ coincidence..?  Of course the author of Revelations refers to a star falling and what happened at Chernobyl was not that…  still it was a place where nuclear reactions occurred.  The same energy that powers stars…

The sub-title to one of the other images in that same set as the image at the top of this post, an image from Chernobyl:

“What is most striking here is the contrast between the world of Civilization which is ours and the world of Nature. The world of civilisation is physical, while Chernie is a metaphysical world, “meta” means “after”, Chernobyl is the world after physics. The world of Nature is something that exists of itself, it is how this world has been for millions of years before us and how it will be after us, while civilization is mere appearance, it is not “just there,” it is not self-supporting. It is artificial and requires engineering and science to support it. If we want to make use of the advantages of civilisation, but are not prepared to concern ourself with the upholding of civilisation�we are done for. In a trice we find ourselves left without civilisation. Just a push of a wrong button and everything goes straight to a primitive state. We look around and see that civilization is vanishing into the air, like fata morgana. The primitive forest appears in its native state, just as if the curtains of Civilization, covering pure Nature, have been drawn back.”

Hebrew

Here is a look, from a slightly different perspective, at the idea of coincidence.  The Hebrew language seems to lack a precise equivalent of ‘coincidence’:

“Coincidence” is the English equivalent to the Hebrew word, mikreh. Is there a difference in their meaning? At first glance, you might say no. After all, how else would you translate mikreh, if not “coincidence”? But Hebrew – loshon hakodesh – is the holy tongue; the language in which G-d Himself spoke; the language in which He gave us His holy Torah. Therefore, there can be no true equivalent to any Hebrew word in another language.

Literally translated, mikreh means “karah m’HaShem – it happened from G-d. The word itself testifies that nothing, absolutely nothing, occurs without His guidance, and this holds true from the most major to the most insignificant event. Our sages teach that a man does not so much as prick his finger or stub his toe without it being orchestrated from Above. Coincidence, on the other hand, connotes a random event. Things happen because they happen, without rhyme or reason, and G-d is most certainly out of the equation. On the other hand, we, Am Yisrael, see hashgach – Divine guidance and direction in every situation, even in apparently ordinary occurrences, and nowhere is this more evident than in Jerusalem.
The full article is here.

There is no word for coincidence in Hebrew. And Jews are likely to share the view that coincidences are just not worth talking about. After all, the word has been perverted from its orginal use. Coincidence first entered the English language in the seventeenth century as a means of denying any causal connection between unrelated events. The word was a particular favorite of Sir Francis Bacon, who advanced scientific rationalism against the claims of faith.

Please see here for original article.

Baader-Meinhoff Phenomenon

There are a host of related ideas having to do with the concept of synchronicity. The Baaden-Meinhoff Phenomenon, Littlewood’s Law, the Law of Truly Large Numbers, the Recency Effect, Cognitive Bias, the so-called 23 Enigma, probably there are others…  Whether or not to take these as synonyms of synchronicty, or as descriptions of its varied aspects, is probably more a matter of individual taste than a true delineation of logical categories.  

Littlewood’s Law has to do with probability and miracles.  What is the frequency of ‘miracles’…  again we are caught in definitions and semantics; to some extent this is a fundamental concern.  Drawing the lines to decide what constitutes a synchronicity in the first place can be difficult… 

If you think, for instance, one of the defining characteristics of a miracle is its rarity, Littlewoods Law attempts to relate this probability to the number of events happening to an individual in a month of days.  So if you regard a miracle as something that only happens once in a million times, for instance, we are very likely, in a months’ time, to experience at least one miracle, because in a month’s time we experience at least that number of events…  perhaps really yet another example of the Law of Truly Large Numbers…   The relationship to synchronicty depends on your window to this idea.

 The Baader-Meinhoff Phenomenon? 

You may have heard about Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon before. In fact, you probably learned about it for the first time very recently. If not, then you just might hear about it again very soon. Baader-Meinhof is the phenomenon where one happens upon some obscure piece of information– often an unfamiliar word or name– and soon afterwards encounters the same subject again, often repeatedly. Anytime the phrase “That’s so weird, I just heard about that the other day” would be appropriate, the utterer is hip-deep in Baader-Meinhof.  More here.

More from that same article:

In point of fact, coincidences themselves are usually just an artifact of perception. We humans tend to underestimate the probability of coinciding events, so our expectations are at odds with reality. And non-coincidental events do not grab our attention with anywhere near the same intensity, because coincidences are patterns, and the brain actually stimulates us for successfully detecting patterns… hence their inflated value. In short, patterns are habit-forming.

Further reflections on this particular aspect of synchronicity may be found here.

Mantis Carol 

I will end this post re synchronicity with a reference to this ….  Unusual work by Laurens van der Post.  Mostly famous for his The Lost World of the Kalihari… from The Coming of Mantis: 

This was perhaps the most reprehensible lapse of all, for some instinct has prevented me from ever finding coincidences accidental.  I had come gradually to think of them as manifestations of some cosmic law of which we are inadequately aware, confirming among many other things, the extent to which one’s own life was obedient to an overwhelming universal pattern.  I had even reached at that precise moment the place in the book I was writing where I was trying to suggest that this great veiled law with its special messengers of strange, often absurd parallels disturbing our highly organized allegiance to a rational and causal progression of thing, could be the law becoming the growth of meaning in our lives, the kind of meaning which the Chinese centuries before Christ defined as that which has always existed through itself. 

The Birds

In the spirit of this post I wanted to somehow bring full circle the zig zag path that began with Blade Runner.  That is rally a tangent to what this post is about and yet, strangely enough, seems really to have something to do with this idea of synchronicity and not just a roundabout fashion. 

There was also a comment re The Birds, ala Jung and the movie, that was going to be explored.  Here is, after a search on Google for ‘Blade Runner & The Birds’ a comment from one of the sites it pulled up:

Birds are also a common motif in Blade Runner. Nothing represents freedom quite as well as a bird in flight, and nothing represents imprisonment quite as well as the same bird caged. However, different birds appear at different times, each serving a different function. Roy refers to “shores burning with the fires of a hawk,” a bird known as a hunter and predator, perhaps meant to represent Roy himself. Instead, the dove released by Roy when he dies symbolizes peace and, perhaps, his soul. Much earlier, near the beginning of the film, there is an owl in the lobby of the Tyrell Corporation. It’s a bird known for its large eyes (again, a symbol of watchfulness), and it is also mechanical. As it flies across the lobby, its image is juxtaposed to that of Rachael, looking like a flawless china doll as she walks out to meet Deckard. The message is obvious: the owl is artificial; Rachael is artificial. (Owls are also a symbol of wisdom, of course, which suggests that the replicants are in some respects wiser than humans; more on that below.)

See here and here.

We are in dire straits financially. Strangely, because I don’t see how, I expect we will recover and move beyond this place but while we are here it’s not fun being here. It’s taking a toll on our marriage, and our marriage doesn’t need any more tolls, and to be honest I am not sure we will weather this storm. We will, finally, financially I believe, but I am not sure where our relationship will be a few months from now.

I know Michelle is ready to leave, not just because of money, she doesn’t feel appreciated emotionally, in more ways than one, and she is just plain tired of the storms. I know to some extent all these wonderings are a distraction for me, but they are not ‘mere’ distractions, not momentary considerations at all, but guests that have been in my life for a very long time. So I indulge them I guess.

Omnec Onec. Alias ‘Sheila’… Just one of the many, many contactees. The following is from her book “I Came From Venus”:

“After two Decades of silence, can the truth be told about those cold desert night. Until that moment, to me sometimes appears like an eternity, I have the life lived by Sheila. But Sheila was only so long as my name, until the right time had come to tell the people of the world, who I really am and where I come from really. That time has arrived.

My real name is Omnec Onec. I was in that night the desert the little blonde girl and the handsome man next to I was Odin, my beloved uncle. We both came from Tythania, the planet that you call Venus. As a child I had the decision prepared to spend the rest of my life on earth, one before particularly fateful matter of karmic reasons.

I am one among thousands of people from the neighboring planets, the earth make it their home. Some of us remain only until they have fulfilled a special mission, but many have taken the courageous decision, the rest of her life here to spend. Scientists, doctors, educators, artists, engineers and live ordinary citizens of this planet advanced and work incognito among the inhabitants of the earth.”

The following sites have info about the varied literature from many contactees here, here, and here for more on Omnec.

Is Omnec the real thing…? We might as well ask that of George Adamski… Not very many people will believe Sheila is a ‘walk-in’ that indeed hails all the way from Venus, and then not really the Venus most of us earthlings are familiar with but an astral analog of that Venus, one that exists on another plane.

Let’s face it for most of us that is a lot to swallow all at once, and even in bite-sized gulps it’s going to make you wonder… For some reason she has gotten stuck in my mind, partly this name Omnec Onec, which is just plain odd (of course the name Valiant Thorr, one of her ‘countrymen’, is unusual too), partly her appearance, she has an attractive appearance, but there are videos of her as well, and in addition there is a blog by someone claiming to have been her husband… in short she doesn’t look as if she came from Venus (of course being a ‘walk-in’ she would look quite earthly wouldn’t she…), still the few details about her on-line seem to indicate she has an unusual character. And Omnec was stuck in the back of my mind too, along with Lucretia, Abraham Lincoln, David Vincent, Mac Tonnies, and others.

Mac Tonnies, someone I came across only very recently, was definitely someone with a unique point of view. He has now, post-humously, a book out, “The Crypto-Terrestrials”, and though I have not read the book, only his blog, and listened to some interviews, I am sure it is informed with the same wisdom and wit as his blog. Mac had given some real thought to what this field is about, his was a unique voice, and will definitely be missed.

His death, at the early age of 34, seems definitely peculiar, a strange kind of anticlimax of sorts to a strident, intelligent voice that was full of life, and curiosity about everything.

The subtitle of this book I think says a great deal about him and his message: “A Meditation on Indigenous Humanoids and the Aliens Among Us”.  He was coming from a place in his ruminations on this subject that indeed rank him next to Keel and Vallee and other noteworthy researchers in his attempts to get to the heart of the matter. A review by Nick Redfern on Fortean Reviews has a detailed summary of Mac Tonnies’ point of view:

“Rather, Mac – right up until the time of his death – was chasing down the theory suggesting that the UFOnauts may actually represent the last vestiges of a very ancient race of distinctly terrestrial origins; a race that – tens of thousands of years ago may have ruled our planet, but whose position of power was thrown into overwhelming chaos by two things: (A) the appearance of a “debilitating genetic syndrome” that ravaged their society; and (B) the rising infestation of a violent species that threatened to eclipse – in number – their own society.

They are the Cryptoterrestrials. And that violent species that blusters around like an insane, unruly and spoiled child, and that has done more damage in its short life-time than can ever be truly imagined, is, of course, us.”

And this:

“And that is the trick, the ruse: in actuality, their numbers today may be very small. They may well be staging faked UFO events to try and convince us that they have a veritable armada at their disposal when, perhaps, the exact opposite is the case. And, most important of all, they desperately want us to think of them as visitors from the stars. If their plan to rejuvenate their species is to work, then stealth, subterfuge and camouflage are the essential orders of the day.”

Finally:

“As for so-called “alien abductions”: the clumsy, intrusive means by which ova and sperm are taken by a race of beings we are led to believe are countless years ahead of us is addressed. That the ability of the aliens to wipe out the memories of those they abduct is constantly and regularly overturned by nothing more than simple hypnosis is highlighted. And the unlikely scenario that our DNA would even be compatible, in the first place, with extraterrestrial entities is also firmly dissected. Mac’s conclusion: all this points not to the presence of highly-advanced aliens who are thousands of years ahead of us; but to the actions of an ancient Earth-based society whose technology may not be more than a century or so in advance of our current knowledge.”

I think that is enough of Nick Redfern’s review- and it can be found here- enough to show where Mac stands.  He stands, perhaps, one step closer to finding a window on the phenomenon- phenomena?-  that allows us to begin to see it for what it is… wouldn’t it be advantageous to the ‘crypto-terrestrials’ to make sure our versions of remote history come nowhere close to the truth?

Indeed they are probably partly responsible for collapsing legominisms that would have revealed their identity. Of course this opens up a whole new window on what has been going on down through the ages and sinking these bridges to the past is one reason we find ourselves where we are today. Lost is perhaps the best single word summary.

Here is a note to end this long commentary re my gaggle of thoughts, a review of yet another work I have never read (in addtion to ‘The Crypto-Terrestrials’ and ‘Raechel’s Eyes‘) that includes an interesting aside re Tolkien:

“A pertinent factoid about Tolkien that is not in the book, is that the good professor had dreams throughout his life about a huge wave that crashed over the land, destroying everything. The dreams stopped when he began to write the Lord of the Rings, which is of course a vast mythology based on the concept of an ancient civilization that had somehow been destroyed.”

Find the review of  ‘Occult Atlantis’  here.

Mac indeed I believe is onto something.

The Logo

I hesitate to include this here.  Though the experience had a rather dramatic quality for me, I suspect it is basically meaningless.  It happened a couple of years ago- well literally about 2 years ago now.  Really it seems ludicrous but, at the same time, lurking underneath its uncanniness, and that strikes me as an excellent word in this context, there are some interesting perspectives nonetheless.

In the city where I live, off a main road in the north section of that city, we have a Hotel Intercontinental.  I have no idea how long the hotel has been there.  It has been there a long time.  At that time it wasn’t unusual for me to use that road and, depending on the direction I was traveling I could glimpse their logo as it was displayed on the side of their hotel.  It wasn’t right on this main drag but it wasn’t far away from it.  You can see the logo above and to the right of these words.

The Transformation

How many times I had looked at that hotel and their logo, not thinking twice about it, well I could not say.  Many times.  One day, for apparently no reason, driving down this road and glancing over at their logo, it appeared different.  I saw a ‘leering’ alien face, reminding me of an insect.

Never before had I seen this face when looking at their emblem.  As a matter of fact it was startling enough I wondered what in the world was this building I was looking at?!  And it wasnt obvious that whatever this logo was supposed to represent had been completely effaced by this strange face… until I realized of course it wasn’t what it seemed to be..  Now it is difficult not to see this insect staring mutely from the side of their hotel.

I had forgotten, until I began to recall this phenomenon, how startled I was, at first, by this image.  I remember looking at it several times, trying to decipher what it really was, and in the back of my mind some truly ridiculous notions were bobbing, was this building the embassy of the Schwa elite, was there a coup-de-tat, an incursion by the Grays that had escaped my attention, or have they been here all along, their home away from home here in the very city I reside…?  Of course all these ideas are plain ridiculous but the transformation- and I didn’t notice any ‘transformation’ at all, it had never been a trademark for a hotel chain as far as I was concerned when I first noticed the face- only this thing I was looking at- anyway when I first noticed this face it was simply uncanny.

The Illusion

This is obviously a figure-ground reversal phenomenon.  Why that day I suddenly saw this face in their logo I don’t know.  Why had I never seen it before?  Since that time I haven’t been able to shake some of the strange feelings the face seemed to awaken and of course I can no longer look at this image without seeing the face.  There is a strange wry, even surreal, humor in all this too that I find appealing and even comforting.

Some related comments from a site with many examples of optical illusions:

“What is an optical illusion? “I know it when I see one”could not be farther off the track – as the best illusions are the ones where a discrepancy from reality is not ‘seen’ until one uses other modalities (eg. touch) or instruments (rulers, light metres). And even when we know that we are subject to an optical illusion, most illusory percepts still persist – a phenomenon called cognitive impenetrability.  As Gregory aptly stated it “it is surprisingly hard to define ‘illusion’ in a satisfactory way”. According to the Merriam-Webster Online Collegiate Dictionary, an illusion is

1. something that deceives or misleads intellectually; 2. perception of something objectively existing in such a way as to cause misinterpretation of its actual nature.”

Molyneux’s Question

I cannot go back to that time when this image was not a face.  And of course I cannot see both the face and trademark simultaneously…  This is a curious thing… and as the paragraph above mentions it is related to the issue of cognitive impenetrability, as well as Molyneux’s question…

“This question concerns a man born blind, who has learnt by the use of his touch to distinguish spheres from cubes. We suppose him now to gain the use of his sight. And suppose a sphere and a cube to be placed where he can see but not touch them. Will he be able to tell which is the sphere, and which the cube?”

If vision is ‘continuous’ with cognition in the sense of our knowledge ‘penetrating’ and being able to change our vision then the answer to the above question would be yes: the knowledge we have gained through touch would be sufficient to enable us to distinguish the cube from the sphere.  On the other hand, and as the question stands today, it seems more probable the answer to the question is no.  Though the visual system in general does seem affected by our knowledge and expectations a portion of this system is ‘encapsulated’ and remains unaffected and this portion would include our first knowledge of shapes and figure ground distinctions as well.

So even though I know the trademark is not the face of an alien that knowledge is not sufficient to enable me to simply no longer notice it; the most I can do is flip between these different views.

The First Time

It is interesting that this question seems related to a similar one concerned with seeing things for the first time.  The first time we see something we have no categories yet for that thing and impressions of that first time, memories of it, are going to be plagued by that lack, just as afterwards, after a category has been chosen our memories will be affected by the characteristics of that category.

“Since the time that Cheselden published, in 1728, his empirical account of a cataract operation in a patient blind from birth or from infancy, and his observations concerning the patient’s visual perception, theorists as early as Berkeley (1733) have cited cases of recovery from congenital blindness as support for the negative answer to the Molyneux question. After such operations patients are unable to distinguish between objects.  Some patients, with the assistance or tutoring of touch, go on to learn to visually distinguish objects; others give up the difficult education of the visual sense, ignore their imperfect vision, and return to the life of a blind person.  In the face of this empirical evidence, is it possible to maintain a positive answer?

The problem is that the empirical studies of Molyneux patients are plagued by ambiguities.  These are well rehearsed in the literature from La Mettrie (1745) to Oliver Sacks (1995) and involve uncertainties about the timing of onset of blindness, the degree of blindness in cases of cataract, and the confused experience of the patient after the operation.  The uncertainties about the empirical data create uncertainties with regard to the negative answer to the Molyneux question.”

In short a definitive answer to this question is still lacking.  Here and here are further comments on Molyneux’s Question.

The Schwa Conspiracy

The Schwa Conspiracy is something of an artistic tour-de-force.  The originator now seems to be in the shadows but the original idea of exploiting the alien image in our culture survives.  There are now several sites on the internet trying to revive his use of the image.  Of course my discovery of the alien face in the logo of the Hotel Intercontinental is but a small detail in the larger picture of the Schwa Conspiracy.

Marjorie Fish & Mike Clelland

Recently Mike posted something on his site, mostly I think tongue-in-cheek, but also an effort to express something about his state of mind, and because he mentions he may take this posting down I will quote in full:

“During the middle of March I was swallowed up in the obsessive throws of map weirdness. At one point I was on a skype call with my pal Natascha, and my cat walked across my desk and she ended up spilling a full cup of coffee and it splashed all over everything, including some pencil notes on that map.

As I cleaned up the inky mess, I saw that the coffee had splattered quite an compelling array of speckles on the paper with the notes. There was something captivating about the new image. My first reaction was: “Wow, is this looks like a constellation, is this a star map?”

I spent a little bit of time with H.A. Ray’s beautiful book STARS (a book I dearly love) trying to find some correlation to the polka-dots of coffee on that paper.

After a while, I realized that this was a little bit fanatical, even for me.

Please know, I am probably gunna take this post down at some point. I think it’s funny, and there are a few readers who might think so too.

Also – To write this post, I made good use of the thesaurus to find synonyms for the word compulsive. No foolin’ – that map got really intense.”

Now of course this seems pretty ridiculous.  What is more ridiculous:  seeing a map in some coffee stains, or an alien in a hotel logo?  Hmmm…  well they don’t seem too far away from each other….  He does include a picture of his napkin:

I will refer you to his posting here.

The coffee stains do have a resemblance to the constellation Cassiopeia but really I think this resemblance is without meaning.  And my incident with the alien in the logo I suspect is equally meaningless.  But I think it does say something about how ubiquitous just the idea of ‘the alien’ has become.

The whole idea behind ‘the Schwa conspiracy’ is really to play with this idea and even turn it around, co-opting it for a whole array of separate ideas and attitudes that don’t necessarily have anything to do with the connotations this image has acquired in our society.  The end result of that co-option throws into stark relief how much power we have given the idea of ‘the alien’.

Marjorie Fish seems like a fitting coda to this sprawling post.  Here, from Wikipedia, is the origin of the star map Marjorie Fish ‘identified’:

“In the dream, Betty asked the leader if she could take an artifact from the ship in order to prove the reality of the encounter. The leader let her take a large book whose pages were filled with symbols filled in columns.

She then asked the leader where he and his craft had come from. Betty wrote that, in response, from the wall the leader “pulled down a map, strange to me … It was a map of the heavens” marked with numerous stars and planets. (Clark, 281) There were different types of lines between some of the stars which denoted, she was told, trade and exploration routes. The leader asked Betty if she knew where the Earth was located on the map. Betty responded by saying that she did not, being unfamiliar with the map. The leader then said that because of her ignorance, it was impossible to explain where he had come from.

Betty then suggested that humanity would like to meet other inhabitants of the universe, and tried to persuade the leader to openly announce their presence on Earth. Amid her pleas, the men brought Barney into the room. He seemed to be in a daze.

The men began escorting the Hills from the ship, though an argument broke out amongst the men in the strange language they’d spoken before. The leader then took the large book from Betty. She protested, saying that the book was her only proof of the encounter. The leader said that he personally did not care if she kept the book, but the other men of the ship did not want her to even remember the encounter. Betty insisted that no matter what they did to her memory, she would one day recall the events.”

Later, under hypnosis, she finally drew this map.  And later still, in 1968, 7 years after the original encounter, after she had read ‘Interrupted Journey’, Marjorie Fish wondered whether or not, through logic and trial and error, she might be able to identify the stars in this map.  Her identification of Zeta Reticuli as the home of the Greys is now, not unlike Roswell, almost an article of faith for many of us.

Initially, like Mike Clelland’s coffee stains, this map looked just like dots on a piece of paper.  Here it is:

Just as primitive as Mike Clelland’s coffee stains but, thanks to Marjorie Fish,an entire mythology now surrounds these dots.

The Pleiades and Beyond

It seems that the coffee stains above most closely resemble the constellation of the Pleiades.  I will refer you again to Mike’s blog and the ‘addendum’ to his original post.  I am flabbergasted at the resemblance.  I dont know what else to make of this but a synchronicity in the truest sense of the word, the kind of thing Jung really meant when he referred to the idea; still and all at the same time it seems to be stretching this meaning almost beyond our understanding.  His coffee stains seem to take on the nature of hieroglyph, something of undecipherable significance.

There was something more from this rambling post I wanted to follow up on, something about noticing something for the first time.  Surely our first communications with something beyond us, our first contacts, will be consumed in the beginning with many illusions, misunderstandings, and false starts…

Just as a blind man attempting to really see for the first time doesnt quite understand what he is seeing.  The panorama and vistas available to us will be only a blur to him in the beginning until he fills in the meaning of what he is seeing.  I suggest we are filling in that blur…  we are still in the groping stage and dont know what we are doing.  We have many mistakes to make yet.

I have not yet had the opportunity to read Raechel’s Eyes.  I have listened to an interview on Jerry Pippin, read a review of the book, even had a very short email correspondence with the author Helen Littrell.  I have to admit I find the idea, what is the word, well I do find it incredible, in some sense I think I find it even enthralling, but fascinating is perhaps a good word.

Here is something from a review of the book:

The story begins with a young man named Harry Nadien, who joins the Air Force in the 1950s to escape from small town life. He is assigned to a secret military installation in Nevada, simi lar to Area 51, called Four Corners. Nadien is part of a team that deals in retrieving crashed saucers as well as diplomatically receiving the aliens who manage to land their craft safely. Nadien rises up the ranks quickly and becomes one of the main points of contact with the aliens since he seems to have a gift for telepathic conversation.

On the scene of what appears to be another routine crash-retrieval mission, Nadien comes upon a young hybrid child shivering in the cold Nevada night. There is an instant rapport between them, and Nadien decides to take special care of her. His superiors tell him that if he wishes to continue his relationship with the young hybrid, he will have to adopt her formally as his daugh ter, which he agrees to do. The hybrid is eventually given the name of Raechel, and the idea of placing her somewhere in the normal, human world is hatched.

A Complete Blank

Of course to me even this makes no sense.  How many of these so-called ‘crash-retrievals’ are there?  Why, if these alien devices are really ships of some sort, would they continue to crash?  Really that seems pretty strange and next to unbelievable.  Her description of how some of this information came to her:

“As I remember,” Littrell said, “I sat there in the living room and made a little small talk with the Colonel, and he started to tell me the story of how he had obtained Raechel and started to raise her. Then all of a sudden, it was like a huge fi le of infor mation was just transferred into my mind. I sat there and looked at him, looked him in the eye, and there was this tremendous amount of information with all these details transferred! “I believe he was probably taught that skill as part of his specialized training. It’s not something that just anyone can do without some training.”

Raechel  went out on dates:

“But on one date that I have knowledge about,” she continued, “the boy that Marisa set Raechel up with does not remember much after the fi rst few minutes of the date. He remembers talking to Raechel briefl y, and he thinks that they had gotten up to dance. He re members how unusual her skin felt and that she didn’t seem to be very outgoing. She didn’t seem like any of the other girls he’d ever met in his life. The rest of the evening is a complete blank.”

A Visit to the Twilight Zone

These are the barest details of her story.  It is a fascinating story.  Is it true?  I have no clue.  There are elements of it really that simply don’t seem logical; well they literally seem to defy logic as the saying goes.  That the government would allow this to happen is difficult to believe.  If you get past that, accept that Helen’s daughter had a very unusual roommate, does it make sense she would be going out on dates if she was a hybrid, if she looked as unusual as she is described?  Would she pass for human?  I have to admit though I find the story fascinating the details lead me to wonder what is really going on…  and of course there are no photographs.  The drawing itself, and the cover of the book, is by Helen.

I have to admit the thing that really strikes me about her narrative isn’t so much whether or not her narrative is true.  The idea that hybrids are mixing with us at all is really what snags my attention.  We are living in the Twilight Zone!

Helen isn’t by herself in making claims like this.  I hesitate to say there are ‘many’ others but there is a very real ‘faction’ out making similar claims.  Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs, both respected researchers would assent to the possibility of her narrative being true, whether or not they would completely endorse it.  They have clients of their own making similar claims.

Growing up Absurd

Why would she make all this up?  It seems equally if not more absurd.  Still I would refer you to Satan’s Underground and Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years for two examples of outrageous claims that proved to be hoaxes.  And there are many others out there.  Still the idea of making it up seems absurd, as absurd, if not more so, than the story itself.

Last but not Least… Invasion

The absurdity of this story is a fundamental part of it.  Maybe this is where David Vincent and his story hook up.  Of course David Vincent was just a character in a TV show…  The Invaders.  Here is part of the ‘teaser’ from every show…

The Invaders, alien beings from a dying planet. Their destination: the Earth. Their purpose: to make it their world. David Vincent has seen them. For him, it began one lost night on a lonely country road, looking for a shortcut that he never found. It began with a closed deserted diner, and a man too long without sleep to continue his journey. It began with the landing of a craft from another galaxy. Now David Vincent knows that the Invaders are here, that they have taken human form. Somehow he must convince a disbelieving world that the nightmare has already begun.

Surely something like this isnt really going on…  Isnt that too far out?

Vampires? Werewolves? Bigfoot? UFO’s? What is the story here? What is the truth? Sampling and surfing the windows on the internet you can find some really strange things. Without a solitary doubt one of the most unusual sites, bar none, and there are many strange things on the internet, is Lucretia Heart’s blog “Towards a New World” with the sub-title “Darkness before Dawn”. Not unlike a handful of other blogs, I find myself drawn to this one, coming back to find out what is going on in her life, a life very, very unlike mine. Maybe one more “very” would not be out of place.

Recently a link from Mike Clelland’s blog, from one of his posts touching on the phenomenon of ‘orbs’, took me back to her place, a very recent post of hers about something that occurred over 10 years ago. The post is called “The Doorway Painting and the Blue Orbs — Summer/Autumn 1996”.

It is a long description of some unusual things that took place in her life some time ago, entered as a post finally @ Mike Clelland’s urging to provide more details re some of her ‘paranormal’ experiences. I can do no better than quote Lucretia:

“Several strange things seemed to happen during this time that indicated the membrane between realities was thinned (as I’ve often noted when “They” are coming around a lot.) We saw (and felt!) strange fairy-like beings in our bedroom and upstairs hallway. I know how that sounds, but I swear it’s true. The only other time I saw something like that was during a wave in 1986– I saw one for a few seconds just a foot outside my bedroom window in daylight. We had poltergeist events. Rattling doors constantly. Turning water faucets on. Rapping on walls. Oh, and the ghost of my cat who had just died, Sarah, came (apparently through my closet) every night to pad, purr, and lay down at the foot of the bed for several months.

[See--? This full disclosure is hard because it's sounds like absolute bullshit. I know it. But this is what happened. I don't expect most people to believe it, and if you don't just spare me the digs. I'm not writing this to convince anyone of anything. Just sharing it with someone who has similar events in his life and allowing the rest of you to 'peep in.']

The events seemed to climax in the late fall. That’s when Gerick finished one of his last huge blue orb paintings. It looked like a portal flanked by a gate topped with a… blue orb. Gerick called it his “doorway” painting. We were running out of room to put all these big paintings, and he stowed this one under the stairs facing out towards the living room. That particular painting was the only one that wigged me out a little bit. I couldn’t pinpoint why. Maybe because it lacked a human subject? Maybe because it was 2 feet wide and 6 feet tall and looked 3D enough to step into?– from a very amateur painter whose other work couldn’t compare?”

The stuff in brackets is to the point. It is fascinating reading, makes me think vaguely of a story out of the pages of a Lovecraft novel that was never written, but just who is really going to believe her? I’m on her side, I know there is some weird stuff out there, having seen some strange things myself (uh nothing anywhere close to her experiences… really her experience of this side of things is so far out I am humbled, amazed, aghast, and taken aback all at the same time), but I know the average person that might come across her experiences, if not dismissing them outright, which I think would be a common response, would instead come to one of two conclusions, it is meant as some form of absurd joke, perhaps an imaginative exercise, or she is, if not crazy, simply lying, and only she has the insight into the real reasons behind such a possibility.

What do we say if all this is true? The world is obviously nothing like the notion people may ordinarily have of it. The little knowledge, ‘real’ knowledge, we do have, or at least people think we may have, is so ‘lame’ as to border on a joke itself, told at our expense I think, and our technology, which we do pride ourselves on, is basically nothing more than a crutch, and I am being kind with that description I think, making us believe we have control when in fact we have none at all.

This ‘doorway’ from her post was in the back of my mind, jostling for attention with many other things this morning when I heard on the radio this morning Corey Haim was dead. We used to follow ‘The Two Coreys’ and, though I didn’t know Corey, hearing of his death seemed to strike me somehow personally.

I can remember “The Lost Boys” and how full of life he seemed in that movie. Thinking about it now, as a kind of counterpoint to the ‘death-in-life’ of the vampires in that movie, and his death now, it seems a strange thought, and it inspires me to offer a prayer that He will watch over Corey.  Of course on my mind too, besides that, is the stress we are going thru financially. How will we make it to the end of the month? And beyond… my prayers are offered too for a ‘rejuvenation’ of our financial situation.  How are we going to make everything work?  The thought is stuck inside me like a lead ball.

But his death also brings to mind Paul Vigay, a Fortean researcher that died last year. What really happened is still something of a curiosity to me and I find myself going back and looking at his site and thinking of my brief correspondence with him.

Abraham Lincoln? Vampire hunter…  the name of a book on the stands now. Abraham Lincoln kept a secret diary. He kept his closely guarded thoughts there and his revelations as a vampire hunter is tucked away in that diary. Sort of an original idea… I stood in Wal-Mart, during lunch the other day, reading parts of this fanciful biography.

At work today I noticed a diploma for one of our clients- his first and middle names David Vincent hark back to The Invaders, a series I followed when I was younger. He also appeared in the X-Files as a sort of rebellious alien with supernatural abilities, a gift for healing, and changing shapes. 

From the comments section to the Doorway Painting post:

“uberreiniger wrote:

Mar. 8th, 2010 08:58 pm (UTC)
Re: mind control
I can only view the whole phenomenon from an outsider’s perspective. However, is abduction, torture, and mind rape don’t qualify as malicious in your eyes then I absolutely do not wish to fathom the entity that does. And so what if they’re they’re desperate? Junkies who kill elderly convenience store clerks in botched robberies are desperate, but no one gives them a pass based on that. The common picture that emerges from all abduction stories is that whatever the aliens might wish to pass themselves off as, they’re actually nothing more than cowardly parasites skulking and scraping to take what they want from people who can’t fight back.Unfortunately that means they’ve come to a world where they fit right in.

And Lucretia’s response:

lucretiasheart wrote:

Mar. 9th, 2010 06:26 pm (UTC)
Re: mind control
Firstly, I HEART your icon!!And don’t get me wrong– I’m not saying they are justified no matter how much they think so. You make the most obvious and difficult to dismiss point there…

I suppose because the aliens themselves would not object to being used (even raped) for an “obviously needed” cause. The Greys seem to be from a hive-like mentality where telepathic communion is the norm and so the concept of individual rights is totally incomprehensible to them. They are genuinely puzzled and stymied when it comes to such things. “You mean this hurts you? But how can that be– it is just your body. One body is like another, so what does it matter?” seems to be their position. But then again, they’re all clones!! One body IS like another when you’re a CLONE!

So, it’s not like they do harm purposefully. They even use mind-rape to “help” people to calm down, forget trauma, and not feel pain (you know, while they’re in there making people see and do what they want.) In their extreme ignorance, most Greys honestly don’t think they are doing any harm. Of course, over time, they start to comprehend otherwise, and once they do (there are many groups and sub-groups) they begin to switch into being more altruistic and less mechanically barbaric.

The result is that you run into some Greys who are very respectful and patient and careful and will stop if you ask them to and all of that. While others are “nothing more than cowardly parasites skulking and scraping to take what they want from people who can’t fight back.”

It’s a mixed bag, in other words, kind of like humanity. “Unfortunately that means they’ve come to a world where they fit right in.” — Takes the words right out of my mind.

I should caution, though, that since I’ve been subjected to these “mind rape” things, there IS the danger that I myself have been brainwashed repeatedly to the point I am incapable of hating my captors– which is way beyond Stockholm Syndrome! I may not be the best judge on this. Or maybe I don’t like admitting I’m beholden to evil beings.”

Uh…  to be continued…  I have yet to mention Omnec Onec and Mac Tonnies…  probably I should throw into this mix the author of Rachel’s Eyes too.

This phantasy that settled on me as I drove one day, quickly evaporated, but left behind a lingering feeling of strangeness I attempted to target in the following ridiculous ‘poem’:

the lakes on Titan, a satellite of Saturn, are brimming with liquid methane. can you ever see the faces in passing clouds reflected on their surfaces?

a race of human beings, unable to see by day, except in wavelengths beyond visible light, have learned to prowl the city in broad daylight by the black light cast from souped up cars. where do they hide out?

i painted my hands and my face blue, but was suddenly swept up by the wind and started to fly, and in the infinite sky, i discovered the being Volare. how long has he been there, in the infinite sky?

Attempting to articulate the idea surviving my fantasy, in as few words as possible, was a frustrating experience. And for reasons not obvious to me I bracketed the expression between a couple of other rather ludicrous expressions of a kind of ‘far-away’ feeling. Today I was thinking how this attempt at poetry had so left my thoughts; I had almost forgotten even putting it together.

I went back and looked at the different parts of this creation out of curiosity. The questions are more or less unanswerable, perhaps even without real meaning. Strangely I discovered, out of a little bit of research on the internet, a kind of background to this mesh of words that really seems as strange to me as the fantasy itself.

There have actually been reports of people able to see ultraviolet light, especially ‘aphakic’ individuals, people who have had the lenses removed from their eyes. Strange to say but the eye itself, rather the lens, seems to help block perception of this light.

“An illustration of how ultraviolet appears is provided by the Impressionist painter Claude Monet. Following cataract surgery in 1923, his colour palette changed significantly; after the operation he painted water lilies with more blue than before. This may be because after lens removal he could see ultraviolet light, which would have given a blue cast to the world.”

See the full article here.

The final stanza includes the opening words to the song ‘Volare’. Now most covers of this song leave this intro out. Interesting but seeing ultraviolet light is a bit like seeing shades of blue…

Last but not least are the lakes on Titan. Recently confirmed to be liquid methane along with other hydrocarbons, ultraviolet light has a big part to play in their formation, breaking apart methane into other compounds that end up in the lakes as well. The lakes are very black, reflecting very little light at all, and seem as incredibly calm as a mirror. Reflecting clouds is probably something that may not happen at all.

“We know the lake is liquid because it reflects essentially no light at 5-micron wavelengths,” Brown said. “It was hard for us to accept the fact that the feature was so black when we first saw it. More than 99.9percent of the light that reaches the lake never gets out again. For it to be that dark, the surface has to be extremely quiescent, mirror smooth. No naturally produced solid could be that smooth.”

The complete article is here.

We have lakes without reflections, people that can see ultraviolet light, and a song about flying in the sky, painted blue, meeting one of its denizens…. Yet it almost seems as if there is a kind of story here, something behind the fantasy, trying to find expression… of course that seems equally as ridiculous as the ‘poem’ itself… the triad reminds me also of a sort of analogy test. This is to that as that is to something else etc.

The lakes without reflections seem strangely like eyes without their lenses. The fact that images seen by ultraviolet light are tinged with blue seems to find a sort of echo in Volare…. Here are the lyrics in English:

I think that a dream almost never returns:
I was painting my hands and my face blue.
Then suddenly I was coming, carried off by the wind,
And I was beginning to fly into the endless sky.

To fly, Oh!, Oh!,
To sing, Oh!, Oh!, Oh!, Oh!
In the blue, painted blue,
Happy to be up there.

And I flew and flew happily to the heights of the Sun
And higher and higher into the sky.
While the world slowly, slowly
Disappeared in the distance down there.
Sweet music sounded
For me alone.

To fly, Oh!, Oh!,
To sing, Oh!, Oh!, Oh!, Oh!
In the blue, painted blue,
Happy to be there.

But all the dreams vanish at dawn because
When it sets, the Moon takes them along,
But I continue dreaming in your beautiful eyes
That are blue like a sky dotted with stars.

To fly, Oh!, Oh!,
To sing, Oh!, Oh!, Oh!, Oh!
In the blue of your blue eyes
Happy to be there.

But I continue to fly happily to the heights of the Sun
And higher and higher into the sky.
While the world slowly, slowly
Disappears in your blue eyes,
Your voice is sweet music
That sounds for me.

To fly, Oh!, Oh!,
o sing, Oh!, Oh!, Oh!, Oh!
In the blue of your blue eyes
Happy to be there.

Comparing the blueness of the sky and blue eyes is I am sure literally ancient. But getting lost in the sky by painting yourself blue and comparing that with getting lost in your lover’s eyes is definitely surreal. The original name of the song in fact, in English, is ‘In the blue, painted blue’.

In the midst of our text it could refer to an effort to join that ultraviolet world, the world of ‘blind’ drivers, losing oneself in that world…

There is a network of associations this poem seems to want to explore, a network I know nothing about, only uncovering second-hand in this roundabout fashion, and what it may be fishing for in this network, perhaps Volare, but more likely something else, I simply don’t know. It seems to be trying to say something, yet does it really say anything at all?

I would draw yet another likeness among these lines: reflections on Titan’s lakes, if they exist, are probably quite unique, as is this ‘ultraviolet’ race of car ‘enthusiasts’, as is this song, in more ways than one. Again the text seems to be a comment on this uniqueness in some way, drawing parallels between- among? – these varieties of uniqueness. What do we make of these parallels?

Perhaps if we shift our attention just a bit we will see another likeness; protective coloration or camouflage. The word crypsis is also used in this context, to borrow from the vocabulary of ecology, and refers to the ability of an organism to avoid observation. All of the lines in this text are comments on protective coloration.

This other race of human beings, sensitive to ultraviolet, blending with us in the maze of roads, the lover painting himself blue to vanish in the sky, an allusion to losing himself in his lover’s eyes, and last but not least the lakes on Titan without reflections; the surface of still waters here on Earth being a perfect representation of the idea of protective coloration, simply reflecting their surroundings, on Titan they absorb most light. The blackness itself stands out but at the same time reveals nothing of what is underneath or surrounding.

Now what do we make of this common theme? Without a doubt when I first put this text together- I hesitate calling it a ‘poem’- I can’t say this was in my mind. Still the idea lurks behind this mesh of words. The text itself was, for me, as cryptic as its theme.

Of course- does this race of human beings making their way through ‘our’ maze of roads by ultraviolet light really exist?- I am sure this is nothing but an extravagant fantasy.

What would that be like, crashing into one of their cars only to discover the driver couldn’t quite see us, trying to exchange information on our insurance companies… a television movie maybe but reality no way. At least not any more real than Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The fantasy itself was real. It was a bit of shiver down my spine. Where did the intimation originate? Who knows, who can answer that question? Still beyond those obvious questions the network of curious associations this text seems to plumb is something else.

People that are sensitive to ultraviolet light, the role of ultraviolet light in the climate cycles on Titan, Volare, in the blue, painted blue, and the idea of camouflage and protective coloration in species longevity, the use of ultraviolet dyes, to brighten clothing among other things, all of these things linked together through connections, sometimes a bit absurd, to ultraviolet light and crypsis, seems … odd?

“A camouflage garment laundered in typical laundry detergent laced with ultraviolet dye, added to brighten colors, may blend into the background when seen with the human eye, but the deer’s eyes are sensitive into the near ultraviolet portion of the spectrum, and the garment will stand out as a brightly colored object.”

See the article here.