Though you all may be mired in rationality... or not... certainly a lot of people aren't, and occasionally it is valuable and useful to take a look at what kinds of stories circulate through the undercurrents... and subterranean rivers... of society. Plus, it's entertaining. If you don't care, delete! If you want, let me know what you think. Tell me to go to the moon if you want to; I dunnot care. MJ-12, you may recall, is the supposed ubergovernment council in charge of the "alien phenomena", that is, UFO sightings, abductions, cattle mutilations, and the like. It's funny that the parking validation stamp at my doctor's office is "MJ-12". Anyone who watches the X-files on Fox television just _knows_ that all the UFOs were government fakes, the whole thing's a conspiracy, and actually it was the government abducting the citizens, including Agent Mulder's little sister, who was cloned as a worker for a Canadian farm producing some sort of transfigurative herb or flower. Anyhow, I've come across supposed CIA files here and there which do seem to indicate that sometimes the CIA tried to stop these sorts of rumors and sometimes it tried to encourage these sorts of rumors. I even came across one thing which indicated the CIA actually conceived and promoted the "Six-million-dollar man" TV series in the 1970's as a way to entertain the "populace" and make them think that obviously anyone who really reported weird phenomena was a total whacko, lying, or just dumb, craving attention, and watching too much TV. I don't know. Never believe what you read in the papers. Never believe anything. Even that computer in front of you might not be real; in fact, your whole life really could be a sham from a logical and rational perspective. There's nothing to say you aren't a disembodied nervous system floating in a tank and hooked up to a computer, being poked by graduate psychology students and computer programmers who make you think you're looking at a computer or blowing up or walking at the park or going to church. But wait, there's more. They popular myth... throughout the ages, actually... seems to illustrate beings who live in us but transcend us and time, living much like "memes" across many minds and bodies, with lives, existence, and individuality much like our own. I like to look at that one from the perspective of neuroscience. Each of our individual neurons take in information from some small number of others, process it, change it a little, and relay it to some small number of others. The Purkinje cells take around 10,000 inputs; this is about the most a mamillian neuron takes. That's some wacky signal processing. Considering an average human brain contains some 80... or who knows, maybe 300 million neurons, you're looking at a substantial number of independent processing units, each communicating with each other, even if we do only use about 6 to 10 % of our neurons. Then, jump up a scale of magnitude to people-frame. All these people each act relatively independently, with little ability to get a sense of the entire scale of the world and society in which they live. They all take in informtaion, process it, and relay it back out. Hmm. Interesting, isn't it? Take it to stellar or quantum scales and it's even more bizarre. And you thought that was the end of the weirdness! No, indeed, maybe C.S. Lewis _is_ right, and there are doorways to other worlds accessible at every turn, where we can leap into and out of other dimensions with alternate time flows and talking lions named Aslan who serve the Emperor Beyond Time. In fact, it appears from experimental psychology that indeed, reality is what we make of it, and those whose senses are altered, damaged, or no longer believed are able to move into and out of these other worlds... to a degree. Unfortunately, their bodies usually end up jumping off bridges or brain-rotting on the wrong medication. Maybe there's a way to "take everything with you" and go without neglecting something here... who knows. Maybe I read too many fantasy and sci-fi novels. I don't own a TV, though... I resist that opiate of the masses as I can. Here's some stories I've heard from random people at coffee shops and shows and college... One person described a bizarre series of occurences in which friends would stop speaking normally and suddenly say something completely strange, and then "wake up" and wonder what they said. This happened to multiple friends of this person, and the things they said always correlated to the same set of messages. Later, this person saw strange lights in a forest and a perfectly square light door open in the middle of a field, out of which stepped... humans, who waved hello, and then went about their mysteriously cosmic business. Another person described an ability to hear whispers of words or phrases from other people's minds, and then subsequently confirm the information. A person described the ability to make the sky turn night or day by playing music, as if several different periods of time blended into one. Another person described parking at the side of the road to sleep on a long journey. The person woke and heard a sound like the voices of joyous children coming from down the road, along with bright headlights. The lights, it turned out, did not accompany a car but floated by on the road and began swirling in a circle some distance away from the person's car. Many more lights followed, and the voices of many more frolicking children or some sound like that. As the lights swirled in a circle, another green light formed at the center and a door opened (very similar to the first person's story, although these were all different people). Streaming lights or lightning streams came forth from the door and struck places behind the car on the tops of small hills nearby. Giant glowing "mushrooms" sprouted from these places. The person lost consciousness. I take an interest in these kinds of stories, because while under a period of some considerable stress in school, I experienced several incidences of sleep paralysis, a condition in which the consciousness centers of the brain activate, but the motor centers do not, and muscle tone remains flaccid. Interestingly enough, beta sleep coincides with conscious activity; it is in effect a waking dream. It's also incredibly painful; the feeling is similar to that described by those stunned by a nonlethal electric weapon, or like the entire body is "asleep" like your foot when you sit the wrong way, except ten times worse. In one of the first, it was dark, I could not move, and I felt terrible fear. Then suddenly daylight streamed in from my bedroom window, and I felt overwhelming peace. I knew that everything was fine and that it was time to go back to sleep. I did not remember that for three days. In the next, I awoke on a plain of brown fog, in my bed, and I could not move. A grid of 1-meter beams of yellow light tiled the ceiling, and from each corner, a beam shot up as far as I could see. A creamy, gold-colored blob or amoeba thing stood, about 3 meters tall, next to the bed. It shifted into different shapes and patterns. Angered by my paralysis, I cursed at the thing and managed to raise my middle finger, a rude gesture in the U.S. I felt its thoughts... I'm not really sure, it was a "dream" anyway... though these incidents were beyond the scope and clarity of any other dream I'd ever had, because I was fully conscious while they took place. Some grad students in Cognitive Science at UCSD told me there's some research on chronic sleep paralysis patients to back up this stuff about the conscious centers switching on even though sleep continues... I felt its thoughts, and I knew its thoughts. Effectively it spoke, but as if my own brain translated for it. It gave me this "feeling" like "what are you gonna do?" accompanied by a sort of sarcasm or smirk. We proceeded to have a timeless "conversation" about the future of earth for the next 40 years or so, including a great deal about democracy and democracy's enabling technologies, telecommunications and the personal computer. At the end, I was no longer paralysed. I asked it, "What do you think I should do about this?" It said, "You should start to think for yourself." At that moment, I made the decision to do so. I was instantly awake... I was awake the whole time... I was there, still on the bed, with my eyes open, but the bed was once again in my room. I got up and ate a cookie and thought about that a while. In another sleep paralysis experience, I woke on my bed and strained against the paralysis. I "popped" with the most horrid wrenching sensation. I floated around the room. I couldn't turn on the lights. I felt something watching over me like a parent or a guardian. I went in my walk-in closet. On the wall was a contract in bright orange letters. Its title said "THINK". The fine print looked like scribbles, but I'd signed, so I thought I'd better think. Then a snap, and I settled on the pillow and went back to sleep. Admittedly, the brain does some curious things when it's under stress, but as far as changing the political economy, I think things like this are still interesting. Why would Jews, Arabs, Catholics, Atheists, and Politicians all want to kill each other if giant blobs from beyond time talk in their dreams about peace and a fair world? This world isn't so big... just a tiny, mostly inactive neuron inside a big brain. Maybe it is a good idea to turn it on. Maybe the process cannot be stopped. Maybe we will blow up! I hope not. Who knows. Mark Hedges
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Apr 13 2001 - 13:05:22 PDT