From Dan Draisin:
Hi, Richard and Keith...
I just finished listening to your marvelous conversation on Substack. I could go on for pages, but will offer just a few random responses for now.
Riichard -- Thanks for recounting your iPod story. I don't think I'd heard the whole thing laid out so clearly til now.
Keith -- Thanks for your inner and outer biographical history!
I can relate to what you say about some of the dogma and reactiveness that can infect our nominally liberal/progressive culture. Its often blind, hyperreligious belief in orthodox and institutionalized science seems especially misguided.
Thanks also for your reminiscences about the Aliens, Angels and Archeypes event in SF. That was a truly seminal event for many of us.
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Regarding Apports: If you haven't seen it yet, I'm sure you'll enjoy the Apports sequence in my Scole Experiment documentary. Go to www.bit.ly/scolemovie and watch from 19:23 to 23:44. I actually held one of those apported newspapers in my hands, whereby hangs a wee tale for another time.
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Sagan: I knew him personally in the late '60s and can tell you he was indeed a secular mystic at heart and was ufologically savvy. But his public persona, the politics of his status as a cultural icon and God only knows what else tended to forbid any overt expressions thereof. (One of his mentors at Harvard, astronomer Donald Menzel, was a notorious debunker and following his death was revealed as a CIA asset. Make of that what you will.)
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Where did we come from before this life? I think hypnotherapist Michael Newton's work stands out as one of the best modern accounts of between-lives experience. If you haven't read his Journey of Souls and Destiny of Souls, I'd recommend them without resservation.
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Keith -- your book's subtitle: As you were reciting it I was picturing all the words literally reproduced on the cover, with a nice graphic treatment. I think it would make a compelling and appealing cover design.
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Are at least some UFOs materialized thoughtforms? I'm convinced of this, and believe I have at least the outlines of an applicable theory. Please let me know what you think:
If you've seen the Navy's video of the fast-moving underwater object you'll see that the water offers no resistance. And It's well known that UFOs can move at supersonic speeds without generating a sonic boom. Similarly, apports can appear out of nowhere without creating an explosive "pop" in the surrounding air. If they remained pure thoughtforms this would compute, but they're quite physical. So how to square this circle?
Well, suppose the process of "materialization" consisted of transforming the underlying quantum energy of the air or water into the shape of the thoughtform. In other words, at every given microsecond, the quantum consruct we call "water" that's coterminous with the submerged UFO has taken on the shape of its thoughtform. So the "object" isn't moving per se, but materializing and dematerializing along its path, gzillions of times per second. LIke a high-speed movie film. Ergo, no resistance.
This general picture also seems to make sense in terms of the notion of interstellar travel in "zero" time.
Sheldrake's morphic-field theory seems to fall into this general ballpark as well.
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Keith-- I belive you know the story of Joe, the perfectly solid guy I met in NYC in 1967 who, it turned out, had been dead for several years. I'm guessing that human materialization might work similarly to what I'm suggesting above. Human levitation, as well.
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Last week I was interviewed on Brian Smith's "Grief to Growth" podcast. We were discussing fear of the unknown, and at one point I questioned why we should necessarily fear the unknown... at which point my webcam started flickering brightly for about a minute. It's never done anything like that before. Here's the clip:
Smith's daughter (whose photo you can see behind him) is on the other side. Yesterday I was writing to someone about this and when I wondered whether the daughter might have been behind this camera flickering, my computer monitor switched itself off and on again. :-)
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All for now.
Cheers...
=Dan=
From Keith Thompson:
Thanks you Dan for all your reflections! Especially your thought about “transforming underlying quantum energy…” Maybe it’s time to bring Occam into the conversations where this often gets said with the certainty of catechism: “Yes, quantum phenomena show weird stuff, but we have no way to know what this means for the macro world.” That’s supposed to end the water-cooler conversation and get us to walk back to our cubicles. How about this as parsimony: the quantum field is pervasive so, yeah-kinda, it “impacts” the macro world! It’s time to reverse the burden of proof, as with so many of these debates. Why would we assume quantum “strangeness” doesn’t carry over?
From Dan Draisin:
How about this as parsimony: the quantum field is pervasive so, yeah-kinda, it “impacts” the macro world!
Aye. What I'm suggesting is that the quantum field + thoughtforms = the macro world.
And that motion (time) is not continuous but incremental, like a film or video which is actually a sequence of still images, albeit at an ultra-fast frame rate.
From this perspective, materialization and teleportation would be common and natural. Influences inserted by consciousness during the "dark" period betwen frames would produce "paranormal" macro effects.
It’s time to reverse the burden of proof, as with so many of these debates. Why would we assume quantum “strangeness” doesn’t carry over?
For the most part, the question of scale (in terms of the "frequency of time" and our spatial perception, which is referenced to our familiar surroundings) makes it hard to think/perceive in these terms.
Overlaid on all that is the burden of social norms which tend to keep "paranormal" information siloed at the level of the individual or at best a particular subculture. Within that subculture we feel comfortable sharing our paranormal experiences, but in other environments we're more circumspect and reserved.
BTW, I'm not sure I've mentioned another experience I had, circa 1972, that included missing time and another materialized person. It happened near Sugarbush, VT when I was working on a flim job there. Details on request.
=d=
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