Over the years many individuals have had life changing experiences due to contact by some kind of entity. The prior statement will of course make many cringe, or worse, as I myself would have only a few years ago. But when one consider both the scale of entity contact, and some of the noted individuals who claimed contact, it becomes harder to dismiss. We shall examine some of those historical figures a little further down. I will not get much into the scale, however. This blog will also tie in heavily with several other prior blogs, most notably Contact, The Nine, Mind's Eye Part 1 and 2, and On Macrobes.
There is no set formula for contact. Some have managed it through the occult, drugs, and/or sex; and in some cases totally back accident. Others merely stumble into the Fortean at some point in their day to day lives for no apparent reason. The only consistent is that individuals who have had experiences almost always emerge from them as changed individuals. Consider this UFO experience Dr. Jacques Vallee collected in which the woman in question afterwards become obsessed with building a motor that couldn't work:
"During our interview, Helen confessed that the motor idea was triggered by an abduction aboard a UFO. It seems that she had seen the UFO with a group of musicians coming back from Lompoc, California to Los Angeles in the summer of 1968.
"'We left after the last performance on that weekend,' she told me. 'We probably packed up the gear by 2:15 A.M. We must have been on the road half an hour to forty-five minutes, it might even have been an hour. At that point, we were on a flat stretch of land. There were hills on the right side, and we were going south. Out of these hills came a white light, and it moved up and began to come in our direction. An airplane couldn't have turned the way it did, so we figured it was a helicopter. Then it began to do very erratic things and twists, go very far out and come closer very quickly...'
"It came up over the car and in front of us, maybe 100 to 200 feet above the ground, and it was, I would say, about six lanes of the freeway in width. It was white, and it showed a very beautiful kind of glow. I seem to remember some kind of windows, but I really couldn't be sure. It didn't make any noise. The thing was big. Four white lights, funnel-shaped, extended from the perimeter of the vehicle and down around each of our bodies...'
"'I remember leaving my body on the seat of the car and being about three or four feet out of the car...' 'All four of us did the same thing: off we went! At that point I don't remember anything else. Then I began to realize that something might have happened, because the next thing I remember I was coming back into the car. I looked around and saw the light shimmer around Barbara and Dave, and we were slowly dissipated back into our bodies.'
"At her request I arranged for Helen to undergo a very mild form of hypnotic regression. During the session, she remembered going on board the 'saucer' and observing its propulsion mechanism. She met a man dressed in white, who showed her the amazing motor she is now determined to build.
"I began checking her story. First, I had a lengthy telephone conversation with George, who hasn't seen Helen in several years but remembers the incident as 'a turning point in [his] life.' Dave has moved to another city, where I traced him. A friend of mine, a psychiatrist, got in touch with him and obtained his statement. Like George, his vividly recalls the whole incident and describes it in similar terms.
"Ever since the sighting, Helen has felt the urge to build the machine whose principle was revealed to her by one of the saucer pilots. It has become a central point for her, the goal of her entire life. Yet the motor she wants to build could never run, physically at least in the way she explains."
(Dimensions, pgs. 6-8)
To recap, we have four people driving along the highway at night who witness a white light coming out of a hill. Eventually this light hovers over them and manages to pull their consciousnesses out of their bodies and into it. Inside one of the group sees a man in white who shows her a motor that can't work. She then returns to her body dead set on making the motor her life's work. As far as UFO abductions go, this experience is more typical than one may think, especially in regards to the sheer absurdity of it. And this is just an accidental contact.
As previously noted, some enterprising individuals have set out to deliberately channel the macrobes. Since the mid-19th century, with the rise of Spiritualism, channeling via a medium has become especially popular.
"The birth of modern Spiritualism can be traced to the year 1848, when the youthful sisters Maggie and Katie Fox made contact with a source of poltergeist disturbances by 'rapping' in answer to mysterious knocking on the walls of their home in Hydesville, New York. Rapping -in which messages were spelled out in exchange with supposedly discarnate communicators -quickly became a craze which spread all the way to the salons of Europe and created a need for more direct communication with the other side. In answer to this call, mediumship grew and multiplied on both sides of the Atlantic.
"The seance room became almost an institution in late Victorian society; a place where the dead were invited to show just how alive they really were. As the stars of the show -the mediums -were swallowed up in trance, their voices and sometimes their bodies were expropriated by non-material intelligences. On occasion, entirely unconscious of their behavior, they would walk about the room making gestures as they spoke to those around them. The intruding entity or 'control' would often introduce himself or herself as the guide or teacher of the medium. Usually, the entity would claim to have links with the medium spanning many incarnations, would speak authoritatively about discarnate life and would impress the medium's 'sitters' with clairvoyant abilities -a draw which ensured the trance sessions were well-attended. Frequently, the 'control' or 'dorkeeper' would step aside to allow other voices to express distinct individualities with varying degrees of eloquence."
(The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts, Joe Fisher, pg. 99)
For more personnel communications extreme methods were often employed.
"Even before history was recorded, shamans worldwide were invoking guardian spirits for the purpose of healing and protection. The means of invocation have taken many forms, from sleep deprivation and the ingestion of hallucinogens to enforced seclusion and acoustic stimulation, usually involving extended exposure to loud and persistent drumming. Shamantic training among the Austalian aborigines aimed at developing the 'strong eye' that is, the faculty of seeing spirits."
(ibid, pg. 82)
The seveity of the invocations, often associated with initiation into shamanism or the Mysteries, cannot be understated.
"In the course of my investigations, I have undergone a number of occult initiations and have become aware of the basic similarity of such rituals in all traditions. This is the pattern of death-rebirth which even today appears symbolically in the Roman Catholic Mass and the Masonic 'raising' ceremony. The Investigator is betraying no secret when we say that, in serious occult orders, such performances are not mere rituals but real ordeals. Insofar as possible within the law, the candidate is often brought to a state of terror similar to the emergency condition of the nervous system in near-death crises. What occurs then, and is experienced as rebirth, is a quantum jump in neurological awareness. In Leary's terminology, new circuits are formed and imprinted.To this end psychedelics have been a favorite since the dawn of time. In the mid 1980s Stanford trained anthropologist Jeremy Narby became perplexed by the Amazonians who claimed to learn the medicinal properties of plants by drinking ayahuasca, a DMT laced brew. As the information proved to be remarkably accurate, Narby decided to give the drink a whirl for himself with the aid of a shaman named Ruperto.
"Obviously, the first shamans had no teachers; they simply went through the illness-rebirth transition accidentally, as it were. Later, schools of shamans developed techniques (psychedelics, rituals of terror, yoga, etc.) to catapult the student into such experience. In most of these schools there is great reliance on an entity or entities of superhuman nature who aid in the initiatory process, sometimes for years."
(The Cosmic Trigger, Robert Anton Wilson, pg. 139)
"Ruperto started whistling again as I sat down in the darkness of the platform. Images started pouring into my head. In my notes I described them as 'unusual or scary; an agouti [forest rodent] with bared teeth and a bloody mouth; very brilliant, shiny, and multicolored snakes; a policeman giving me problems; my father looking worried...'
"Deep hallucinations submerged me. I suddenly found myself surrounded by two gigantic boa constrictors that seemed fifty feet long. I was terrified 'These enormous snakes are there, my eyes are closed and I see a spectacular world of brilliant lights, and in the middle of these hazy thoughts, the snakes start talking to me without words. They explain that I am just a human being. I feel my mind crack, and in the fissures, I see the bottomless arrogance of my presuppositions. It is profoundly true that I am just a human being, and, most of the time, I have the impression of understanding everything, whereas here I find myself in a more powerful reality that I do not understand at all and that, in my arrogance, I did not even suspect existed. I feel like crying in view of the enormity of these revelations. Then it dawns on me that this self-pity is a part of my arrogance.
"I stood up feeling totally lost, stepped over the fluorescent snakes like a drunken tightrope walker, and, begging their forgiveness, headed toward a tree next to the house."
(The Cosmic Serpent, pgs. 6-7)
Those of you familiar with Narby know that his experiences on ayahuasca had a profound effect on both his world view and career. This interview gives a brisk run down of Narby and his work.
Another common type entity contact is with some type of 'guardian spirit', which the Greeks referred to as daimons and what Christians adopted as guardian angels. These types of beings are acknowledged the world over and have contacted some of the more noted men of their eras.
"Embracing all races and creeds, the non-physical guardian is generally endowed with a common aim: to protect its ward and to promote personal growth by encouraging adherence to the highest ideas. The names assigned to these spirits are as diverse as the cultures in which they appear: the Romans called them genii; the Greeks, daimones, the Zoroastrians, fravashis; the Mongols, Dzol-Dzjagatsi; the natives of New Guinea, tapum, to name but a few.
"Those living in the classical societies of antiquity... were no less knowledgeable about the special relationship between the living and the so-called dead. Socrates, the great Athenian philosopher, spoke in the fifth century B.C.E. of a being whose voice, from time to time, dissuaded him from some undertaking but never directed him as to what he should do. Socrates told his friends that when a man dies his guardian spirit, which has watched over the course of his life, escorts him to the place of judgement from whence he will be guided to the initial stage of the postmortem existence. The wise and disciplined soul, he said, will follow the guide. But the soul that is deeply attached to the body and its pleasures will hover around the visible world for a long time."
(The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts, Joe Fisher, pgs. 82-83)
Socrates was hardly the only historic figure to claim spirit guidance. The later French monarchy as well as Napoleon Bonaparte claimed to be in contact with a being they refereed to as 'the little Red Man of Destiny.':
"The Little Red Man of Destiny was a legendary ghost who had appeared at the Tuileries Palace, a royal place that stood on the right bank of the River Seine in Paris until 1871. Since the time of Catherine de Medici, every time that an important event was going to happen to one of the inhabitants of the Tuileries, legend has it that the Little Red Man of Destiny appeared. Henri IV supposedly saw him on the morning of the day that Francois Ravaillac assassinated him. Anne d’ Autriche saw him a few days before the Fronde began. Marie Antoinette saw him in the corridor the day before August 10, 1792, when the mob stormed the Tuileries Palace and ended the monarchy.
"The Little Red Man of Destiny seemed to follow Napoleon through all of his campaigns and he provided a rough map of some of the events of Napoleon’s life. People at the Tuilieries were familiar with stories of The Little Red Man of Destiny appearing to Napoleon while he stayed at the palace. The legend says that the Little Red Man of Destiny appeared to Napoleon for the first time in Egypt in 1798, and told Napoleon that he had ten years to enjoy victory and triumph on European battlefields.
The writer Arthur Conan Doyle was also in the club:
"Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was told independently by seven mediumistic individuals that he was accompanied by an elderly, bearded man with tufted eyebrows -the marked characteristics of deceased naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who was actually named by several of those who were able to perceive him. In his later years, Conan Doyle asserted that he was consciously aware of Wallace's presence, intervention and assistance. As if in anticipation of his activity after death, Wallace had written that earthly evolution 'must be directed and aided from outside by superior and invisible intelligences...'"
(The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts, Joe Fisher, pg. 96)
The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung was also claimed contact, both in dreams and in reality.
"Jung understood psychic reality because he encountered it directly -in a dream. There appeared to him a 'winged being sailing across the sky. I saw that it was an old man with the horns of a bull. He held a bunch of four keys, one of which he clutched as if he were about to open a lock.' This mysterious figure introduced himself as Philemon; and it was the start of a beautiful relationship. He visited Jung often, not only in dreams but while he was awake as well: 'At times he seemed to me quite real, as if he were a living personality. I went walking up and down the garden with him, and to me he was what the Indians call a guru... Philemon brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which have their own life... I held conversations with him and he said things which I had not consciously thought... He said I treated thoughts as if I generate them myself but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room... It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche."In the modern era members of the US intelligence community also became interested in making contact. One of the strangest claims of entity guidance stems from that of Dr. Andrija Puharich, a former Army officer involved with Edgewood Arsenal and various high ranking members of the Pentagon, CIA, and Naval Intelligence in the 1950s. Rarely discussed in mainstream history, Puharich is a man that nevertheless seemingly had a huge influence in the closely related fields of intelligence and the occult.
(The Daimonic Reality, Patrick Harpur, pg. 34)
"The story of Puharich is central to any study of the US government's postwar interest in how psychology and parapsychology could benefit the intelligence agencies. It was arguably Puharich who was the first to bring the potential uses of paranormal abilities in military applications to the attention of the United States Navy; it was Puharich who introduced the Israeli psychic, Uri Geller, to American audiences... and to American intelligence. Further, it was Puharich who formed a mysterious cabal that numbered many important and influential Americans among its members, a cabal that would deliberately attempt to make contact with alien beings and -according to some commentators -actually succeed. This cabal included a man with shadowy connections both to Operation Paperclip on the one side... and to the Kennedy assassination on the other."
(Sinister Forces Book One, Peter Levenda, pg. 235)
During that time he claimed to have made contact with the Grand Ennead, gods of ancient Egypt who revealed to Puharich and company that they were in fact extraterrestrials. During his communications with the Nine Puharich rubbed shoulders with members of the Du Pont, Bouverie, and Astor family, and Arthur Young, the creator of the Bell Helicopter; the psychic Uri Geller, and Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek. For much more information on the Nine and Puharich, read this prior post.
In next week's installment we shall focus on the effects entity contact has had on various individuals.
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