My seeming preoccupation is to ask odd questions while others count the rivets on the flank of a flying saucer. In ruminating on the abstracted subject of non human sentience, we have no other direct example other than ourselves, upon which could develop a operating platform to create the necessary conceptual basis required to formulate a third party set of characteristics of such a elusive species.

In any consideration of a non human species that is sentient, we make a critical assumption in engineering terms, of there being present awareness, perception and consciousness.

If this is so, when we examine our own nature, then we ask a deceptively simple question. What exists prior to the organization of consciousness,that,in turn creates it? Whether we define consciousness as behavioral, phenomenological, cybernetic or some other taxonomy, the presupposition of awareness predating that of the senses without the reflective surface of a mirror to capture perception, is perhaps the sound of a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it.

Non linguistic awareness prior to the formatory conception of perception could be called a hidden variable, however it does infer a pre-existing spacial relationship where former is required for the creation of the latter.

Are we speaking of a range of awareness that predates sensory phenomenology? Is it outside or inside our sensory range or, is it both sides of this Janus face of Self which is a geometrical nexus and yet it is neither one exclusively?

Perhaps this question first arises in the preliminary evolution of somatic awareness,or body awareness sometimes referred to as proprioceptive information and proprioceptive awareness which certainly qualifies as a prelinguistic form of consciousness.

This, in turn, leads us down the path of what is called Psycholinguistics or psychology of language The hardwired version of this theory of neurobiology is countered by the innate view which claims that the ability to use syntax would not exist without an innate concept that contains the underpinnings for the grammatical rules that produce recursion. Children acquiring a language, have a predisposed hierarchy that, in effect creates the hard wiring, or a capability to explore among possible human grammars, settling, logically, on the language(s) spoken or signed in their own community of speakers.

Of course all of this is inter-related to the behavior it observes. A non human, upon first contact with our species would perhaps face the same issues, especially if it were in a preliminary and comparative stage of cognitive development, as I suggested in the last post. Or, simply be absolutely perplexed as there was no Rosetta stone available to connect behavioral, linguistic, cybernetic paradoxes which we freely navigate.

In other words, further, if there was no community present, as this creature had no biological origin, and this was a case wherein a pre-existing set of semiotic terms did not exist in order to transpose our behavioral language, would it attempt to mimic us in order to deduce the relationships in this multi-layered reality of ours in order to explore it's own context by our cognitive, reactive and behavioral language in relation to what metaphors it may display?

Our own accounts of this phenomenon are experiential rather than intellectual. In the last post, this is directly related to the immeasurability of this phenomenon because it is both organic and represents a form of consciousness, for which we have no theories..as subject to object. Ibn Al Arabi, the metaphysician, could have been referring to the paranormal, (he was addressing states of consciousness), that could well apply when he wrote of what he termed "the creative divine imagination" or intermediate state(s) of existance :

"Now since the Barzakh (of the creative divine Imagination) is something separating what is knowable and unknowable, existent and non-existent, intelligible and unintelligible, affirmed and negated, it has been given the name "Barzakh" as a technical term. It is intelligible in itself, yet it is nothing but the imagined-image (al-khayâl)! For when you perceive it--assuming you are in a rational state--you know that you have perceived something existent on which your gaze has fallen; indeed you most definitely know that there is absolutely something there. But what is this about which you affirm that it is an existent thing, while at the same time you are also denying that?! For this Imagination-Image (al-khayâl) is neither (entirely) existent nor nonexistent, neither (entirely) known nor unknowable, neither (entirely) affirmed nor denied. This is like a human being perceiving their (reflected) form in the mirror. The person definitely knows that they have perceived their (own) form in a certain respect, while they know just as absolutely that they have not perceived their form in another respect, because of the smallness of the image they see in the mirror, assuming the body of the mirror is small--since they know that their own form is a great deal larger than the one they saw.... So what is that reflected form? And where is it actually located? And what is its (ontological) status? For it is both affirmed and denied, both existent and nonexistent, both known and unknown."

We often lapse in recognizing that we communicate on a parallel platforms of simultaneous and disparate "languages" that often, on the surface are far from coherent. Waging war to create peace is a exoteric example.

As a somatic creature, you register a sensation from your fingertips, therefore you are. However, what if you possessed no somatic image? What is it within that mirror, or that which this mirror reflects or both the image in relation to the object, that must capture somatic awareness in some geometric yet energetic manner in order to integrate this spacial awareness? If energy is information does there exist a sentient form of energy that is non linguistic and non somatic and is in the preliminary phase of developing a transposed or translated database of semiotics? Consider the sensory paradox and utilize the closest person to you as an example. What do you consider your cognition of that person to be composed of?

You soon discover at it's root, it is finite and that essentially if you move outward from that point of discernment, you find that due to the finite nature of our cognition everything we consider as knowledge or distinctions are more accurately described as a metaphors. Perhaps another word we used previously fits which is a hidden variable which lurks behind the finite range of perception. It is not surprising that in turn leads us to use a metaphor as a imaginal tool to describe hidden variables. A name is a metaphor.

A metaphor is also interestingly related to the perception of time, as a cognition of distinctions, which is entirely perceptual, but that is another subject for another post. Again, we return to the definition of a metaphor.

Metaphor: (from the Greek language: Meaning "transfer") is language that directly compares seemingly unrelated subjects. It is a figure of speech that compares two or more things not using like or as. In the simplest case, this takes the form: "The [first subject] is a [second subject]." More generally, a metaphor is a rhetorical trope that describes a first subject as being or equal to a second object in some way. Thus, the first subject can be economically described because implicit and explicit attributes from the second subject are used to enhance the description of the first.

Correspondingly, in the acquisition of Self in relation to our own species, would a non human sentience utilize a human metaphor to communicate?

There a correspondence in human consciousness that utilizes metaphors to create simulations such as we know this consciousness as "dreams". Can this parallel correspondence determine the dream like characteristics that is rooted in non human communication? In the next post, we will enter the realm of dreams as simulations that form the connective tissue of the ontology of the imaginable realm to the transposition of non human terms.

Is a UFO a form of non linguistic metaphor staged in our sensory range that has no utility outside of unknown semiotic term? In semiotics, a modality is a particular way in which the information is to be encoded for presentation to humans, i.e. to the type of sign and to the status of reality ascribed to or claimed by a sign, text or genre. If all signs must also be objects of perception, there is every reason to believe that their modality will determine at least part of their nature. It may be a non linguistic sign or metaphor that denotes a transient and localized sentient expression that organizes a variety of images as the chimeric vehicle utilized to transport a variety of correspondences rather than a passenger carrying, hard wired object. Again, consider that a metaphor literally means to "transfer" and is a "language" that directly compares seemingly unrelated subjects. Terrence Mckenna once observed if we looked at the UFO and dissected it as one would an onion, we would find nothing inside.

One is reminded of the strange power of this imaginal realm in our own individuated developmental history. Do they speak to us in the language of dreams? Vehicles without passengers, humanoids who parody our behavioral characteristics outside of a meaningful context? Strange beams of light that randomly illuminate the night as if searching for what could be easily seen in daylight? The hapless Men In Black who parody the secrecy of military personnel, while making unending demonstrations of what they are attempting to hide? The epicurean and carnivorous behavior that slaughters our cattle in advance of our harvest of them, while leaving the carcasses in plain sight? This is the language of the metaphor we experience in dreams, the paradoxical signs of a observant mimic who does not comprehend the context of it's behavior. The robots that shoot ineffectual beams of light at hunters in the woods, the silly goblin like creatures and the insect like Greys who mimic genetic tampering. Consider that all of this may be more evidence of a incoherent sentience in human terms rather, than a purpose driven, deceptive ploy. The egocentric play of a child who imagines itself to be as if it were human without any understanding of who and what we are. In this we have much in common as this may be a pantomime we both play at and the perceptual metaphors that arise from the ether may be our own behavioral language mirrored back to us that make us tremble when things go bump in the night.
All of these innumerable masks may be the chimeric formulations of a singular creature who has no face of it's own.

The wildly variegated zoology of "extraterrestrials" may be simply a proverbial recombinant genome of a sentience with a highly complex intermediate nature that is a moving target rather than a flotilla or an empirical Noah's Ark filled with a multitude of distinct species all traveling here to clumsily steal pigs, bags of fertilizer or make nonsensical pronouncements that don't add up when scrutinized in the light of day. If this is so, this is truly alien to our understanding of what variation or form or lack thereof, in evolutionary terms, of how sentience may be organized outside of our own highly localized origins as cellular membranes..if this is true, then the truth is stranger than our own fictions.
Posted by Bruce Duensing at 12:17 AM 4 comments
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Part One: The UFO As A Non Linguistic Lifeform.

“I throw a spear into the dark, that is intuition. Then I have to send an expedition into the jungle to find the way of the spear,that is logic.”
— Ingmar Bergman

"I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent to sting you, as mine has been."
-Mary Shelly
it possible that individuated minds are simply recombinant facets of a singularity that uses a common operating platform to become self aware? If so, are UFOs a evolutionary and intermediate manifestation of a developing, non linguistic, seemingly dependent creature in it's infancy, for which we have provided a nursery in the form of a refuge of habitation, an ecology that is, in of itself, one of entanglement?

In this lies a cautionary tale.

The classic definition of communication is "The exchange of thoughts, messages, or information, as by speech, signals, writing, or behavior," However in all this there is a learning curve. Cybernetics is the study of feedback and derived concepts such as communication and control in living organisms, machines and organizations as applied in this case, to learning. Can these concepts be applied in a revision of the nature of UFOs?

The assumed role of deception in this phenomenon parallels Thomas Pychon's observation that “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.” This issue is a circular argument in lieu of the role of self deception in the face of an unknown versus a manipulation that comes from without. What I am suggesting is perhaps the phenomenon itself is neither one, while on the other hand, our own perspectives seem to reinforce that it may be a case of both being in play if we are faced with an unknown phenomenon that does not openly extend itself to us, it must have deception as it's prime motive as a tactical ploy. This undoubtedly, arises from the earliest human territorial prerogative wherein suspicion as a heightened awareness was a necessity for survival.

Conversely, in our earlier stages of developing self awareness, these instincts can make strangers appear to be either overwhelmingly intimidating or frightening and so perhaps a reluctance to engage with that which "they" do not fully apprehend can be applied if the shoe is on the other foot. This is meant to suggest an encounter with our species may not be as assuring or "safe" as we naturally assume it to be. What we imagine ourselves to be and what we are is a line of demarcation that would be difficult for a proverbial child or "stranger" to process, let alone integrate.

Further along this line of considerations, one could go further and suggest that if this is so, then would a learning curve be present? Consequently one could then invert the normal line of assumptions that we are dealing with a sentience in an advanced stage of cognition. Perhaps the opposite may be the driver. When you ruminate over the evidence, one has a sense of this.

"A new kind of mind thus beings to come into being which is based on the development of a common meaning that is constantly transforming in the process of the dialogue."
-Physicist David Bohm

However, if this phenomenon represents more than an interface with consciousness and has the potentiality to become self aware, then can it be separated from this proverbial embryological cord as something other than a Darwinian adversary?

Perhaps if myths are indeed metaphors, it is the reinvention of this form that is occurring as indelibly as those of the Dragon were for our common ancestors.

The entanglement between the historical cultural contexts of manifestations as well as that of it's evolving nature during our own epoch apparently follows a parallel path of acceleration in terms of the complexity of the conceptual basis that it utilizes as a shell to encapsulate the leading edge of our speculative formulations as to it's identity.

In a few decades, it has changed it's general form within a subset of wildly variegated transitional combination's that apparently follow our own capability to conceptualize them as a visualization of a potential coherency, much like a child would conceptualize it's own identity along the entrainment of complexity which arises from it's own self image. This self imaging is, in the case of the UFO is still pliable and non linguistic.Non linguistic communication is the imparting of information without using language. Or in other words, sending and receiving messages without using a communication system that has the characteristic features of a language as identified by linguists. Albert Mehrabian, a psychologist at UCLA and a pioneer in non linguistic communication research, has studied nonlinguistic communication for over thirty years. His research shows that, on average, the spoken words we use account for only seven percent of the meaning people derive from conversations. Paralinguistic information accounts for thirty-eight percent. The majority of meaning, fifty-five percent, comes from nonverbal, or unspoken information. What do our non liguistic behaviors portray to one who has never encountered them?

Perhaps the visualizations of a non linguistic communication in it's early developmental stages depends upon the context of the observer in relation to the form of mimicry it parrots, not so much as an act of determination but rather as a ongoing process of integration. During a certain developmental stages in human infants,,intelligence is increasingly demonstrated through the use of symbols; memory and imagination are developed as language use matures; thinking is nonlogical, nonreversible, and egocentric enough to be indifferent to the context in which it behaviors occur, in the form of the observer's reactions and\or anticipations.

They are largely outside of the context of a give and take of a transactional behavior focused on the recipient. This parallels the behavior of this phenomenon.

Correspondingly, this leads to the possibility that if this phenomenon represents a more evolved or if you will, more complex living organism than ourselves, this may not necessarily infer that it's cognitive ability to have a fully developed sentience is fully formed, especially if it's lifespan should require the passage of centuries rather than in years to be fully developed to it's full potential.

In the last post, I was concerned with the appearance of sentience versus actual self awareness and how difficult it is to discern between these two Janus faces of behaviorism by even the most dispassionate observer. However the inference in that post was perhaps there is an intermediary form of sentience that learns by mimicking the behavioral characteristics of it's parents. The close encounters with the phantasms of our mirror of the possible are filled with non nonsensical communications, half truths and outright parody that is so absurd that it is laughable which then we then reorient ourselves to observe the early behaviors of an infant who learns by mimicking the behaviors, the language and modality of it's parents. I am suggesting that this phenomenon is not simply an extension of human consciousness but instead possibly represents a non human form in it's early developmental stages.

What I am suggesting is not simply a parallelism but rather a reformulation of Jung's conceptual basis of the Universal Mind, in that this collective database is not simply a singularity of differentiation but rather a semi autonomous nexus that utilizes input from us in a parasitic manner to formulate coherency in relation to differentiating itself from us. It is both human and non human, contingent in form, an excellent mimic and is set upon a proverbial learning curve it which what it is is largely determined by what we believe it to be.

The same could apply to the intangible frameworks we utilize to defend our own realities and which may constitute the boundaries of this phenomenon's potentiality, as it was Tolstoy who said" “I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”

In the case of appearances versus the unknown natural laws that would apply if this phenomenon represents a living organism, perhaps the creation of distinctions that are required for self awareness are trial and error choices of comparative relationships rather than a predetermined role.

All of us are but individuated by not only biological variation but also as the result of identifying ourselves by a learning an externalized curriculum of relationships which are entirely experiential, which we in turn develop as quasi-identities of persona. Beneath this learned differentiation is a common or consensus form of expression whose mathematical variations are the appropriate configurations of language in order to elicit a form of intermediate reality that we have formulated as a database, that in of itself has no independently derived existence and so all of these many perhaps countless variations that are thermostatically set into a cultural form of shared concepts, which in turn, form a creature who while none the less existing in anthropology cannot be determined to reside in a specific location, outside of the behaviors it manifests in it's expression.

They are yet but another example of the material nature of an intangible, of information translating into behavior, that may be exhibiting itself in a chimera whose reflective surface observes us, translates and reformulates it's varying basis of comparisons through the development of conceptual relationships. Then again the basic energetic composition of localized information can be spontaneously transmitted over vast distances. This would allow for a semi closed feedback loop which allows for the spontaneous metamorphosis of form as indicted by the data utilized to conceptualize it. It could be a non local phenomenon which is attracted in a localized arrangement based upon the bias or receptivity of observers who are entrained to visualize a conceptual form by anticipation. This, in turn drives a reciprocal process of locking a contingent visual identity onto a common referential form.

In all this we have the apparent immeasurably of quantifying the potential of observers in relation to the probabilities of localized manifestations of this 'other." despite this, I suspect there is a strong correlation between the two which essentially forms a proverbial gravitational field that is an attractor, as much as in is in microcosm through the potential of those who experience the paranormal versus those who do not.

This infers that information can be likened to a field that much as lightning does strikes under predisposed conditions and only appears to be random in this case due to the immeasurably factor.

In all of this we have another major feature of all of these architectural arrangements of seeking coherency that is to say, the lack of a universal identity, a universal concept of who and what we are despite our best in filling, remains a potentiality that in of itself seeks it's own image by metaphor, comparison and contingent belief systems, which have had their own developmental arc. Therefore if a sentience had a parasitic connection to our own information field as a composite arrangement of it's resulting form, it would be as far from being in stasis as one can imagine which is exactly what it is, just as much as what it is not, as an intermediary form of energetic expression.


In other words, the Greys are representational mimics or the shadow plays of this phenomenon that have no independent existence of their own as they are representative of behaviors of a conceptual interpretation of human behavior expressed as a metaphor arising from the images arranged toward incoherent behavior as a process of imagination from a sentience whose contextural relationships between it's entangled root and fledgling autonomy are not fully formed.

In a paper on "ASL Linguistics: Nonlinguistic Communication" by William Vicars, Mr Vicars uses the example as follows to illustrate this concept;

"Suppose I design a new water dispensing system for charitable use in an multilingual locality. I want to make sure people of any language background can use it. So I videotape myself going to the machine, setting my jug under the spigot, pressing a red button to position the spigot, pressing and holding a blue button to fill my bucket, releasing the blue button, pressing a green button to raise the spigot, and then taking my jug and walking away. My making and posting the video equates to my sending a message. The video is on a loop and so it continues playing again and again. People coming to the machine will be able to watch the video and form and understanding in their mind of how to use the dispenser. The message has been received. Language was not involved in the communication. The person watching my video may choose to use his native language to encode the steps of getting water into his memory. But that doesn't take away from the fact that I'm not using his language to communicate with him. A message has been sent and received without reliance upon language. I may use language to formulate my message. He may use language to process and encode my message into his brain...but the medium of transfer of the message was not language. That is the essence of nonlinguistic communication. "

And so if we take this process to ascertain the nature of the form of non linguistic communication ( in this case form and behavior)of the UFO, it becomes obvious that this non directed behavior while demonstrative, is not purpose driven but is a crude representation of processes in behavior that it apparently does not comprehend in terms of context, but rather an imaginal use that uses behavior as a representational totem or a "magical" act, as if attempting to determine the reaction to inversely deduce it's meaning.

We in turn are then entangled in a semi autonomous experience that is a parody of the other, as expressed by a mimicry of human behavior. We may be creating a monster in that experiential learning by mimicry, that may have a very dark shadow which is none other than a reflection of our own.
Posted by Bruce Duensing at 4:58 PM 3 comments
Monday, January 26, 2009
Do Agents of Sentience Dream?

Beyond Appearances: A Masquerade of ConsciousnessAreas of intense Fortean phenomena are called window areas. Many of them were places of former religious importance that have now waned or fallen from use. Could the worship or occult use of an area over hundreds of years create a sort of artificial life form? Something that fed on the worship. When the worship is taken away the "thing" still needs to feed. It now feeds by creating fear with paranormal manifestations. Another idea is that they are a massive, collective, sub-conscious, thought form....Perhaps dragons are a giant worldwide thought form emanating from our innermost fears."

-Richard Freeman, In Search of British Dragons.

To date, the strangest central feature that is easily found with very little effort is the five hundred pound elephant in the room, that is to say, the further one descends into the seething well of the nether regions to plumb the paranormal field, the quixotic defining feature we blithely assign to ourselves as a unique attribute is the very odd distinction that is our own direct failure to define what consciousness is, and as a consequence, what it is not.

In previous posts I have written about the emotional carrier wave that seems to draw open these opportunistic windows that allow us a transpersonal glimpse of our own amphibious nature. To discount the perceptions of intuition, fear,hope and desire is to remove the chief characteristic that allows the extradimensional and intangible realities that are our own signature.

Whether it is a mother gazing out a window having an instantaneous perception of her child in some danger or the global initiative wrought by Princeton's PEAR Project in relation to measuring the human consciousness field in relation to catastrophic events, I have little doubt that the entanglement of emotions and intellect are not compartmentalized phenomenon in relation to the paranormal. Whether you consider this tin foil material or not depends on your own experiential terms.

All of these dimensional attributes lead back to our lack of comprehension as to what constitutes consciousness.

If we consider this rumination as a statement of fact (which it is) for a few moments and let it's portent saturate all of the pages we have collected in our library of taxonomic demarcations,such as UFOs versus Daemons, Angels versus Vivid Dreams, Psychokinesis versus Telepathy,and so forth, we find that this quilt we have woven at our feet does not suffice for any useful purpose, except as a game board of place markers, or post it notes lodged between our questions, for what is vaguely deemed "further investigation" as none of them, in of themselves, have any coherency as individuated phenomenon, except by the nature of what we term "observation" which again is the prerogative of the subjective and experiential, neatly entangled within the architecture of the lens or aperture through which one tunnels through reality. In doing so, however, it is an apt question to ask if we ourselves as a portion of a process create intermediary agencies which imbue a semi-autonomous sentience in to order to unwittingly frame what we create as transitional, conceptual models of perception? Intermediate worlds....in other words, can behaviors of the paranormal (without individuated sentience) mimic human behavior without the accompanying locational nexus of a observer, individuated in time and place? Can our fears, hopes and desires in an era of growing stress be made manifest in an intermediate series of manifestations? Perhaps this process is representative of an unknown form of Meme, which comprises a unit or element of cultural ideas, symbols or practices; such units or elements transmit from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena. Perhaps they reach further than we suspect. The etymology of the term relates to the Greek word mimema for mimic.Memes act as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate and respond to selective pressures. One could could consider these many masks of the self to be a holographic house of mirrors wherein we mistake our own reflection for the another face in the mirror. Is there a form of DNA in memes that demonstrably organizes and transmutes our shared perceptions into an intermediate form?

It was Dr Rupert Sheldrake who coined the term,'Morphic resonance' The term is more on par with the Stoic's notion of the logos. Bergson's notion of the élan vital, or Plato's notion of the eidos than it is with any scientific notion of the laws of nature. What the rest of the scientific world terms lawfulness--the tendency of things to follow patterns we call laws of nature--Sheldrake calls morphic resonance. He describes it as a kind of memory in things determined not by their inherent natures, but by repetition. He also describes MR as something which is transmitted via "morphogenetic fields." This gives him a conceptual framework wherein information is transmitted mysteriously and miraculously through any amount of space and time without loss of energy, and presumably without loss or change of content through something like mutation in DNA replication. Thus, room is made for psychical as well as physical transmission of information.

If we cannot ascertain the nature of human sentience, how do we recognize or validate it, or more deeply now, how can we distinguish between a mimic of sentience and sentience itself? Are these players scripted by a consensus of emotional tones or an intensity within a field that organizes this output into into coherent forms of energetic sensory feedback that must don a mask since it has no identity of it's own?

Does a dream in of itself contain multiple sentience? Although the various behaviors of the peopled universe in which we are engaged appear to be individuated in terms of their free will and interaction with us, are they but a strange form of zombies which are internal memes or agents? If the dream state represents a spectrum of what we term consciousness does waking consciousness itself provide us with similar intermediaries between our consensus world of form and that of the root cause of the phenomenon itself, whose origin is unknown inasmuch as we do not know what sentience is? Is there a parallel interface to our own nature that in effect creates dreams with legs?

The term "life" itself may be misleading as what we experientially refer to as reality may represent a contingent,intermediate state between life and death which corresponds to a dream. This concept of intertwined dream states dependent on the cognition of the observer is known in Eastern practice as Bardo states. Originally bardo referred only to the period between one life and the next, and this is still its normal meaning when it is mentioned without any qualification. Buddhism expanded the whole concept to distinguish six or more similar states, covering the whole cycle of life, death, and rebirth. But it can also be interpreted as any transitional experience, any state that lies between two other states.

Its original meaning, the experience of being in an intermediate state and station between death and birth. By refining even further the understanding of the essence of bardo, it can then be applied to every moment of existence. The present moment, the now, is a continual bardo, or potential state, always suspended between the past and the future. In essence, a dream. All of paranormal experience , not surprisingly, in one form or another corresponds to a waking dream state

Whether it is in terms of quantum theory or metaphysics, the realm of dreams, the image of metaphor is considered a spectrum rather than a series of territorial prerogatives. The thoughtforms we experientially digest in dreams and the thoughtforms of concretion, the semiotics of referential visualization, are all perhaps within a band of interdependent frequencies rather than on one side we have the material and here on the other we have the non sensory realm.

Thoughtforms, in the sense of being homunculi of awareness with the attribute of self-will and self-determination – also figure in various cognitive and psychological theories.

Marvin Minsky , cofounder of the artificial intelligence laboratory at MIT, proposes that there are agencies of the mind, by which he means any and all psychological processes. Although he grants that a view of the mind as made up of many selves may be valid, Interestingly, he suggests that this may be a myth that we construct. This has been verified by various studies on the discontinuous nature of perception and cognition. There may be a series of selves or if you will, a series of agencies ( recombinant programs?) that span the possible and the indeterminate. Some agencies may appear to be sentient but may be autonomic. The same may apply to intermediate realities, whereas they have behavior but with no coherent tasking. When we ask about these externalized or internalized equivalents of agency,there may be a linkage we are missing in a common thread...we can certainly move our hands without visualizing the signal that produces the effect, the same may be true, of phantasms.

"However, when introducing the concept of agencies (a broad term that includes selves as one type of agency), Minsky (1986) does suggest several important questions to ask about agencies: How do agents work? What are they made of? How do they communicate? Where do the first agents come from? Are we born with the same agents? How to make new agents and change old ones? What are the most important kinds of agents? What happens when agents disagree? How could networks of agents want or wish? How can groups of agents do what separate agents cannot do? What gives them unity or responsibility? How could they understand anything? How could they have feelings and emotions? How could they be conscious or self-aware? Not all of these questions, of course, apply to subselves or internalized memes,but the questions of origins, heredity, learning, character, authority, and competence are pertinent to subselves."

-David Lester, Theories of Personality: A Systems Approach.

"Man has no individual I. But there are, instead, hundreds and thousands of separate small "I"s, very often entirely unknown to one another, never coming into contact, or, on the contrary, hostile to each other, mutually exclusive and incompatible. Each minute, each moment, man is saying or thinking, "I". And each time his I is different. Just now it was a thought, now it is a desire, now a sensation, now another thought, and so on, endlessly. Man is a plurality. Man's name is legion."
-GI Gurdjieff

The stranger formulation of what are termed "Philosophical Zombies" or "P-Zombies" are a conceptualizing and recombinant platform that is widely used in thought experiments, though the detailed articulation or specifics of this concept is not always consistent. There are, in effect, differing types of p-zombies.
What differs in this range of theoretical probing is how much exactly they have in common with ourselves. P-zombies were introduced primarily to argue against specific types of physicalism, such as behaviorism. According to behaviorism, mental states exist solely in terms of behavior: belief, desire, thought, consciousness, and so on, are simply certain kinds of behavior or tendencies towards behaviors. When one peers through this reality tunnel, one might reasonably invoke the manifested result of a p-zombie that is behaviorally indistinguishable from a normal human being, but that lacks sentient discernment. Perhaps these are the equivalent of Minsky's Agents, wearing a variety of masks that we provide, rather than a destination or a coherent sentience in of itself.
other words, perhaps at least some of the illogical and patently absurd encounters with strange creatures, may be an interface into a world of our own intermediate creation that at the same time expresses behavioral characteristics that mimic our own but are undone in the final analysis by their own lack of sentience. One is reminded of John Keels observation, in regard to the MIB quasi-humanoid phenomenon, as these ineffectual "investigators" seemed to be acting a preordained role as ill prepared actors in an out of place context,with no tangible tie to any organization outside of behaviorally being ill clad mimics of human authority. Sometimes, in the rare circumstances, where a encounter leads to an exchange, the ill fitting parody of human behaviors become surrealistic.

"On April 18, just six days after Yury Gagarin became the first person to orbit the Earth, and while the Bay of Pigs invasion was disintegrating, a strange UFO encounter allegedly took place at Eagle River, Wisconsin. At 11 a.m., Joe Simonton claimed to hear a whining sound and then saw a craft, thirty feet in diameter and twelve feet high, resting on his property.

A man about five feet tall appeared from the craft; he wore a black, turtleneck pullover with a white band at the belt and black trousers with a vertical white band along the side. Inside the craft, Simonton discerned two more figures; he said all three resembled "Italians."

The strange man held up a metallic jug, which Simonton took and filled with water. He noticed one man frying on a flameless grill and motioned for some food. He received three ordinary pancakes or cookies, about three inches in diameter, perforated with small holes. Soon after, the craft departed. The air force investigated the case and even analyzed the pancakes, finding them to be entirely ordinary, except for the lack of any salt. The case was inconclusive: nothing ever pointed to a hoax, but little evidence supported anything more."

source and references:

UFOs and the National Security State by Richard Dolan, pp. 247-8, © 2002

According to the behaviorist, such a being is not logically possible, since consciousness is defined in terms of behavior. So an appeal to the intuition that a p-zombie so described is possible furnishes a nifty argument that behaviorism is false. In other words, it is an autonomic creation set forth by the gears and mainsprings of it's environment and while it mimics human attributes of consciousness,by it's behavior, it is no more than a series of set points, actuators, feedback loops, all of which are intrinsically entangled in a manifestation akin to a living still birth, yet without sentience.
These zombies have distinguishable characteristics, of if you will, chief features

1. A behavioral zombie is behaviorally indistinguishable from a human and yet has no conscious experience.
2. A neurological zombie has a human brain and is otherwise physically indistinguishable from a human; nevertheless, it has no conscious experience.
3. A soulless zombie lacks a soul but is otherwise indistinguishable from a human; this concept is used to inquire into what, if anything, the soul might amount to.

Of course then we have the matter of physicality. According to the tenets of physicalism, the physical facts of forms determine all other facts; it follows that, since all the facts about a p-zombie are fixed by the physical facts, and these facts are the same for the p-zombie and for the normal conscious human from which it cannot be physically distinguished, physicalism must hold that p-zombies are not possible, or that p-zombies are indistinguishable from normal humans. Therefore, zombie arguments support lines of reasoning that aim to show that zombies are possible.However, the zombie argument against physicalism in general was most famously developed in detail by David Chalmers in "The Conscious Mind" (1996). According to Chalmers, one can coherently conceive of an entire zombie world: a world physically indiscernible from our world, but entirely lacking conscious experience. In such a world, the counterpart of every being that is conscious in our world would be a p-zombie. The structure of Chalmers' version of the zombie argument can be outlined as follows:

1. If physicalism is true, then it is not possible for there to be a world in which all the physical facts are the same as those of the actual world but in which there are additional facts. (This is because, according to physicalism, all the facts are fully determined by the physical facts; so any world that is physically indistinguishable from our world is entirely indistinguishable from our world.)

2. But there is a possible world in which all the physical facts are the same as those of our world but in which there are additional facts. (For example, it is possible that there is a world exactly like ours in every physical respect, but in it everyone lacks certain mental states, namely any phenomenal experiences or qualia. The people there look and act just like people in the actual world, but they don't feel anything; when one gets shot, for example, he yells out as if he is in pain, but he doesn't feel any pain.) Read non human or quasi human creatures.


It is one possibility over potentially hundreds that the very reason these phantasms do not have any meaningful connection to human behavior while apparently sentient, is that they are, at their root, a form of Tulpa. Tulpa or Thoughtform may be understood as a 'psychospiritual' complex of mind, energy or consciousness manifested either consciously or unconsciously, by a sentient being or in concert. In the Dzogchen view, accomplished thoughtform of the kye-rim (Tibetan) mode are sentient beings as they have a consciousness field or mindstream confluence in a dynamic of entrainment-secession and organization-entropy of emergent factors or from the mindstream intentionality of progenitor(s).

Thoughtform may be benevolent, malevolent or of complex alignment and may be understood as a 'spontaneous or intentional manifestation' or 'emergence'the term was first rendered into English as 'Thoughtform' by Evans-Wentz :

"Inasmuch as the mind creates the world of appearances, it can create any particular object desired. The process consists of giving palpable being to a visualization, in very much the same manner as an architect gives concrete expression in three dimensions to his abstract concepts after first having given them expression in the two-dimensions of his blue-print. The Tibetans call the One Mind's concretized visualization."

Back to John Keel....
"Not too long ago, a photographer showed me a lot of pictures be had taken of an outdoor rock festival in England. There was something very extraordinary about the picture. There was a large crowd, and scattered in the crowd were three men who looked like brothers. Their hair was quite short in contrast to the other people in the picture. They were dressed identically, and they all had this man-in-black look. Not an Oriental look, but a gaunt, evil look. They were widely separated in the crowd, and yet if you brought these three men together, they would have looked like triplets. This doesn't prove anything, except that the picture fascinated me.

In January 1969, during Nixon's first inauguration, I was very interested to notice three men in black suits looking very much like our classical men-in-black sitting together a few rows from the front, right behind Nixon when be gave his inaugural address. Every time the television cameras shot Nixon from a particular angle, I could see these three men. They seemed out of place. Of course they could have been ambassadors from Vietnam or something.

I wondered afterward if my imagination had been running away from me. I got a hold of all the magazines I could find with pictures of the inauguration; and I went over them with a magnifying glass; but I could not find those three guys. Yet I had seen them very clearly on television."

-Interview With John Keel, "The New UFO Sightings." By Glenn McWane & David Graham
1974 Warner Paperback Library Edition

In all this, the sensory expression of the intangible tonal range of human experience is fraught with the intersection of entanglements, what we are, what we could be and what is that which we serve, all draw from the same impenetrable well, of images, associations and contingent belief...that may be marked as surely as the movement of the wind over these winter prairies..by the ghosts of the our potential.

Whether it is the cadaverous uniformity of the Men In Black whose pathology attempts to control appearances, or the Greys whose manipulation of the human genome was an expression of a free floating intuition of all that Mary Shelly knew long ago, the mirror world of these proxies of our collective unconscious may be shouting warnings between the lines of what we have written to date...

The silent airships like strange stars in a constant movement that encircles itself with no apparent purpose, the strange creatures who have no earthly ground beneath their footsteps, the wandering ghosts of our primeval past who warn us away from the dark wood...there purpose is perhaps yet unborn, as a bridge to some reality that follows us like a shadow...that encircles the square in the mirror of dreams.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Part Two: An Ontology of The Imaginal Realm.

The Issues of Physics, Metaphysics and The Imaginal Realm
Dedicated To Mary Pat Corbin

"I will not Reason and Compare: my business is to Create."
-William Blake



"Once upon a time" begins the tale, but soon we find ourselves in places not connected to any time we know, where golden apples grow on flowering branches and strange creatures hide in the deep woods. For Clarissa Pinkola Estés, the opening words, "'Once there was and once there was not' ... alert the soul of the listener that this story takes place in the world between the worlds where nothing is as it seems."What is this "world between the worlds"? For much of the postmodern West, it is nothing but fantasy and daydreams, a relic of an older, more gullible past. This is the realm of fiction. The logical, materialist worldview is based on a rigid distinction between fantasy and fact. The most fundamental facts are those material things we can perceive with our physical senses and control with our hands.But we no longer live in that old Newtonian universe. Since Einstein, the solidity of matter has increasingly dissolved into space-time continua, probabilities, and fields of influence whose extent is unknown and perhaps unknowable. Physicists are familiar, if not always comfortable, with this new universe. It is David Bohm's realm of unbroken wholeness and Werner Heisenberg's world of tendencies….”
The Door To The Imaginal Realm By Mary Pat Mann http://www.mytholog.com/essays/mann_imaginalrealm.html

Mary Pat Mann extends the concept in the previous post beyond the physiology of perception to a place or “thing”, we both acknowledge that the Imaginal Realm –“ is ontologically real if it persists in some kind of space-time location and can be perceived by independent observers at different times. It might not be physically present to our ordinary senses, but is accessible in a consistent way to those with the skill to get there. This is the sense in which some kinds of mystical or psychic events are real.”

One of the many coatings that we apply to reality, as the give meaning to our personal valuations is theology, as applied to a shared consensus of writ and whether this may be either praiseworthy or blameworthy is as subjective as any other subject I could examine. One interesting book that examines this issue is The Physics of Angels; Exploring the Realm Where Science and Spirit Meet"
by Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake. In a dialog between a theologian and a physicist, one observes at one point where Sheldrake ruminates that "in an evolving universe, it seems to me that the idea of creative intelligences throughout the cosmos makes a lot [of] sense..."

All of these theological creeds, none the less, attempt to frame reality as a series of discernment's that, at times, on the surface of things, seem to counter oppose one another, while the transpersonal quality of those who experience a intermediate state between one realm and another, that apparently transcend the foundational differences, or focus of his or her adherence to systems of belief when it comes to these strange creatures we call Angels, seems to indicate that these creatures supercede theology and the intellect that attempts to apply a corresponding strict architecture upon the possible and the impossible, the allowed versus the damned. All of these precepts fall under the thrall of the subjective as well as the perhaps the ontology of a world or realm that we unwittingly co-create. Information processing and information flow occur in the course of an organism's development and throughout its lifespan. Organisms do not exist in isolation, but interact with each other constantly within a complex ecosystem whether it is one that is apprehended by our sensate cognizance or not. The relationships between organisms, such as those between prey or predator, host and parasite, and between mating partners, are complex and multidimensional. In all cases, there is constant communication and information flow at many levels. In the last post we examined such a relationship between the imaginal realm and that of our own enfolded nature. Reality itself may be a fluid dialog wherein the answer as to it's nature is such that it is a question of multiple realities posed as a choice rather than an edict.



The transcribing sentience of this information flow from a non sensory platform into the receiver as the nexus of the Imaginal Realm,may be a spectrum of potentialities as I am reminded of the various graphic illustrations of this principle, within Tibetan Buddhism ,that graphically illustrate an intermediate reality that produce a range of experiential manifestations (which when defined as the energetic locus of an interaction) are transitional forms, likewise, these "deities" perhaps correspond in this sense to those mysterious creatures we call Angels...as our non local yet more complex equivalences.


The term "Tulpa" was first rendered into English as 'Thoughtform' by Evans-Wentz: "Inasmuch as the mind creates the world of appearances, it can create any particular object desired. The process consists of giving palpable being to a visualization, in very much the same manner as an architect gives concrete expression in three dimensions to his abstract concepts after first having given them expression in the two-dimensions of his blue-print. The Tibetans call the One Mind's concretized visualization the Khorva (Hkhorva), equivalent to the Sanskrit Sangsara; that of an incarnate deity, like the Dalai or Tashi Lama, they call a Tul-ku (Sprul-sku), and that of a magician a Tul-pa (Sprul-pa), meaning a magically produced illusion or creation. A master of yoga can dissolve a Tul-pa as readily as he can create it; and his own illusory human body, or Tul-ku, he can likewise dissolve, and thus outwit Death. Sometimes, by means of this magic, one human form can be amalgamated with another, as in the instance of the wife of Marpa, guru of Milarepa, who ended her life by incorporating herself in the body of Marpa."

The inference is perhaps the Angel is an "thoughtform" as well although it is rooted outside of the observer, it's nature or unique quality within a range of manifestations may be tempered by the orientation of who is observing.

Yet ,one of the most difficult entanglements one immediately discovers when investigating the paranormal is the propensity to immediately attempt to name or term an event or a category of phenomena rather than take an agnostic approach and view it as something that is apparently unnameable beyond our discernment. In other words by giving the unnameable a semiotic identity, we may be unconsciously attempting to edit our own perceptions under the guise of personally controlling the immutable as a form of self comforting psychology. However, this is not to say that we can easily dismiss the various levels of how a phenomenon manifests itself to the observer. In terms of these creatures we call Angels, there are discernible characteristics in this regard.

One finds that to determine the nature of the phenomenon, one has to move beyond one’s own orientation.As far as the role of the observer, it may be that akin to Perceptual control theory (PCT), which is a psychological theory of animal and Human behavior originated by maverick scientist William T. Powers. In contrast with other theories of psychology and behavior, which assume that behavior is a function of perception — that perceptual inputs determine or cause behavior — PCT postulates that an organism's behavior is a means of controlling its perceptions. In contrast with engineering control theory, the reference variable for each negative feedback control loop in a control hierarchy is set from within the system (the organism), rather than by an external agent changing the setpoint of the controller. PCT also applies to nonliving systems.

An intellectual courageous young graduate of theology studies, by the name of Emma Heathcoate, while being highly skeptical on the subject at hand, was determined to study this phenomenon of Angels and came up with some interesting data when she placed ads in a variety of media and weighed the respondents experiences in terms of how they had manifested themselves. I think it is very interesting that only 26% of these respondents had an encounter in a traditional manner. The spectrum of these experiences as in other phenomenon seem to indicate the type of experience one has is determined by the inherent characteristics of the observer. The respondents were Atheists, Christians, Muslims, Jewish and Agnostic.

This may be a case wherein a specific faculty of the transpersonal Self is such that it brings together sensory things which have shapes and forms, and consciousness, which has no shape or form. Thus dream images are perceived in sensory form, yet they are animated by a formless awareness, or, as the Ibn Al Arabi often puts it, they manifest "meanings", which are supersensory realities. . . . In a slightly more extended sense, imagination refers to the realm of the Self, a level of being and consciousness that is situated between the immutable and the contingent."

The inclusion of all beliefs, or a complete lack of same is of particular relevance to us today. Since it is these creatures who appears in every form, without being limited to any particular form.

From a theological point of view, they can be seen in all ways of worship and all forms of belief. However, the ability to accept all beliefs without being tied to any one in particular requires giving up all of one's preconceived notions about reality. When Ibn 'Arabī exhorts us to be the “substance” of all beliefs, this is not so that we just take on another belief which is more inclusive.

Categorization of "Angel" Experiences:

Traditional-style angel with wings: 26 per cent
Human form which disappeared: 21 per cent
A force/presence: 15 per cent
Figure in white: 11 per cent
Scent: 7 per cent
Engulfed by light: 6 per cent
Voice: 6 per cent
Enveloping wings: 4 per cent
Other: 4 per cent

As far as I know, she is still collecting these experiences and should you care to share one you may have had, they can be sent to Emma Heathcote, PO Box 7459, Birmingham, B32 2TQ, UK.

Throughout his work, having studied it for over a decade, Ibn 'Arabī emphasizes the need to be aware of those aspects of reality which transcend particular circumstances, as well as paying attention to how that reality manifests in the world, for he maintains that the movement of the world from non-existence into existence is a movement of love, or if you will, the intelligence of the heart as a organ of perception as a formless form of sentience. The world is itself nothing other than the one and singularity of reality manifesting itself in infinitely varied forms and states, which are already present within it in potential.

From this point of view, the signs manifested in the world should not be dismissed or ignored, especially for those who are embarked on a quest toward one’s integration to the larger whole of reality. He emphasized the importance of what he termed the Imaginal Realm as one wherein these “creatures of light” dwell.

A very interesting correllary to this is a paper entitled "Consciousness, Information,and Living Systems" Energy in relation to information in terms of consciousness is studied as an interactive, creative act...specifically in terms of it's effect on sensate materiality.And so one could easily extend this concept toward a form of sentience of an indeterminate nature whose manifestation is a co-creative process, dependent upon the orientation of the observer.

http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/CMBarticle.pdf

Again in “The Door To The Imaginal Realm” By Mary Pat Mann, this path leads to the openings found in quantum physics…...“The physicist “Fred Alan Wolf explored some of the esoteric implications of the new physics in his book, The Dreaming Universe. He says if we look deeply into "hard reality," we find that "levels begin to dissolve and atoms appear to be not things; they seem like ghosts, and we enter into an imaginal realm." Wolf uses the word "imaginal" deliberately to link quantum physics to Sufi mysticism. Robert Bly and Marion Woodman link this same realm to poetry and myth: "Avicenna said there was a world Aristotle didn't know of, in which Spiritual Presences live. One world is mud and stone; one world is divine; and there is a third world, an in-between world. The name given to it so far is the Imaginal World. Saint Francis and Saint Teresa can meet a human being there."

For myself as I ruminate on the realm of these creatures, I am also astonished at the correspondences between metaphysics and physics. Having read Ibn Al Arabi’s “Insha' al-dawa'ir “(The Description of the Encompassing Circles ) This fascinating tome was astonishingly written in 1201 (598) in Tunis .It describes the fundamentals of his metaphysics, discussing existence and non-existence, manifestation and non-manifestation, and the rank of the human being in the world, using diagrams and tables. His cosmology of an ontological spectrum ( stations and states) and their corresponding intersections is a interesting place for the Fortean to ruminate on the nature of intermediate realities as well as our own.

Is the matter of an ontology one we have yet to either recognize or fathom which intersects our own? Is this the dwelling place of creatures that are “as close to us as our jugular veins” and yet are only accessible in the deepest sense by our own formless perception which occurs within the sentience of the heart? Perhaps we are experienced by these creatures termed Angels, as a form of sentience that exists within an imaginal dream that is within a dream.
In other words our ruminations are so focused on that within us in which we are embedded so much to the extent that we are as ghosts, and not cognizant of any demarcation between self perception and the perception of the experience itself...perhaps this is the crux of how how our emotional intelligence transmutates experience...then again, all of this is an entangled affair. Reductionism is a temptation when faced with just how many complex facets one can slice and dice from the infinite amount of material in the kitchen. Perhaps once again, as my mysterious mentor in the last post pointedly illustrated that the point of the exercise is a sort of unending differentiation from a singularity as a recombinant, creative process.The more choices, the merrier. In the next post, I will describe a very strange encounter to illustrate the nature of the Imaginal Realm..In this fine madness, to paraphrase this experience, "to know where the boundaries are.. is to know where to cross them..". Perhaps when we next meet, it will be behind the broken barricades up upon some promontory where the territorial prerogatives of ontology need not apply.


Posted by Bruce Duensing at 11:31 AM 2 comments
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Part One: An Ecology of Angels.


A Sentience Without A Sensate Form

One of earliest creatures of an intermediate and indeterminate realm known to our species that encompasses both the formalized range of human ruminations, as well as the intuitive senses held in the intelligence of the heart, (that instrument of cognition being of greater sensitivity than that of the intellect), is the Creature of Light, The Angel.

I recently read a wonderful post entitled "In Search of Nothingness" by Peter Fotis Kapnistos, which I highly recommend;

http://www.alienseekernews.com/articles/in-search-of-nothingness.html

This post examines the counterintuitive concept (among other concepts) that everything that exists, even nothing has a material basis regardless if whether we can apprehend this by our sensory apparatus or not. If this is so, then our thoughts, knowledge, and emotions have a non-sensate material and energetic composition that bears further consideration. Perhaps if the next rung on the evolutionary scale is a form of sentience without form, such as that of an Angel, this non-sensate form of intangible materiality may be the realm of it's subsistence as they may be stationed between the realm of dreams and the realm of delimited potentiality, a quantum state we might call Eternity.

One could say the the difficulties of transcribing one form of sentience of a species to another in a coherent form is both astonishingly complex and nearly impossible to correlate, but this post examines a means in which this may not be so.

In both metaphysical and paranormal considerations, the underlying basis of comparison that both have sought in applying anthropomorphic attributes to this non human sentience, have created some amount of resulting abstractions as to the nature of this creature of the Imaginal Realm.

Just as we swim in an environment of invisible or if you will non sensory fields held behind the veil of forms or rather the surfaces or the semiotics that we utilize to describe them, this post is a consideration of a non human sentience that is the essence of organized energy as a form of intelligence that does not require an intellectual rational logic encased in a closed loop of mathematical constraints, or language as we understand language as a recombinant calculus.

What this post attempts to describe is an unseen world, just as unseen as your thoughts are invisible and yet it's effects can be measured so it may be so with the existence of these creatures whom I have followed and I suspect have followed me as well. Once, several years ago, I may have had an encounter with one, but more on that later.

In the last post I wrote about the limitations of the intellect in relation to perception and so this is a natural extension of those ruminations.

In the 10th Century,the Sufi Psychologist and Metaphysician, Al-Ghazali was one of the first to divide the sensory motives (apprehension) into five external senses (the classical senses of hearing, sight, smell, taste and touch) and five internal senses: common sense (Hiss Mushtarik) which synthesizes sensuous impressions carried to the brain while giving meaning to them; imagination (Takhayyul) which enables someone to retain mental images from experience; reflection (Tafakkur) which brings together relevant thoughts and associates or dissociates them as it considers fit but has no power to create anything new which is not already present in the mind; recollection (Tadhakkur) which remembers the outer form of objects in memory and recollects the meaning; and the memory (Hafiza) where impressions received through the senses are stored. He wrote that, while the external senses occur through specific organs, the internal senses are located in different regions of the brain, and discovered that the memory is located in the hinder lobe, imagination is located in the frontal lobe, and reflection is located in the middle folds of the brain. He stated that these inner senses allow people to predict future situations based on what they learn from past experiences.

More recently science has discovered what is now termed, EI or Emotional Intelligence, Grahmn Brown wrote in 'The Smart Heart' that "Famous scientists have said that their discoveries seem to be merely following up the revelations of mystics from the past, and even the arrogantly sceptical Freud wrote, “everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me”. The poets and mystics have always known that true intelligence is a blending of head and heart, of thought and feeling and now psychology is moving towards a definition of what EI might be.It defines EI as including self-awareness, impulse control, zeal and motivation, empathy and social deftness; these are the qualities he identifies as prerequisites for success in career and in relationships. However the term EI was first formally defined in 1990 by the psychologists Mayer and Salovey as: “1) Knowing how you feel, how others feel and what to do about it. 2) Knowing what feels good, what feels bad and how to get from bad to good. 3) The emotional awareness, sensitivity and management skills which help us maximise our long term happiness and survival.” More recently they have updated their definition: “Emotional intelligence involves the ability to perceive accurately, appraise, and express emotion: the ability to access and or generate feelings when they facilitate thought; the ability to understand emotion and emotional knowledge; and the ability to regulate emotions to promote emotional and intellectual growth.”

When I use the term Imaginal Realm, I think one of the greatest difficulties that researchers face when the term is used is to immediately associate it with the formulation of non existent phantasms. However, this is but a reductionism of a more complex relationship that we also incessantly utilize as a necessary platform on which we operate under the assumption that we have a consistent and immutable self that is the locus of an organized autonomy in nature. As related in previous posts, neither perception nor the senses are continuous, they are in fact discontinuous and so a form of organic imagination makes these appear to be seamless.
Taking this concept further than ourselves as an example, nothing in nature is autonomous. The other perspective in this is the concept of a contingent nature which all things whether we consider them to be dead or alive share, which is co dependence.

"What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery

A metaphysical phrase for this relationship of one form of energy being reciprocally digested and\or fed by another is termed living in poverty. What this means is that is essentially as related to our own situation, we have nothing of our own, so to speak and that we are entirely dependent on the entire system of energy exchanges, as one could say a hummingbird or a solar system is a transceiving station and not an immutable entity.These energy exchanges both ascend and descend on a ladder or scale that could be considered from a certain point of view a spectrum, and rather than the varying shades of color as in the spectrum of a rainbow, we see in this process, a scale of velocities, densities and irradiance.

From the iron core of our planet, through the semisolid layer of magnesium, to rock, to crystal, to sedimentary layers to soil, to bacterial to cellular, to invertebrate to vertebrate and then downward from irradiated energy to the magnetosphere to atmosphere to water, etc. And so in this exchange within a spectrum of processes, we envision these creatures as representative of a station that consumes energy from living creatures. What energy is this and where does it arise? When we look at this systematizing hierarchy of transceiving stations of energy in terms of density, we also come upon a corresponding and parallel scale of sensitivity. A leaf is more sensitive than a rock, as well as the fact that this causal chain becomes more complex in terms of the energies each station requires to produce or if you will as step up transformers, produce increasingly more sensitive and complex energies.

Now we as sentient creatures in this process are the sole transformers of energy that consume from all the other groups such as mineral,bacterial, cellular,invertebrate, vertebrate etc to produce what? If you examine the intellect in great detail and compare it to the "heart" or our emotional sensitivity or intelligence, you find that in terms of intelligence not only does it not require the artifice of the intellect and broadcasts on non linguistic level. Those who study the paranormal for any considerable amount of time hear such phrases as "pregnancy is the womb of intuition" or that intuition is related to mediumship and precognition, or the other areas such as "sympathetic magic".

When one reads the details of the long running PEAR experiments with random number generators and the results derived during moments of global catastrophe, one immediately "gets" the concept that as an aggregate sum of our species we irradiate a field that not only provides the carrier wave of the intellect but reaches a wider distribution in the range of it's frequency. This being said, in certain metaphysical circles, this field is a form of food for those creatures we call the Angels. It may be these creatures uphold a world that is enfolded into ours as we are enfolded into the microscopic or bacterial realms. Perhaps to coin a pun, this is food for thought.

One day, as nameless as there are stars in the firmament, I was tracing a route of errands as autonomic as it is wearing and one of my required destinations was the grocery store. On that particular day, I was having an inner dialog or more accurately, an internal debate over how unnecessarily complex my life as well as others were, especially in terms of how unnecessary all this seem to be, in a self pitying diatribe of existential angst.

Honestly, I dont recall what particular item I was there to retrieve, however with great clarity I recall being overwhelmed by the enormous variety of variations of the same commodity that seemingly went on forever on shelf after shelf.I was intently mulling over how surrealistic all this was when I sensed and then confirmed that a very elderly gentleman with long white hair and deeply penetrating blue eyes was practically looking over my shoulder. I was caught unprepared and felt silly that I was probably blocking his way. I commented to him that there was too many selections and choices. He looked me squarely in the eye and said, "That's the point .....isn't it? To have as many choices as possible?"

I was taken aback as such an answer was unanticipated and instead of a amusing or clever reaction, I was stuck without being able to recollect an appropriate response. For a moment, I fixated my attention on a box of product just for a few seconds to regather some focus and when I wheeled around to find there was no one next to me, unlike my usual behavior of simply letting such an odd remark go, I felt compelled to find him as if to reconfirm that what just occurred in fact did occur.
I looked high and low to no avail. Unless he was sprinting, I could not account for his seemingly impossible exit and disappearance. This event still causes me to ask, "What was that?" His comments had the effect in their resonance as if he had taken a surgical knife to my private and self absorbed ruminations. As quickly as he appeared over my shoulder, he was gone.

In Part Two we will examine the mythology of these creatures as to ascertain commonalities toward a revised conceptual map of their ecology as well as examine the utility of their purpose. Of course, this is all a play upon our possible suspicion that they could they exist.