Garry Bryan wrote:
Garry Bryan <garry@soco.agilent.com> wrote:
: There is a book that relates the fairy myths with that of the modern alien
: myths. . .I'll try and find the title. . .something about a study of Communion
: the Streiber book. . .
It is by Ed Conroy and is titled "Report on Communion: An independent
investigation of and commentary on Whitley Streibers Communion
MORROW, c1989
the online book catalog doesn't have the universal book code for it.
Garry
Report on Communion
© 1989 Ed Conroy
William Morrow & Company, Inc.
http://www.beyondcommunion.com/reportoncommunion.html
http://www.beyondcommunion.com/index.html
HIGH TIMES Interview: Whitley Strieber
WHITLEY STRIEBER & THE VISITORS BY GARBLED UPLINK
Whitley Strieber hasn't spoken to the press since 1989
and it's no wonder. As the prolific author of a number of
best-selling masterpieces of horror fiction, including
The Wolfen and The Hunger, he had no reason to stick his
neck out and announce to the world that he had experienced
a number of encounters with beings so utterly strange and
puzzling that to label them "aliens" would be presumptuous.
He has been subjected to a fair amount of vilification for
being so forthcoming, and he has responded to each and
every accusation directly and rationally.
In response to accusations of fabrication, he voluntarily
submitted to three different polygraph examinations.
It would seem that he is telling the truth. In response to
the suggestion that he suffers from temporal-lobe epilepsy,
he underwent extensive neurological examination.
His brain functions quite normally, albeit graced with a
magnificent sense of wonder, humor and imagination.
Mr. Strieber is not a user of mind-altering substances or
plants, but he graciously agreed to speak with us because,
as he put it, "HIGH TIMES is about changing the paradigm of
reality, from the paradigm based on assumptions and
expectations to a paradigm based on questions and surprises.
His experience with "the Visitors" are detailed in his books
Communion and Transformation (now in paperback), and his latest
work on the subject, Breakthrough, is available in hardcover
from HarperCollins.
HIGH TIMES: Could you briefly summarize Communion,
Transformation and now Breakthrough, for readers who
may not be familiar with that work?
Whitley Strieber: Well, in late December of 1985 I had
what I would describe as a forcible encounter with what
seemed to me to be completely nonhuman beings, and I was
unable to deny in my own human mind that it was a physical
thing that had happened. I began to struggle trying to
understand what had happened. The true nature of the
experience was very difficult to comprehend.
Out of those struggles came more contact and the book
Communion, and then Transformation. Now five years after
the publication of Transformation, I've written Breakthrough,
which is an attempt to make something more sensible of the
experiences, to say something about them that would be
fundamentally more useful than simply describing them.
HT: Communion was profoundly frightening, but in Transformation
there was this sense of a deeper contact beginning to come through.
In Communion I got a keen sense of a purely extraterrestrial source,
but you seem to be shifting away from the extraterrestrial
hypothesis. You also explored the transtemporal hypothesis and you
played with Celtic fairy mythology. Am I wrong about that?
WS: No, that's right. I did.
HT: The fairy encounters in the Celtic belief system resonate
with the experiences you're having. There's a certain whimsical
quality about them that particularly comes through in Breakthrough.
Would you care to elucidate on that?
WS: Well, first of all, this is the most complicated experience a
human being can have, and if you turn your attention toward it, it
quickly becomes the most powerful. It leads you at one time into
everything you are at its most intense, including, among other
things, your sense of humor. It is a big, powerful, extremely
subtle experience. Whatever's out there has got the sense of humor
of a dancing elephant. There's a lightness of touch and an amazing
kind of whimsy connected with the feeling of the giant that's amazing!
HT: In the accounts that you reported in Breakthrough, I very
much got the sense of a circus feel to what they were doing.
WS: Right! That's right. One of the witnesses who's not mentioned
in Breakthrough--simply because the experience wasn't one of the
ones I chose to write about--said it was like a troop of Ukrainian
acrobats, reminding him of the Flying Karamazov Brothers!
When they're in the house, you get a weird combination of emotions
as if you're dealing with a bunch of clowns. But there's also a sort
of sinister side to it. They're a little bit scary. There's the grin
that's a little too artificial, the collar that's turned up that
maybe shouldn't be.
HT: It's like having Cirque du Soleil come to your kid's birthday party!
WS: Right! Speaking of which, there's a figure that turns up in
Saltimbanco who moves around the tent before the show. When I saw
the way it looked, I thought, "So creepy yet so funny. God! Somebody
in this has got the Visitors in their lives. They have to!" A lot of
us do, you know, and we don't really acknowledge it directly. It's the
kind of experience that underlies a lot of artistic production, and I
think that somebody involved in the creation of that must be very
close to them.
HT: One of the consistent themes in your reportage is that what you
bring emotionally to the experience of contact will be what you get
emotionally; they seem to mirror what we deliver. If you harbor
enormous fear, then you will be greeted with something enormously
fearsome; but if you come with enormous joy, you will be greeted with
something joyous. In Breakthrough, Dora's child reported being taken
by a fairy.
WS: When I saw the Visitors with Dora's child, it was a terrifying
experience. What the child perceived was that she'd been visited by
fairies! For me, it was very different. In my estimation, I saw her
being attacked by what looked like some sort of monstrous goblin.
Her perception of it was that she had had a fairy in her room.
HT: So you brought the concerns of an adult to the experience.
WS: What's fascinating is that we're bringing all the costumes and
masks and putting them on these guys.
HT: Yeah! We supply the props, the tent, the costumes.
WS: What I discovered was that I could have fun with this.
Why not have fun? If this is really contact with someone from
another planet, they are really terribly, terribly cool, and we
can have an awful lot of fun with them if we quit taking it quite
so seriously. Go to a UFO convention and you will not find a lot
of humor. But when you are living with the Visitors every day of
your life, and doing it in a way that is comfortable, humor is the
center of the experience. Your fears and so forth can be worked
through with humor.
In a way, I'm reminded of Meister Eckhardt, the 14th-century German
philosopher, sort of the German answer to St. Thomas Aquinas.
Except he had fun! St. Thomas [Aquinas], I don't think, really did.
I mean, let's face it, most of the old church fathers were not fun
guys. You can't think of St. Augustine and St. Thomas doing a
soft-shoe together.
HT: There wasn't a lot of fun in those times.
WS: Not a lot of fun, no. He had a great creation myth,
Meister Eckhardt: His creation myth was that God laughed,
and the laughter of God begot the son and the laughter of
the son begot the Holy Spirit, and the three laughed together
and out of their laughter flowed the whole universe.
And I think that when we get to that level of material,
where laughter is a kind of art, then we're getting real
close to where the Visitors are coming from. In many respects,
that is what my book is about. Breakthrough is a discovery of
a new kind of freedom.
HT: An interesting departure in Breakthrough from your two
previous books--although the segue is quite visible--is the sense
of you as playwright.
WS: It is a visible segue, but I hasten to add: as playwright
and player. I have received over 140,000 letters all about this
stuff over the past few years. About 80 percent of the people
are puzzled and confused about their experiences, but not
necessarily scared. About 20 percent are somewhat scared, and
a small number of those are looking for help because they feel
really beat up. The reason the media promulgates fear about this
is that UFO investigators only get the ones who need help.
The vast majority of people don't need help. They'd like to know
what was going on.
I got a wonderful letter from a psychiatrist, who was lying in
bed one night in her apartment in a large city. She described what
she had seen as obvious aliens. I don't know what she meant by
that, but she said they looked like the face on the cover of
Communion. They came bebopping out of her
closet in a conga line,
went around the room and disappeared into the wall of an apartment
building outside. That was just wonderful, and I talked to her
about it. The thing that was so much fun about it was that she
was totally serious. It was a big experience, it was a major
change in her life, but look at the whimsy involved. Of all the
people to do that to--a psychiatrist!
HT: I would imagine the first reaction on the part of the human
would be horror. Only in retrospect would you be able to see the
humor of the conga line. Unless you're equipped with a powerful
sense of humor and a relentless counterphobic impulse, you're going
to respond with shock and horror, at least initially.
WS: She was upset, no question about it. The way it operated was
the closet door flew open, and while she was clinging to the fact
they were real, they went out through the wall! But she still
maintained they were absolutely real.
HT: Well, "real," this is the fundamental question of this
work: What is "real"?
WS: No, it's more the fundamental question of this work.
It's the fundamental question of life! I'm trying to do a
very small thing--create a total revolution. The reason I
wanted to be interviewed for HIGH TIMES is that I think
that HIGH TIMES is about doing this, too. That is, changing
the paradigm of reality, from the paradigm based on assumptions
and expectations--which is what we live by now--to a paradigm
based on questions and surprises.
HT: Thank you! That gets us to a question. I want to reiterate
that you are not known as a recreational drug user. You were
tested extensively in the period around Communion, were you not?
WS: Yes.
HT: There have been accusations of temporal-lobe epilepsy.
I understand you've been tested three times for this.
WS: I've been tested by two different types of
electroencephalographs. One of them involves the placing of
leads up into the sinuses to get a really detailed picture
of what the brain function is like. These epilepsies are
transient events. If the test takes place while there is no
event happening, obviously the brain-wave patterns might show
something approaching normality. My brain-wave patterns are
not just normal, they are absolutely normal. In fact, my brain is
exceptionally stable in its patterns. It's a stable operating
system, a very, very normal brain. Temporal-lobe epileptics are
not supposed to have a sense of humor, and my humor defines
my existence.
HT: It's profoundly expressed in your fiction.
WS: In my fiction and also, I hope, in Breakthrough.
HT: Quite well in Breakthrough!
WS: My Communion experience started, let's face it, with my
little men ramming what looked like a telephone pole up my ass!
It wasn't the most amusing thing that's ever happened to me, but
I got over it. Now it's become more interesting, and more fun.
HT: The accusation of falsehood or derangement does not wash
when compared with not only your own work, but also the work of
Jacques Vallee. There seems to be a hardcore body of people who
are presenting themselves as skeptics who are not really skeptical,
because what they are doing is defending consensus reality as
opposed to genuinely inquiring in a skeptical way. There have
been a lot of accusations. Are there any specific things that you
would like to address that I haven't addressed that have to do
with the kind of questions that have been raised about this work?
WS: Well, let's see. If I could address some of the accusations
against me, the most delightful one is that I have frightened people
by telling them that I have seen their disembodied heads aboard
UFOs! This was used by certain UFO organizations who told people
that you've got to stay away from Whitley Strieber. He's very
dangerous and he tells people these terrifying things that
blow their minds.
What's fascinating about this is, I had a lot of neck trouble,
so I went to an orthopedist and they took X-rays of my neck.
The doctor asked, "When did you have the surgery?" I replied,
"What surgery?" He said, "Look at these two vertebrae fused
together--the result of surgery." I told him I'd never had
surgery on my neck. He said, "You're telling me this is not
a surgical scar." I said, "No, I've never had any surgery
whatsoever." He said, "Well, look, if you want to be treated
by me, I can give you exercises that will make your neck feel
better, but I'm not going to deal with you unless you tell me
what your actual medical history is." I said, "You're saying
to me that this is surgery." He said, "Of course it's surgery."
I repeated that I had never had any surgery and left.
Then I thought, "Well--hell!--what if it's my disembodied
head aboard the UFO!"
HT: You're familiar with the business about Arthur Koestler's
play, Twilight Cafe--the fact that there was a blackout, a power
failure associated with the Visitors in this play. Prior to this
play, there hadn't been any association of power failures with
encounter phenomena. Suddenly, power outages of various sorts
became ubiquitous in the reports.
WS: That's right, I mentioned it in Communion.
HT: How do these things enter into the human experience? I believe
the Greek word is egregora--if enough people believe in something
strongly enough, it will manifest.
WS: Hmmm.... Well, in this case, in this experience, what is
immediately and observably true in that the perceiver is the
architect of structures through which he sees whatever is out there.
In other words, there's like a veil between us and the Visitors,
and what you expect them to look like is what you see through that
veil, because the veil is just vague enough that you have to connect
the dots in your own mind. We create these things. We more or less
construct these things on the other side.
This is why it took me so long to escape from the fear trap, which
is so devastating. It is a psychic rape of the first order--to be told,
but also to convince yourself that this stuff is scary. You can see
it in an entirely different way. The exact same thing! A little girl,
to me, would be in a frightening situation. To her, it's fun.
It just depends on how you look at it.
There has never been any experience where it has been more clear that
the mind is the architect. At the same time, there is some kind of
objective reality behind that architecture, looking in at us literally
through the filter of the way we see it. I've tried to see it in a way
that's objective enough so we can have some darn communication, because
what I'm able to detect of what's back there behind all of this
perceptual static is fabulous! I want to see more of it!
HT: So the whole perception is that there is some sort of performance
going on here.
WS: Yeah! Exactly! I couldn't agree with you more. There is a very
theatrical, performance-oriented quality to the thing. In earlier
drafts of Breakthrough, one of the things I stressed--but which I
pulled away from--was the highly theatrical nature of the experience.
The reason I pulled back from that a little bit is that I didn't want
to distance it from people. There is a tendency to become passive
when you see the word "theater." Not for people who are in the theater,
but for people who are habituated as audience members.
HT: Particularly television-generation people.
WS: Yeah, right. What I want to do is to let people know that they
are the artists, the architects here. There is somebody there, somebody
who is alive on the other side of this. We have created the perceptual
envelope in which we live and they can't come to us except through the
concept of our own expectations. So we have to rise to our best, our
most open, our most questioning levels of expectation. We could really
have some fun with this and see what's really happening at the same time.
A couple of years ago there were so many sightings over Mexico City
that a lot of people in Mexico were left thinking that this had to be
real. If the same amount of sightings happened over New York or
Washington, and if the networks had taken photographs or video,
we would all know that there was somebody out there--that it was real.
What I don't want to see is the government hierarchies, the military,
all that horrible old, dead garbage from the past, to get between us
and what's there. I want to dance with this thing. I think we can!
This material is copyrighted and may not be republished without
permission of HIGH TIMES magazine. (c) 1997 Trans-High Corporation.
The information and images you receive online from the HIGH TIMES
web site are protected by the copyright laws of the United States.
<http://www.hightimes.com/> The copyright laws prohibit any copying,
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copyright-protected material.
Monkey Business.............
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
America's Role in the 21st-Century World
by Gary Hart:
http://vander.hashish.com/articles/misc/garyhartforeignpolicy.html
And:
http://www.garyhartnews.com/hart/about/conversation.php