UFO UpDates Mailing List
From: Stephen MILES Lewis <elfis@io.com>
Date: Wed, 19 May 1999 23:19:29 -0500
Fwd Date: Thu, 20 May 1999 11:30:42 -0400
Subject: ELFIS - Conference Abstracts/Bios/Links
Otherworld Reality Conference
Exploring the Ontological Status of Imaginal Consciousness
ABSTRACTS OF THE PAPERS
(With Additional Background Links)
Introductory Talk:
Paul Devereux
The Imaginal in Ancient Persian Religion and Modern Experience
Henri Corbin coined the term " imaginal" to describe a
particular state of consciousness coveted by the mystics of
ancient Persia. While this was understood within a religious
context, the imaginal state still occurs in people today outside
of any coherent cultural context. Rather, we have a fragmented
range of contexts, so we talk of lucid dreaming, alien
abductions, out-of-body experiences, hallucinogenic visions, and
so forth. It is a remarkable level of mind in which the senses
can seem to be operative within a stable visual reality
possessing full spatial fidelity - it is just that the "reality
channel" has changed. Is this simply the product of
neurophysiology, or is some objective, if different and
non-consensus level of reality involved?
Michael Grosso Death and the City of Imagination: William Blake
ann Otherworld Realities
Wiliiam Blake, prophet of the Mundus Imaginalis, once declared
that after death we enter the world of imagination. With the
help of psychical research, and related studies, we can begin to
map the nature of imaginal states: their distinctive properties,
and how they may relate to the possibility of life after death.
With Blake as our mentor, we conclude with remarks on how this
might be of use in the art of living and dying.
Ian Marshall The Otherworld and the Physical World: Some
Unifying Perspectives
I assume a double-aspect, emergent view of the universe; its
basic entities possess mass, position, charge,
proto-consciousness and proto-intention. Hence neurology and
physics may cast light on mental phenomena. The brain EEG or MEG
of lucid dreaming or trance resembles that of waking
consciousness, except for the reduced or absent response to
sensory input. This gives each person a private, subjective
Otherworld. Can there be other forms of input to this state, to
give a shared, objective Otherworld? I will discuss three
physical models which, though speculative, allow this to varying
degrees.
Charles D. Laughlin Imagination and Reality: On the Relations
Between Myth, Consciousness, and the Quantum Sea
While it is true that we may imagine worlds that do not exist,
and may fail to imagine worlds that do, there often appears to
be a striking correspondence between mythic stories and aspects
of reality. We will examine the process of creative imagination
within a neurobiological frame, and suggest a theory that may
explain the functions of myth in relation to the hidden aspects
of reality. True myth is peppered with archetypal entities and
interactions that operate to reveai hidden processes in reality
relative to the human condition. The imagery in myths in a sense
"sustains the true." That is, mythopoetic imagery keeps the
interpretative processes of experience closer to the actual
nature of reality than rationality operating alone is able to
do. Indeed, while the rational faculties can easily lead us
awry, genuine myth rarely does. Explanations of events offered
by traditional peoples are frequently couched in terms of mythic
themes and events. This talk will focus especially upon those
mythic themes that represent facets ofthe quantum universe, and
which give us clues as to the relationship between
consciousness, symbolism and reality.
Alan Worsley Lucid Encounters in the Imaginal State: Controlled
Exploration in the Realm of the Metachoric
Convincing imaginal experiences - dreams, OOBEs, NDEs, alien
abduction - occur unexpectedly to people who are unprepared,
possibly frightened, with specific cultural expectations. In
these circumstances ontologicai considerations ("Is it real?")
tend to be neglected. Consequently, coherent informed
pre-arranged experiments concurrent with the experience are
unusual. Techniques to induce comparable experiences predictably
while maintaining clarity of thought allow intra-state
experiments to investigate phenomenology. They afford
opportunities to observe, even guide, subjective content and
also obtain physiological measures (EEG, brain scan). Evidence
thus gathered and verified suggests induced alternate realities
can be as remarkable and realistic as spontaneous cases.
Jacques F. Vallee The Rise of the Replicants: Four Scenarios
Impacting Consciousness in the Years 2000 - 2025
At a time when the stability of the world's economy is in
question, and the technical community faces its greatest
challenge ever in the passage to the Euro and the Year 2000, it
is not difficult to think of dramatic developments impacting the
human environment. History teaches, however, that profound
change in consciousness is subtler than mere extrapolation of
today's crises. Here we attempt to reframe several future
scenarios around fundamental issues: will the development of
novel technical structures such as the quantum computer
challenge the very notion of what it means to be human? Can the
new communications media continue to grow without precipitating
a major restructuring of social systems, and what are the
implications? Survival (both individual and societal) will mean
something different in the next century, and so will novel
spiritual movements based on the Web. These developments will
carry danger as well as seduction. Those who try to ignore them
may find themselves trapped in visionary fantasies with which
humanity hasn't had any previous experience.
Day Two Line-Up
Peter M. Rojcewicz Beware the Physical in the Material:
Imaginalia, Folk Belief and the Eclipse of the Literal
Imaginal phenomena are first and foremost archetypal images,
self-originating and autonomous manifestations of the psyche,
fundamental ground of mind and nature. Our every idea,
perception and bodily sensation is a psychic event existing
first as an image. AlI realities physical, social, mythic,
religious - are inferred from psychic images. They are the
fundamental stuff of consciousness. The continuum of
extraordinary imaginal encounters with ETs, fairies, dream
figures, angels, ghosts, Men in Black, apparitions and other
anomalous entities are archetypal images of ontological and
epistemological complexity. Their paradoxical nature is
described in folk belief traditions as simultaneously psychic
and somatic, physical fact and creative fiction, personal and
impersonal. Archetypal images are simultaneously immanent in and
between people and transcendent of people. We can never be sure
if we invent them according to patterns they set, or they invent
us. Any definition of imaginal reality is, therefore, an
approximation at best, a metaphor remaining "as-if." Imaginal
encounters help us to recover a mythopoetic vocabulary of the
soul.
Imaginalia are nudges by the soul toward developing the capacity
for personifying images as real "persons" and assuming an
aesthetic perception of reality. Extraordinary encounters with
imaginal others returns the psyche/soul to its non-human
imaginal ground. Our century has lost vital contact with soul,
seeing it as an outdated notion. When we can see deeply through
images to realities beyond the literal, we enlarge our
imaginative capacities and expand the soul through aesthetic
modes of knowing. It is as if the ego must undergo encounters
with non-human entities or abductions to otherworlds of the soul
where we ourselves are images, in order to help us recover our
aesthetic ability to take in the world and see images as true
realities and actual powers. The images we create in turn create
us. The ways we imagine the world provide us with images by
which we view ourselves. As such, encounters with imaginalia are
experiences of death. We die to the ego's illusion of ourself as
a literalism of biology and society when we realise that we are
multiple personifications of the life of images within us,
objectitied images of the imagination. By engaging imaginal
persons immanent in all people, things, and events, we realise
that the greater part of the soul is outside the body and
thereby shatter the illusion of the world as without psychic
life. A life lived along the psychic and extrapsychic continuum
of imagination avoids spending itself in either unrestrained
sensual materialism, or tinker bell-headed spiritualism.
Folkloristic, aesthetic, and archetypal perspectives will be
used to discuss the movement of consciousness toward imaginal
perspectives.
Richard Rudgley The Ethnography of the Imaginal
Henri Corbin used the term imaginal in order to provide an
adequate cultural translation of Iranian notions concerning the
faculty of imagination, finding our word imaginary having been
subverted by reductionist thinking. The relevance of his
pioneering research in this sphere has not been appreciated by
anthropologists. The potential of an 'ethnography of the
imaginal' is outlined. The idea of the imaginal world is used in
the interpretation of Amerindian and Melanesian cosmologies.
Particular emphasis is placed on shamanism and ritual activities
involving psychoactive plants. Indigenous beliefs concerning the
ontological status of the imaginal world (and the role of
hallucinogenic agents in entering altered states of
consciousness) are compared with our own cultural ideas.
Cross-cultural study reveals that the ontological and social
status of imaginal consciousness is radically different in many
indigenous societies and that our own denigration of this human
faculty is the exception, rather than the rule, in human
cultural experience.
Karl Jansen Ketamine (the Mental Modem) and the Near-Death
Experience
Ketamine (K) is a dissociative anaesthetic which can produce
trips to other realities which are identical to near-death
experiences. In this session, I will discuss the most recent
explanations for this finding. These range from events in the
brain itself to the possibility that the brain acts as a
transceiver, converting energy fields beyond the brain into
features of the mind - as a television converts waves in the air
into a visible and audible drama. K may retune the brain to
provide access to certain fields which are usually inaccessible.
This retuning may open doors to realms which are always there,
rather than actually producing those realms, just as the
broadcast of one channel continues when we change channels. The
dramatic effect on the mind of adding K to the brain raises
important questions about the relationship between the Universe,
Spirit, Mind, and Body.
Dean Radin "No career track for parapsychology. Reality isn't
what it used to be." (No Official Abstract Available)
Audience/Panel Question and Answer Session Moderated by Stanley
Krippner -Imaginario -States, Structures and Planes -Sex, Gender
and Everything -Dreams, Lucid, Psychic and Otherwise
BRIEF BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Michael Grosso received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia
University where he also studied classics. He is presently chair
of the Philosophy and Religion Department at New Jersey City
University. His main interest is in consciousness, creativity,
and the parapsychology of religion. Books include: Frontiers of
the Soul, Thg Millennium Myth, and Soulmaking: Uncommon Paths to
Self-Understanding, he has also published many articles in
popular and scholarly journals on topics ranging from Marian
visions to out-of-body experiences. He is currently completing a
monograph titled Consciousness and Survival: Expanding the
Paradigm for The Institute for Noetic Sciences. Recently he
wrote several papers and gave presentations on the theme of what
he calls "creative dissociation." The latter studies in
dissociation led Grosso in 1995 to take up again his early love
of painting. His work attempts to bridge the gap between
surrealism and psychical research. He has opened a studio in
Warwick, New York, and exhibits in NYC. Website address:
http://www.parapsi.com http://www.njcu.edu/core.htm
http://www.helsinki.fi/kasv/nokol/blake.html
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/blake/
http://www.hutchison.org/allen/poetry/poets_a_to_h/william_blake/index.html
http://207.200.73.135/Society/Religion/Spiritual_Personalities/William_Blake/
Karl Jansen was born in New Zealand where he graduated as a
medical doctor. He then completed a research degree in human
brain science, and moved to the University of Oxford, England,
where he gained a Ph.D (D.Phil.) in clinical pharmacology,
focussing on the mind/brain interface. Moved to London to train
in psychiatry at the Maudsley and Bethlem Royal Hospitals: is
now a Member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. His current
main interest is in uniting lessons from altered states of being
with aspects of quantum physics to develop a 'quantum
psychiatry.' He is based at the new South London and Maudsley
NHS Trust, and welcomes messages so mailto: K@BTInternet.com
http://skepdic.com/nde.html
http://lycaeum.org/drugs/synthetics/ketamine/
http://lycaeum.org/drugs/synthetics/ketamine/Ketamine_NDE_Model.html
http://lycaeum.org/drugs/synthetics/ketamine/Ketamine_near-death.html
http://www.promind.com/bk_ye4.htm
http://maps.org/news-letters/v07n2/07221bbc.html
http://www.resproject.com/ http://www.entheogen.com/
Stanley Krippner, Ph.D. is Professor of Psychology at Saybrook
Graduate School in San Francisco. A leading researcher and
teacher in the field of consciousness studies, he has in many
books and more than 500 articles investigated developments in
consciousness research, education, and healing. In 1972, in
Tokyo, he read the first paper on parapsychology ever accepted
by an International Congress of Psychology. He has served as
president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, the
Parapsychological Association, and the American Psychological
Association's Division of Humanistic Psychology and Division of
Psychological Hypnosis. He is a Fellow of numerous other
institutions and is co-author of The Mythic Path, and co-editor
of Broken Images, Broken Selves: Dissociative Narratives in
Clinical Practice.
http://www.saybrook.org/
http://www.saybrook.org/sayfac.k-l.html#Krippner
http://www.intuition.org/txt/krippner.htm
http://www.nfgcc.org/20.htm http://www.psiexplorer.com/asc.htm
http://www.psiexplorer.com/asc2.htm
http://www.csp.org/chrestomathy/ecstasy_mdma.html (wrote
foreward)
http://paranormal.o.se/book/advances_in_parapsychological_research/vol_5.html
http://goertzel.org/dynapsyc/1996/stan.html
http://www.asdreams.org/search.pl?type=insensitive&search1=krippner&paths=basedir
Charles D. Laughlin, PkD. is Professor of Anthropology at
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Trained in both ethnology
and in the neurosciences, he is a co-founder of the
neuroanthropological theory of consciousness and culture called
"biogenetic structuIalism" and has done ethnographic fieldwork
among the So of Northeastern Uganda, Tibetan lamas in Nepal and
India, and the Navajo in the American Southwest. His interests
focus on religious ritual and states ofconsciousness, healing
systems, sacred symbolism, cross-cultural dream phenomenology,
the evolution of brain and technology, and the biophysical
interface between conscious brain activity and the structure of
the quantum universe.
http://www.carleton.ca/~claughli/biogen.htm
http://www.carleton.ca/~claughli/articles.htm
http://www.carleton.ca/~claughli/history.htm
http://www.carleton.ca/~claughli/allabout.htm
Dr. Ian Marshall studied mathematics, philosophy and psychology
at Oxford University, then medicine in London. He has been
involved in hospital psychiatry and in Jungian and humanistic
therapies, and is now in private practice as a psychiatrist and
psychotherapist. He has published papers on ESP, quantum physics
and consciousness. Books co-authored with his wife Danah Zohar
are The (Quantum Self(1990), The Quantum Society (1994), and
Who's Afraid of Schrodinger's Cat? (1998). They are now
completing Spiritual Intelligence, to be published world-wide in
early 2000.
Dean Radin, Ph.D. has alternated between conventional
telecommunications research (Bell Labs and GTE Labs) and
experimental studies of psychic phenomena (Princeton, Edinburgh,
and Nevada Universities, and SRI International). He was elected
President of the Parapsychological Association in 1988, 1993 and
1998, and has received numerous research awards. Author of The
Conscious Universe, 1997, and over a hundred journal articles
and technical reports, Dr. Radin presently works at a major
Silicon Valley think tank on theoretical and technological
aspects of psychic phenomena.
Peter M. Rojcewicz, Ph.D. is a folklorist and Chair of
Interdivisional Liberal Arts, The Juilliard School, New York
City. Has taught and frequently lectures at the C.G. Jung
Foundation, NYC. Was invited to Dharamsala, India, by the
Fourteenth Dalai Lama to speak on the nature of imaginal
phenomena. He is an award winning teacher and recipient of the
Worcester Poetry Prize and the National Library of Poetry Award
(2nd prize). See his article on the imaginal entitled "Between
One Eye Blink and the Next: Fairies, UFOs and Problems of
Knowledge" in Peter Narvaez, ed., The Good Peopk?: New Fairylore
Essays, 1991.
Richard Rudgley is currently based at the Pitt Rivers Museum,
Oxford, undertaking research into the prehistoric and ancient
use ofpsychoactive plants. In 1991 he became the first winner of
the British Museum Prometheus Award which resulted in the
publication of his critically acclaimed book The Alchemy of
Culture: Intoxicants in Society (British Museum Press, 1993). He
is also the author of The Encyclopaedia of Psychoactive
Substances (Little Brown. 1998) and Lost Civilisations of the
Stone Age (Century, 1998).
Jacques Vallee was born and educated in France, where he
graduated from the Sorbonne and Lille University with a master's
degree in astrophysics. Coming to (Austin, Texas) in the United
States in 1962, he obtained his doctorate in computer science at
Northwestern University, where he was a close associate of
Professor J.Allen Hynek, the Air Force's scientific consultant
on the UFO problem. While he pursued a career in computer
science, Dr. Vallee wrote extensively on technical and
scientific subjects. His diaries, covering many aspects of
paranormal research in the United States and Europe, have been
published under the title of Forbidden Science, complementing
his trilogy on UFO studies: Dimensions, Confrontations and
Revelations. Jacques Vallee has also published several
science-fiction novels in French, and was awarded the Jules
Verne prize for a space-opera entitled Le Sub-Espace that
anticipated current theories about non-human consciousness in a
universe with multiple dimensions.
Alan Worsley is a psychologist and author, and conducts
independent instrumented research into consciousness during
sleep, dream guidance and lucidity induction. In 1975, at Hull
University, England, he made the first communication from dream
state by coded eye movement signals recorded by Keith Hearne on
EEG polygraph. In the 1980s, he was subject and experimenter in
experiments at St Thomas's Hospital, London, with Peter Fenwick,
using conscious dream control to study correspondence between
reported dreamed events and actual physiological activity. This
study demonstrated Morse code communication from the dreamer,
and, by showing the dreamer's ability to receive and acknowledge
coded signals, possible two-way communication with and between
dreamers. http://www.au.spiritweb.org/Spirit/dream-faq.html
http://www.sawka.com/spiritwatch/papers/fatherx/toc.htm
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D051788710X/
THE CONSCIOUSNESS CONNECTION emailto:TCC@liminal2.demon.co.uk
Phone/Fax: UK: (01608) 652829; USA: (914) 967 0322 Formed to
address the more neglected questions in consciousness studies,
and to help promote a greater convergence of thought within the
Field.
Directors/Co-Founders
Paul Devereux. Author, international lecturer, broadcaster, and
consultant. Has written twenty books to date (1979-1999), and
his writing spans the range from academic to popular on
archaeological and consciousness research themes and geophysical
anomalies. Recent book titles include: Re-Visioning the Earth,
The Secret Language of the Stars and Planets (with Geoffrey
Cornelius), UFOS & Ufology (with Peter Brookesmith), and The
Long Trip. Peer-reviewed papers have included:
'Three-dimensional aspects of apparent relationships between
selected natural and artificial features within the topography
of the Avebury complex'. in Antiquity; 'Acoustical Resonances of
Assorted Ancient Structures' (with Robert Jahn and M Ibison), in
Journal of the Acoustical Society ofAmerica; 'The Archaeology of
Consciousness', in Journal of Scientific Exploration. Is
currently at work on three new books, and engaged (1999-2000)
upon an extensive field research programme on 'shamanic
landscapes' throughout the Americas. He is a Research Fellow of
the International Consciousness Research Laboratories (ICRL),
Princeton, and takes part in collaborative research on lucid
dreaming, ancient sites dreaming, and geophysical anomalies. He
is director of The Dragon Project, UK. Paul Devereux is also a
speaker at this conference. http://www.acemake. com/PaulDevereux
Charla Devereux. Author, lecturer, and organizer of
international conferences and symposiums. Senior program
analyst, IBM; founder and executive vice-president of The
Natural Oils Research Association; co-founder/co-organizer with
Dr. Keith Shawe (National Research Institute, UK) and Professor
James Simon (Purdue University, US) of the International
Training Program in Essential Oils: Advanced Studies - the first
academically certified course in its field in the US. Has
developed an introductory course for aromatherapy, and is
founder of Arome Essential Oils. Books have included: Diet
Logic; The Aromatherapy Kit; The Lucid Dreaming Kit (with Paul
Devereux). Recent lecture presentations include: 'Food as
Medicine for Mind and Body'. New Aspects of Whole Health and
Food Quality, Schweisfurth Stiftung, Neuss, Germany, 1998, and
'The Practice of Aromatherapy', 20th Congress, International
Federation of the Societies of Cosmetic Chemists, Cannes,
France, 1998. Member of the Education Steering Committee to
establish educational standards for aromatherapy. Advisor to The
Environic Foundation International, Washington D.C. Has
co-organized and hosted specialist tours in England, Scotland,
Egypt.
Trish Pfeiffer. Career in marketing; a researcher in the
Parapsychology Foundation's lab in NYC; founder and former
director of the Center for Exploring New Dimensions of
Consciousness; a founder of the Marion Foundation in Marion, MA;
serves on the Advisory Board of The Friends of the Institute of
Noetic Sciences (FIONS). Lifelong researcher in consciousness
studies, quantum physics, anomalous phenomena, philosophy and
alternative models of reality.
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