Rey Hernandez, Scientific Study of ET Contact and the Paranormal |412|

I agree with this. Essentially all of it. So perhaps I was addressing a straw man. But I would disagree that this most recent post of yours is necessarily at odds with my previous post. I think it’s a matter of the inherent limitations of language and personal interpretation.

Yeah. I get that. I mean I'm here talking too. I just think we need to be mindful of it and not fail to take the time to break away and delve into these things via direct experience, beyond language, etc. and gain our understanding that way.
 
There is nothing but Mind and creative imagination. Where our mind is focused a world is created.

Eric,

You seem to have some very well developed ideas about the nature of consciousness, and I think it would be great if you explained your ideas further in a new thread within "Extended consciousness" - hopefully including some of your own experiments/experiences that have lead you to this view.

This would leave a more permanent record here on Skeptiko that simply replying to this thread can achieve - you can obviously do both! Pasting stuff across or planting cross links

David
 
... I think Rey Hernandez has the contours about right ...

There are hints - Don DeGracia (Skeptiko 388) is a good beginning. There are a bunch of other sources I think drive a deeper awareness of what Hernandez is pointing at - and they combine to create that 'soft mind' (the sceptical state of doubt - or at least rational uncertainty) that is needed to engage with 'extended consciousness'.
nicely put. I still worry about Rey slipping into shut up and calculate mode... i.e. forget about all that pesky data that doesn't fit neatly into my favorite paradigm.


Arguments about whether an NDE experiencer encounter the 'real Jesus' are silly and should be left for folk whose faith is naive and literal. We can have all the faith drenched assertions we can get our hands on, but the fact is that nobody has the slightest shred of evidence that Jesus, grandad or whomever, who appears is what they appear to be. All we have is evidence that they are mediums of messages - media of some kind. Asserting objective reality in a domain we know stuff all about is ill-disciplined intellectually and essentially faith-based. Mixing the two never works from an intellectual perspective - and why waste time arguing with the faithful? And, besides, we are told these appearances are really performances by those who stage them.

Does it matter? Of course not. We are not upset to discover that our greatest fictional heroes are not 'real'. Why do we imagine that our sense of a personal connection should assure that the figures we see are 'really' those folk? The idea that Jesus zaps around the metaphysical domains looking like he did 2 millennia ago is clearly idiotic. And since we don't know what he looked like as an historic character (if real) all we have is our interpretation of one of countless artist renditions. But then, if we think this really is Jesus, then that's the only image that will convince us to listen to what could be deep sense. If we filter the NDE and OBE and Abduction accounts with some decent discipline the clues about it all being metaphorical and/or symbolic abound.

Pay attention to Rey Hernandez. This guy is talking the best sense you are going to get for some time.
You are teeing up episode 413 with david sunfellow :) it will be interesting to see what you think when we get there.
 
in the spirit of the UFO/angel healing the Jack Russel Terrier of paralysis story which Ray gave, here is a fantastic video done on a bizarre case of healing via UFO which occurred to a French Physician who was unable to walk well. After the encounter, he was able to walk perfectly and had no signs of even the wound he used to have. Vallee wrote about this case in one of his books.


Others aren’t as lucky. There’s the famous Cash-Landrum case where these poor ladies got symptoms which strongly mimic radiation poisoning after their contact experience.

great contract of cases. thx. highlights the contradictions.
 
Arguments about whether an NDE experiencer encounter the 'real Jesus' are silly and should be left for folk whose faith is naive and literal. We can have all the faith drenched assertions we can get our hands on, but the fact is that nobody has the slightest shred of evidence that Jesus, grandad or whomever, who appears is what they appear to be. All we have is evidence that they are mediums of messages - media of some kind. Asserting objective reality in a domain we know stuff all about is ill-disciplined intellectually and essentially faith-based. Mixing the two never works from an intellectual perspective - and why waste time arguing with the faithful? And, besides, we are told these appearances are really performances by those who stage them.
I don't really agree with this. If an NDE experiencer sees their grandfather, then that surely involves a more specific identification of an individual that does an identification of 'Jesus' - where that identification might be based on that person's authoritative personality, and little else. For example, most images of Jesus were too light skinned to have corresponded well with the real Jesus - even if one existed!

David
 
My take from having read a number of NDE accounts is that you're given information in the form you can best apprehend. I agree it seems a mistake to take these forms literally, not just the entities but the beautiful sunlit fields and such as well.

https://www.near-death.com/experiences/group/may-eulitts-nde.html

We saw that the sparkling lights were tiny, transparent bubbles that drifted in the air and sparkled on the grass. We realized that each tiny sparkle was a soul. To me, the valley appeared to be Heaven, but at the same time I knew that James and Rashad were seeing it differently. James saw it as the Gulf of Souls. Rashad saw it as Nirvana, and somehow we knew all this without speaking. The light began gathering at the far end of the valley, and slowly, out of the mist, a pure white being began to materialize. I saw an angel with a strong, bright face, but not like you'd usually imagine. She was closer to a strong, Viking Valkyrie. I knew she was the special angel that watches over the women of my family, and I perceived her name to be Hellena. James saw this same being as his late father, a career Naval officer, in a white dress uniform. Rashad perceived the being to be the Enlightened One, or Buddha.
 
Alex,

You quizzed Rey about the extreme outliers of the data, including those who said they were raped as part of their abduction.

I am not sure that is a good way to use his data, because there are inevitably going to be a few mentally deranged individuals who will say some very strange things. Extracting the commonly experienced phenomena may be the best you can do with his data (still very useful!).

David
 
Alex,

You quizzed Rey about the extreme outliers of the data, including those who said they were raped as part of their abduction.

I am not sure that is a good way to use his data, because there are inevitably going to be a few mentally deranged individuals who will say some very strange things. Extracting the commonly experienced phenomena may be the best you can do with his data (still very useful!).

David
from Rey's survey you have 173 positive responses re MILAB.

just got done interviewing near-death experience researcher David Sunfellow. do you know how often milab-like experiences are reported as part of the near-death experience? 0... as in zero... as in never. I think we gotta be careful with the outliers.
 
from Rey's survey you have 173 positive responses re MILAB.

just got done interviewing near-death experience researcher David Sunfellow. do you know how often milab-like experiences are reported as part of the near-death experience? 0... as in zero... as in never. I think we gotta be careful with the outliers.
That difference makes intuitive sense to me. Why would an ND/afterlife experience involve a MILAB? MILAB would only be a during-life experience...
 
Sidebar: I keep hearing allusions to Dec 17 UFO US govt revelations as a psyop. Is there a good write-up on this theory? I concur that at first glance it was odd and came out of the blue and seemed to have almost no lasting impact, which leads one to suspect it was designed to have no lasting impact, the way you try to sneak bad news into a Friday 6pm press release or something. Tying it to the Blink182 dude seems also crafted to turn up the meme-factor.

I'm one of those folks who believe that you control mankind by controlling its belief system, so it's serious business.
 
Alex,

I wonder if you have contacted Rey about the fact that his website is (still) down - not just down, but the domain seems to have been deleted. He quoted an email address at one point, and I think that used the same domain name. Whatever has happened, it happened just after his podcast was published here - this might be a dirty trick by someone.

David
 
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from Rey's survey you have 173 positive responses re MILAB.

just got done interviewing near-death experience researcher David Sunfellow. do you know how often milab-like experiences are reported as part of the near-death experience? 0... as in zero... as in never. I think we gotta be careful with the outliers.
Agreed, but I wasn't talking about MILAB - but the extremes of unpleasant abduction experiences.

David
 
nicely put. I still worry about Rey slipping into shut up and calculate mode... i.e. forget about all that pesky data that doesn't fit neatly into my favorite paradigm.

But if we are induced to use where Rey is now as a starting point for our thinking I think we can tolerate a bit of the shut up and calculate mode. There is always 'pesky data' that pokes out like leg hairs on a drag queen wearing pantyhose. No paradigm can be so neat that something does not agree with it. Sometimes we may have to live with a set of ideas until we are comfortable with them and while we let them evolve our thinking - a bit like then punctuated equilibrium notion of evolution.

Sometimes we need to settle a bunch of ideas so we have the platform to move on. For me Rey and others have opened up a host of comparatively new ideas that we need to learn to be comfortable playing with before we start to develop new insights to move on. One of the real problems we have with new ideas is that there is an initial discomfort with the inadequacy of language to describe them. Its only when we have matured the language that we can start to move on to novel notions.

White's 'Unobstructed Universe' is a study in how hard it is to learn to think in metaphysical terms (sans time and space) from a physical perspective. More recently DeMarco shows the same challenge - and I am sure there are others. What I liked about DeGracia was his employment of Hindu metaphysics to challenge our materialistic model of thought - and how damned hard it is to make the transition to a more genuinely looser way of knowing. Our ancestors had the advantage of myth, symbolism and metaphor - whereas we, with our addition to rationalism, are trapped in the wrong kind of language.
 
we have a non-human intelligence demonstrating an unprecedented capacity to manipulate dream and awake states of consciousness

I want to believe that what's going on in our world today, as reported by the respondents to Rey's research and interpreted by Rey, is benevolent, or at least benign, but it seems to me that his analysis is akin to asking cattle what they think of the rancher, and it reminds me of the "Evil Magician" story as told by Gurdjieff who believed most people live their lives in a kind of hypnotic trance or waking sleep.

When I overlay this Gurdjieff story with the results of the FREE research, I come away with a more alarming analysis than does Rey.

“There was an evil magician. He lived deep in the mountains and the forests, and he had thousands of sheep. But the problem was that the sheep were afraid of the magician because every day the sheep were seeing that one of them was being killed for his breakfast, another was being killed for his lunch. So they ran away from the magician’s ranch and it was a difficult job to find them in the vast forest. Being a magician, he used magic.

He hypnotized all the sheep and suggested to them first of all that they were immortal and that no harm was being done to them when they were skinned, that, on the contrary, it would be very good for them and even pleasant; secondly he suggested that the magician was a good master who loved his flock so much that he was ready to do anything in the world for them; and in the third place he suggested to them that if anything at all were going to happen to them it was not going to happen just then, at any rate not that day, and therefore they had no need to think about it.

He then told different sheep…to some, “You are a man, you need not be afraid. It is only the sheep who are going to be killed and eaten, not you. You are a man just like I am.” Some other sheep were told, “You are a lion – only sheep are afraid. They escape, they are cowards. You are a lion; you would prefer to die than to run away. You don’t belong to these sheep. So when they are killed it is not your problem. They are meant to be killed, but you are the most loved of my friends in this forest.” In this way, he told every sheep different stories, and from the second day, the sheep stopped running away from the house.

They still saw other sheep being killed, butchered, but it was not their concern. Somebody was a lion, somebody was a tiger, somebody was a man, somebody was a magician and so forth. Nobody was a sheep except the one who was being killed. This way, without keeping servants, he managed thousands of sheep. They would go into the forest for their food, for their water, and they would come back home, believing always one thing: “It is some sheep who is going to be killed, not you. You don’t belong to the sheep. You are a lion – respected, honored, a friend of the great magician.” The magician’s problems were solved and the sheep never ran away again.”
 
How do the tools of social science help us get any clarity on these phenomena? If "physical" sightings can truly be explained 75-90% or whatever, wouldn't there be a comparable error in this kind of self-reporting? Isn't it going to end up garbage in, garbage out?

Some folks are highly credible to me (Dorothy Izatt), but most others are not, esp the fear-dominated types.
 
Sidebar: I keep hearing allusions to Dec 17 UFO US govt revelations as a psyop. Is there a good write-up on this theory? I concur that at first glance it was odd and came out of the blue and seemed to have almost no lasting impact, which leads one to suspect it was designed to have no lasting impact, the way you try to sneak bad news into a Friday 6pm press release or something. Tying it to the Blink182 dude seems also crafted to turn up the meme-factor.

I'm one of those folks who believe that you control mankind by controlling its belief system, so it's serious business.
I hammered on Leslie pretty hard here :)
#289 - Grimerica Talks UFO Disclosure & Life After Death with Leslie ...
Kevin Day, Navy UFO Contact After-Effects |403| - Skeptiko - Science ...
 
Alex,

I wonder if you have contacted Rey about the fact that his website is (still) down - not just down, but the domain seems to have been deleted. He quoted an email address at one point, and I think that used the same domain name. Whatever has happened, it happened just after his podcast was published here - this might be a dirty trick by someone.

David
I pinged him
 
Agreed, but I wasn't talking about MILAB - but the extremes of unpleasant abduction experiences.

David
sorry I may have been writing / thinking in shorthand :) bottom line issue here seems to be whether or not we accept the light / love spiritually transformative ET contact as rey has outlined, or if we opted for the evil alien abduction storyline.

so as part of my skeptiko thing I like to press rey milab because it directly contradicts key aspects of the light and love alien space brother thing.
 
But if we are induced to use where Rey is now as a starting point for our thinking I think we can tolerate a bit of the shut up and calculate mode.
I think we need more data. id like to see rey do 5 more surveys in really tighten up what he's finding
 
I want to believe that what's going on in our world today, as reported by the respondents to Rey's research and interpreted by Rey, is benevolent, or at least benign, but it seems to me that his analysis is akin to asking cattle what they think of the rancher
thx... cool story. I have similar concerns. ain't no MILAB NDEs :)
 
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