December 14, 2014 — George Hansen

[Constance]

Do y'all think that taking GH's theory and seeking to verify it via each new witness's account is appropriate? Should GH's theory be taken this literally on an individual basis, or applied from above to a distribution of events over time?

Thank you for the information about this researcher's fairly rigid application of Hansen's trickster theory to the examination of ufo witnesses or abductees, or both. My own view of whether he should do so or not is that all of us tend to pursue a working hypothesis in any/every field of research we work in (and need to avoid doing so if/when it leads us to think in only one direction about anomalies and anomalous experiences). But people will do what they do, and I think in the long run contributions come from almost all approaches to these daunting subjects. I've actually avoided reading Hansen's trickster book because of its immense influence and what has seemed to me, in various applications I've read, to avoid dealing with the question of the source of the figure, which is why I was so glad to see your initial question in this thread:

"Does GH leave open the question of whether his theorized "control system" that seems to respond with what we call paranormal activity in response to anti-structural events is a purely automatic process, i.e., a law of nature like the balancing and unbalancing of weather systems? Or does he leave open the possibility that there is an intelligence beyond this phenomena, acting (as Jacque Vallee would say) as a control system on the human race? Frankly, I do not recall if Vallee considered this control system to be under intelligent direction or an automatic reaction (perhaps residing within the human consciousness?) without a so-called directing EXTERNAL intelligence?"

Speculating as Vallee has done about a possible 'control system' regulating what we are capable of thinking -- or even seeking to confuse us -- about the nature of reality and our own nature is to raise a question that we need to pursue and attempt to answer. To accept his speculation in itself as an explanation fails to do the work necessary to approach a possible answer.

 

[Randall]

... Also, one earlier poster did not consider UFO's to be appropriately categorized as paranormal. I think this depends on your basic assumptions. If you believe that UFO's are literally craft designed and piloted by off-planet physical entities, then the paranormal classification may seem deluded. In my opinion, it makes sense within GH's paradigm to include UFO's within the paranormal classification because we honestly do not know what we are dealing with ...

Allow me to clarify. Simply not knowing what the object in a UFO report is doesn't mean the object itself is a UFO, and we can blame the confusion on those who incorrectly label every vague or unknown object or phenomenon in the sky a UFO. Vague lights off in the distance aren't UFOs. They're just vague lights off in the distance. Strange phenomena in the sky aren't UFOs either. They're better classed as UAP ( Unidentified Aerial Phenomena ). Some UAP might very well be paranormal. Then again, hypothetically, UAP can also be some as of yet unidentified natural phenomena.

The word UFO however is much more specific. There is overwhelming evidence by way of usage and history to show that it is meant to convey the idea of an alien craft, often assumed to be, but not necessarily of, extraterrestrial origin. Again this doesn't mean every object in every UFO report is a UFO. It just places those objects in the context of that possibility for investigative purposes, and that context excludes the paranormal because alien craft are not beyond the possibility of scientific study. So the issue isn't so much about belief or assumptions as it is about definitions and usage.

 

[smcder]

Well ... now this is interesting ... I can't access the Trickster and the Paranormal on the "cloud reader" and I no longer have my Kindle ... I just accessed this a few days ago ... ???

Mystery solved ... browser issue on this PC which is different from the one a few days ago.

 

[smcder]

Windows 9 ... anyway to read Kindle? ... and no, I can't change anything on this laptop

i could read it on my phone ... very tedious ... very tiny

 

[Wade]

"...Does GH leave open the question of whether his theorized "control system" that seems to respond with what we call paranormal activity in response to anti-structural events is a purely automatic process, i.e., a law of nature like the balancing and unbalancing of weather systems? Or does he leave open the possibility that there is an intelligence beyond this phenomena, acting (as Jacque Vallee would say) as a control system on the human race? Frankly, I do not recall if Vallee considered this control system to be under intelligent direction or an automatic reaction (perhaps residing within the human consciousness?) without a so-called directing EXTERNAL intelligence?..."



Here's an interesting article I came across
Anti-Anti-Tricksters @ The Nightshirt
In invoking the consteallation metaphor i think that most people would consider it to the collective number of phenomena under one umbetella, however I believe I heard Chris on a couple of occasions bring up the possibility that the trickster could become (or may be becoming) sentient but I wonder if that was the case would that mean the phenomenon could loose it's objectivity ?
The trickster is defined as amoral but i wonder in order to stay that way it couldn't be a self aware being i would think if it could become self aware then it could conceivably become agenda driven.

 

[smcder]

The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe/Volume 1/The Imp of the Perverse - Wikisource, the free online library

 

[Wade]

Additionally a few years back a guy by the name of eric stitt put out an ebook "The Psycho Terrestrial Theory: Are You The Trickster?" which basically was a collection of his posts that he posted on what was Bill Birnes Bastardly site. I kind of felt sullied having to visit the site (although I do and did take in the offerings of a couple of other frequent posters there) so I downloaded the book. eric's site is no mas but some of his blog entries are still there at the ufo magazine site. If you feel compelled to go there, heed my advice AT ALL POSSIBLE COSTS do NOT venture into the musings of Alfred Lehmberg, failure to heed this advice will result in excommunication from the Paracast forums. consider yourself warned..

Eric seems to have disappeared but I found his ideas interesting which was essentially summed up in the books title. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm not exactly impartial to this line of thinking as my interests in the paranormal lies heavily in the feedback cycle between human perception and this paranormal energy that plays with it.

 

[smcder]

Additionally a few years back a guy by the name of eric stitt put out an ebook "The Psycho Terrestrial Theory: Are You The Trickster?" which basically was a collection of his posts that he posted on what was Bill Birnes Bastardly site. I kind of felt sullied having to visit the site (although I do and did take in the offerings of a couple of other frequent posters there) so I downloaded the book eric's site is no mas but some of his blog entries are still there. If you feel compelled to go there, heed my advice AT ALL POSSIBLE COSTS do NOT venture into the musings of Alfred Lehmberg, failure to heed this advice will result in excommunication from the Paracast forums. consider yourself warned..

Eric seems to have disappeared but I found his ideas interesting which was summed up in the books title. I'm not exactly impartial to this line if thinking as my interests in the paranormal lies heavily in the feedback cycle between human perception and this paranormal energy that plays with it.

AT ALL POSSIBLE COSTS do NOT venture into the musings of Alfred Lehmberg failure to heed this advice will result in excommunication from the Paracast forums consider yourself warned..

Being serious or being Impy?

Briarpatch psychology?

 

[Wade]

The excommunication part was impy, Alfred' s posts are wimpy. Serious i am, and that's no laughing matter for Alfred is as loony as the mad hatter.

 

[Randall]

... AT ALL POSSIBLE COSTS do NOT venture into the musings of Alfred Lehmberg, failure to heed this advice will result in excommunication from the Paracast forums. consider yourself warned ...

I've heard some gossip about Lehmberg in the past but I never really got a clear picture of the situation. What has this guy done anyway? Can someone explain this to me please? Or maybe we should have him as a guest on the Paracast so he can tell us all in his own words .

 

[Wade]

Actually he hasn't done anything, at least in the matter of contributing to the field, I suppose the same can be said of others in the field as well but I'm not as famliar with all the fools and charlatans that dwell within so I tend to linger on him. As far as being on the Paracast I don't think Alfred would be able to pull off an hour and 58 minutes of iambic pentameter under the withering cross examination of Gene and Chris.

 

[SheaOlmsford]

I've heard some gossip about Lehmberg in the past but I never really got a clear picture of the situation. What has this guy done anyway? Can someone explain this to me please? Or maybe we should have him as a guest on the Paracast so he can tell us all in his own words .

Alfred was a writer of articles for UFO MAGAZINE. I do not know if he continues in this role. His claim to fame may be due to his "unique" writing style. Seldom has one man written so many top shelf multi-syllable words to say what a lesser man might say in 10 simple short words or less. In other words, Alfred is to language what Baroque is to interior decor. To state it simply, he has a way with words (which at times few can understand....).

Now, if you happen to get on the wrong side of Alfred, the insults he will spin that will precede your name will be some of the most horrifying that have been created in the history of human kind. He does not suffer fools silently. He often seems to seek them out (at least by his definition of a fool).

Alfred has created numerous enemies over time since he doesn't mince words. Instead, Alfred explodes words with the fury usually reserved for splitting an atom. I will not repeat some of the smear campaigns against him because I do not think they are true (or at least I hope they are not true).

Alfred does fight on the side of the oppressed of all kinds in our society via his internet posts. In doing so, he shows that he has a good heart. But the Old Testament God had less wrath than Alfred when crossed.

 

[Burnt State]

I'm really really really NOT trying to be a jerk when I say:

Read the book

There's no summarizing it or really discussing it adequately without having read it ... and then referring back to it in discussion.

Ok, you're being a stickler here, and while I wholeheartedly believe in primary text reading, from what I've read that he has available online, the other major articles he points to, as well as the anthropologists please tell us if GH steps outside of documenting the examples of the trickster or creates an analysis that moves beyond notions of anti-structure, the catalyst for change in society and the anthropological features that appear to be attached to the basic steps described in many rituals concerning rights of passage, or how we move from destabilized spaces to eventually become reintegrated into society, with perhaps new appreciations of tradition or insights into new processes for one's current tribe or group? (besides, the fastest way to digest a text is via another human's condensation/distillation of the text)

All I ever see around the trickster is its symbology, it's features and it's role. Notions around origin can be seen in beyondthestargate's UFO interview scenario in which s/he means to pin the origin of the UFO sighting on the witness themselves. When life gets topsy turvey, or turkey this time of year, we tend to have weird things happen. That's what I get from the trickster.

For myself, I would site two generally strong themes: alien abduction experiencers often have other very complex psycho-emotional histories that manifests as AA, and for those who tend to stare deeply into various phenomenon, be it evil possession, UFO's or other oddities, there is the sense of the phenomenon staring back at you, with results that include the deconstruction of the one who looks.

The paranormal is anti-structure at its heart. If you play with fire you will get burned. Steeping yourself in the wild woods of anti-structural thinking can only bring weirdness or ruin to the participant, unless they are very open to living inside of spaces without rules, and where the unexpected is expected. Oh look, there's Sana climbing down my chimney right now except he's an insectoid alien. I hope s/he still likes the cookies and milk my kids left out onto table.

Either way, glad to see this thread get more mileage as I think it is the eye of the maelstrom, or at least is the hideous heart beating under the floorboards of the paranormal.

 

[SheaOlmsford]

Anti-Anti-Tricksters @ The Nightshirt[/URL]
In invoking the consteallation metaphor i think that most people would consider it to the collective number of phenomena under one umbetella, however I believe I heard Chris on a couple of occasions bring up the possibility that the trickster could become (or may be becoming) sentient but I wonder if that was the case would that mean the phenomenon could loose it's objectivity ?
The trickster is defined as amoral but i wonder in order to stay that way it couldn't be a self aware being i would think if it could become self aware then it could conceivably become agenda driven.

Thank you for the fascinating article. Of course, the Rich Reynolds referred to in the article just happens to be an arch enemy of your earlier mentioned Alfred A. I think Alfred's choice words of condemnation for Rich Reynolds still circle the planet seeking escape through a hole in the ozone layer.

 

[SheaOlmsford]

I apologize for not having read the GH tome yet before commenting, but I thank Burnt State for suggesting that those who have read and digested (ah, that is the problem, isn't it?) the book should be able to offer some morsels of wisdom, a summarization of thought. In my life, I have always used writing to discover what I really knew about a subject.

Have you all previously discussed Tom Campbell? He wrote MY BIG TOE (THEORY OF EVERYTHING). He takes a trilogy of over 800 pages to state what could be primitively distilled down into the standard Playstation as Universe metaphor. Tom posits an external intelligence = god that seeks to expand itself. One chosen method is via the creation of separate universes, each with their own rules, populated with offshoots of itself that report back their experiences into the greatest computer storage and analysis system that NSA could dream of having. Now, I bring this up only because perhaps in this metaphor, the software that underlies our particular universe includes some code that automatically induces the paranormal as an anti-structural wake-up call when invoked (and we are studying what the invocation may be a la GH). The process may be totally automated, part of the ground rules, so to speak. But in Tom's theory, the software did not originally create itself. There was a creator external to all universes/Play stations. The creator is still manifest within each universe, but does not tinker with the rules, i.e., this God does not create a Hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans for being tolerant of its gay residents!

I guess I am just moving the mystery outside time/space. I am proposing simply that the mechanisms may be running like clockwork based on "software" that runs this Playstation universe. We can never truly know the ultimate creator in meager human terms. But humanities' obsessive instinct for creating a god figure (or a royal family of gods) might represent a small inkling in our DNA of our origins and the origin of the playpen we find ourselves in.

 

[Wade]

This i did not know
My ignorance I do show
until i read your post my knowledge of rich was zero
and considering this news Mr. Reynolds is now my new hero.

 

[Randall]

Alfred was a writer of articles for UFO MAGAZINE. I do not know if he continues in this role. His claim to fame may be due to his "unique" writing style. Seldom has one man written so many top shelf multi-syllable words to say what a lesser man might say in 10 simple short words or less. In other words, Alfred is to language what Baroque is to interior decor. To state it simply, he has a way with words (which at times few can understand....).

Now, if you happen to get on the wrong side of Alfred, the insults he will spin that will precede your name will be some of the most horrifying that have been created in the history of human kind. He does not suffer fools silently. He often seems to seek them out (at least by his definition of a fool).

Alfred has created numerous enemies over time since he doesn't mince words. Instead, Alfred explodes words with the fury usually reserved for splitting an atom. I will not repeat some of the smear campaigns against him because I do not think they are true (or at least I hope they are not true).

Alfred does fight on the side of the oppressed of all kinds in our society via his internet posts. In doing so, he shows that he has a good heart. But the Old Testament God had less wrath than Alfred when crossed.

Thanks for that. So would this have been during Don Ecker's tenure at UFO Magazine? If so I wonder what Don would have to say because Don is also a rather colorful character too .

 

[Burnt State]

Wade, I do think Wile E. Coyte is a genius. He has a smarts and dedication that places him high up in the ranks of expressing a kind of humanity; while the Roadrunner, that mad trickster character, keeps thwarting the hell out of him by defying the laws of reality as Wile E. knows it and is that precognitive sentient intelligence that knows what Wile E. is going to do even before he does.

But it really is all about intentionality. There's something to be said about The Imp of the Perverse as we so do enjoy doing ourselves in, the way Wile E. is a glutton for bringing untold amounts of inexplicable and utter chaos into his life. We humans are excellent at that sort of thing. We are an intentional agent of change - we choose to go out into the wilds, to the marginal areas and so we see monsters, aliens, ghosts and Bigfoot flying some UFO's with his own remote control box (about time we invert that old story for the sake of redeeming Sakquatch's precognitve sentience).

There is a kind of mirroring at work with us, I think sometimes, and then there's that UFO stuff. Well that stuff is all aliens and we can't even begin to communicate with them...it all blends together on the spectrum of weird doesn't it? I keep thinking we are being distracted by all the obfuscations and mystery, the way they'll never find an answer to The Mystery of Oak Island. Maybe this distraction is being used to teach us how to forget?

 

[smcder]

Ok, you're being a stickler here, and while I wholeheartedly believe in primary text reading, from what I've read that he has available online, the other major articles he points to, as well as the anthropologists please tell us if GH steps outside of documenting the examples of the trickster or creates an analysis that moves beyond notions of anti-structure, the catalyst for change in society and the anthropological features that appear to be attached to the basic steps described in many rituals concerning rights of passage, or how we move from destabilized spaces to eventually become reintegrated into society, with perhaps new appreciations of tradition or insights into new processes for one's current tribe or group? (besides, the fastest way to digest a text is via another human's condensation/distillation of the text)

All I ever see around the trickster is its symbology, it's features and it's role. Notions around origin can be seen in beyondthestargate's UFO interview scenario in which s/he means to pin the origin of the UFO sighting on the witness themselves. When life gets topsy turvey, or turkey this time of year, we tend to have weird things happen. That's what I get from the trickster.

For myself, I would site two generally strong themes: alien abduction experiencers often have other very complex psycho-emotional histories that manifests as AA, and for those who tend to stare deeply into various phenomenon, be it evil possession, UFO's or other oddities, there is the sense of the phenomenon staring back at you, with results that include the deconstruction of the one who looks.

The paranormal is anti-structure at its heart. If you play with fire you will get burned. Steeping yourself in the wild woods of anti-structural thinking can only bring weirdness or ruin to the participant, unless they are very open to living inside of spaces without rules, and where the unexpected is expected. Oh look, there's Sana climbing down my chimney right now except he's an insectoid alien. I hope s/he still likes the cookies and milk my kids left out onto table.

Either way, glad to see this thread get more mileage as I think it is the eye of the maelstrom, or at least is the hideous heart beating under the floorboards of the paranormal.

WAKE UP!



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Burnt State]

WAKE UP!

Are you attempting to quote Greg Bishop or are you just trying to get me out of bed?