O
O'Rilly
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Can there be some unifying aspect of so-called paranormal phenomena?
IMHO, at this stage of the game the bottom line is that human beings themselves are the “unifying aspect.” We are the ones reporting various extraordinary experiences that are beyond our “normal” repetitious daily experience. These experiences seem to be caused by sentient agents or by intelligently directed forces or objects.
IMHO, the apparent intelligence behind weird experiences is what leads to the “para-normal” label. UFOs exhibit sentient interaction with humans, and the higher CE number (as in CE3), the more defined the characterization of sentient agents. Still, these interactions do not occur under scientifically controlled conditions and are not repeatable, even with trace remains and radar returns. Plus, plenty of CE3 and above encounters are high strange par excellence. Others on these forums have said it before: if the ufonauts wanted to objectively prove their presence beyond a shadow of a doubt to all humans on the planet, they evidently could do it easily. So far, they haven’t. In that respect the ufonauts “act” like many other kinds of reported paranormal activity. Coy. Maddeningly alluring. Trixterish.
Just after the recent Dean Radin interview, I happened to read the NT from a Greek text, together with two very recent English translations. I came to the phrase – στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου - stoicheia tou kosmou – which I was surprised to see translated as “elemental spirits of the universe” (compare Galatians 4:3, 9). In the past I had read translations like “rudiments of the world,” which is not identical. To be sure, stoicheia could be understood in either sense. In any case, this term “elemental spirits” reflects the view of antiquity that consciousness pervades the universe in its various objects, and that those conscious objects can affect the course of human affairs. According to the apostle Paul these stoicheia influence humanity negatively. Just to be sure, Paul wrote his letter centuries before there was a massive institutional Christian Church, so Paul is not writing about ecclesiastical power, but about personally experienced “spiritual” power, which was the terminology of that time. In any case, I am not sure if Radin’s view of “The Conscious Universe” and “Real Magic” is similar to this view of consciousness in antiquity, but it seems to me that there is a very strong similarity.
If there are conscious beings in the universe who exist in non-anthropic forms and who can manipulate the substances of the universe in ways we humans can’t, then there could be a more bizarre reality behind physical UFOs than is often thought. For example, the military radar I supported as a technician was designed to detect aircraft, yet it could detect non-metallic objects. I once observed a stormfront about 150 miles away. So, it is not entirely accurate to say that radars only pick up metallic objects. I’m not suggesting that UFOs with radar returns are made of water. I’m suggesting that if a non-human entity wanted to trixterize humanity, they might manipulate reality to reflect radar waves just like metal, or to reflect light waves, etc. In this speculation, I go as far as these entities manipulating reality to generate what we would experience as actual physical objects. That’s my speculation, extrapolated from my experience. The reported events of Skinwalker ranch would seem to support this suggestion.
While the preceding view may seem extravagant, I think there are extenuating circumstances. The last I read, it is thought that an adult human has 100 Trillion cells in their body. The vast majority of these cells contain the entire DNA blueprint from which the body is made – from the day the two haploid cells from mom and dad joined to make a person’s first cell, until adulthood. So even though there are ~ 7 billion X ~ 100 trillion human cells on earth containing DNA blueprints for complete humans, extreme constraints prevent all these gazillions of human cells from spontaneously generating other complete human beings. The point to make is that even in a world with a vast ocean of human cells, human beings do not spontaneously arise from nearly any of those trillions of cells. In contrast to Jeff Goldblum’s Jurassic Park character, life is actually constrained to a very high degree. Thus, IMHO, even with the supposed extrapolations of billions of “earth-like” planets, the high constraints of cellular function, and especially reproduction, may prevent a universe teeming with “human-like” life. Indeed, the Harvard Origin of Life team leader uses exceedingly guarded language to express himself, and that is about life here on earth that we can study to our hearts' content.
So, IMHO, it is overplaying the evidence to assert that physical UFOs must and can only be from other interstellar beings traveling across the universe in special vehicles. Maybe they are. Maybe they aren’t.
IMHO, at this stage of the game the bottom line is that human beings themselves are the “unifying aspect.” We are the ones reporting various extraordinary experiences that are beyond our “normal” repetitious daily experience. These experiences seem to be caused by sentient agents or by intelligently directed forces or objects.
IMHO, the apparent intelligence behind weird experiences is what leads to the “para-normal” label. UFOs exhibit sentient interaction with humans, and the higher CE number (as in CE3), the more defined the characterization of sentient agents. Still, these interactions do not occur under scientifically controlled conditions and are not repeatable, even with trace remains and radar returns. Plus, plenty of CE3 and above encounters are high strange par excellence. Others on these forums have said it before: if the ufonauts wanted to objectively prove their presence beyond a shadow of a doubt to all humans on the planet, they evidently could do it easily. So far, they haven’t. In that respect the ufonauts “act” like many other kinds of reported paranormal activity. Coy. Maddeningly alluring. Trixterish.
Just after the recent Dean Radin interview, I happened to read the NT from a Greek text, together with two very recent English translations. I came to the phrase – στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου - stoicheia tou kosmou – which I was surprised to see translated as “elemental spirits of the universe” (compare Galatians 4:3, 9). In the past I had read translations like “rudiments of the world,” which is not identical. To be sure, stoicheia could be understood in either sense. In any case, this term “elemental spirits” reflects the view of antiquity that consciousness pervades the universe in its various objects, and that those conscious objects can affect the course of human affairs. According to the apostle Paul these stoicheia influence humanity negatively. Just to be sure, Paul wrote his letter centuries before there was a massive institutional Christian Church, so Paul is not writing about ecclesiastical power, but about personally experienced “spiritual” power, which was the terminology of that time. In any case, I am not sure if Radin’s view of “The Conscious Universe” and “Real Magic” is similar to this view of consciousness in antiquity, but it seems to me that there is a very strong similarity.
If there are conscious beings in the universe who exist in non-anthropic forms and who can manipulate the substances of the universe in ways we humans can’t, then there could be a more bizarre reality behind physical UFOs than is often thought. For example, the military radar I supported as a technician was designed to detect aircraft, yet it could detect non-metallic objects. I once observed a stormfront about 150 miles away. So, it is not entirely accurate to say that radars only pick up metallic objects. I’m not suggesting that UFOs with radar returns are made of water. I’m suggesting that if a non-human entity wanted to trixterize humanity, they might manipulate reality to reflect radar waves just like metal, or to reflect light waves, etc. In this speculation, I go as far as these entities manipulating reality to generate what we would experience as actual physical objects. That’s my speculation, extrapolated from my experience. The reported events of Skinwalker ranch would seem to support this suggestion.
While the preceding view may seem extravagant, I think there are extenuating circumstances. The last I read, it is thought that an adult human has 100 Trillion cells in their body. The vast majority of these cells contain the entire DNA blueprint from which the body is made – from the day the two haploid cells from mom and dad joined to make a person’s first cell, until adulthood. So even though there are ~ 7 billion X ~ 100 trillion human cells on earth containing DNA blueprints for complete humans, extreme constraints prevent all these gazillions of human cells from spontaneously generating other complete human beings. The point to make is that even in a world with a vast ocean of human cells, human beings do not spontaneously arise from nearly any of those trillions of cells. In contrast to Jeff Goldblum’s Jurassic Park character, life is actually constrained to a very high degree. Thus, IMHO, even with the supposed extrapolations of billions of “earth-like” planets, the high constraints of cellular function, and especially reproduction, may prevent a universe teeming with “human-like” life. Indeed, the Harvard Origin of Life team leader uses exceedingly guarded language to express himself, and that is about life here on earth that we can study to our hearts' content.
"Is it easy or hard for life to emerge from the chemistry of early planets? In the lab, we try to work out a complete, step by step, plausible pathway all the way from simple chemistry to more complex chemistry to simple biology and if we can actually show that there’s a continuous pathway to life with no super hard steps along the way, then we could conclude that it’s likely that there’s abundant life out there..."
So, IMHO, it is overplaying the evidence to assert that physical UFOs must and can only be from other interstellar beings traveling across the universe in special vehicles. Maybe they are. Maybe they aren’t.