Close Encounters and Science

How may we use aknowledged science exploring unusual side?

When children formulate their first words and questions, only their mothers and a few other people are able to understand and encourage them in the efforts they are doing. The attention to a child’s growth determines his ability in expressing himself and thinking when he will be fully-developed. Formulating a correct question represents a fundamental part of the communication among sentient beings. If thinking connection is logical and the language is acquired, questions – which are one of the first characteristics of the child ‘s communication – remain the fundamental nucleus where all the scientific discoveries move from.
In front of an experience, new in its content and in the way to perceive it, the human being goes back to his childhood, when he didn’t have any instruments to express himself, but wondering or fear, waiting for a “decoder” that sees him to recognise what has happened or what is happening and which gives him the opportunity to associate further experiences.
No one would state that little children don’t speak or that what they say has no importance, or again that their questions are stupid. In front of CE4 cases no one should state that they are questions without an importance, stupid or inexistent. We have to handle the human being who is turning into a child again, in a vaster scale and with deeper implications.
It is a good thing if we are invited in more than one context to better consider the value of the people who live CE testimony’s, and to use this testimony as an important datum: the untiring attention to a person who comes to perform a work about his own history – whatever it is – is the most elemenary as far as not renounceable necessity of a therapy, but it must not be given out as a discovery happened in the last months. The objective story is not the fundamental nucleus of the therapy, because an “objective story” doesn’t exist. The recall of some facts is linked with the peculiar emotions of the time we lived the experience. So the recalls are not untrue, but surely they are filtered: a “subjective story” does exist. Extraordinary experiences are necessarily lived with emotional ancient filters too. Due to this, the mere testimony, even if it represents the fundamental onset hook for any speculation, is really too personal to be raised as an objective truth. Least of all as collective truth.
It is a curious thing that a famous psychiatrist such as John Mack underlines the importance of testimony as it is a scientific new presupposition: it is normal to base on people’s testimony or account, otherwise wherefrom should we start to perform a therapy? Why should we consider testimony as a “new frontier”? The mere account is not sufficient – due to the reasons we have just mentioned. What is the game that the researchers are risking to organize in this way? Why are American people so touchy to the invasion theme?

After a close exam – even if partial – of the CE field, I think it is possible to affirm that there is no necessity to change the psychological approach to the human being in aim to understand better what is happening: that means that I think it is not necessary to become resolute in an aggressive way to snatch all the information we imagine are stored in these particular events witnesses’ minds. I believe that inside our psychic structure live some access codices which are useful to decode every perceivable experience, these ones included, and that we can enlighten these facts with true significance in a soft way, allowing involved people to accustom themselves to elaborate step by step also the emotions which are linked to these experiences.
Perhaps some of these access codices have never been used or, if used in the past, they have fallen into disuse. They are linked in such a way that, if we set out inside the psyche, it is possible to meet them anyway.
Moreover I dissent from those who believe they have to find new thought schools based on the upsetting of the research methods of psyche. The tested junghian and transpersonal schools already contain many theoretic levels about psychic experiences, of whom you may become conscious, and which only a very low percentage of people can contact. In other words, the human race is very far from an experimentation of all its psychic strenght and significance.
If we wish to penetrate the mystery which wraps CE4 experiences, we have to prepare ourselves to face the human psyche potentialities in an organized way and make an inventory of what is ours. The work field branches out in three research hypothesis, which may go on at the same time:
° If CE4 are an invenction or an hallucination, what could be their sense, and what human beings are trying to communicate to themselves by the means of a mass fantasy?
° If CE4 are real experiences, what is our knowledge of “reality”? What do we mean by “reality”? And who creates it?
° If CE4 happen in material, atomic, structural dimensions which are different from the ones we consider as normal, what are the resources that our brain and our mind can use to enter? May we stimulate our brain – as a mere “organ” – in a different way from the one we know? Then has it vaster functions than we verified? May we bend our mind towards directions that are different in respect of our daily use?

I think that the thickness of the questions which rise simply broaching the subject of CE4 deserves attention and could stimulate our scientific attitude. Beginning with preconception or taking as a base what other people tell without having a personal research experience is like handing on an echo whose source is no more known. A cold rationality, incapable of a confront, is the less scientific thing that could exist, it is the illusion that reality is created from outside and that we may see it only as external: it is the worst kind of father you can meet, the one who mentally corrupts his issue and whose physical disappearing sanctions his complete extinction too.
Then let me try to dialogue with Science and with the things that happen, and let me allow that this dialogue finds its way to procreate. It is important if everyone among us feels himself as called to contribute to this dialogue. We shall seek to go on in a way that thoughts and discoveries that come will be understandable. I don’t think it is justifiable to surrender at once in front of the arguments of psychoterapy, due to the incomprehensibility of a part of psychoanalitic literature. Nor I think that the account – certainly passionable – of the performances of hypnotic regressions, opened to sensationalism, could be a sound reading if they were presented without right correlations.
So that the intention is to keep up, together with some collaborators – ufologists and therapists – a thought line that may help everyone to enter in psyche, phylosophy, religion and laboratory research world and where everyone – everyone – may find a place to say something.

One of the fundamental problems in ufology is to obtain results – in chemistry, physics and psychology science - that can be read by people who don’t mind about ufology. Then the fundamental element which may link Science and Ufology is using tested methods with which we can go on to discover new findings. That is method can not be experimental, but application. This requires a bit of creativity.

The archetypes.
In the psychoterapy official milieu they often speak about “archetypes” when they discuss about flying dishes. Jung said that mankind could project on flying dishes the necessity to have an external reference point that could be a save carrier which also could satisfy their habit in a technological progress (1).
But Jung never said that flying dishes were hallucinations or a psychic creation anyway. He could discuss about their symbolic meaning in dreams, but he was upset if someone asked him about extraterrestrial’s existence, because he thought he had no evidences in regard. Although he believed they were real.
Among the theories about collective unconscious, Jung and M.L. Von Franz discussed the archetypes’ connection pattern: their function is linked in a logical manner (2).
Basically this is the matter we must pay attention to: during this particular century ending, the archetypes that mankind is constelling are the Beginning and the End ones, and with the starting of these archetypes mankind looks forward to possible meeting with extraterrestrial people.
The archetype is an already existing psyche’s establishment, a sort of “module” that everyone has and we graft on it our life’s experiences (3); the archetype expresses itself by means of symbols.
We live our lives starting on - case by case - Father or Mother or Child or Male or Female archetypic parts, and we add our peculiar “notes” to this musical background, that was formed with thousands of human experiences that preceede us.
Archetypes concern each side of our condition of living beings: so the archetypes of the End and of the Beginning of the human ages do exist too, they had sedimented during the course of our planet’s history. Everyone builds the End archetype and the Beginning one - the New Age - by the affective occurrences of our own life - and probably by other personal baggages that are not commonly explorabled.
The temporal passage that we call “Millennium End” is putting enigmas that are not personal only: in the most part they are collective. We can try to be indifferent, but the End archetype is involving all of us, because an Apocalipse has been announced since a long time ago and our culture collapse seems the sign of this in the last 30 years.
In a beautiful book (4), that was written as a transcription of conversations and letters by Michael Ventura - a journalist - and James Hillman - a famous psychoterapist, they investigate the concept of “mind echology” and they state that our degradate way of life, and the way of thinking that substains it, represents one of the motive of the present culture’s end. “Collectively, as a culture, we are in the history of the dominant culture’s death. We haven’t metaphors for this, but only the Biblical metaphor: Apocalipse. And if we don’t pay attention we shall represent it, because it is the only metaphor we have.
We are inside an avalanche, we can’t stop it” and our culture will bang. “How do you live in a decline time? You can do a work with your soul. We can’t depend upon a culture that can’t substain us anymore”.
That is very interesting: Hillman and Ventura could emphatize that the word “Apocalipse” doesn’t mean the end of history: history is always present, it contains all the cultures that have passed by over the face of Earth and it is there to be taled. If Apocalipse means the Biblic history’s end, the end of all the things we have built upon this culture, then we can imagine that the message that was vehicled by Bible has expired; perhaps we are living the last time shred during we have the possibility to gain self-consciousness and the sense of our existence. “It is possible that the world is in extremis because we don’t know how to go to extremes”.

The assumption of the present research is that the Christianized mankind is living inside the Apocalipse myth. One part of the people live this passage with a great faith in the New Age, preparing themselves in a psychological manner, that is working at a psychological level. Another part has a negative prospective and reacts in a negative way every time there is a new conflict or at the arrival of new refugees from poorer countries.
Inside this archetype that we are collectively living we must see in a new light the UFO sighting’s experiences and the CE4 witnesses, whose interpretation is the appearance of a salvation and evolution element, otherwise they feed fantasies of persecution.
The concept of archetype in ufology has been widely used, but we have not found a lecterature of works that group a check of the precise use of flying dishes as a representation of such an archetype.
We must ask ourselves: the mankind is living an End archetype and is this fact linked with the increased UFO sightings and - overall - with the incredible increase of CE4 witnesses? Are flying saucers an archetypic symbol linked at the “end of the world”?

Let we see the method of the present research. A group of people was formed; they accepted to work on the “end of the world”; the subjects were volunteers who were interested in examinig closely this theme.
The archetype of an apocalipse has been started by a specific assignment some days before the group workshop: in this way the people have had the time to put themselves in the right condition to imagine an extreme moment. So at the beginning of the workshop the people were already equipped with a personal little baggage, including also a few dreams.
Some little groups were created - consisting of maximum of four people. They had to create and then represent a situation of an extreme event and what happen in a follow. It was interesting to observe the different solutions that every group could find and the social organizations that the new little societies took in aim to survive at the extreme event, considering that every person had to work with the oppositive of the good and bad qualities they had chosen to bring. In fact one of the assignments was to bring with themselves two their own good qualities and two bad ones. At the moment of the work in little groups, these qualities have been transformed in their opposite. In fact the experience teaches that in severe emergency situations (as a coup d’etat, for example) the “Shadow” characteristic of the people started.
Concerning the results of this research, in three quarters of the cases the End archetype has been linked at once to an effective Beginning archetype, open to practical solutions and to hope. The aim of a quarter of the partecipants was to have children.
Instead another quarter of the subjects represented a disgregation situation, and one of them stoled the indispensable resosurces to survive.
This first part of the work aimed to encourage the people to use the inner resources at the best, putting themselves in the condition to listen in a creative way. At this point we asked them to imagine an external resource who came to give a push to the vital and rebuilding process. This is the part of the work that may be relative to the psychic research in ufology.
Most of the people planed the help on natural elements; so they represented the rain - the vivificant power, the rainbow - linked to the rain and a symbol of the union and of the communication between Sky and Earth, the Sun and the light, the wind, the water and the fire - as a souce of warmth and light, to defend, to attract. The symbol of the tree has been presented in a significative number of cases: it is one of the symbolic features of the Rebirth indicated in the Bible: I will feed the winner with the tree of life, the book of Apocalipse says. The tree of the “life without death” represents the immortality or, better, the Absolute Reality which is never-ending, the Primum Movens.
Only two subjects represented exclusively symbolic elements: a spiral, defined as a “sense of infinitive, something that never die”; this is a spiral that moves itself on the right, in an clock wise, whose significance is “take counsciousness”. The other element is a sphere, a creepy and “full” symbol at the same time. Totality and perfection are represented by this geometric solid, in addition to the omogeneity, the unicity and the infinity.
The sphere deserves a deepest explanation, because it is a symbol that appears in the rappresentations and in the dreams of the subjects witness of UFO sightings and CE4. As in the circle, the central point of the sphere is equal from every external surface point. The external surface represents the ordinary reality, but an endless number of concentric spheres can follow inside the sphere and this represents the possibility to approach the Beginning Point more and more, going deep in the not usual states of the being. It is not by chance, one of the most particular science fiction movie has been “Sphere”: a sphere coming from another space and time teached to the people that the thought, the desire or the fear can transform the matter.
The person who represented this sphere could not indicate why he has drawn it, and certainly he had not in his mind UFO or extraterrestrial beings.
No one of the working people imagined, as an external help, beings coming from other worlds. In our opinion this result is significative: UFOs and extraterrestrial beings don’t seem to be archetypic symbols. So the description of sighting or encounters represents - for the analytic psychology - a real experimented fact lived at some level of reality. We hope that this method of investigation will be applied widely and that it may help us to find deep theoretical confirmations, that are necessary to the academic psychiatrist world so that all the matter could be considered with seriousness in the closest sphere of psychoanalysis.

There is an open question about the intensity of referred CE4 in U.S.A.: why American people is so sensibilized for space invaders?
I have reflected upon this rimarkable matter. With this work on Apocalipse (whose effects on the people who partecipated are not reported here) I could notice that choosing to invoke natural elements to help Life and Beginning is a typical Celtic way.
Celts were born from the fusion of two people. The first was an European people, whose life was linked with agriculture; they have care for the Earth and God was female at that time.
In 2000 b.C. a bold population, coming from Black Sea, brought in Europe a much more warrior culture, and their God was male.
Fortunately these two cultures melted together and from this encounter began the Celtic culture. Celts created the indipendent European way of thinking; they were a proud stock, aggressive, wildly indipendent and tribaly faithful, who had learnt to honour all the facets of Nature and their tribal gods together.
So it seems to me natural that, in a dangerous moment, an European subject’s inconscious evokes the power of Nature.
American people, although they have some European roots, seem having lost them. In its race miscellaneous, American people – in its origins – didn’t melt with the pre-existent population and this archetype of invasion is still functioning in their inconscious, bringing them to invade other Nations when they think it is necessary (this argument don’t want to be a politic digression), to feed the fear that other countries spy them and to be afraid of the invasion with aliens.
I don’t want to subtract importance to the phenomenon or to the caring that CE4 subjects surely need. I wish to point that there is the necessity to look at this matter in a disenchanted way, considering when testimony is real and considering when psychologic collective functions are acting inconsciously inside people.
Surely a rewiev of the relationship between American actual people and the Native one should be felt as a need, in aim to avoid all the underground implications of a not resolved situation too.

I believe that a better counsciousness of the changing that we are living could take ourselves to the significance of Life as a choice. Only if we could take this resposability and conscience for ourselves we could meet other Beings and the eternal First Cause, because we will have on our side the only Straight that makes us to communicate.

Giulia Maria d’Ambrosio, 1999

Bibliography
(1) “C.G. Jung Speaking” – Princeton University Press, 1977
(2) Marie-Louise von Franz - “On Divination and Synchronicity” – Inner City Books, 1980
(3) Jung, von Franz and Others - “Man and His Symbols” – J.G. Ferguson Publishing Company
(4) James Hillman and Michael Ventura – “We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy – And the World’s Getting Worse” – 1992

 

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