Alien abduction as some form of initiation.

I'm most familiar with Harpur's "Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld". By daimonic reality he means, of course, the World Soul or Anima Mundi or Jung's Collective Unconcious. It's important to note that the unconscious he's talking about is the collective memory of the human race and not Freud's personal unconscious. If I understand him correctly, Harpur is saying this collective unconscious can only be represented by metaphors/archetypes so that these "otherwordly" encounters some of us have had with various entities are encounters with metaphors/archetypes and are to be experienced not interpreted. In fact, they can't be interpreted. The experience, itself, is the message, as it were. Literal interpretations will get us nowhere.

When it comes to UFO encounters, he says that luminous spheres traditionally represent projections of the disintegration and fragmentation of the psyche and signal a shamanic initiation. Shamans talk about undergoing a process of disintegration or dismemberment (the initiation) before re-emerging whole--not a pleasant experience. This suggests that that which some describe as alien abductions may be archetypal experiences of a shamanic sort rather than encounters with literal alien races. This would certainly explain why strange encounters have occurred throughout human history with little but the trappings being changed.

I'm not sure that Harpur is pro pain but, rather, because physical and emotional pain is universal, it shouldn't be thought of as solely a negative and, instead, recognized as being required for self-transformation. It goes back to the shamanic initiation thing which is clearly traumatic. I'm not big on pain and suffering, myself, but I can see the value of giving it meaning. I agree with him about the deprivation of meaning, enchantment and transformation in our culture. Suffered a trauma? We've got meds for that. Had a strange, frightening experience? You were probably just dehydrated or sleep-deprived. Don't think about it. Had a powerful mystical experience? You must have been high. Our culture has stripped all meaning, other than the physical, from life. So-called primitive cultures have rituals for different stages of life during which individuals are initiated into the mysteries and welcomed into groups where they "belong". That's largely missing from modern society.

I think "Daimonic Reality" is well worth reading and it resonated with me in a way that most books about strange phenomena, for lack of a better term, don't. I have had some very strange experiences and something tells me that they can't be explained via literalism which is the default direction for explanations in this culture. I could be wrong, but I think they were encounters with a subtle realm that can't be measured and weighed and literalized.

I think your observation that we understand anything we encounter (ie. our personal experiences) better than cult leaders/initiation herders who strive to keep us clueless and looking to them is a profound insight and something all of us should keep in mind. We have been conditioned to look to so-called experts for answers about our own experiences of the world when we, not they, are best able to understand our own experiences. Importantly, their agendas are in their, not our, best interest.

At the same time, I think there is value in considering the insights of others so long as — and this is very important — we keep ourselves as the baseline and weigh the insights of others against this baseline. When presented with the insights or claims of someone else, I ask, “Does my gut tell me that this rings true?” If the answer is yes, then it makes sense for me to put those insights in a “file” of sorts for future testing much like I would a cooking recipe.

As time passes,I use the recipe and tweak it to suit my personal tastes. But I must be careful to not claim that it is the one-and-only recipe. Over time, I may encounter ingredients to add or subtract from the recipe or encounter an entirely different recipe that better suits me. Above all, I shouldn’t accept some “expert’s” opinion that their recipe is the best simply because they say it is. After all, what is an expert except someone who has been declared by some other people to be an expert or has declared himself/herself an expert. I must not be afraid to weigh someone else’s recipe, no matter who they are, against my personal baseline, and decide whether my gut tells me that it doesn’t ring true for me.

My own personal experience with weighing the claims about strange phenomena has led me to hold tentative positions. But, to paraphrase Charles Fort, a position is only a fashion to be held for a while. Sadly, the field of strange phenomena, especially the areas involving Bigfoot and UFOs, is filled with so-called “experts” who have committed themselves to a position from which they will not yield. Many of these people make a living appearing at conferences and selling books based on positions they adopted decades ago. They don’t change their views over time for fear that it will destroy their careers. There have been studies that show that a significant percentage of clergy come to no longer believe that which they preach. However, few of them stop being clergy and, for the sake of their careers, continue making claims they no longer believe. I have to wonder what percentage of the well-known personalities in ufology wish they had the luxury or personal integrity to publicly reexamine their positions. I wonder how their fans would react if they did.

I have been a fortean, one who has an interest in/studies strange phenomena, since childhood. I’ve read many things in the field and my views have changed over time. At first I took the proclamations of the UFO “experts” literally: UFOs were nuts and bolts craft piloted by aliens who were here to study us and save us from our own stupidity. Over time, that evolved into the view that “they”, at least some of them, weren’t so benign and friendly after all. Then I had an epiphany. I still remember the first time I saw and read John Keel’s Mothman Prophecies. For the first time, something I read about strange phenomena deeply resonated. He captured the utter convoluted, entangled, frightening, disorienting, lying strangeness of it. He got that these entities, this paranormal realm, doesn’t operate on the same system on which we operate and doesn’t share our agenda.

The insights of Jacque Vallee also resonated with my baseline. Although his writing is less disjointed and free-form than Keel’s (Keel seemed to give us his unfiltered impressions), Vallee, too, gets that this paranormal realm doesn’t operate on the same system on which we operate and these entities don’t share our agenda and can’t be understood by applying our culturally indoctrinated materialist/literalist approach to everything.

That brings me to Patrick Harpur, another person whose insights resonate with my baseline. He has the ability to simplify complex concepts. Whereas Keel plunges us into the experience of high strangeness and invites us along on his wild ride and Vallee takes a mighty stab at intellectually decoding it (he calls it a control system), Harpur describes this other reality in, to my mind, a much clearer, understandable way.

Again, these are ideas I’m trying on for awhile and, however infatuated with them I am right now, in the future they may give way to other ideas. I certainly don’t believe that they’re beyond challenge but simply argue that they’re worth measuring against your baseline.

Back to your comments. You say, “(t)he realm of the ‘otherworldly’ is in the same archetypal sea we all are in and just as much meaning and intent can be interpreted from encounters with various entities as can be potentially known about anything else.”

I think Harpur’s point is that we can’t actually know anything (I’d be so embarrassed if he read this and I haven’t understood him at all!): we can only experience it. We have created this consensus notion of reality that isn’t but, probably for the sake of our sanity and cultural cohesiveness, we pretend is reality. When people experience high strangeness, most try to explain it away, some by outright denial (it never happened), some by a lesser form of denial (I must have been hallucinating or the light was playing tricks with my eyes or I ate some bad oysters) and some, understandably, by placing it within the context of our literalist cultural indoctrination (ETs).

I think that reality is far, far stranger than aliens from other planets visiting, abducting, and terrorizing us. It seems to me that the appeal of the ETH lies in the hope that we can, if not now, eventually deal with entirely physical extraterrestrials. By contrast, the fear of daimonic, otherworldly, reality is that we’re pretty damn clueless about it and we can not understand it or deal with it using materialism and literalism. We can only acknowledge and experience it and we’re not very good at that. So-called primitive societies are good at it but we aren’t.


You wonder whether Harpur is unaware of the majority of people’s reported experiences of alien abductions, suggesting, if I understand you correctly, that he’s got it wrong. He talks about abduction experiences in Daimonic Reality. He’s familiar with Keel, Vallee, the Bords, and his sister writes about mysterious big cat appearances in the UK. I would be very surprised if he isn’t aware of many reported abduction experiences. In what way do you think he’s got it wrong?

I do see what you mean when, on the one hand he says experiences of high strangeness defy interpretation and, on the other hand, interprets them through the lens of Hermeticism and Neo-platonism. I suspect this is due to our inability to communicate experiences other than with language and through a philosophical filter. For most people in Western culture, that means through a materialist/literalist filter whereas he’s doing it through a hermetic/neo-platonist filter with the caveat that it really has to be experienced rather than weighed and measured.

He’s not denying the reality of experiences of high strangeness. He believes it’s very real — more real than our consensus materialist reality. He’s simply saying that, for example, experiencers who believe they’ve encountered or have been abducted by extraterrestrials have actually had very real encounters not with extraterrestrials but with denizens of daimonic reality who are here with us all the time.

When he says, “Yeah, the Attack of the Little Grey Men. Wasn’t that interesting folklore? With all the requisite memorates and fabulates, as those annoying folklorists with their quasi-scientific jargon call them….” , I think he’s criticizing those who relegate reports of high strangeness to folklore categories (in other word, “just stories”). Did you, perhaps, take that the opposite way, to mean that he was ridiculing the experiencers? Having read Daimonic Reality, I didn’t get that at all. Quite the contrary.

You asked what I think he has in mind when he says, “…unless we find new ways of initiating ourselves into the Otherworld, we run the risk of being forcibly initiated, against our will, by daimons who have become apparently demonic by virtue of our neglect of them.” Harpur argues that our culture denies the existence of daimonic reality but that daimons demand to be acknowledged. If we don’t acknowledge and integrate daimonic reality, we’ll get the equivalent of a daimonic slap in the face: encounters with malevolent daimons (ie. demons). Could it be that this is the inversion of archetypes that you mention? Either we acknowledge and integrate the shadow or it consumes us.

You ask whether this is “voluntary domination initiation GD style?” That’s an excellent question. I could be wrong but I don’t get the sense that he’s suggesting that. He’s clearly saying that choosing to ignore the daimonic realm will get us a ride we won’t enjoy simply because it exists and we can’t avoid it. But I don’t get the impression that he suggests we volunteer for domination. Let’s imagination the daimonic realm as a forest in which we all live. We stay in a little cottage with a warm fire and food and water and human companionship and we are oblivious to the existence of other animals who live in the forest. In fact, we’re unaware that the forest, beyond that which we can see out our window, exists. But this forest is very much alive and will interact with us with or without our consent. Chipmunks will enter our cottage. Birds will sing. Pinecones will fall from the trees onto the roof. Should we ignore the existence of the forest and its inhabitants until a mountain lion leaps into the cottage and grabs us or should we become aware that the forest exists and is inhabited by other beings? He seems to be saying that simply acknowledging the existence of these beings keeps the mountain lion from pouncing on us. There’s an East Indian belief (current or past, I don’t know) that if you encounter a snake, you should acknowledge it and it will go about its business and won’t harm you.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think Harpur is suggesting that all of us become shamans and voluntarily plunge ourselves into a full-bore ritualistic experience during which we’re psychically (and physically) dismembered and put back together. I think, rather, that he’s suggesting that it’s wise, even essential, to willingly undergo a relatively gentle initiation into the mysteries. The very fact that we’re talking about this suggests that we’re acknowledging it.

Perhaps you would get an entirely different take on Harpur from reading Daimonic Reality .I’d be very interested in your insights.

You ask why Harpur resonates with me and why I feel there’s no literal interpretation to my experiences with high strangeness. I guess I say there’s no literal interpretation of these experiences because I’ve expended a considerable amount of mental energy attempting to make sense of them using the logic of literalism/materialism. Any explanation that “worked” for one part of an experience failed miserably to explain another part of the same experience which put me in the position of having to deny part of the experience. The facets I tried to deny actually became more prominent. It was like trying to ignore the proverbial elephant in the room. The elephant is too big to get through the door but there he is! Harpur simply provides a context in which my experiences with high strangeness can be integrated. I’ve always been an animist so his way of looking at the world resonates with me. That doesn’t mean that he’s right or that I’m right or that I understand it entirely. It simply means that his daimonic realm seems to make sense for me. It’s a working theory that works — at least for now.

I like where you are coming from with this
and this basically describes my process as well and I believe we all should have a similar flexibility to our belief process. I encourage this as to me you cannot begin to be open without it. It appears we share a similar disposition when it comes to discussion in these areas.

Everyone defines their words differently and then you can add to that there are about a million and one recipes of religion/beliefs to try and sort out and explain. This is pretty much daunting and impossible if tackled solely with the typical tools society provides us and that you sum up as our “culturally indoctrinated materialist/literalist approach to everything.”

I am not a bible thumper and I am not a member of any particular group other than those I consider to be caring and compassionate. If I pull from any sources at all to speak on these topics (and there are so many) it does not mean I participate as guru and/or initiate of any of these knowledge systems or belief structures. I do believe there is a purpose to my life and I look for patterns that connect human experiences in a way that allows for the most inclusion of people’s individual convictions and needs. So often we misunderstand each other when underneath the surface confusion we are in complete agreement without realizing it.
This is how confusion and inversion of purpose can have any of us creating misery for ourselves and others while thinking we are only fighting the good fight. We need to know ourselves.

During my time spent reading I have come across a fair amount to do with various forms of initiation systems at work in the world as well as the various teachings they pull from. I admit these systems can be quite intricate in detail and draining to try to describe in mass. However I think for purposes of what we are talking about it would be useful to rope a couple of random examples of types of ‘initiation knowledge’ I pulled from the net this morning. One is found here:Sanat Stuff This first part starts off talking about: As I read all seems familiar and maybe I can work with this. Then I start reading the other half of the same stuff:
It then goes on to list the majority of the world’s major religions and how Sanat (Satan?) is to be found as an active participant/ in all of them. If you begin to rightly wonder just how big a part they are suggesting he plays here they clear it up by saying,
Wow that’s high up. Yeah I do get a pretty clear picture of the edicts being referred to and they ain’t pretty. Actually the most Apt word that comes to mind are that edicts issuing from apparently Sanatic/Yawaehic sources are quite hellish. At least these edicts are straightforward in their intent and purpose. Those were the good old days (I guess?) when you did not have to deal with the complexities of a deceitful domination based control system operating through false fronting and obfuscation.

One frustrating thing about this tactic is that more than half of the stuff various initiates absorb is knowledge I resonate with. Yet somehow the other portion of what they absorb often seems to me to contain contradictions to such an extent that they appear to be at cross purposes both with themselves and the portion of their knowledge we are in agreement with.

Often the goal of having a hierarchy and initiation system has been to essentially create a box that appears to contain everything you need to the point you cannot see what is missing. Often the box is crafted so well as to make it very hard for anyone to even try to redefine anything that could have been inverted.

Now lets take a sample from another site discussing Initiation for comparison found here:The Nam Why the middle man? Why the continued misery under the current regime? Why the constant obfuscation? Why are we left with little but more questions and fostered misery from those posing as our shepherds? We probably know the answer, but it sure would be nice to start turning this thing around.

The article continues:

Wow, where can you Not begin to go with that. It would be one thing if this type of circular logic and sameness of initiatic myths were only isolated to these two samples, yet to my mind I have seen virtually no existence of anything that deviates from this to any real degree what-so-ever at its core. It is a Huge time/energy investment just to find out what these initiation systems are trying so hard to hide in plain site. They do it through re-labeling, inversion, misdirection, compartmentalization, etc.

Never the straight dope from the regime, always the false promise and the parasitic dominance imposed through the manufacture of consent.

I have taken you up on your recommendation to read Harpur’s “Daimonic Reality” and just started it. In the introduction:


He compares a person’s experience and description of acute distress to mystical experience, saints, visions. Maybe his comparisons/interpretations/labels are still there just perhaps a bit more subtle. Hard to operate as a human being and not have some of course I need to read more, but you have already sped up my learning process a bunch already.

When you say, I would say in addition to this what we can also do is openly/truthfully communicate and share what we feel and conclude about our experiences. Through connection and comparison we have a better chance to “know” anything worth applying that label to.

I just read this in Daimonic Reality p. 153 and thought I would note it as food for thought: "Most daimonic events are contradictory, both physical and spiritual, for example. As Jung said of his archetypes, they contain their own opposites."

Are you familiar with runes? Inverted, they are their own opposites.

Might this somehow relate to the inversions of which you spoke?

Neither of us deny our experiences of high strangeness. It seems that the focus of this discussion is how to understand them, what to do with them, and how to not be personally compromised by them. Our materialist/literalist cultural indoctrination has taught us to ignore or reject the shadow (everything outside the light of conscious awareness, both light and dark). The problem is that by ignoring it, it becomes darker and overcomes us. Theoretically, the objective is to acknowledge and integrate it to create balance. To me, these strange experiences have to do with daimonic reality/collective unconscious/anima mundi/the Otherworld and can't be integrated by literalizing them. Literalizing them by declaring them the work of extra-terrestrials is an obvious example. Literalizing them by declaring them negative and something to reject is another example. That is not to say that these experiences can't be frightening, but that doesn't mean they're to be rejected off-hand. Using runes as an example, should the objective be to, as you say, "push the flow of conscious awareness toward either increasing (upright) or diminishing (inverted)"? Or should the goal be to integrate both and create balance?

I see fundamentalists (literalists) as a prime example of people who deny their shadow until it consumes them. In their view, they are agents of God (whom they see as all good) and everything and everyone that isn't "by the book" (their interpretation of the Book, of course) is an agent of Satan. They see themselves as wholly positive but, if you've spent time around them, you know they project quite the opposite. They become consumed with fear and hate and anger and condemnation. They project it onto others but, at the same time, it consumes them.

We have to be careful to not become consumed with fear of the Otherworld and, instead integrate it into our lives. Anyway, that's how I see it. What are your thoughts? How do we integrate it into our lives?

I agree that we don't need to have "an initiatic ho down with the boogies (dark) to try to show them some love." I'm not someone who believes that if we're kind and trusting to people, let alone entities, that they will return that kindness. Life has dissuaded me of that notion. For one thing, these entities are tricksters and can not be trusted. I suspect -- and it's only a suspicion -- that malevolent entities feed on fear and are attracted to it. How to not feed them with fear is the question. I think the the East Indian belief that if you encounter a snake, you should acknowledge it and, rather than striking you, it will go about its business might be metaphorically pertinent. Harpur stresses that, above all, daimons must be acknowledged -- not worshipped, not loved, not trusted, not followed, not submitted to but acknowledged. Acknowledging them may disempower their ability to manifest malevolently. Perhaps that's what's meant by integrating the shadow. I'm just tossing out ideas for consideration. I don't claim to have the answers.

We may not agree about this, but I don't think that abductions, extraction of sperm/eggs, and the creation of hybrid children happen in this (our) realm which is why there is, despite decades of claims and investigations, no testable evidence proving that it's fact. I think it's an archetypal experience that happens in the Otherworld. It's real, but not in the every day meaning of the word real just like abductions by fairies are real, but not in the every day meaning of the word real.

Our culture makes it very difficult to talk about these things. We often don’t have the words to communicate beyond the literal/material except in the vaguest of ways. To clarify, I do not believe that your high strangeness experiences were limited to your interior psychological realm. I do not believe that my high strangeness experiences were limited to my interior psychological realm (although they certainly affect it). Daimonic reality/Otherworld/World Soul/Anima Mundi/collective unconscious, whichever term one may choose, is not our interior psychological realm. It is separate from us and it is very real.

I suspect that the synonym collective unconscious creates the impression that it is part of our unconscious. The Freudian unconscious is personal to us and is part of our interior psychological realm. The Jungian collective unconscious is not personal to us and is not part of our interior psychological realm. It’s populated by archetypes distinct from us. However, the very use of the term collective unconscious creates the default and faulty impression that it’s “all in our minds” so I’ll try to remember to not use it. Instead, I’ll refer to this other realm as daimonic reality. Note the apt use of the word reality.

It might help to think of it as another, very real, dimension populated by entities who can, and do, interact with us. We did not and do not create them. They have always been there. Confusingly and frighteningly, these daimons can create physical effects. They can leave “landing traces”, crop circles, foot prints, burns and scars. Some say they are gods. Some say they are agents or representations of gods who are, themselves, without form. Some say they are archetypes. Whatever, they are very real; they are simply not literal. They don’t function according to our cultural rules of literalism. They don’t speak the language of literalism. Harpur, of course, explains this much better than I.

I hope this clarifies my position: I don’t think you imagined your experiences of high strangeness. They happened. They were and are real.