Alien abduction as some form of initiation.

I believe two of his main goals with the book are 1) To show that aliens are obviously not extraterrestrial. 2) That we should clump all these various betwixt apparitions under the umbrella term ‘daimonic’ because this is in some way more accurate or useful. His selection of experiences are indeed strange but not really typical or very similar when comparing dreams to visions to physical encounters and attempting to redefine them all.I miss how he knows ‘they’ appear as projections in the first place let alone how he can build upon this implying not only are our 'alien' abductions and such not ever physical or literal but that it in fact makes much more sense they are instead projections/apparitions. I did not miss how he basically explained that his most relevant personal experience to this topic consisted of personal stories told to him about the interaction between more traditional fairies and his family. This seems to have impressed him into wondering about all the ways in which ‘literal’ UFO nutters have so obviously got it all wrong.

I can see that Harpur’s views are a tad more accommodating than a full on materialist’s viewpoint in these areas. However the functional difference between the two is less apparent to me than others. The 100% I mentioned was my perception of Harpur and his view of Harpuric reality referencing what I have read of it so far. I am approximately a quarter of the way through, though I am really not rushing, pausing to reflect and take notes for later. I guess like many I tend to think of daimons exactly in that context already, as label applied to one side of that host. I am aware of the history of the term and I do know what you mean, I am just saying that it is commonly defined as pertaining to something rather specific: Webster's
Here is some text that may aid discussion: Jung stuff When Jung says things like “‘…shows up in life as certain feeling states…that is we feel something…we are taken over…in its ‘grip’” to me he clearly indicates the term as referring to forces working on us from within and not ever implant leaving, embryo taking, physically accountable beings assaulting us for instance. The only time I know of when he veered from this was in his book on UFO’s and I am unaware of a good reason for him doing so. I believe some beings are able to manipulate our deeper level/CU consciousness when interfacing with us without having to reside or spring forth from there. You realize this sounds like a description of 'physical' humans right? So why the big surprise if there are physicals of other kinds? What makes this so unlikely and obviously wrong to Harpur in your opinion?

This is an addendum to my above post.

After doing some research, it appears that I have, in part, misrepresented Jung’s collective unconscious. Harpur says, “Jung’s real contribution to the debate lay in his discovery of part of the psyche — the collective unconscious — which is objective. Thus he dissolves the question of whether UFOs are subjective (“all in the mind”) or objective (“really out there”), and asserts that they are always objective but that they derive from the inner realm of the psyche.” This is a very difficult concept to grasp, at least for me.

Later in the book, Harpur says, “Jung addressed the problem of daimonic events and causality with his concept of synchronicity, which he defined as an ‘acausal connecting principle’. An inner psychic event and an outer physical once could be connected by meaning. He cites the example of an aerial photographer of crop circles who thought about a crop circle design not yet seen. The next day, it appeared.

Harpur goes on to say, “Jung was able to abandon the mechanism of causation but could not quite bring himself to ditch causality altogether (he was himself, after all, as a scientist)…..A faint whiff of mechanism remains, doubtless because Jung still divides the world into outer and inner. He has not yet reached the imaginative, unified view of a world in which physical events simply have an inner meaning, as naturally as trees have their dryads, or in which psychic events such as dreams, images, and ideas have outer physical counterparts. Despite working on synchronicity with a nuclear physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, Jung did not see that daimonic events such as crop circles are to the ordinary world what quantum events are to the subatomic world — spontaneous, autonomous, and uncaused. They just are.”

In my view, the fact that Harpur brought Jung’s collective unconsious into his discussion of daimonic reality adds confusion. I wish he hadn’t but I suppose that he did because there are strong similarities and Jung is well known (not to say well understood!). The differences, however, muddle things. I apologize for misrepresenting Jung’s collective unconscious as entirely outer. For that reason, I think it’s best to stick to the Neoplatonists’/Harpur’s daimonic reality/Otherworld/World Soul, which is challenging enough on its own.

For example, p. 153, “…Neoplatonists…were able to abandon causality and replace it with the ‘law of sympathy’….” I don’t know about you, but after reading that section several times, for me it’s still pretty slippery. I found a quote from Michael F. Wagner (Neoplatonism and Nature: Studies in Plotinus’ Enneads), “…sympathy is rooted in the transcendent world soul and …it…manifest(s) on the same horizontal level in different ways, both for nature in general and human experience in particular.” Still pretty slippery.

Jay Kinney (The Inner West: An Introduction to the Hidden Wisdom of the West) says, “Everything in the Neoplatonic universe is interrelated. all things are full of gods, forms, and principles…” The connecting link is called sympathy. “It can cause visions or communications from the gods or spirits…” “Sympathy is not a dead, external similarity, but a living, magnetic principle.” “Quantum theory speaks of it as ‘nonlocal causation,’ by which effects can occur in any part of the universe.” Still slippery but I get that Quantum events and daimonic events are alike (are they the same thing?) in that they occur spontaneously, autonomously and uncaused: They just are.

I added this to rectify my misunderstanding of Jung and I'll stop talking about him and the collective unconscious. I'm very interested in your responses to the questions I posed in the previous post.

When asked what would best explain abduction by fairies, you said, “…(W)hatever the actual people who have the experiences tell us.”

Most (but not all) reported fairy encounters were from earlier times and experiencers then, just as now, explained fairies through a cultural and religious context. If the experiencers were pagans or neoplatonists, they explained them differently from the experiencers who were Christians or scientific materialists. The same holds true for experiencers today. They often describe the encounters/abductions in very similar ways but interpret them differently.

Therein lies the problem. Is the nature of fairies determined by the experiencers view of them? Are they demons if the experiencers think they are? Are they fallen angels if the experiencers think they are? Are they a “race” of people if the experiencers think they are? If the experiencers think they don’t exist, are they hallucinations?

The same dilemma applies to UFOs. Is their nature, their very existence, dependent on the experiencers or do they exist independently of the experiencers? By arguing that those who have experienced UFO abductions provide the best explanations for the nature of UFOs, you would either have to argue that UFOs don’t exist independently of the experiencers or that all experiencers agree on the nature of UFOs.

Who are the UFO experiencers? Most of the ones we hear about are, of course, Western scientific materialist literalists or have had their reports filtered through the mindsets of Western scientific materialist literalists. MUFON, the largest UFO organization in the US, claims to use the scientific method and holds a strict materialist literalist view that UFOs are extraterrestrial craft piloted by extraterrestrials. MUFON throws out reports, or portions of reports, or doesn’t collect information that doesn’t correspond to this predetermined conclusion. They subject nothing to the scientific method and do not scientifically test their hypothesis. Despite the scientific veneer, MUFON isn’t remotely scientific. MUFON is more religion than science. MUFON is analogous to its religious counterpart, the Institute for Creation Research, the fundamentalist Christian group that tries to pass itself off as scientific but doesn’t do any actual scientific research and throws out anything that differs with it’s predetermined religious conclusions.

How many ufologists are gathering reports from Australian aborigines or animists living in the Brazilian rainforest and taking their interpretations of abductions seriously without filtering them through scientific materialism? In other words, if someone says a god visited them in a circle of fire, is it documented that way or is it interpreted by the so-called researcher to accommodate the ETH? Do we ever see the raw data (the actual words of the experiencers)?

I only know of two prominent US ufologists who bothered to get the impressions of people in non-US indigenous cultures and didn’t filter them through scientific materialism as well as listening carefully to people in Western Cultures and not filtering their reports through scientific materialism: John Keel and Jacques Vallee. It’s perhaps important to note that Vallee is an astronomer and computer scientist and very knowledgable about scientific materialism and the scientific method. He became interested in UFOs when he observed his fellow astronomers not reporting them because they couldn’t explain them using scientific methodology. Instead of joining the crowd and being a good little scientist, Vallee had the integrity to question science. He has written a number of books. If you’re interested, I suggest that you start with his “Dimensions”. It includes many accounts by experiencers as do his other books. Vallee has traveled extensively talking to experiencers.

You continue to insist that Harpur says there is nothing physical about UFOs. He repeatedly states that they are, in part, physical. He also never says that there are no physical occupants of other planets. He simply says that scientific materialism has utterly failed to prove the ETH and he’s right. That’s the thing about science: it has to prove its hypotheses using testable evidence and when it can’t, ACCORDING TO ITS OWN RULES, its hypotheses fail. Of course, there may come a time when science proves the ETH and it becomes fact but, until that day comes, if it ever does, the ETH holds no more water than any other hypothesis and is not fact. It’s simply belief with no more validity than fundamentalists' Satan and Harpur's daimons. That said, quantum physics’ non-causality is vastly closer to Harpur’s hermetic/neoplatonic non-causality than it is to scientific materialism. In other words, even the forefront of science is leaving behind the narrow world-view of literalist scientific materialism.

You said, “ I find no greater clarification gained through trying to re-label or redefine someone else’s reality states surrounding their actual experience through theoretical contradictory ideas half borrowed from other people’s respective sources as Harpur appears to me to be doing. I do not see anything explained yet by Harpur, only attempt by him to re-classify and stitch other people’s dissimilar concepts and experiences together with a resulting increase in confusion and with a firm intent that nothing be looked at as literal, at least as I am so far able to understand it.”

Harpur’s ideas aren’t contradictory. He’s a hermetic neoplatonist and his ideas are entirely consistent with that worldview. That it’s not easy for us, from a scientific materialist culture, to understand hermeticism/ neoplatonism is not due to a defect in Harpur’s thinking. If you read other scholars' explanations of neoplatonism, you’ll see that Harpur is doing a fine job of explaining it. If you read the original materials written by Plotinus and others, you’ll see that Harpur is doing a magnificent job of explaining it. It’s simply very difficult for us to grasp. He brings in Jung because Jung was a modern thinker who pretty much, if not entirely, “got it”.

Yes, Harpur is not a literalist. It is immensely difficult for us to wrap our minds around the idea that something can be both physical and not literal. It’s all about world view. The one you choose (or is culturally chosen for you) changes how you see everything.

You said, “events that are both related as being physically real and that are accepted by others to be physically real have the capacity to emotionally motivate caring people to committed action in a way that is not found with non-literal apparition experiences. The less a person cares the less they feel anything is literal or real including sensations endured by participants or any final outcome as this is just that person’s relation to their own betwixt stuff.”

To which specific committed action do you want to motivate caring people?

Who accepts UFO abductions as physically real (by which I’m pretty sure you mean literal and scientifically quantifiable) other than some of those who have had the experiences? Almost no scientists take it seriously. I don’t think even the majority of non-scientist Americans believe that ABDUCTIONS are “real” (about half believe that alien spacecraft MAY be observing our planet but there’s a significant leap between that and believing in abduction). How are experiencers going to motivate non-experiencer literalists to believe that abductions are real? The only way you’re going to convince literalist materialists who understand science of the ETH and abductions is to prove it via testable evidence and, in that regard, you’re starting from zero. The ETH claims of Hopkins, Strieber, Friedman, Marrs, Greer, Jacobs, et al. are totally devoid of testable evidence. They're believed by literalist materialists who don't understand how science works and can't distinguish between it and pseudo-science, by religionists who approach ufology as their religion (a surprisingly large number) and by experiencers with a literalist materialist worldview. The latter need to have a way to explain their very real experiences to themselves and they can only do that through their cultural world-view (unless, of course, they've exposed themselves to other world-views that they've accepted as a better fit).

At this point, pretty much the only non-experiencer scientific materialists who understand science and take the experiences seriously are mental health professionals who, Jungian’s aside, regard the experiences not as literally “real” but as mental health problems. Similarly, fundamentalist Christians, literalists of another variety, take it seriously but regard the abductions not through the lens of the ETH but as the work of Satan.

Other than that, you’re left with the animists, neo-pagans, hermeticists, neo-platonists, and similar, including Harpur, Keel and Vallee, who take it very seriously but see it differently because they have a different world view. I much prefer this crowd, of which I’m one, to the literalist scientific materialists or fundamentalist literalists.

You said, “Dispassionate disconnection and over intellectualization help generate an atmosphere conducive to the harvest of fear you mention. This is the direction the dark pushes things when dimming consciousness like it does.”

I’m not entirely sure to which group/person(s) you’re referring, if that was your intent. I hope you’re not referring to Harpur because animists/hermeticists/neoplatonists like Harpur are anything but that. They believe that everything is alive and that we live in an animate world. They necessarily have to communicate that in words in books. It’s the literalist scientific materialists who are disconnected and the literalist fundamentalists who are consumed with fear. The dark consumes those who don’t integrate it (ie. fundamentalists). Nature is the shadow of scientific materialism. As I look around at the world, it seems that nature is backlashing against the materialists who refuse to see it as consisting of anything they can’t measure and even that which they can measure as just “stuff”.

You’re certainly correct when you say those who have experienced these things know more about them than those who haven’t. We have thousands of years of written records of people experiencing high strangeness and even older records (tens of thousands of years old) via pictographs, etc.. Humans (Homo sapiens) have existed for approximately 200,000 years and, for as far back as we can determine, were animists, then shamanists, then polytheists. Monotheism is only several thousand years old. Scientific materialism has only been prominent for less than 200 years. For only a fraction of the time of human existence have humans been literalists. So consider that for most of those 200,000 years, the experiencers would have taken something very close to Harpur’s view about their experiences. Of course, that does not mean that you, or anyone else, has to share that view.

I do understand that modern people are vastly more likely to take something seriously that is presented as being “real” in terms they understand. I absolutely understand the desire of many UFO abduction experiencers to get people to accept that extraterrestrials exist, visit earth and abduct people. At the same time, until experiencers can prove it, that’s highly unlikely to happen. I think it’s a much better investment of effort for each experiencer to come to an entirely personal understanding of what happened. Nevertheless, the desire exists among most people to share their experiences and find common ground with others.

I have not had an abduction experience, nor do I want one, but I have had a panoply of high strangeness experiences and have the same desire to share those experiences and find common ground with others that I have observed in people who have had abduction experiences. Animism, hermeticism and neoplatonism put my experiences within a context that resonates with me and, understandably, I hope, I’m eager to discuss this with other like-minded people. They’re few and far between! I’m not so much trying to get you to accept this worldview as your own (well, OK, maybe a little) as exposing you to it so I have another person with whom I can discuss it.

You quoted Harpur (page 52) talking about aliens, fairies, angels and demons and expressed your confusion about what he meant. I join you in that confusion. I read that paragraph over several times and, each time, it became less clear. I do understand what he says about the polytheistic religions and daimons but, after that, he loses me. I love your comment, “Now I am not sure, but I think I am not going to be able to reconcile this with anything I ever understand.” .

As you’ve discovered from reading Harpur, it’s not an easy world view to understand. I recall that he thought he could understand alchemy in a couple months but, three years later, was crying in frustration. I’ve been reading this stuff for a number of years and still, fairly often, feel like I’ve slipped a cog. I appreciate your willingness to read Harpur.

Love the Rob Lowe photo. Literally.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I get the impression that you don’t like Harpur’s worldview because you feel that he dismisses or somehow diminishes UFO and abduction experiences by relegating them to the category of fantasy. That’s not at all my take on Harpur. He does regard the experiences as real. He simply argues that they’re caused not by extraterrestrials but by denizens of the Otherworld or what John Keel called Ultraterrestrials.

Harpur believes that these denizens of the Otherworld have interacted with humans as long as humans have existed. He believes that they can take material form in this dimension and can cause us physical harm (not to mention psychological trauma) and leave physical traces.

There’s certainly no testable evidence proving that extraterrestrials have visited earth and abducted people — and this is not dismissing the claims of experiencers, simply stating a fact. Likewise, there is no testable evidence proving that ultraterrestrials have abducted people — again, not dismissing the claims of experiencers who hold that belief, simply stating a fact. We are left with the claims of experiencers and some untestable physical evidence such as scars, eye burns, damage to terrain, etc.. When I say untestable, I mean that testing the very real scars, eye burns and damage to terrain won’t prove the ultimate origin of the cause (ie. who did it).

Eliminating the outright liars and the mentally ill who truly are fantasizing/delusional (there must be some of those), there remain a substantial number of credible people who claim to have been abducted in conjunction with UFOs. I am not doubting that they have had very real, even profound, experiences. It’s the nature of “real” that I’m exploring. If their experiences were generated by ultraterrestrials instead of extraterrestrials, the experiences are equally real.

Unless I’m misunderstanding you, I get the sense that you believe that anything less than acceptance of the position that people are abducted by extraterrestrials is an attack on the credibility of the experiencers. From the perspective of the victim, why does it really matter whether an extraterrestrial abducted and tormented them against their will or whether an ultraterrestrial did it? Either way, the experience was real.

How does an experiencer absolutely know for certain who or what did this to them? I imagine they rely on their senses to form an impression. They may even have been told by their abductor who has done this to them. But why should the victim trust the abductor to tell the truth? Surely, anyone who would commit such a gross violation of someone’s rights wouldn’t hesitate to lie.

I should imagine that the victim is left to make sense of the experience as best he can. In our culture, we’ve been educated in scientific materialism and that’s sort of the default against which we measure our experiences. Within the context of scientific materialism, extraterrestrials make more sense than ultraterrestrials (despite the fact that scientific materialism has utterly failed to prove the existence of ultraterrestrials visiting earth) — and I’m not saying that’s wrong. But, outside of the context of scientific materialism, and for the vast majority of human history, ultraterrestrials make more sense. Ancient and some currently existing belief systems and religions certainly take the ultraterrestrial view, commonly referring to the ultraterrestrials as gods, angels, demons, fairies, daimons and other sorts of Otherworldly beings and depicting them as interacting with humans on a pretty regular basis.

From my perspective, the perspective of someone who has not had an abduction experience but has experienced high strangeness, interaction with an Otherworld far better explains strange phenomena, in general, than extraterrestrials. But that’s just me. Are you suggesting that extraterrestrials explain UFOs and abductions AND other strange phenomena or are you suggesting that the causes of UFOs/abductions is different from the cause of other strange phenomena? If it’s the latter, how would you explain other strange phenomena?

You question Harpur’s credentials, and that’s fair. He’s a working alchemist and, thus, a serious occultist. Anyone who has gone down that path likely has had anomalous experiences and was probably propelled to go down that path because they had previously had anomalous experiences. You might want to write to Harpur and ask him about his personal experiences. It would certainly be interesting to know but I don’t know how it would validate or invalidate his thesis.

Harpur may have chosen to not talk about his personal experiences to prevent his book from being about himself and, instead, make it about daimonic reality. His "Mercurius" is considered to be a serious work on alchemy. He didn’t really go into alchemy in "Daimonic Reality" because it’s a very complex topic and certainly doesn’t make for light reading and doesn’t lend itself to a quick overview. Unfortunately, he is stuck with the task of explaining a worldview that is largely foreign to us using models that do not precisely fit with each other (and he states this). Had he plunged into an explanation of alchemy, it would only have been more obtuse. Certainly, "Daimonic Reality" is highly regarded by Forteans, of which I’m one, which is not to say that you have to share the Fortean approach to strange phenomena.

You said, “Over and again Harpur implies that most everyone else’s opinions of their own experiences are too literal or flat wrong and that daimonic phenomena cannot be explained by definition.”

Just as you have your own interpretation of the cause of anomalous experiences, Harpur has his. He’s simply offering an alternative interpretation. I don’t see anything wrong with that. I don’t think he says that daimonic phenomena can’t be explained because he spends an entire book explaining it. He simply says that it’s difficult to explain. Also, pretty much everyone who lived prior to 200 years ago would have interpreted anomalous experiences far more like Harpur does than like most UFO abductees do today. Do you dismiss their interpretations as flat wrong?

You asked, “He called everything from a ethereal pancake to a crop circle a personified ‘daimon’ and fancies this progress. I am not sure why he has not included drive through visits at McDonald’s as daimonic events and/or anything and everything for that matter. Does this view of all things as daimonic help clarify or understand anything better or does it gain you an up side down chair at the Mad Hatter’s table?”

I think anyone who has had significant anomalous experiences already has been given an upside down chair at the Mad Hatter’s table. What do you think produced the “mysterious” artifacts of UFOs that turned out to be just silicon or aluminum or buckwheat pancakes? To answer your question, yes, I do think that his explanation is a better explanation for anomalous events than that provided by scientific materialism: far better.

I don’t see how his claim that daimons can appear in different material forms is, defacto, absurd—unless you don’t believe that they exist at all. If they do exist, they don’t operate according to our physical laws. It seems just as unlikely to me that extraterrestrials from thousands or millions of light years away pop up here on a regular basis or at all. In fact, it seems far less likely to me that extraterrestrials of purely material makeup have been visiting here, landing, and abducting people for thousands of years without leaving an iota of testable evidence. That these visitors are, instead, paraphysical and not purely material and are ultraterrestrial far better explains why they have been able to interact with us for thousands of years without leaving an iota of testable evidence.

You asked, “…(D)o you find that some of Harper’s harder core ideas (about the Virgin Mary, the ambivilance of all daimons at all times, etc.) conflict with your own beliefs?”

I’m not sure to which specific ideas about the Virgin Mary you refer but no, I don’t find his ideas in conflict with my own. I especially find his ideas about the ambivalent nature of daimons to be apt. They’re tricksters with an agenda that is not ours and never to be trusted. George P. Hansen talks about this in "The Trickster and the Paranormal" as does Jacques Vallee in various of his books (he refers to the phenomena as a “control system”). It’s the very nature of these entities to be elusive, changeable, deceptive and manipulative. They’re mind fuckers. We don’t know what their agenda is (it’s almost certainly not that which they occasionally tell people it is—that varies considerably and is often proven to be lies). We’ll probably never know. They have their way with us and we’re left wondering.

You asked, “What do you perceive to be the most defining and useful characteristic of Harper’s model as applied toward someone who tells you they were physically abducted, assaulted, and experimented on by a being with the same name and physical appearance from the time they were 3 to now at 36?”

I would say that the most defining and useful characteristic of Harpur’s model for such a person is that the entity has an agenda that can not be known and cannot be understood. To quote Harpur, “He manipulates us, knows our every thought — knows us better than we know ourselves. He is secretive, ruthless, impersonal, and inhuman. Like a psychopath. Like a god.”

Your comparison of Harpur to Discordians is interesting. I don’t think Harpur is like a Discordian, but I think his topic is in that he describes a reality that is not that which we have been raised to believe it is. Unlike Discordians, I don’t think Harpur is engaged in mind fucking. Instead, he’s describing a phenomena that mind fucks. Big difference.

I never said this or anything else is defacto absurd, I find Harpur spares no chance to exclude all literal interpretation of strange events as being absurd.I have no problem with this and all I might add is that in addition to what you think of as 'ultra', there may also include elements of advanced technology aiding these races in ancient times and then as now this has given them an apparently magical edge.

The way Harpur defines testable evidence no individual (daimonic/demonic, human, or otherwise) could ever be literally held accountable for anything. There never will be anything that can satisfy the type of ‘testable evidence’ Harpur describes, although in court even three people’s corroborating eyewitness testimony can serve as convincing additional evidence. If Harpur’s model were dominant no rapist or murderer be they daimonic, demonic, human, or otherwise would ever fear retaliation. After all the real victims can’t fully prove anything ever right? And Harper sure as hell is not going to let a little blood stained and terror filled stone cold story of abuse sway his daimonic understanding of every situation. Most experiencer’s I have spoken with or read about do not absolutely know anything for certain and they will be the first to tell you so. A more literal question is how does Harpur absolutely know for certain all that he claims about other people’s experiences as he repeatedly presents himself?

Proof is not reality and those who require the type of proof Harper requires will never be persuaded anything literal is going on that ever requires a literal rectification.

When doing a science paper you are interested in proofs and theorems. When keeping it real you are interested in living life and helping others to thrive and be protected.An experience with a daemonic entity as Harpur describes them is not equally real because he excludes the possibility of ANY weird being having any physical continuity to their existence combined with the idea that they ALL have totally unpredictable motives and little to no persistent personal intent behind their actions perpetrated on others. Instead he implies people are not paying enough attention to the “daimons/demons”, that the ‘apparitions’ are all related to their own inner stuff, and that they are ‘lucky’ they did not get off worse when anything from rape to death happens to them. He also believes you really should never consider for one minute that anything literal has ever happened to them no matter what they may have to say or feel about it.

I have no problem with the concept that ANY being might be Ultraterrestrial including humans. Yet for me this possibility does not block all possible acceptance and belief in an emotionally credible person’s experience as they relate it to me. I feel I am able to relate more genuinely and relevantly when not feeling a constant need to believe I somehow obviously ‘daimonically’ know better then they or anyone else does about every weird thing. In this we are in good alignment, but I do not believe your ideas sum up all of what Mr. Harpur is attempting to convey. I do not notice anywhere where he disapproves of their deceptive trickster ways if anything he encourages some undefined increased devoted attention to them.

To me any being could be Ultraterestrial or could be fully physical and using technology to phase shift into other dimensions. I do not exclude this or much else for that matter. However, to Harpur all weird beings (absolutely no other way) ARE non-literal betwixt daimonic personific apparitions that if ‘ignored’ may come at you as demons. His main advice after such an occurrence is that it is largely your fault, that you are lucky, should above all start cogitating out what the whole incident means symbolically, and quit being so ridiculously literal. You are misunderstanding me. All I have continued to show is Harpur’s absolute intolerance of the idea that some of our experiences may be described every one bit accurately as physical than anything else in this “physical” world ever will be.

In my opinion what he attempts to do with every effort is to redefine and invert concepts offering a smoke screen of indecision and uncertainty for perpetrators to hide behind. His ideas attempt to divide the preyed upon and prevent them from connecting to those individuals who could at least believe them, even if such individuals were coolly and rationalistically able to do little else.