Reality Checking
Mystical Experiences, Quantum Physics, and ET Channelings
By Brent Raynes
(YouTube Video)
“Vacuum energy is the presumed energy field that is in continuous dynamic exchange with matter, which sustains the form and existence of matter at the quantum level.” Astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell, The Way of the Explorer (2008)
An Ancient Gnostic named Mani and Bottled Light and Unbottled Matter
The new emerging paradigm of quantum science is that we exist in a “sea of energies” that, thus far, is largely untapped and unrecognized at this time. In his book, The Daemon, author Anthony Peake describes how Mani, a founder of an eastern Gnostic religion in northern Babylonia had, over 1,700 years ago, arrived at conclusions that parallel our modern interpretations of quantum physics. Peake wrote: “Gnostics believed, and indeed still do, that we are beings of light that are trapped in an illusory universe of darkness. However, Mani had a curiously modern interpretation of this state of affairs. For him the purpose of religion was to release the particles of light imprisoned in matter. This is an amazing belief taking into account what we now know about matter. The mathematician Sir James Jeans suggested in the early 1930s that what we call light is really matter moving at its fastest possible speed, and that to move matter at this speed requires infinite power. As he pictured it, the moment this infinite energy is reduced and the speed of matter slows down, it ceases to be light and becomes ‘matter.’ He termed matter ‘bottled light’ and he termed light ‘unbottled matter.’”
Peake explains how Mani had described how he had undergone a series of profound mystical experiences with what was described as his “heavenly twin,” a being that imparted great knowledge to him, as well as precognitive understanding of future events as well. This brings to mind my own mystical experience of sorts back in 1975, when I was going through an intense inner struggle to gain some sort of meaningful foothold on spirituality. I felt that there was more to ultimate reality than what was embraced by my fire and brimstone Christian friends. Two nights later, after I had prayed intensely about it and then left this burden in God’s hands, I had what I now recognize was a pretty profound vision, though at the time I wasn’t really sure quite what to think of it. In my “vision,” I was walking through my darkened bedroom headed for the open door leading out into the lit hallway outside. However, something I sensed that was behind me stopped me in the middle of the room and instead of turning to see who or what was restraining me, which would have seemed a logical thing to have done, as I reflected on it later, I instead kept looking straight ahead, out into the hallway. Immediately, I began to see these tiny, marble-sized translucent, white pulsating balls of light – hundreds of them – suddenly moving rapidly about like a swarm of bees. They were everywhere in that hallway, but within moments they had settled down near the floor and seemed to be taking the shape of a small four-legged animal.
Then instantly it was over and I was surprised to find myself laying in bed again, on my back as I recall, looking up at the ceiling, wondering what in blue tarnation had just happened. Years later, in hindsight, perhaps in my own spiritual quest for meaning I got this same apparent message that true religion is about releasing the light from matter (which could be found in a four-legged animal, for example).
Brain mapping of mediums
Some scientists are trying to understand how the spiritual mindset differs from a regular one. Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia is one of those. He points out that their current study is to simply understand what happens in the brain during spiritual activities and events. In a study of experienced Brazilian mediums, engaged in “psychography” (automatic writing), it was found that when each medium, while in a trance state engaged in this activity was injected with a radioactive tracer that traveled to their brains, neural activity was found to decrease in six areas, including the left hippocampus, left anterior cingulated and the right superior temporal gyrus. Newburg noted that parts of the brain that shut down while they were engaged in “automatic writing” were areas normally involved in actively writing, as well as concentrating and processing language. Reportedly a previous study found that similar effects were noted with people who spoke in tongues. Newburg was surprised to find that experienced psychographers consistently provided more complex forms of language when in a trance.
A total of ten Brazilian mediums were used in this study. Five were considered quite adept, with an average of 37 years practice behind them, conducting an average of 15 sessions per month. However, the other five were called novices, had engaged in far less time and practiced with much less frequency in this craft, and their brains instead showed increased activity in the same areas of the brain that shut down with the advanced practitioners, implying that training over time certainly improves this activity, resulting in the anomalous brain activity noticed with the more advanced mediums.
“At some point, maybe we will design the perfect study that can prove there were not spirits there and this is just a fascinating way that the brain works,” Newburg noted. I applaud the ongoing study and hope that the investigative process continues, and that Newburg and other neuroscientists will be okay and remain scientific even if their findings were to confirm the presence of spirits instead.
Many researchers and practitioners of channeling/mediumship certainly feel that there is a very real mystery here, and that a spirit intelligence independent of the medium is being processed.
Formulated Contactees
Back in the mid-70s, I spoke on the phone with a UFO researcher named Don Elkins of Louisville, Kentucky, who founded a group called L/L Research. Don was a very interesting and educated man. For example, I’ve read that he held a B.S. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering, had a Ph.D in philosophy from an English university, and was even a Boeing 727 pilot, and later a Captain for a major airline until his passing in 1984. He was very interested in the whole UFO/paranormal realm, particularly the so-called “channeling” phenomenon. He even spent a week at Giant Rock back in 1964, hanging out with George Van Tassel, perhaps one of the best known contactee channelers. We had a very interesting conversation about what he referred to as “formulated contactees,” and a project that he himself initiated to try and cast further insight and understanding into the ET channeling phenomenon. Later, one of his colleagues, Carla Rueckert, would provide in a letter (07/13/76) an overview of what this was about. She wrote:
“Don’s experience with UFO contact began in 1962. He had met Hal Price, a Detroit contactee who had moved to Louisville. Hal told him about how he’d received contact generated by a certain meditation-type group called UNDERSTANDING OF DETROIT. This inflamed Don’s scientist’s curiosity. He had long been interested in UFOs, and here was a ready made experiment. If he and Price duplicated the conditions of the Detroit group, could they duplicate the contact? After months of trial and error, their somewhat surprised subjects began getting excellent results, and through the years Don has generated at least 100 ‘formulated’ contactees in this manner. Needless to say, the style and content of the messages agree substantially with the bulk of others around contactee messages received and reported by lots of others around the world. The method of producing the contactees was very simple: a meditation-like attitude was adopted, the group sitting in the dark with spine erect, relaxed, eyes closed, thinking of nothing. Eventually, with Hal there to ‘seed’ the occurrences (although he was not the first Louisville contactee) some of the subjects began getting their throat and mouth muscles manipulated. Then words came out involuntarily. Then, as the subjects got less tense about the phenomena, whole phrases would come at once, then whole sentences. This was a blessing to those of us in the early group, because at first it might take a couple of hours to receive a simple message! This has been an exclusively telepathic experience to those in the Louisville group, although psychics who have sat in with us can allegedly see the astral form of the UFO entities at times. The ‘channel’ who receives the telepathic message then verbalizes it to the others of the group.”
Later, Carla and Don’s book Secret of the UFO (1977) was published, adding more details to Don’s work and findings. “Most of my fabricated contactees who have seen a UFO have done so shortly after becoming contactees,” Don wrote. He also pointed out, “People who have had face-to-face encounters with UFOnauts report telepathic communication more often than any other form.” I wondered recently if the other psychic elements fairly common to the contactee syndrome also evolved with the Louisville group, like clairvoyance, clairaudience, spirit encounters (ghosts, angels, etc.), poltergeist or psychokinetic events, etc.?
Don noted in this book how there were some surprising parallels that he was later to discover that had been going on between what his group was experiencing and what American scientist Dr. Andrija Puharich and Isreali psychic Uri Geller had been claiming with regard to their alien contact experiences. Don even met Uri Geller and claimed that they did a very successful mind reading experiment together. In October 1975, Don was piloting a small Beechcraft Baron when he experienced a total malfunction of the artificial horizon. “This is the primary instrument used to maintain level flight during bad weather, when there are no visual references that the pilot can see,” he wrote. “The artificial horizon is similar in its malfunctioning to a flat fire, in that it never fixes itself.” However, after being inoperative for more than an hour, Don’s instrument began working again, just when he came truly in need of it. “This was so unusual a thing to happen that I doubted whether I could convince the maintenance mechanic that it had malfunctioned at all, and for this reason I took a witness to the phenomenon when I talked to the technician back at the hangar.”
Five days later, while visiting with Uri Geller at the Las Vegas Hilton, he happened to mention the odd gyro horizon incident. He wrote that Uri became very excited and pulled out a folder from some other papers he had, asking Don, “Is this it?”
In the book, Don recalled the event:
“’Open it, open it up,’ he (Uri) shouted. I did, and found the following notation scrawled across the first page: Horizon went out!!
Plane?
Comparison of our activities showed that when I was having my troubles in the air on the 19th, near Evansville, Indiana, Uri had been listening to stereo music on his headset in his New York City home. Over the music, Uri suddenly heard a voice say, ‘Horizon went out.’ He didn’t know what the statement meant, so he wrote it down on the folder. Then he felt energy flow through him, like when he fixes something. But this made no sense to him, and he forgot about it. Until he heard my story.
‘I guess I fixed your horizon,’ he said. ‘It sure looks that way,’ I replied. We then noticed an ashtray in the middle of the floor that had not previously been there. As I commented on this, a small bottle flew spontaneously from the desk across the room, sharply striking a window some ten feet distant. The bottle hit glass with such a resounding crash that I was surprised that nothing was broken. ‘I fixed it, I fixed your horizon,’ said Uri. ‘That’s how they tell me.’”
Just recently Carla Rueckert, who still lives in Louisville and carries on the work of the late Don Elkins, who passed away back in 1984, described how she became involved in this “ET channeling experiment” herself. “I was in the group from the first, but did not want to channel, and so simply listened to the others as they went from silent meditators to comical sound-makers to channels,” she explained. “My channeling began in 1974, when the other channels had graduated and taken jobs away from Louisville [Don was a college professor and so apparently many of his channelers were students – BR], and Don saw his experiment dying for lack of subjects. He asked me to give it a try and I could not say no to my partner and companion. I worked for a couple of weeks before getting over being bowled over by the rush I felt when I opened to channel. Once I could handle that, I made better progress and within two months I was channeling. I seemed to have a gift for the work that no one else in the group had manifested, much to my own surprise, and I became very interested in making my channeling better. I am, after all, trained as a librarian/researcher. I found that there were elements that created a better channeling, and that created a lousy one. Firstly, if I tuned myself to my own best and highest spiritual tuning before beginning the work, the reading was far better. Secondly, if I challenged spirits in the name of what I held dearest to my heart – in my case, Jesus the Christ – I snagged a far better source. Outside of my ability to make things better was what the question was, and how it was asked. I soon found that fear-based questions, or specific questions, detuned the channel so results were dismal. I began refusing to take fear-based questions, and accepting specific questions only if they would matter as much in the thousand years as today. These are fairly simple principles, but applying them carefully has definitely maximized my ability to offer a good channeling session.”
“My assumption from the beginning in ’74, based on all I had seen, since 1962 when we first began the experiment in ET channeling, was that this flow of information was subconscious material which I became able to perceive consciously. At first I had no idea whether it was just a part of myself or if there was an ‘other’ in the source’s identity. After producing hours upon hours of readings (well over 1500 at this point) I am convinced that these sources are entities with identities independent of myself.”
“I have never been and am not now psychic. I do not perceive things about people, I do not see auras, I would rate myself as thick as a plank in that wise. My personality is very mystical however, with a lifetime history of going off into other realities, most of them having to do with the light. I either become the light, or am in it. These episodes typically last for a few seconds or minutes but have endured as long as three days. It is possible that this mystical turn may have something do with my ability to do well as a channel.”
Curious (after all, I had my own light experience which I described at the beginning of this feature) I questioned Carla as to what these mystical “light” experiences of hers were like. “When was two years old, as I told you, I inadvertently discovered that if I looked into a sunbeam I could slide out on it,” Carla explained. “Then I was instantly in a different reality. All the colors were so alive and flowing, they made what we see look like black and white. It was a forest environment. The wise old trees spoke to me when I talked, as did the animals. I remember especially two – a very large, blue owl, which bore no resemblance to any stuffed animal I ever had, and the cat which was made in waking reality to sit permanently on its side. In the magic forest, as I called it, it could walk and talk to me, and it was appreciative that I had fed it from its sitting pose.”
“Jesus was there too. Unlike the animals, he never spoke, not to me or at all. But he emanated enormous love, and I would hold his hand and just look into his eyes, which were a beautiful gold color. When I did that, I knew exactly what unconditional love was, and I loved Jesus right back. I still serve my Jesus to the best of my ability and I imagine I will every day of my life.” “When I was five, I made a huge mistake, telling my parents about the magic forest. They explained that this was not real, only a dream. I believe they thought I had made it up. After that I could not slide out on the light beam as before.”
“However, at random times I find myself in the light – and sometimes I am the light. Both states are wonderful to experience. They are usually fleeting, but have lasted several days a couple of times. In that state I can see that everything is perfect and all is well. I can see the plan, and it works so well. However, I can bring back nothing but the memory of those mystical times. And I cannot induce the states.” Continuing on about the work and her channeling, Carla also recently wrote: “Don died in 1984, but Jim [McCarty, research partner – BR] and I have soldiered on, still working for him as far as we are concerned. Perhaps if feedback had been lacking we would have not been persistent, but the last three years of Don’s life, we three, Don, Jim and I, created a series of readings which has been called The Ra Material and The Law of One. This body of material has had very strong response from the start, and still is doing so to those who run across it for the first time. So we continue, knowing for sure that we are of service, which is Jim’s and my mutual goal, and always has been.”
“Before and after the time of the Ra contact, and indeed during it, I continued to channel consciously – the Ra sessions were done in trance – and that material too has many fans.”
“Don asked me to do two things for him – make our material available to all globally, for free. Thank heaven for the internet and volunteers who have painstakingly transferred the early work from hard copy to digital by OCR. So that is done! The other request was that I head a spiritual community and ‘live the Law of One.’ I’m still working on that, but it looks good.”
Carla explained that over the last couple of years she’s had serious spinal operations that have necessitated the use of pain medicines. “This is not conducive to the production of good material, so I have taken a break from channeling.” She hopes to get back to it again in the future.
Her research partner, Jim McCarty, shared the following remarks: “I don’t have a lot to share in addition to what Carla has shared but I can say that I too learned to channel from Don and Carla and can say that as all who learn to channel I had to deal with the possibility that what I was channeling might be coming from my own subconscious mind. Part of the reason for this is that those entities who contacted our group and sought to channel through our instruments said that the ideal combination of their minds and our minds was 70% them and 30% us. The reason for this was that they wanted to utilize our experiences to illustrate their points and they also wanted to validate our own seeking process. In most of the channelings that I did I noticed some information in it that I had never thought about before and that gave me more confidence that I was channeling a source that was exterior to me. After 25 years of channeling I finally decided that I would stop channeling because I was only fairly good and I decided that the planet didn’t need more average information, especially when Carla was doing such a splendid job.”
“Don was a scientist, a physicist actually, and he conducted all of his channeling work using the most careful controls possible. For example, for the first 23 sessions of the Ra contact he would not let Carla see the material, fearing it would contaminate the work. Only when the Ra group assured him that it made no difference did he allow Carla to see the material. He felt that the Ra contact was the best contact that he had seen and he described it as a tuned trance telepathy and as the culmination of his life’s work. The tuning Carla spoke about earlier still was used for the sessions but only in the first one did Carla get to challenge Ra. They passed just fine. Apparently Jesus the Christ is a principle of unconditional love that goes far beyond our little planetary myths. Carla’s trance during the Ra contact was the kind where the instrument leaves the body and is unaware of what is going on while out of the body. And the telepathy portion was necessary since those of Ra did not inhabit Carla’s body while she was absent from it but used it ‘from a distance’ to make the words in response to Don’s questions.”
Electricity from trees
As I described in my last column, the late Yale Medical School Professor of Anatomy, Harold Saxton Burr, Ph.D., was a true pioneer who had studied continuous electrical readings in trees, for some 30 years, finding profound “electromagnetic cycles” in those readings that incredibly corresponded with such things as lunar cycles and sunspot activity. Now it looks like scientists may be on the verge of using tree electricity for practical applications.
University of Washington engineers Babak Parviz and Brian Otis are working on a device that can be plugged into any tree for electrical power. They found trees were generating up to a few hundred millivolts of steady electricity and that with a boost converter could produce increased output. “Normal electronics are not going to run on the types of voltages and currents that we get out of trees,” Parviz noted, but the hope is that down the road a new generation of electronics can be developed that will. We’re asked to imagine how one day a person could be out in nature, say at a local park, and could simply plug their iPod or cellphone into a tree for power.
New kind of magnetism
MIT researchers have discovered a new state of matter with a new kind of magnetism, something whose existence had been theorized about since 1987. Called quantum spin liquid (QSL) this new discovery could lead to new communications systems (that could involve long-range quantum entanglement), advances in data storage, and the development of higher-temperature superconductors. Researchers had suspected that a crystal called herbertsmithite was a QSL candidate, and after growing a tiny sliver of it in the lab for 10 months and then firing a beam of neutrons into it to analyze its structure, the MIT scientists had their confirmation. The internal magnetic state is said to be in a constant state of flux, with electrons interacting with other nearby electrons. “But there is a strong interaction between them, and due to quantum effects, they don’t lock in place,” stated Young Lee, a lead author and researcher on this project.
Gone but not forgotten….!
As we look optimistically ahead to 2013 (having survived the dire end-of-the-world warnings some had forecast based upon the Mayan Calendar for December 21) we do mourn the loss of some old friends we left behind who sadly didn’t make it out alive from that year. Most recently author and investigative journalist Philip Coppens, who made frequent appearances on TV’s Ancient Aliens, passed away suddenly on December 30th, not long after being diagnosed with a rare type of cancer called angiosarcoma. He hosted the weekly Spirit Revolution radio show with his wife Kathleen McGowan, wrote articles for Nexus magazine and Atlantis Rising. The author of several books, Philip Coppens had entered the publishing field at 23. A few weeks before that, we lost the legendary ufologist James W. Moseley, on November 16th. Jim Moseley had been battling cancer of the esophagus. He was 81 years old. Patrick Huyghe stated, “He was one of the last remaining old timers from the golden age of flying saucers.” Back in the early 1950s he had begun editing a newsletter called Saucer News, though he was probably best known for his informal, humorous, oft-times sarcastic and even irreverent style Saucer Smear newsletter. He listed himself as the “Editor and still Supreme Commander” and in many issues on the front page, up near the banner title, he proudly displayed a quote from a letter John Keel had written him in 1977, “You are…a boil on the ass of ufology.” He seemed to thrive on controversy and poking fun at others and having it poked back at himself as well.
Undoubtedly both men will be missed by many, many fellow researchers, friends and family.
