Tuesday, August 02, 2005

The Mystery Man


Something is burning, baby, something's in flames
There's a man going 'round calling names
- Bob Dylan


Of all the purportedly-true horror stories of Budd Hopkins' Intruders - his study of an Indiana family seemingly beset by generational abduction phenomena - the one I found both most persuasive and horrifying could be ascribed, by convention, to a prank caller.

When Kathie Davis, the principal subject of the book, was pregnant with her second son Tommy in 1980, she began receiving indecipherable phone calls every Wednesday at 3:00 in the afternoon. "Above a background noise that roared like a factory in full swing she heard a voice moaning and muttering and using no syllables [that could be understood]." The voice would neither acknowledge the other party nor even pause when asked to identify or explain itself. Sometimes Kathie hung up within moments, sometimes she listened for minutes, "fascinated by the weird sounds." (Her friend Dorothy and her mother Mary also answered Kathie's phone on occasion, and heard the same gutteral moaning and industrial roars.) During this event, Kathie decided to get an unlisted number. One Monday afternoon the telephone company called to say the change was in effect, and told her her new number. Moments later the phone rang: it was her strange caller, making the same bizarre sounds, though now with an angry tone. It was the only time, other than Wednesdays at 3:00 pm, that Kathie received such a call.

The calls ceased abruptly when Tommy was born. When Hopkins asked Kathie about the health of her boys, she said "Tommy my youngest, has a speech problem. He just makes this sort of moaning sound. I've had him thoroughly tested. They've done brain stem and brain wave analysis, and so on, and he's normal. He's very bright. He just doesn't talk yet." Later, she confided to a female colleague of Hopkins' that Tommy's speech was a tremendous worry, because it reminded her so much of the mysterious caller during her pregnancy.

Now here's a curious something I discovered just last night:

Doris Lilly, who lived in the south end of Point Pleasant, West Virginia - the locus of "Mothman" sightings - began to receive strange phone calls early in March, 1967, at the height of the Mothman flap. (Reportedly many did, though none, I've seen, like these.) John Keel writes in The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings that daily, "around 5:00 pm her phone would ring, and when she answered she heard only a bizarre metallic voice speaking in an incomprehensible language. It was gutteral and rapid. These calls came only when she was alone." According to Lilly, "it was as if they knew when I came home." The calls persisted, and Lilly became afraid to stay alone in her house. The phone company examined the line and could not explain the calls.

Keel wrote his book in 1970; Hopkins in 1987. Though the briefly-described episodes have an urban legend frisson about them, they're not tales told of a friend of a friend. Both Keel and Hopkins did their own research, travelling to the locales and speaking at considerable length the the parties involved. The repeating, indecipherable telephone calls were minor aspects of particular tears in the veil they were investigating: the "Mothman" appearances and the Copley Woods abductions. Oddly, I've yet to find these strangely similar stories in each other's context.

I imagine skeptics of the Amazing Randi school would have no trouble dismissing both accounts, as they have no trouble dismissing anything that threatens to trouble their Closed System: the Davies' family and Kathie's friend must have been familiar with Keel's book, and had no qualms about exploiting a three-year old's speech impediment to support their hoax. (It's a familiar tactic of such skeptics to discount solitary, extraordinary events as mere anomalies, and multiple events as the signature of copy cats and mass hysteria.) As for Doris Lilly, if she didn't fabricate or embellish her story, there's still nothing about it, they would undoubtedly say, that demands a supernatural explanation.

I might agree with that point, except there's very little about the Mothman story that makes sense, and so to force sense upon it does a certain measure of violence to it. If the data is intrinsically absurd, making it conform to our rational assumptions will destroy it. And for some, that's a job well done. (It becomes a feat of strength: can the presumptions of a rational, material universe take down the facts?) Perhaps the explanation which best lets the data explain itself is occultic. Keel entertains this in The Mothman Prophecies. Just before the sightings began, the charred carcass of a dog was found on unsinged ground which became, in effect, Ground Zero for the phenomenon. Keel wonders whether the dog was a sacrifice to initiate the events, and open a door through which the entity called "Mothman" could pass.

Presuming there were points to the bizarre phone calls may be presuming too much. But if there were, what could they have been? This seemingly obvious question neither Keel nor Hopkins asks.

Was the point communication? Unlikely, given their monologic indecipherability. There was no engagement at all with the person on the other end of the line. Also, the description of the speech is reminiscent of the story of Jose Antonio Da Silva, the Brazillian military policeman who, in 1969, claimed to have been abducted by "two masked individuals about four feet tall, wearing dull aluminum suits." The creatures bore him to a stone chamber, and an audience with an extremely hairy dwarf. He said the entities "talked among themselves in an incomprehensible language with many R’s."

Was the point ritual? More likely, when we consider the patterns with which the calls were made: every week at 3:00 pm on Wednesday; every afternoon at 5:00 pm. Repeating acts at regular intervals is at least suggestive of ritualistic behaviour.

If so, then what was the point of the ritual? With respect to the Davies' case, it's clearly linked to a pregnancy, and perhaps meant to be an influence upon it. According to the reports of several family members, after his birth, Tommy was himself subjected to abduction and intrusive attention from unknown entities. As for Lilly's calls, there's not enough information, other than to associate them broadly with the Mothman phenomenon.

But here's a question that should be asked, and answered thoughtfully, before any other: Why bother? Don't we have enough mysteries already in this mundane world? Why become entangled in those of another? Surely there's something more pressing than this.

Erik Davis offers an answer of sorts, in TechGnosis:

Most of us feel comfortable chalking up such close encounters to neurochemical imbalances, bad lunch meat, lax education, or the editorial philosophy of the Weekly World News. But the closer you look at these phenomena, and at many of the people who are captured by them, the more difficult it becomes to completely separate this loopy world from the straight one.... [A]ll about us the planet seems to be cracking apart at the seams. Reality, it seems, has been deregulated, and nothing is business as usual anymore - least of all business. The horizon of history bends into an asymptote, and at its warping edges, the more wild-eyed and speculative can't help but glimpse the shadow of some imponderable and ominous X leaning in. As the ancient mapmakers wrote when they sketched the edges of the watery unknown, "Here be dragons."

Increasingly, entanglements don't seem to be a matter of choice. As the domain of our mundane experience begins to undergo unprecedented stress, there is an apparent cascading correspondence of irrationalities between this realm and another. Another here. The growing unreality that many have sensed for the past five years is an aspect of that correlation.

Thirty years ago, in conversation with Jacques Vallee in The Edge of Reality, J Allen Hynek spoke of "the whole craziness of the thing, the whole absurdity [of the UFO phenomenon] - it's another world, another realm, that seems to have some interlocking with ours, and what we're describing here is just that interlocking."

Why bother? Because there are ever more points of congruence these days between the realms, and in our world many of those appear to rest on the nodal points of Earthly power.

In David Lynch's Lost Highway, saxophonist Fred Madison is approached at a party by a figure known only as the "Mystery Man":



Mystery Man: We've met before, haven't we?
Fred Madison: I don't think so. Where was it you think we met?
Mystery Man: At your house. Don't you remember?
Fred Madison: No. No, I don't. Are you sure?
Mystery Man: Of course. As a matter of fact, I'm there right now.
Fred Madison: What do you mean? You're where right now?
Mystery Man: At your house.
Fred Madison: That's fucking crazy, man.
Mystery Man: Call me. Dial your number. Go ahead.
[Fred dials the number and the Mystery Man answers]
Mystery Man: [over the phone] I told you I was here.



Fred Madison: [amused] How'd you do that?
Mystery Man: Ask me.
Fred Madison: [angrily into the phone] How did you get inside my house?
Mystery Man: You invited me. It is not my custom to go where I am not wanted.
Fred Madison: [into the phone] Who are you?
[Both Mystery Men laugh mechanically]
Mystery Man: Give me back my phone.
[Fred gives the phone back]
Mystery Man: It's been a pleasure talking to you.


If we can glimpse the shadow of the imponderable and ominous X, then unlike Lost Highway's Fred Madison, who didn't know himself well enough to know his own nightmares, we may be able to recognize the Mystery Man coming, before he sets upon mystifying us.

47 Comments:

Blogger McCoy said...

Very interesting post. I was reminded of Jack Sarfatti’s strange calls from a conscious computer,on a spaceship, from the future. Sarfatti, a theoretical physicist and director of the Physics/ Consciousness Research Group at the Eslen Institute, attributes his interest in matters such as the nature of time, directly to the bizarre phone calls he received when he was fourteen. As silly as this stuff seems to most people, it’s undeniably having an impact on influential members of society.

4:43 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

nice post. when i got to the part where the phone calls to kathie davis stopped when tommy was born, my first thought was the tommy had been the caller himself. ooh!

also: i know it's all here in various parts of this blog, but i'd like to be reminded of some of the examples of this:

"there are ever more points of congruence these days between the realms, and in our world many of those appear to rest on the nodal points of Earthly power."

5:22 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Utter tripe.

Just one question. After all these billions of years, in all the span of the universe, would these "last 5 years" all of a sudden become "different" right here?

It's the simple recurring fantasy of every age to believe they are special. Something very unusual and signficant is happening now or just about to happen, and all the "odd" occurrences recently portend these unique events.

How can this notion be made sense of in any way other than hubris?

5:42 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Funny how none of these deep mysteries survived into the Caller ID era, isn't it?

5:47 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

eez, the 'mystery man' (that he's played by robert blake is creepy enough) always scared the bejeezus out of me. lynch has a way of creating characters that are truly frightening-- killer bob, frank from blue velvet, bobby peru from wild at heart, the beggar/monster from mulholland falls . . . .

personally, i wonder if the phone calls didn't contain some kind of audio signals recorded at a lower or higher frequency, but i can't remember if any of them were ever recorded.

"Funny how none of these deep mysteries survived into the Caller ID era, isn't it?"

they have, on many occasions. typically the call in question is from an unlisted and/or untracable number. i've had a few strange 'mystery calls' during my time. nothing like the ones in this post, but most certainly odd and untracable and not pranks.

of course, if you weren't a lazy skeptical troll, you could do a little research and find that out for yourself, you wretched waste of bandwidth.

6:18 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Nothing but fax calls for me. However, it reminded me about the "Amazing" Randi. Naturally, something like this is easy for him to debunk because he can reproduce the phenomenon in earthly ways. Therefore, the phenomenon is of mundane origin.

Of course, it also occurs to me that I could easily, with photoshop (actually, I use open source GIMP...it's free, check it out) take a picture of a model airplane and then superimpose it on the sky. With Randi's thinking, this would disprove that planes can actually fly.

6:33 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

McCoy, your comment regarding Sarfatti made me remember what an interesting guy that is. He is the only person I know of who claims (with any credibility, anyway) to be a descendant of "Illuminati". A couple of quotes from the Disinformation article on him, "Weird Science":

"Future causality also plays an important part in Sarfatti's Destiny Matrix, a conceptual synchronicity timeline describing Sarfatti's family history. He traces his Hebrew title back to the Rabbi, Rashi de Troyes (1040 - 1105), an advisor to Godfrey de Bouillon, who led the First Crusade to Jerusalem and who experienced a precognitive vision. Another ancestor, Samuel Sarfatti, was physician to Pope Julius II, and was crucial in getting Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling (the esoteric meaning of the painting, says Sarfatti, is God reaching backwards in time to create himself through mankind). This cosmology closely links with the Cabbalistic Great Work of manifesting the unconsciousness, which is probably why Sarfatti was annointed by occultist Carlos Suares as 'Heir to the Tradition' and given the task of "smashing the wall of light." Sarfatti also bears the name of Rashi des Troyes and, like the Tibetan Tulkus, "I may well be a reincarnation not only of Past Rashis but more importantly of Future Rashis."
These Rash's, he says, are part of the Elect or Illuminati that have decoded quantum messages from the future throughout history, transmitting the information via objective art"

""Non-lethal psychic warfare using the distant manipulation of the consciousness of the 'enemy' will be an important factor in the 21st century," Sarfatti believes. "But it is preferable to the old means of war. The potential for these techniques of mind-control to be used in the field on unsuspecting naive populations in 'non-lethal warfare' are awesome to behold and contemplate. They can be and will be easily misused by authoritarian immoral power structures. These techniques not only involve manipulation by drugs and ordinary electromagnetic, sound and kinaesthetic signals - as in subliminal television broadcasting and virtual reality transmission via the Web - but also purport to involve quantum action at a distance in the reports on psychokinesis, telepathy and remote viewing."

Despite the SRI controversies during the 1970s, Sarfatti believes that " there is still great interest," which is proven, he feels, by the gathering of such heavyweight physicists, neuro-psychologists, and cognitive-science researchers as Paul Davies, Roger Penrose, David Chalmers, Michael Lockwood, Brian Josephson, Henry Stapp, Daniel C. Dennett, and Sarfatti himself at the Tucson II Conference on Consciousness held in April 1996, in Tucson, Arizona.

"Most of the funding can be traced to spooks. If I were head of CIA or DIA I would put a few billion dollars into consciousness research."

The 1996 U.S. defence authorisation bill earmarked $37.2 million to further investigate non-lethal technologies. Colonel John B. Alexander of Los Alamos National Laboratory, Major Edward A. Dames of PSI TECH Inc, Willis Harman of the Institute for Noetic Sciences, and other 'spooks' maintain links between military intelligence, physics researchers and the New Age community, claims Sarfatti."

http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/article/id773/pg1/index.html

7:17 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I've had weird experiences myself with strange phone calls.

Perhaps the most recurrent happened several years ago, about 1997-1998. The caller voice sounded young and female. I can't be sure that it was human, though...perhaps it most closely resembled the voice of a toddler's vocalizations before they learn speech. Sing-songy babytalk. And there was a weird quality to it, like maybe it was an adult making speech noises with a gag in their mouth...

It spooked the shit out of me. Particularly at first. Later I just said to myself, "oh...this again." Sometimes I'd keep the phone open for quite a while. The "babytalk" wasn't incessant, there were times when I'd just be hearing the ambient noise of a room at the other end. Then the phone would be hung up, without anyone saying a word...or I'd tire of the "game", and hang up myself.

I was doing sort of a high-profile gig talking about political orruption and the drug war on my local college radio station (KDVS-FM, 90.3, Davis, CA) at the time...eventually, the amount of weirdness that entered my cognitive field was frankly bizarre. But I kept doing the show, until I was talked out. Historiography tends to run about three years behind the times...few people were paying much attention, anyway. I had to compete with Lewsinskygate.

My "rational" explanation for the phone calls is that it was a toddler, playing with the family phone. Who somehow hit on the same combination of numbers as my home phone number, repeatedly. The numerals- 3 different ones- did not appear in anything like a straight line on the phone dial, though. Happened maybe five or six times, over a period of months.

This is the first time I've mentioned the phenomenon to anyone, I think. I may have mentioned it in passing to one of my "X-Filie" friends once. I doubt he recalls it. It was just part of a whole truckload of weirdness...eventually, one develops a sense of nonchalance about it all.

My role model is from an old '70s Colt .45 malt liquor commercial, where the guy is sitting in a chair on the beach, and someone surfs up in a tux, and hands him a frosty glass of the malt liquor...and the guy simply accepts it, like "no big deal."

What "ended" the phenomenon? I eventually stopped answering the telephone, pretty much.

I can only imagine what REAL whistleblowers go through, along this line.

8:12 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Of course, it also occurs to me that I could easily, with photoshop ... take a picture of a model airplane and then superimpose it on the sky. With Randi's thinking, this would disprove that planes can actually fly."

Silly post.

Every freshman philosophy student knows you can't prove a negative. Randi would never claim he had done so. The burden of proof is on those claiming something exists or that they have unusual powers. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." - Sagan

11:09 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

It wasn't Sagan who originated "Extreaordinary claims require extraordinary truth," but Marcello Truzzi, a founder of CSICOP who later left the group because he didn't like the way the group was headed.

Truzzi's friend Jerome Clark says, "Basically, Truzzi concluded that the
twice-used "extraordinary" is largely a question-begging,
subjective judgment and that, moreover, the maxim has serious
flaws as a description of how science actually judges truth
claims. I know this from my many personal conversations with
Marcello, a close friend, who died, sad to say, before he could
write a paper or book elucidating his revised thinking."

http://www.virtuallystrange.net/ufo/updates/2004/dec/m09-032.shtml

Despite Anonymous 5:47's proclamation that strange phone calls didn't survive Caller ID, a google of ["caller ID" paranormal] brings over 4000 entries.

12:06 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

RDR,

I'd love it if you'd post more detail of your experiences here. I think it's imortant to share these. The fact that they happened in conjunction with your broadcasting subject matter the government might not appreciate is interesting. Who knows if they are connected.

1:40 a.m.  
Blogger Ty said...

I'm having a paranormal experience on this website.

All my posts in the lasts three days get attacked by anonymous trolls!

Anonymous said (not referring to my post this time):

"It's the simple recurring fantasy of every age to believe they are special. Something very unusual and signficant is happening now or just about to happen, and all the "odd" occurrences recently portend these unique events."

Yeah man, they were saying that shit back in 1941. What idiots.

Here's a link about your buddy Randi. He's a real winner, that guy. http://www.skepticalinvestigations.org/exam/Prescott_Randi.htm

1:43 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

yet another interesting and provocative post.

this one got my attention, for an additional reason. just as a data point, the phone calls theme rings a bell. usually without caller ID, but not always.

of course, a lot of 'unexplained' calls, comprised solely of silence, are explained by automated telemarketing go awry (even though we're not supposed to be receiving such calls); but i think there is something else going on here.

odd synchronicities with controversial expressions. and i'll be damned if not synchronous with particular surges of mental energy .. that is, minor eureaka moments accompanied by phone call .. almost like the multiverse 'confirming' the thought.

then, there are the emails with untraceable headers - the ones that refer to portions of one's life. was convinced that someone with unrestricted network access was 'reading' my mail, not just capturing tcp stream with sniffer. has occurred even in the era of encrypted transport.

---
just as strange as the onset of these phenomena (about ten years ago) is their apparent disappearance. neither the phone calls nor the emails occur much anymore.

while i have formed reasonable guesses about both the genesis and disappearance of the phenomena, i actually have no idea what is going on. while at first i suspected pure political retribution and attempts at intimidation .. i now am more inclined to think that, if it's just that, then the 'intelligence' agencies must also possess mind-reading skills .. in addition to traditional means of eavesdropping and monitoring electronic communications.

yes, incomprehensibility and absurdity accurately describe one aspect of the context. if there's an aspect of ritual, it has been in the consistent, attemped inculcation of anxiety and self-doubt through negative reinforcement. brainwashing.

one related factor was hinted at in a previous comment: i have correlated my unwillingness to cooperate with concepts of intimidation to the diminution of intimidating phenomena themselves. am i just not attaching as much importance to (or just don''t notice) phenomena that still occur? no, the phenomena basically no longer occur. i am reminded of the need for a victim to subscribe to a particular belief system in order to be subject to a curse.

be they tricksters from parallel dimensions, alphabet agencies, or just crazy people who have nothing better to do .. the unwillingness to submit to negative emotion - and the active will to nurture the liberated zone - are correlated with the little phantasms going their merry way.

my best guess is that there is some validity to The Mystery Man. Then again, not ascribing importance to him may help send him back from whence he came.

---
after reading this, you may come to see it's about evolution of internal state (loss of paranoia). maybe so. but if so, the inner evolution has a synchronous, consensus reality counterpart that has evolved along with it.

1:47 a.m.  
Blogger cabdriver said...

Dream's End, I posted just about everything about the incidents of the "phone call phenomenon" I experienced that I recall. And I don't recall not remembering anything else...

The actual content contained in the phone call itself was minimal, as I noted. If there's anything I could add, it's my impression that the vocalizations "communicated" had a mutable character. They could be interpreted benignly- a toddler, gurgling into a telephone; as a more sinister phenomenon, like someone in bondage and distress, able to vocalize noises but not to speak; as a prank, or perhaps even a conscious psyop directed specifically at myself, for reasons that I could only surmise; or as something else, entirely. It was unknowable to me, and I lacked any means of making more of it than was presented to me. So I acknowledged my limits in attempting to make anything of it. I couldn't imagine a productive way to deal with the situation, other than to minimize it and ignore it. And that worked.

I mean, after all, consider the phenomenon I experienced. There really isn't much there, beyond its mysterious character, which repelled inquiry. I mean, the first couple of times I asked..."Hello, who is this?"

No reply. Nothing coherently meaningful, anyway. Nada.

"Okay then, be like that...see if I care." Thay was my response. After a while.

Other than that, I'd just say that I find a lot of good, thought-provoking material in the post by "ranger", above. In the wider sense of what I at one time experienced, in regard to how to cope with a rising tide of weird phenomena..."ranger" sounds to me like he's talking about the notion of "The Dark Night Of One's Soul." I'm hesitant to say that I've crossed over that threshhold, and I'm untouchable. I'm aware that the tides of weirdity could rise again, perhaps to a point beyond coping. But at least I feel somewhat seasoned, in the aftermath. Maybe the first challenge from that realm is the worst. I'd like to think so, at any rate.

3:12 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The past, present, and future are connected yet separate, only occasionally crossing over. Fiction has prepared us for this eventuality, that physics and the pursuit of scientific knowledge would eventually explain that the ground beneath our feet is not as solid as we presume. Knowing this to be true and experiencing this phenomena in person are quite different kettles of fish.
Human perception is very limited in that the range of sensory phenomena that can be experienced are limited by our sense organs and our minds as well. The next step where we as a species fall short is interpretation of these phenomena that transcend our ability to perceive them and from those interpretations to understand them.
Cinema-wise, think Rashomon, Donnie Darko, Repo Man, Babylon 5 (the Vorlons especially), Brother from another planet, Man facing southeast. We are being given the stories that will provide the narratives, the parables, even, of how to interpret the physics of the future, where science will tread heavily on the domain of theology.
I have seen and experienced otherwise the paranormal, alone and with many witnesses, and what is most interesting to me is the need to return to a "normal" state, which for some people is blissful, willful ignorance. Other strategies exist, and some learn to just accept weirdness. I'd like to think I am among the latter but I would be lying to you and myself if that were really the case, or if the paranormal world (which is really the normal world with additional understanding of its workings on the part of the observer)wasn't working to ante up the freakiness at some point. Some of these adepts gain power to use against others, for the self, while others understand the universe we are part of thinks of us as we think of it. We are too small and too feeble to attack the thinking universe; we are so small that we think we have dented it somehow with our futile gestures of power. We are small parts of the universe, a portion of the universe thinking about itself.
Some day this will be in Discover and Scientific American at the drug store, and Edmund Scientific will sell kits for kids to warp the fabric of space time, or exist simultaneously in multiple perspectives and positions. Who will want to buy beer, cigarettes and fried chicken then?
Republicans?

5:12 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"The growing unreality that many have sensed for the past five years is an aspect of that correlation."

Jeff,

Love your site - it is truly fascinating.

Please can you provide more background / links for the statement above?

Harry

5:28 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Jeff,

I should have been a bit clearer with my question.

I am curious about the 'sense of growing unreality' you mention.

Harry

5:35 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The strangest phone experience I had happened about 30 years ago.

I was visitng an old high school friend who lived in a small town (about 15k population) in Massachusetts. My friend needed to make a phone call while we were there at her house, and I was puzzled when I saw her pick up the receiver but not dial. She motioned me over and we both listened. There was a conversation already going on, and she was not on a party line. Weirdest thing was that the conversation was about _her_. It described her physically (she's a member of a racial minority), described her car. We listened for about 20 minutes and as I recall she tried to speak up to them after a while but they didn't seem to hear her.

8:12 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Ranger made an important point that the power of occult processes comes from our own preparedness to believe in them and credit them with power.

This is why I think that 'investigating' occult or potentially occult groups, discussing them, assigning them the power to actually infiltrate and affect us is to unwittingly do their work for them. By believing they can do this to us, we end up doing it to ourselves.

We need to remember the way that past ages dealt with the unknown and the other world, because they had not forgotten - as we have - the rules of engagement.

The old tales tell us that anyone who ever tries to employ the unknown to his own advantage in pursuit of worldly gain ends badly.
The folk tales of every country will say that the fairies or the Gentry, or the ikals, or the angels will NOT be used, and those who try end up deceived, corrupted by their own smallness, ultimately powerless.

It seems to be about tuning out egoism. About tuning in self-honesty, deeper thinking, selflessness. About finding harmony and observing it. This is a recurring theme in all folklore and it must be there for a reason.

Perhaps the lesson is that the Unknown is not something that can be tamed or used? That it is not prepared to be yet another artefact of our incessant obsessive egoism?

And isn't that something we need to celebrate and give thanks for?

The unknown seems to have no interest in earthly power. It tends to bypass kings and presidents and reveal itself always to the marginal, the alone, the poor or the disadvantaged.

Remember the Shaughnessy poem?

We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams; --
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

The whole poem which I won’t quote here because it is too long, is saying that the world is really shaped – not by the kings and the presidents but by those on the edges, those who see beyond the narrow confines of the consensus, those who dream; that their dreams end up somehow becoming the reality of tomorrow.

Do you think this may be the big truth we just don’t get. That the illusion of earthly power is just that – an illusion. That viewed from another perspective, the real ‘movers and shakers’ are the very beings who seem most powerless – the outsiders, the dreamers, the artists. The dissidents and visionaries.

Perhaps this is why UFOs (whatever they might be) don’t trouble with George Bush or Tony Blair. Perhaps in their scheme of things, these men, soul-dead, tiny in spirit are mere incidentals in the unfolding drama.

Perhaps the occultism of the powerful is likewise simply a small distraction? Conjured small by small mean people, may it perhaps be only a small mean thing? And by fearing it do we accord it more consideration – and thereby more power – than it could ever deserve or acquire by its own means?

What I mean is perhaps we have a lot more strength and a lot more resources than we realise? Perhaps all is not blackness unless we decide it is? Perhaps we need to keep a window open to the true Unknown which may be too large and too old, and perhaps too beautiful to be interested in, let alone do business with, the likes of Crowley or the rest of the sad unhinged brigade whose ‘demons’ are only eminences of their own tiny and desperate little souls.

Maybe to enter into a belief that alphabet agencies or other power groups of our own little world can engage with the Unknown, employ it, manipulate it even, is to be guilty in some part of the same hubris as the skeptics and the egoistic idiotic practitioners of 'satanism'.

We have much to fear today in our little world, but perhaps the takeover of or by the Unknown need not be a part of that fear. Perhaps the Unknown can take care of itself. Perhaps in its simplicity and perfection it takes care of us. Perhaps it is older than time and wiser than everything and knows what it is about?

Perhaps what we have to fear here in our little earth is only ourselves and the miasmas of our own minds that can create demons and devils and demi-gods out of other people merely by being foolish enough to believe in something small rather than in something big and grand and perfect in its greatness.

Let's not do that. Let's not enter into the same tiny hubristic darkness of those that truly think their little minds and little spells can change anything. They can't unless we think they can. Let’s remember the universe was made by something we presently cannot begin to know or understand. That it has beauty and order, and is made of dreams and thought stuff as much as matter. And that we might be its witnesses, the thing necessary to give it meaning.

The satanists don’t remember this. The skeptics don’t remember this, and so, consumed entirely by their own littleness and blind to the greatness of this great space, they both go down into their own darkness.

Let’s not go with them. Let’s stay here where it’s light and warm and we can see for light years and for ages.

Ellie

9:46 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Phone synchronicities do happen.

Once when I was in college, I was asked to help plan a surprise birthday party for a friend. The person leading the planning was someone who had been in high school with both of us but whom I knew only slightly. I phoned her a few days before the party to pin down some detail and somehow got connected even though she was already in the middle of a conversation -- the only time in my life that has ever happened.

The person she was talking to was the mutual friend for whom the party was being planned. I stammered out something in confusion and hung up. The next day, my friend said to me, "Oh, I didn't know you knew so-and-so," and I had to tapdance wildly and wonder if I'd blown the surprise.

The kicker came when I told my parents the name and address of the person who was holding the party and my mother said to my father, "Gee, isn't that where your cousin Lennie lives?" It turned out that it was, and that the party planner who I barely knew was my second cousin.

As I've said here before, the occult has a trickster nature. There are laws of affinity that draw events together -- sometimes in patterns which are deeply meaningful and other times apparently just for the hell of it.

10:43 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

RDR,

You had mentioned other things happening during that period. I was interested in that.

And Avalon said:

Perhaps the lesson is that the Unknown is not something that can be tamed or used?

I think this is the main lesson I'm learning.

10:52 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Very groovy, I'm printings Ellie's comment to show to all my friends for inspiration in these F'ed up times. Thank you

11:14 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thank you, Ellie - your perspective on the Other is much as mine. The one thing that is tough about dipping into strange worlds is all of the people caught in the ugly muck of it, thinking that's all there is.

And yes, starroute, sometimes the synchronicities are nothing more than random trickster fun.

Not to deny the existence of Kelly's Dark Actors playing Dark Games, but they are not the whole picture.

11:24 a.m.  
Blogger cabdriver said...

Dream's End, I don't feel like relating the catalogue right now.

I have several reasons for that.

The main one has already been given voice by other sane posters around here: I don't want to give the experience more energy.

It also feels weird to me, like disclosing private medical records...and so much of this stuff is fleeting, and tinged with ephemerality. There are no witnesses, I'm not entirely sure what happened, or even whether it happened, in the way that it initially impressed me. In the retelling, it often doesn't sound to my ears as if anything particularly astounding happened. In fact, even though I've related some of the experiences to friends, I doubt they even remember me telling them.

See, part of the answer is to make them no big deal. The Universe is mysterious, so what else is new...

I have posted a few of the mini-vignettes on other websites, maybe I can dig up an old link or two some time.

I wouldn't have brought the "phone call" stuff up at all, except that Jeff's column for the day tickled that line of code, as it were. Debating over how much more is worth recounting...

It's a strange feeling to be subjected to uncanny weirdness of the type the leaves one feeling in need of psychic self-defense.
All I can say is that it's a first-person subjective situation if ever there was one. And if it's your turn to go into the the tumbler, you'll see for yourself. It isn't anything I would seek out for its own sake. That's my impression of where Ouija boards are at. It seems like everyone I've ever heard of who messed with one wound up getting rid of it, most commonly by burning it. What does that tell you?

I think that both ranger and Ellie have imparted some excellent advice in their posts ( although I quibble with Ellie's use of the term "the unknown". She uses it in the sense that I use the phrase "the unknowable"- a debilitating energy. In the definition I accept, "the unknown" is empowering, that's where you learn new stuff. "The unknowable" is the frontier to avoid.) That advice deserves to be considered, Ithink it's about as good as it gets, and both of them have put things very artfully.

11:44 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I've been thinking a lot lately about order and chaos and the nature of trying to keep things normal.

There is a sort of arc in human history. Back at the start, the original hunting cultures seem to have been comfortable enough with trickster gods and spirits that you had to wrestle with to get what you wanted and a generally unpredictable reality.

Agricultural societies couldn't handle that. They needed regularity and predictability. The movement of the stars was the most regular and predictable thing they knew (give or take the occasional apocalyptic disruption caused by the precession of the equinoxes), so they gradually abandoned the familiar but unreliable old earth-spirits in favor of cold, remote star-gods.

Then, in the name of making everything on earth as it is in heaven, human kings arose with the promise of imposing celestial order on the world around them. They built roads and irrigation canals, set up calendars and timetables, decreed laws and imprisoned and tortured people into following them.

It wasn't just the political world and the natural world that had to be brought into line. It was also the imaginal world -- so you got religions based on dogma and canonical texts, enforced by litmus tests of belief and crusades against heretics.

The burden of carrying this accumulated weight of celestial order always chafed those who would have been shamans at an earlier time -- the gnostics and mystics and assorted weirdos -- but it's only in the last few centuries that we've seen society-wide reactions against it.

The reaction began in the political sphere in the mid-18th century, with the rejection of autocratic rulers and doctrinaire churches. But by the end of the century, it had moved on to a questioning of rationalism, of the conscious mind, and of consensus reality.

Both those struggles are still going strong today -- which is why conspiracy theory and occultism can seem to wind in and out of each other so seamlessly. But I strongly suspect that the long political struggle for democracy and free thought is nearing its culmination, while the struggle over the nature of reality is barely beginning.

12:02 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Jeff, perhaps the best I could do at this point is to reiterate, "if we can glimpse the shadow of the imponderous and ominous, then unlike ... Fred ... who didn't know his own nightmares, we may be able to recognize the Mystery Man coming, before he sets upon mystifing us", but with a twist. is it that we've been mystified, and hence the goal could actually be to de-mystify.

12:18 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Talk about phone synchronicities...

I'm at work, reading this post and its comments at my desk during my free moments. About 20 minutes ago, I received a phone call that was LOUD static, but I could hear the faintest of voices and buttons being pushed.

I left my desk for a few minutes, and when I returned I had a voicemail that was 3 minutes of hold music.

Not necessarily sinister, but still...

1:35 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I just followed a link at Raw Story to an interesting Mark Morford column that's roughly related to the current topic. In writing of the rise of the creepy mega-churches, he concludes:

But this doesn't seem to be the real reason megachurches are flourishing, the real reason for their frightening and viral upsurge. It is more than the power of technology, more than newfound Christian marketing savvy, more than just how so many Christians apparently love to conflate going to church with, say, a Cowboys football game.

I think it's actually something far more interesting, and hopeful, and maybe even enchanting. Here it is: Maybe these megachurches are not, in fact, a sign that the United States is coagulating like a tumor to the Right, but, in fact, they indicate the exact opposite.

Maybe megachurches are, in short, an anxious and massively quivering reaction to a hot divine upsurge, one they can't quite comprehend and which makes their eyeballs shudder and their loins burn; their existence is irrefutable proof that something divinely radical is afoot, a massive sea change, a karmic mutiny, with the churches acting merely as a sleek and desperate defense. You think?

In other words, maybe these delirious throngs of blind believers are merely a trembling shield masquerading as a sleek salvation, vainly attempting to protect themselves from the onslaught of, oh I don't know, divine self-definition? An orgasm of radical sticky nontheistic cosmic beauty? A goddess with a bright red tongue and a wry knowing grin and an appetite for destruction? Let us pray.


"A karmic mutiny, with the churches acting merely as a sleek and desperate defense"? I like that

6:03 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

American christianity is on the way out -- it's always the fools and fanatics who redouble their efforts at the moment that all is lost. How long their last throes take to blow over is anyone's guess, though.

6:29 p.m.  
Blogger cabdriver said...

I identify myself as a Christian..."the abundance of counterfeits implies the existence of a genuine article." If that isn't too pretentious for ya.

12:07 a.m.  
Blogger cabdriver said...

I thought I'd make one addition to my commetns of my "paranormal phone experience", as described above.

Although I read omnivorously, including books on the paranormal, I've never read a book by Bud Hopkins. I have read books where he is quoted or referenced, but this is the first I recall hearing the "phone story" from the book Intruders, the account that prompted Jeff's post. It might have been stuck in my memory banks somewhere before, but not to my recollection.

12:12 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

While reading this thread in the wee hours of the morning, I got an email from a friend, and when it popped up on my screen I jumped out of my skin.
Anyway what a great find this site is (via RobotWisdom, Jeff)! I'm calling myself Enkidu, I hope you don't mind if I join you.
I'd like to comment on two comments, above; first: ellie9:46am, it's my belief that the ones who question the nature of things are most likely those who aren't happy with the way things are, they wanna know What's Up With That, while those who are quite content with the way things are don't ask questions. It may be all one, if you're saying that dissatisfaction is caused by egoism, and contentment is its own reward. As someone who feels he has been enlarged by the mistakes he has made, I bear my scars with some pride.
And to starroute12:02pm, I have a slightly different picture in my mind of this "arc of history" thing, I mean early man lived in very precarious equilibrium with his environment for hundreds of thousands of years, and his survival depended on keeping his eyes and ears open, observing patterns and trends and applying those observations to specific acts of self-preservation--speculating on an unseen spirit-world would have been an extravagance he could not afford. Some want to see in ice-age cave paintings a form of sympathetic magic being practiced, but it could as easily have had a more immediate tactical purpose.
I submit that knowledge was grounded very much in the business of survival, and until it was intuited that knowledge conferred authority over others there was no need to assign supernatural agency to natural phenomena. The old, the sick and injured, the physically weak who could no longer hunt or forage for themselves had to demonstrate some kind of specialized skill or prowess to contribute, or die--that's when yer first shaman came to be.
And I think the back side of the bell curve will find us, as has been suggested in other threads on this site, occupied not with gods or tricksters but with hunting, gathering--surviving.
I'm not disagreeing with what you said, starroute, d'you see? I'm saying don't believe anything you haven't seen with your own eyes, think for yourself--which is kinda what you were saying, innit?

5:10 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

starroute, I'm new to RI and already I seek out your comments, which are invariably superb.

Earlier you write The reaction [to impositions of celestial order] began in the political sphere in the mid-18th century, with the rejection of autocratic rulers and doctrinaire churches.

Why limit organized resistance to the Enlightenment? Every empire has its enemies, and these are not always limited to would-be rivals. The Albigensians and later the Taborites are examples of broad social movements, radical "counter-powers."

Fredy Perlman does a good job describing resistance (in the 'West') to this Leviathan.

Anthropologist David Graeber argues that egalitarian societies are organized in ways that prevent the emergence of an autocrat, i.e. structures act as counter-powers even where "power" is no more than a dialectical possibility.

We've been creating alternatives for a long time, stars or no.

enkidu, it was all "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" was it? I wonder what you make of Hesiod's "golden race of mortal men"?

8:13 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

trachys--I tried to keep my post short, I try to be sensitive to the rules of order on message boards and I don't want to stray too far off-topic.
I don't mean to dismiss or ignore the impact Man has had on the biosphere nor the great resourcefulness and imagination it has required to create the mess we're in today; I think it's a marvelous thing that Man did indeed survive those many hundreds of thousands of years, because it absolutely had to depend on Man's capacity to use his head.
I'll allow that it's pure foolishness to think I can get inside the mind of early man, to imagine what his life was like, but it is something I enjoy doing, for my own entertainment. And it comforts me to think that there is a reason why earth and sky contain puzzles and riddles, and Man has an inquisitive mind. It suggests that there is a purpose behind it. But I think it's a purely human conceit that God gave us heaven and earth for our use, it's infantile to think God is going to save us from ourselves. And all the fairy stories we've concocted, entertaining as they are, have only served to distract us from our responsibilities. The "golden race" has distinguished itself with its pathological behaviors, but--as someone else said elsewhere on this board--if I'm going to die I want to be outside looking at the stars--
Sorry, if you want to discuss this further maybe we should take it to the discussion board--

12:19 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I keep getting odd phone calls that sound like some strange clicking noise, like a machine of some sort that isn't working right but calls me anyway. These are at various times of day, usually several times a week. It has been going on for over a year and it could well be harmless but I have no idea what it is.

12:46 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

well, I too used to get (5 years to 2 years ago) such odd 'no one there' calls, sometimes with muffled noises. sometimes once a week or more. Basicly I just stopped answering the phone. If someone wanted to reach me they would have to leave a message and I would call back. Now I don't keep a land line anymore, strictly use my cell phone, and have yet to recieve more than one or two such calls. always from unidentified numbers (like payphones)

HP and others, one thing this may be is stuff related to 'phone pheaking' one possible motive would be to enale the caller to wait for you to hang up, then make the right tone-pair on the line and dial another number, only now it'll seem to the phone system like the call is comming from your phone. Another possibility would be to enable them to make long distance calls on your line. Most likely this stuff stopped working in the early-mid 80s and 90s with all the ystgem upgrades the phone companies put in. Some people may still be trying the ld tricks though with outdated phreaking manuals, then again in some scattered areas the phone company may still use old analog switching equipment.

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