I haven’t heard it back but it sure felt like the best. Great questions, great conversation. Great host. Check out Bernardo Kastrup’s website and start following his show. I think he’s got a good thing going here. http://www.inceptiondialogues.com/
(For an .m4a version, click HERE and “save link as.” Check out the Inception Dialogues website for iTunes feed and further info.)
Or, for those of you who want the bullet points, here is a ten minute “digest” version….
The face of crazy.
Thanks, those of you who tuned in to Paranormal Waypoint last night. I didn’t expect to go through a primer of my personal history from A-liens to Z-eus.(1) But I’m glad I did because I think it’s important to remember where I (Jeff Ritzmann and I, actually) come from. I think when we tear apart the crappy research that has come to define alien abductions and ufology as a whole, it’s easy to forget that we’re experiencers, not debunkers. We’re not just experiencers, though–we’re really out there experiencers of some unabashedly outlandish stuff. We’re also discerning skeptically-minded people. We have to be. These are our lives we’re talking about here and we would like to see these subjects handled with care.
One question Jeff asked me was if I ever thought I was crazy. He was asking about the spiritual shenanigans–an energy in me, Jer 2.0, that wakes me up psychically and moves the body into yogic postures, tai chi movements, whirling dervish twirls, and things I haven’t the foggiest clue about. I had only a minute to respond so I said “No.” I’d like to explain that a bit….
With the unknown phenomena we seem all too eager to name “alien abduction” I did ponder the crazy question–or at least delusional. I remained open to the real possibility that because I saw this brilliant UFO in 8th grade that was other-worldly in appearance I then read up on UFOs and alien abductions and assumed I was an abductee. Perhaps every little creak, every little bump in the night and alien dream added up to me being an abductee simply because I saw an object I couldn’t explain and read some books that interpreted it for me. Maybe, just maybe, I suffered a neurotic snowball effect from that one sighting. I entertained that idea for years; seeing the Wee People of Wherever at my bedside in October 2001 changed that.
Even so, I could make a George Hansen style Trickster hypothesis work here and it goes something like this: I saw a UFO in 8th grade. I obsessed over it well into adulthood. I feared having intimate relationships with women because I didn’t want to bring this into their lives. As a result, the night after I had sex for the first time–in New York City fresh off of the 9/11 attacks, no less–I saw aliens. This is thanks to the anti-structural context I found myself in culturally and personally coupled with a release of the aforementioned deeply held fear, because aliens didn’t show up when I lost my virginity. I breathed a sigh or relief and then, like a cosmic joke, they showed up the next night instead.
It’s The Secret in action, right? You obsess, you let go, you receive from the universe. Maybe. It doesn’t really fly with me because of all the evidence (and by that I mean personal experiences of the ufological and paranormal variety) I’m glossing over to make this work.
The point is, with alleged aliens I can see some ways in which I could have deluded myself. But the spiritual stuff? Emphatically NO. I know making declarative statements is taboo but I DO know what this energy is doing overall, even if I don’t understand the details or the mechanics. And I know without it we will never be whole. We will always be dysfunctional egos running the world into the mud. We are fundamentally flawed and in 2.0 mode you see that this is not human nature–this is humans running from nature and calling it human nature so they never have to confront the issue.
That is what we do.
The spiritual stuff is me. But the alien abduction stuff happens to me. Anything that is not me is open to debate.(2) A lot more guess work and a lot less acceptance goes into a presumably outside intelligence interacting with me. I can include the question of hallucinations and delusion there. But this energy I talk about is in me every moment. It is as undeniable as my arms and legs.
Finally, when I talk about the energy as an it, this is just a convenience of language. I don’t want to give the impression that I’m the host to some possessive intelligence or something along those lines. It’s not that–although there’s no law that says one intelligent energy has to manifest as one intelligence. After all, look at the universe. Look closer–look at Earth. Look at the chattering human psyche.
Look at you.
———————
(1) Sorry. That’s as “god” as I can get with a Z. I’m part Greek so it works, right?
(2) Yes, I know at the core all is one but I’m talking about the day to day level in which we exist.
I wrote a sequel of sorts to my first book I Know Why The Aliens Don’t Land! titled The Skeleton Key To All Worlds. Ultimately, I scrapped the project and picked from its parts material that became Urgency.
If nothing else, these beings we call “alien” love a well-timed joke. The joke they played on me was giving me my most in-your-face encounter with them I’d ever had shortly after publishing I Know Why The Aliens Don’t Land! Naturally, I wrote it into the unpublished sequel.
I’m toying with the idea of releasing an ebook version of I Know Why… with material from The Skeleton Key To All Worlds but formatting it is daunting and I have other projects on my plate at the moment. However, I told the Paratopia Facebook Group I’d publish this encounter from The Skeleton Key… on my blog, so here it is.
The first part comes from chapter 6–called Cyber Six because it details in typical comically-crass me fashion my first time having sex with a gal I met online. Her screen name was Wildcherry, so that’s what I use as a pseudonym. The important point here for all you Trickster theorists is, I had a fear of intimacy revolving around the fear that I’d be introducing this abduction stuff into my significant other’s life. Night one I lost my virginity and breathed a sigh of relief that no “aliens” stuck their probes through the wall like Porky’s. Night two, on the other hand–boom! Porky’s 2: The Next Day. Wait, no–I mean aliens. Just ridiculous with that comic timing again. 
And with that, we pick up in the middle of the chapter….
excerpt from Cyber Six
Later that night….
Wildcherry and I are snoozing away the wee dawn hours on my floor mattress. I don’t know what time it is but it must be between three and six because we got to sleep really late and it isn’t light out yet. Correction: it is light out. It’s very light out. In fact there’s so much light pouring in through my bedroom windows that it wakes me. The quality of light is strange. It’s bright yet dull. Foggy. Like the sun shining evenly through a thick, thick fog.
I prop myself up on my left arm and just stare at this. Wildcherry remains out cold, unmoved by the brightness. I collapse onto my back and now see that there are three beings standing over me to my right. I am terrified but don’t scream. The beings are short, not more than four feet tall. They are wearing brown tunics. Their skin is gray and from what I can see of their hooded heads they are bald. They have diminutive facial features, save for the eyes, which are huge black oval pools. If human eyes are the windows to the soul these eyes are windows to the infinite depths of everything.
There is something else curious about them: They have a playful nature. The one closest my face, at least, is smirking and exudes this childlike naivety. It is as if they want me to come play and yet I am horrified beyond the meaning of the term. They never speak a word to me. Wildcherry remains unconscious.
The next thing I know—and there is no transition here, it’s literally just the very next moment—I am standing in another room altogether. I’m wearing the boxer shorts I went to sleep in. The room is long and open, not quite cavernous but the illusion of that given the lighting.
About ten feet in front of me begins a row of tables vertical to my sightline. I’m not sure how many tables there are, maybe 5. They’re lit from above by unseen sources. The fixtures, if indeed that’s what they are, give off that same misty/foggy light that had flooded my room. These are the only sources of illumination. Outside of the tables, everything is black and empty.
There are people lying on the tables. Humans. Strangers. Men and women. Naked. Immobile. Unconscious. One closest to me is a blond-haired woman, Caucasian, in her late forties or early fifties. A bunch of similar beings—maybe even the same ones who brought me here—stand around her table. They are examining her in an inclusive way as if letting me in on the situation, like they’re saying, “See? This is what we do for a living.”
Standing there and observing this, I’m totally calm, the antithesis of the terror that plagued me when they stood in my bedroom. ‘Why am I seeing this,’ I wonder silently.
A female voice answers in my head, “Because you’ve always wanted to remember an abduction.” The voice is calm, soothing, and familiar. I know this woman. I know this woman. She is not human and I am not on earth.
The telepathic voice and I have a lengthy discussion. I remember it long enough to jot it when I’m returned to my bed, but I don’t. I let it go.
This wasn’t a dream, this was real. But it couldn’t be. What are the odds? That light in my window… Why didn’t it wake the whole neighborhood? No, this was a dream.
No it wasn’t.
Vivid dream.
No it wasn’t.
Shut up and sleep.
Okay.
————
In the following chapter, we get a sequel, of sorts. It’s not a lot but just enough to confirm the first incident. I could no longer hide behind the “It couldn’t have happened because the light outside would have woken up all of Queens” denial. Here we see that the foggy light isn’t, for instance, shining down from an aerial ship. It could be a portal; it could be something else. Whatever it is, the fact that it appeared the first time outside my window does not indicate that it wasn’t concentrated right there and/or directional for only me to see.
CHAPTER 24
I had no direct link between the meditation energy and alien abductions. After I’d initiated it back in the old apartment there was a night when I felt and heard an enormous crunch followed by a boom high up in my nasal cavity. I felt it reverberate throughout my skull. I thought I was having an aneurysm and was about to die. It felt like it should have hurt but somehow I was anesthetized so the episode felt numb as opposed to excruciating.
Instead of dying, this really bad sci-fi grid of the earth appeared in my mind’s eye. It was a green 3-D model of our planet. It was spinning slowly, as earth is prone to do, and then suddenly ice from the north slid over the North American continent. This wasn’t a vision in the same way I’d have visions bleed into view years later. This was more like a computer simulation…uuuuuh…beamed into me, for lack of a better term. It crackled and popped with an electricity I could see. I’m tellin’ ya, it looked like a bad Atari graphic, but it did its job. I now feared some huge natural catastrophe was going to happen in my lifetime. I figured this was an alien transmission but do I really know?
The second connection was much stronger. This happened in the deep AM of April 17, 2004. I was asleep in bed. I thought I was dreaming that the meditation energy was tapping lines over my face with my hands the way I’d described earlier. The energy does a lot of this tapping, like pressure-point therapy, all over my body. The patterns remind me of the lines native peoples paint on their bodies. Ever wonder where they got the idea?
I thought I was dreaming because this ended with my left hand pinching the bridge above my right nostril like one would do for a bloody nose. The meditation energy had never woken in me while I was asleep before, had never done anything mundane like pinch my nose. I didn’t actually have a bloody nose, so in my tired stupor I thought I was dreaming the whole thing.
The timing of what happened next is hazy. It could have been shortly after or maybe hours later. Not sure. But the next thing I remember happening is waking up because my bedroom was lit up. I thought the sun was rising and invading through my window. I was lying on my right side, facing the wall. I opened my eyes to find my wall missing. Where my wall with its posters and pictures should have been was this field of blinding white light. It was the same quality of evenly-distributed dull light as I’d experienced that October night with Wildcherry 3 years prior.
As I was lying there staring confusedly into the void that had once been my wall, my nose began to bleed. It didn’t bleed out, though. Instead, it trickled down my throat. Nosebleeds are common to abductees and other forms of nerd, so I think I might have been visited by nerds that night—aliens! Visited by aliens!—and the meditation energy cauterized my nose in preparation of the event so that I wouldn’t bleed all over the sheets. Per usual I didn’t bolt out of bed hysterically screaming or leap through the energy field into Narnia. At least I don’t think I did. Huh.
I don’t recall what happened next and, in fact, I’d forgotten about the episode entirely until I’d climbed out of bed at a decent hour and scampered into the kitchen. There I spoke at length with a subletting roommate named Brian. In the middle of our conversation my nose bled out the left nostril and onto my shirt. With the red torrent rushed memory of the previous night as described.
Welcome, Brian: I’m a bleeder.
This incident was the most solid link I could make between the meditation energy and alien abductions. However, just a month prior, that other quality of energy—the one that enters through the spine—the one I’d only felt twice before, the first unspectacularly, the second ending in possession—remember that? Still with me here? Yeah, on March 25th, 2004 that energy welled up for a third and, as of this book, final time. It was the most spectacular experience of all and one I believed all of this meditation nonsense must have been leading to, for on that morning, just before 6:00am… I became God.
Thursday, March 21st
11pm (EST)/8pm(PST)
It’s The Jeff. It’s The Jer. It’s Jeff’s new show, Paranormal Waypoint. It’s finally happening.
Please listen in, chat in the chat room–and call in ya sissies. Ask that question you’ve always wanted answered.
That’s right, I’ll be live with Bill & Nancy Birnes Saturday at 6pm here: http://www.futuretheater.com/
Just last night a little lightbulb went off in my head pertaining to the high strangeness associated with “alien abductions” that I think is a tangible clue neurologists might be able to work with. We’ll explore that and much more. Be sure to tune in!
December 21, 2012 did have an extinction event: the extinction of prophesy. What happens when a species that sets up hope outside of itself recognizes hopelessness at the same time as its environment grows unstable and unsupportive? We discuss it because no one else is.
Well, okay, technically it will be Saturday according to Eastern Standard Time at 1:00a.m. So, if you’re awake, let’s talk. I’ve only got a half hour to say what needs to be said and take calls but I promise to make time for everything. Listen in and call in here:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/paratopia/2012/12/21/were-all-still-here
If you can’t make it I’ll release it through youtube and have it posted here the next day.
Finally caught up with my friend Melissa. She lives on the other side of the island. She’s depressed, trying to find her way, wanting to make good sense of the bad crazy blowing up around us. The usual. I’m sitting outside of Donkey Balls drinking coffee. The usual. She tells me that at 12:12p.m. on this day of 12/12/12, Kahunas will be doing a group mediation all around the island and holding ceremony on the volcano.
As I commiserate with her about the end of an age, whatever that ultimately means, and the idiocracy we’ve become, trying to find band-aid words to make her feel better, knowing that the real dilemma is the difference between what she wants to hear from me and what she needs to hear in herself, the manager comes bustling out of the store.
“The lights just went out. Did you do that,” he jokes.
Power outage. Not just the store, but the whole town. I tell Melissa this and we laugh nervously at the timing and wonder if the Kahunas are behind it. Then, the line goes dead. I try to call her back but my cell service is out. The manager’s, too–and he’s on a different phone plan.
Now that the power is out and cell towers are down I think, ‘I need to get home and be a part of this group meditation.’
I have about fifteen minutes and I live up the street so it’s no problem making the deadline, if there is one. I don’t know–I’ve never done a group meditation long distance, up close, or at all.
I strip down and stand in the middle of my bedroom. Fat, naked haole anticipating that magical energy that is more me than me taking over. Haven’t done this in far too long. In a snap it moves me around in poses and gestures and exercises that are mostly familiar. Some not. I am like this for about 2 hours.
Somewhere in there I start dancing hula. Hula dancing holds great and many meanings to the Hawaiian people but I am uneducated in those meanings. That doesn’t stop the body from dancing and expressing hula.
By the end of the 2 hours I’m resting on my side on my bed in a “lying Buddha” pose recognizable from statues. The body is wafting in a current of energy. This is typical more me than me behavior. The energy sits me up, stands me up. I’m sort of a half-and-half being: half me and still half more me than me. The normal me gets dressed and pours a glass of water. The more me than me observes every facet of those dull actions with great delight. Every movement of every joint; every scent with each step from room to room to out of the house… They’re all colors of one beautiful, joyous tapestry to more me than me.
I’m exhausted and exhilarated by an experience that does not exist in these descriptions. It exists between words, between sounds, like jazz. There is something about this energy and these movements that get me high, is the only way I can think to put it. But now I’m high and walking down the highway (no pun intended; just caught it in the reread.) Walking with purpose. Walking to the edge of town. Where am I walking to? I don’t know and I decide not to find out because, frankly, less me than me is like, “Fuck this. I’m not walking to the middle of nowhere and getting stranded.”
Where would I have ended up? I’ll never know.
As I sit and write this, not giving a shit that I sound like a crazy man, I can’t help but wonder if the Kahunas knew I was meditating with them. Do they all get in that zone, too? If so, I’m sure they know more about it than I. Perhaps they can use it in some way. Perhaps they phoned in the hula to this body and I served a function, holding it down in South Kona.
But then I think, ‘Wait a sec. Why would Hawaiian spiritual folks be doing anything at 12:12 on 12/12/12? Do they go by the Gregorian calendar? They’re holding ceremony on the 21st, too–How can they just switch to the Maya calendar like that?’
Now I wonder if what’s important aren’t dates so much as a vast quantity of human consciousness focused at once. People are focused on these two days. So maybe, if you know how, you can influence human consciousness by tapping it while it’s concentrating on a singular point. And maybe such concentration has its own influence, which is why holidays create an uptick in celebration as well as tragedy. Maybe these special days are when everything goes to eleven and so if you’re mentally deranged you’re more liable to succumb to your lesser impulses around the magical times of year.
I don’t know. All I know is that at 12:21a.m. on 12/21 I’ll be fat and naked again.
Ah… but will I dance the hula?
Peter Kingsley, Jiddu Krishnamurti, and Ken Wilber makes three. Three men from three different backgrounds who have come to understand the universal. I’m drawing attention to these folks for those of us who know there are deeper conversations about spirituality to be had than in church or in a New Age book.
It’s been said that cream rises to the top, but in the world(s) of mysticism and paranormal, it’s shit that floats. So, if you’re looking for something deeper than what you’ve had shot at you through the guns of pop gurus, check these guys out. And compare what Wilber says here about earth not needing our saving with what Tiokasin Ghosthorse said on Paratopia about the arrogance of thinking we need to save Mother Earth. These are not popular ideas. Truth never is. What we warp it into is what becomes the popular idea because the alternative to that is being Truth.
To speak it is to kill it. To be it is to be fully alive. Highfalutin words… until they aren’t.
