Trip To The Alien Vet

You know how we’re always looking at the content of high strangeness experiences to try to solve them? It makes sense to want to know what is going on, but more often than not we make an analogy to events in our normal everyday lives and instead of saying, “It’s like that,” we say, “It is that.”

For example, how many people have you heard sounding all smart to themselves for make the analogy between alien abductions and taking our pets to the veterinarian? These aliens treat us like we treat animals, they say, and so that must be what we are to them. Isn’t this declaration of what the unknown is and is doing really just cutting off a narrow slice of the story, making an analogy for it, and then immediately forgetting it’s just an analogy for that slice?

We want answers and we want them to make sense. This is clear. But might that be code for an even deeper unconscious motive on our part here? Might it be that forming coherent, knowable answers out of analogies is us doing anything we can to retain our outdated sense of reality in the face of great change?

Think about how we absorb new knowledge in any other context. What do we generally do with it? We bounce it off our databanks to see if we know what it is already. If we don’t, we form analogies to the nearest likeness. We judge its importance. We add it to our body of knowledge or discard it. So far this is the same as with high strangeness experiences, but here’s where paths diverge: with normal new knowledge, after hemming and hawing, we concede that we must change our perspective to meet what we’ve learned.

New knowledge–the type that changes everything in the field to which it pertains–changes us. Yet somehow, with high strangeness experiences, while experiencers may be changed, the public rarely is. Researchers rarely are. In fact, experiencers rarely are. This is because other types of knowledge may change us, grow us, have us learn and learn anew, but it is within a safe pretext–namely that we have a hold on reality and whatever we’re learning, it’s going to grow us, not shatter us. We will continue to exist as we’ve always defined ourselves and we will always be in control.

High strangeness tells us otherwise. Over and over again, otherwise. But we look at a facet of it, go, “You know, this looks a lot like that, therefore all of it is that,” and sit like dopes at conferences lapping it up. We run the program like broken robots. We refuse to be shattered because that’s crazy talk to our arrogant culture of self-worth and personal evolution.

Speaking of this looking like that, the that we were talking about in the beginning was a trip to the vet. And in a sense, although I see zero evidence that we are dealing with alien doctors, I’m not so sure what I’ve described here isn’t like the aftermath of a vet visit for scared animals. When my wife and I would bring our cats to the vet, they were scared out of their minds. They didn’t know what was going on. And after, when they came home and stepped out of their carriers onto familiar flooring, they’d confer with the other cats. They’d be sniffed by them, which told part of the story, I am sure. But the formerly terrified vet-visiting cat would inevitably tell the rest his story with great bravado. He’d walk around all puffed-chest confidence, as if telling the others what a hero he was for having survived the unknown. Cut to the next trip to the vet and he’s scared out of his mind again.

Our cats are not fundamentally changed by their trips to the vet even though in the moment (or the car ride and appointment) they are completely different cats. When they get home, that terror transforms into heroism, a story of which they are the center and in which they are brave. And then they go on being cats with zero interest in what just happened. All of their interest is in going on like nothing did.

The bridge they erect to run from terror to normalcy is their story. The difference between cats and us is that we’re married to our story. We’re in love with telling it over and over again. We don’t know that it is escapism.

Those who do come to understand that our new normal is always more of ourself are a rare breed, indeed.

You, As A Reader, Have Entered The Mystery

Are experiencers of high strangeness authors of the impossible, to steal a phrase from Jeff Kripal? Well, first questions first: Are our experiences about the actual, the possible, or the impossible and are we authors of anything at all?

I cheated. That’s two questions. Or four. But who’s counting?

Seems to me that if we’re retelling what actually occurred and we don’t know all of what actually occurred because some elements are missing for us, then we’re not retelling the actual. We’re retelling our reaction to something strange and telling what it means to us. So, we can nix the actual.

Within this whatever-it-is experience, are we shown, demonstrating, or otherwise conjuring the possible? Possibly. Perhaps there’s a dual meaning to having an element of our experience that is missing–which is that there’s something missing in us, or something of which we are on the cusp, and aliens are really movie trolls giving us spoilers to the film of our lives.

What about the impossible, then? Well, that one’s trickier because if we’re shown something impossible as though it is actual, or immersed in a hallucinatory virtual reality wherein we’re tricked into believing something impossible, then outside of another type of trolling, this would presumably be something done to us for us. For our benefit, perhaps, but definitely for us to work on. Maybe just to see what we do with it, see how it does or does not grow us.

Now, you may have tackled those questions before, so let’s swoop it around to a question you might have missed: What, if anything, is the role of the audience in this?

No story comes alive without an audience. And an experience that does not reveal what it actually is, that is itself a mystery, is nothing more than a story. But saying “nothing more” isn’t giving story credit for what it is: story is everything. Story is the living connection between author and audience, both of whom are writing it and filling it and themselves with meaning. So, if I’m an experiencer and I’m writing this and you’re a reader reading it, that means we’re writing the story together. I’m giving the words and my meaning and you’re also giving meaning and pondering to add or subtract words, or, less likely, say, “That’s perfectly stated.” We’re both editing it. We’re both giving life to it and therefore meaning to it and ourselves through the simple act of caring to engage by way of interest.

So then, what is the mystery intelligence with whom I have interacted to write this in the first place–and you’ve taken an interest in in the first place–doing, if not writing and editing and giving meaning along with us?

The intelligence is a catalyst, is clay, is a canvas–but it is not blank. I mean it’s not all freeform for you and me. There is some partially-recognizable event going on in the pre-first place that we’re riffing off of.

We treat alien abduction and paranormal contact at large as if they are one long chainmail going from nonhuman (or nonliving human) intelligence to experiencer to audience, but, as demonstrated here, this cannot be the case. There is no fully fleshed-out, fully-realized experience on the experiencer’s part. And so the experience does not “come alive” in the retelling the way an instruction manual does or a scientific formula or the recitation of one’s average day with people at the office. Or even a myth, for that matter, which has a universal subtextual consistency, even though the story’s surface varies, culture to culture.

No, high strangeness experiences are not what they appear to be. And their meanings are not written where you’d expect them to be–at the beginning, with what should be the intent of the original author, this intelligence bothering to interact with us.

The mystery is a mystery. The experiencer’s role in that mystery is a part of the mystery. The audience’s role in that mystery is a part of the mystery. What comes alive from this in story and why is also a mystery.

Mystery begets mystery and we’re all invited. That is as much actuality as can be stated about high strangeness phenomena.

Perhaps, then, trying to figure out what this intelligence is and what its motives are is the wrong direction, for not only is high strangeness experience not about what we want it to be about, its behavior might not even be compatible with how we typically think about behaviors.

I Am To Tell You This… on Sept. 15th

Ze book. She launches September 15th, no?

Yeeeees. 

And so the next JayVay entry about said book will be one o’ them youtube morsels that looks like an author in conversation answering questions, but will really just be me talking to you. I’ll talk around what the book is about—and how it came about—without spoilers. And then you’ll get super psyched about it and will be dying to buy it. But then you’ll remember that we’re heading into a depression and you have no money. But then you’ll also remember that dire situations like these never stop you from buying other crap you don’t need and you’ll buy it anyway.

That’s if you’re American. If you live anywhere else in the world, you’re probably doing fine. 

And then—wherever you are—I will thank you. In fact, let me thank you now. Thanks! 

Here’s another tidbit that didn’t make the cut. Hopefully, you will find it thought-provoking enough to wonder why such brilliance did not make it in. More likely, you will just go about your day. (Hey, I’m a realist at heart.)

A TIDBIT ABOUT EARTH

Earth is an organism with a very special gift. She is a portal planet, if you want to call her that. Sun gives life to Earth; Earth gives life to people; people give life to dimensions. Paradoxically, dimensions are the fundamentals of the universe in which Sun and Earth exist. So, while this all sounds sequential, like one plus one plus one, the entire equation is happening now. “Unfolding” is an action of now.

***

That’s it. See? I told you it was a tidbit. I don’t remember why I edited it out, but reading it back, it probably had to do with the fact that all “things” are composed of dimensionality, not just humans. However, humans give rise to dimensions in thought, not body alone. We are dimensions in both reality and virtual reality, where we can tinker with them, and perhaps, just perhaps, we can find a fluid sweet spot betwixt and between the two that converts one to the other. And I probably couldn’t find a way to say that without it feeling clunky.

Plus, I’ve got other shit to write about. 

I Am To Tell You This And I Am To Tell You It Is Fiction. Pick it up September 15th, wherever you get yer books.