Category Archives: Rants

A little Grinchiness (Sol Invictus)

I try really hard to be a good Dad and take an interest in every aspect of my son’s life. I’m not a fan of Christmas but I put up an ornate tree, buy presents and make an effort to give my son the best Christmas light tours that I can (which is what we did last night and what we’ll be doing tonight). When his mum was around, I tried hard to make Christmas special for her too. Every year we watch Polar Express and The Grinch and I read some of his favourite Christmas books out loud – just as I have been doing since his first Christmas. My son is almost 17 but in some ways, he’s still a little boy at heart. So I do all of these things for him because I think they’re the right things to do. But I really, really, really, detest Christmas !

I didn’t always feel that way. In fact as a small boy, I was always so excited about Christmas. It was by far, the best day of the year ! Even after I busted my mum filling my stocking, when I was ten. I still believed in the spirit of Christmas and that Santa was out there somewhere. Even in my early 20’s when I had a girlfriend, Christmas still seemed to feel special. But it was the one day of the year, that in many ways I felt most alone. My own family was scattered all around Australia and in Hong Kong and my girlfriends family hated me (and I largely hated them !).

Between the ages of 10-18, I would visit my dad in Hong Kong over the holidays and I’d get to experience Christmas on a huge scale. Even back in the 1980’s Hong Kong had the biggest and the best light shows and fireworks on the planet. For two weeks it was non stop lights, fireworks, crowds and shopping. But after a few years, it all began to become a bit tedious. First, there was the crowds – hundreds of thousands of people. And second, there was the endless obsession with stuff. I’d see millionaires pull up in their Roller’s and Bentley’s and Beamer’s and go home with a car chock full of stuff. People would be walking down the street with more bags than they could carry. And the taxis and Mass Transit Railway were jammed with people like a can of sardines. Then there was this other aspect that I was ALWAYS aware of. There were lots of people living on the street. Some of them were junkies and addicts of all kinds but many of them were on the street, through no real fault of their own. I remember walking through the night markets during Christmas (and at other times) and people would be splurging their money on gifts for Christmas and 10 meters away there would be people sleeping in cardboard boxes or on cold concrete. At that stage of my life, my Dad was kind of affluent by today’s standards (at least Ozzie standards) and so I felt this uneasy discomfort at being able to go home to a comfortable villa and having plenty of food to eat. Of course I never really benefited from my fathers wealth, so I also understood poverty. But right at that time, when I’d see these people, I’d feel like an imposter and like I didn’t deserve what I had (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome). I felt like I should try to help them. But the best I could do was to sneak off from my family and put a few coins in their cups or in their boxes.

At other times of the year, I’d go exploring Hong Kong – especially Kowloon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon ) and the Walled City (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City /https://soundcloud.com/roman-mars/99-invisible-66-kowloon-walled ). I was always struck by the extreme contrasts in how people lived – with the mega rich rubbing shoulders with those who lived on the streets and everything else in between. I had a suspicion, that some of the people living under the overpasses, in the drains, in the alleyways and streets and in the little patches of forest on top of the hills that dissected the city; were not necessarily good people. I had a sense of that but I didn’t understand it. Only years later would I learn that many of them were opium and heroin addicts and former triads. But most of them were just poor. Poor in spirit and poor in wealth. And many of them were disturbed mentally and emotionally. The only people that seemed to reach out to them were the Christine and Buddhist brothers and nuns, that ran small shelters for the sick and the poor. But they were stretched way beyond their resources, so many people missed out on the help they needed.

Later in India and the rest of south East Asia, I would see a different kind of poverty. But the impact on me was always the same. I felt like an imposter ! Walking around in good clothes, with food to eat and a place to sleep. And even though I felt a high degree of discomfort at seeing their suffering, I wasn’t ready to swap places !

In 1980 my parents split and the following year my Dad married a young flight stewardess from Malaysia. That year we spent Christmas in a Kampong near the town of Ipoh (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipoh). My step mothers family were incredibly kind to us and we heard countless tales about black magic and the supernatural. There were the spirit trees, who possessed the spirits of evil doers; the monkey ghosts – who’s disemboweled legless ghosts prowled the jungle for people with pure hearts; the headless tribesmen, who went looking for fresh heads to attach and the black cloud – a sentient dark amorphous cloud, that traveled through the jungle and into Kampong’s and peoples rooms, looking to steal your spirit. Not to mention the witches and sorcerers who lived in the many Kampongs that filled the jungle. I witnessed some very strange things during my stay and by the time Christmas arrived, I was thoroughly freaked out ! And when I woke up early on Christmas day, nothing happened. The day came and went without anyone noticing that it was Christmas. It was then I realized that to a Muslim, the 25th December is just another day on the calendar. Without meaning to do so, the people of Malaysia had crushed that special feeling I had carried for so many years.

Sometimes near Christmas time, my Dad would take my sister and I to another country for a few days. On the plane, I’d often see drunk Australians acting like dick heads and abusing fellow passengers and air crew. Invariably, my Dad would have to come down from the cockpit and sort them out. One time he even had to handcuff a guy who threatened to blow up the plane. The holidays (especially Christmas) were always the best times for dickheads !

By the time I arrived in adulthood, Christmas had transformed from a thing of mystical beauty into a thing of revulsion. Yet still I tried to enjoy it and to make it enjoyable for others. Last week I spent 2 days in Melbourne with my son, his girlfriend and his mum – looking at the Christmas lights and decorations and picking up a few presents. I had asked that no one get any gifts for me but my son went ahead and picked up a couple anyway. I would have rather been looking at the art galleries, the book shops, the botanical gardens and the state library. Anything but doing Christmas things ! But I did it because I care.

As we walked the streets, I began to notice a very familiar pattern. Scattered among the human rich streets, were several dozen homeless people. Some of them were begging and some of them were not. A couple were drunk or stoned and a couple were sleeping. A few of them had dogs that looked equally miserable, curled up next to them. I went to stop on several occasions, until my son and my ex wife gave me THAT LOOK, so I kept walking. But later, when we were inside some or other shop, I went back, under the pretense that I had to eat or pee (which is something I often have to do) and slipped 2 of them some money. It wasn’t much but it was a lot given I was strapped for cash myself. At one point I passed a young man who kept lowering his head and begging vigorously. Later I went back to him, gave him some money and said to him, “You’re better than this ! Don’t ever lower your head. You’re a human being, like everyone else. Have pride in who you are !”. He thanked me and started crying and shook my hand. I’ve met and worked with lots of people like him. My words probably didn’t make any difference but I wanted him to know that someone cares. Most of the time when I visit the city, I hand out $20-30 to a couple of people on the street. The next time I see them, most of them don’t recognize me but I always recognize them and say “hi” to them by name. A name is power and every human being deserves their own power. If I do one thing at all in Melbourne, I remember the names of the people I stop and talk to. Because everyone deserves the dignity of being remembered by name. I have a terrible memory for names but I remember people who had an impact on me.

My ex wife, my guides and Dude – all say to me that not everyone is worthy of being helped. And it’s true that not everyone is who they appear to be. Many people are on the streets by their own choice or by the outcome of their choices. The junky blows away his money, relationships and life by feeding his habit and filtering out everything else that matters. The alcoholic does the same thing. Both of them cause a trail of collateral damage everywhere they go. The man who hits his wife and hurts his children, sometimes gets evicted. The ex con sometimes has no place to go when he’s released from jail. But sometimes people get forgotten or displaced – the migrant who can’t find work; the son who can’t handle another day of school and runs away from home; the daughter who gets pregnant and has no place to go; the wife who can’t find a home after leaving the domestic violence shelter; the woman who sells her body to feed her kids; the man who has a mental breakdown at work and never goes home; the seeker who finally lost his way after seeing through the excitement of the Hare Krishna’s. Shit happens and people end up having to survive any way they can.

But we are all human and we all feel the same things ! Misfortune can happen to anyone. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me (1 Corinthians 15:10).

So here I was walking around the streets, feeling like an imposter again. And all around me the streams of humanity, walked on, as if noticing nothing. Indians, Chinese, Malays, English, Americans, Canadians, Australians and all the colours of the rainbow. Locals and tourists from every walk of life and every nation on Earth, enjoy Melbourne in the festive season. Melbourne is a city filled with affluence, especially affluent migrants (who buy there way to an education *) and the upper echelons of the Anglo Saxon world. All through the streets people walked on carrying huge loads of stuff ! Many of them people who came from countries that previously did not celebrate Christmas. And as I walked and listened to the conversations and witnessed the extravagance, it sickened me to the core.

As I followed my son and his girlfriend through the endless panoramas of the big department stores, plazas and arcades; I saw person after person arguing about what to get so and so for Christmas, other people splashing out big on themselves and people bumping one another and not apologizing.

A few days later I did the same thing with my son, in our nearest city (a place of over 100,000 people). It was so busy, that we had to park more than a kilometer from the main shopping district. Inside the shopping arcades, people walked around like mindless zombies, stopping here and there as if they were magnets flicking from one magnetic attraction to the next. In Big W, I asked one long haired young man how his day had been and he replied, that everyone was bad tempered, lots of old people had been rude to him and that several old guys had told him to get a hair cut. I encouraged him to ignore them. But honestly, a few days before Christmas and people think it’s OK to act like that.

I suppose I have three real gripes with Christmas. Why bother pretending to be nice one day a year and then being an asshole the rest of the year ? Why not be nice to one another all year long and buy gifts whenever the feeling arises ? And why splash out on material gifts at all ? Why not just do something nice for someone ? I mean really, this whole Christmas thing has gone way too far ! With so much of the world transforming The Birthday of the Unconquered Sun (Dies Natalis Solus Invicti – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sol_Invictus) into a orgy celebrating stuff, rather than the birth of Christ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas). I just don’t get it ! Imagine how much money is wasted during the so called festive season and the full environmental impact of Christmas on planet Earth ! For these reasons alone, Christmas is the polar opposite to what the man Jesus would have represented !

Don’t get me wrong I love the Christmas spirit and enjoy celebrating. And I’m a big fan of the Polar Express. But give me Krampus any day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krampus) !

My feeling is that Christmas is all about the human need for ritual and ceremony. Most people in the developed world have no real significant rituals or ceremonies in their lives. Especially those rituals and ceremonies that represent significant rights of passage transitions through the life span. In traditional societies, boys and girls and men and women, had rituals and ceremonies that marked the transition from one point in life to another. And many of these rights of passage experiences transformed individuals by imparting sacred knowledge. We have this idea in the modern world, that knowledge is a right. We just Google what we want to know ! But in traditional societies knowledge was given and earned, when an individual was ready. And some knowledge was appropriate for males and some knowledge was appropriate for females. When knowledge is given and earned, the one who receives the knowledge understands the full context of the knowledge and learns how integrate and use that knowledge respectfully. Today we don’t have that. Instead, people assume that knowledge is their god given right and that they can do what they want with their knowledge, whether it’s accurate or inaccurate. Today’s knowledge comes without any ethical framework for how to use it.

Perhaps in a similar vein, Christmas comes without any real understanding of what we’re celebrating. We do things because we’re stupid and because we crave something meaningful. Christmas offers us the opportunity of practicing rituals – like shopping; wrapping the gifts; putting up a tree; decorating a tree; hiding the presents; putting the presents under the tree; opening up the presents and seeing other people happy with what we’ve given them; cooking a meal for others; and enjoying a fest together. Not to mention the feeling that comes with the preparation for these rituals and the ceremony that is Christmas. Of course Christmas also offers Christians the chance to remember the birth of Jesus and to ruminate on the myths of the man-god who has come to us through history and who will save us at the end of all history ! 😉 But mostly, I think for most people, Christmas offers us the chance to remember the things that really matter. Something that many people seem to be out of touch with. And something I’ve been trying to capture in my documentary film ( https://www.facebook.com/Before-I-Die-479800745376707/ / https://www.facebook.com/Before-I-Die-479800745376707/photos_stream?ref=page_internal).

Whatever it is that matters most to us, we seem to have masked it with the pretense that lights, trees, decorations and gifts will make everything OK. Rather than dealing with real problems in real ways that count, we turn away and gloss over them with pretentiousness. Dude continues to remind me that ETs are not compassionate. They just do what they do. They don’t have to make extra effort to show compassion. That’s a human problem and one that’s very unique to us. If we were altruistic in the truest sense, we wouldn’t need to give gifts during Christmas. We would care all the time about the needs and feelings of others. And let’s face it, we don’t. That’s why people can screen out the suffering of others and why people on the street go unnoticed and hungry. Ironically perhaps the people who best embody the spirit of Christmas live in countries that largely do not celebrate Christmas. Which is why some of the best Christian I’ve ever met, were Buddhists and Muslims and Hindus and Atheists.

I sometimes wonder how many victims get sacrificed on the altar of Christmas, in this temple of decay ?

It’s the day before Christmas I’m feeling a little Grinchy and like a bit of a Scrooge. I’ve tried my best to embrace Christmas for my entire life. But I’m over it ! I’ll be happy to get a piece of coal in my stocking ! 😉

Brightless Brighticus Garlicus.

* Since our federal government did away with free tertiary education in 1989, Australian tertiary education has become a buyers market; where universities, desperate to source enough funding, lift their quotas of international students, knowing full well, it will bring in a healthy revenue. Making the situation much more competitive and difficult for Australian students, who pay up front or through student loans. Ditching free education and opening the gateway to almost unlimited numbers of international students, has made tertiary education almost unafforable. With many students leaving university with what will become life long debts, that will impact on their ability to maintain healthy financial credit records and which will, in time I believe, lead to discrimination between those with an educational debt and those without it. Meanwhile since 1989, federal government spending on defense has increased from $ 7.7 Billion to 31.9 Billion this financial year.

Posted in Rants

4 Comments

Tags: beggars, Bright Garlick, ceremonies, ceremony, Christianity, Christmas, ET and I, materialism, oneness, poverty, rites of passage, ritual, street people

The TommyKnockers and Out of the Silence

Dec 13

Posted by brightgarlick

In 1987 I read The TommyKnockers by Steven King (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tommyknockers) , just after I’d read Whitley Strieber’s Communion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communion_(book)). At the time I just thought it was a bit of old fashion fun. I wasn’t a big horror fan but I enjoyed the book. King’s book tells the story of a buried alien spacecraft that once discovered, transforms the local towns people into aliens. It reminded me a lot of a much older book called Out of the Silence, which was written by Australian author Erle Cox in 1925 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erle_Cox / http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0604821.txt). Out of the Silence tells the story of an unearthly being who has been buried for millions of years and her malevolent plan for the human race. Both books explore similar themes and emphasize an alien agenda.

When I look back, it seems obvious to me that one or both books probably influenced The X Files (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_X-Files) and to a large extent they influenced the development of the Grey Alien mythology which became firmly embedded in western culture in the late 80’s early 90’s. In much the same way that TV shows like V from the early 80’s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_(1983_miniseries) / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_(1984_TV_series)) , influenced the development of the Reptilian mythology.

If you really want to understand the Grey and the Reptilian phenomenon, look back over the history of science fiction and horror in literature and film and you’ll see all the hallmarks of the modern alien abduction phenomenon at the hands of malevolent aliens. It’s an old story that we humans love to tell ourselves but it has nothing to do with reality.

Posted in Alien Mythologies, Rants

Kodachrome Tomfoolery

May 12

Posted by brightgarlick

I might be wrong but I side with Dude, who said some months ago the so called ET in the Roswell Kodachrome slides was a fake. The following presents some pretty good evidence to support Dude’s claim :

http://www.roswellslides.com/.

Posted in Rants

2 Comments

Tags: Kodachrome, Kodachrome slides, Roswell, Roswell alien

Why John Mack was wrong about Mental Illness and ET contact

Feb 25

Posted by brightgarlick

Some of you will recall me saying that I don’t believe in the concept of mental illness. I see it as a form of social engineering, constructed on the basis of clustering of symptoms. In fact, for me, the idea of mental illness, seems to be about grouping symptoms and saying “these aspects of the human condition, taken to the extreme, are not normal, let us label them and treat them as if they were like physical illnesses”. Which of course begs the question of what is the human condition and what is normal. Now this is a huge subject and I could write a book on how the American Psychiatric Association and it’s bible The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders) has taken control of the human condition and fucked the world over. So for now I will just say that I don’t believe in the concept of mental illness but I do believe in a lack of self-awareness and cognitive disturbances. The fact that drug companies provide almost a third of the APA’s budget and support many of the interventions recommended by the APA/DSM, further demonstrates how the human condition has been commodified and supports some very dirty business, that I believe is being actively orchestrated from above and within. Of course many people who work with people in the mental health field are just doing their job as best as they can. They know little about alternative ways of seeing the human condition and have been conditioned to think that mental illness is as valid as physical illness. Personally, I wonder how we can even conceive of mental illness, when we can’t even clearly define what mental or mind is ! How can we categorize and define illnesses when we don’t even have a good understanding of the basis of mind or mental states ? I just don’t get it !

I remember somewhere in John Mack’s Passport to the Cosmos (the best book I know on ET contact) or on his website, I read about how they came to study the 200 odd abductees/experiencers who were part of their project and in it I recall a very interesting point that has been looked over. I think it was Roberta Colasanti, who was John Mack’s trusted offsider (and a very competent clinical social worker in her own right), who indicated how they screened out people who had obvious psychological problems. I wish I could find the exact details of that but I can’t. So I would like to talk to that point because I think it’s critical to the perception of ET contact and how we see the ETs.

So if I understand this correctly, John Mack’s research team went looking for people who claimed to have ET contact and they screened out people with obvious psychological problems. Then in one of the Program for Extraordinary Experience Research (PEER) studies, they looked at the prevalence of mental illness among the group of abductees/contactees they were working with, compared to the normal population. They discovered that 17 % had depressive symptoms, 1 % had schizophrenia and 1 % had bipolar disorder. That seems like a reasonable finding to me. The question I suppose that begs to be asked, is do these so-called mental illnesses, represent distortions in how people perceive reality ? I don’t know the answer to that but I suspect that sometimes the answer is yes !

In Blowing the Western Mind (http://johnemackinstitute.org/1991/09/blowing-the-western-mind/) John Mack says :

“Psychiatric evaluations and psychological studies of abductees, including several of my own cases, have failed to identify consistent psychopathology. Abductees may, of course, suffer from mental and emotional distress as a result of their often traumatic experiences, and a few have been found to have accompanying psychiatric conditions. Many come from troubled family backgrounds. But in no instance has the emotional disorder provided an explanation for the abduction experience.”

I really respect John Mack but I am not sure how he reached the conclusion he states in that final line. I think sometimes a lack of self awareness/cognitive disturbances, can account for some experiences. Although I agree with him that no consistent psychopathology seems to present itself among abductees.

In Why the Abduction Experience Cannot be Explained Away Psychiatrically (http://johnemackinstitute.org/1992/06/why-the-abduction-phenomenon-cannot-be-explained-psychiatrically/), John Mack says :

“With these basic aspects of the abduction phenomenon in mind let us consider once again the above diagnostic possibilities. Any form of psychosis can be ruled out simply on the grounds that abductees, with rare exceptions, are clinically quite normal, and, despite the stress related to their abduction experiences, generally function well in society. Three of my own cases that I have subjected to an extensive battery of psychological tests were diagnosed as mentally healthy. Psychoneurosis can be ruled out by the fact that abductees do not appear to suffer from the sorts of intense personal conflict that characterizes the neuroses. Similarly, the experiences cannot be explained as fantasies since they do not appear to relate to other aspects of the subjects personality or emotional life.”

So here’s where I disagree with Dr Mac. Psychosis (lets call it a lack of self-awareness and cognitive disturbance) cannot be ruled out because John Mack’s team filtered out the people who were most appropriate to their research. So what about all the other people who claim to have abduction experiences or meet Reptilians training for war in underground car parks or Mantids that are actually their mother ? I’ve been on the ARNET/the internet since 1991 (maybe 92 ?), and remember talking to so-called abductees on news groups right back at the beginning. I’ve also worked with a diverse group of hundreds of people in psychotherapy and have heard many stories of abduction. I’ve also met many people in passing and people I know well, who tell stories of abduction. And to be honest, many of these people who tell these stories are clearly unwell and suffering from a lack of self awareness and some sort of cognitive disturbance. I mean, I have heard some real crazy stories from people you would not trust to be in the same room as your pet. Then I’ve met people with good jobs and normal families who are clearly missing something. Something is not quite right in their cognitive functioning ! And yet, there are many people also, who lack awareness and have cognitive disturbances and people who are perfectly healthy in their heads, who are having ET contact. Just because you have some problem in the psyche, doesn’t mean you’re not having contact. But it’s the quality of the narrative about the experience and the narrative about the person’s life, that to me, is the give away.

So lets imagine that everything we know about ET contact and ETs comes from personal experience and what other people tell us. There are people in real life and on the internet, who have wounded psyche’s, who are convinced they are having contact, totally oblivious to the distortions being created in their minds. These people’s stories are mixed in with everyone elses stories. And if you look at the themes which come through about ET contact and the nature of the ETs, you can recognize some of the themes that are coming through from people who lack self-awareness and who are deluded. They stand out a mile away. But then you add a little bit of disinformation, you add a lot of stupidity and lack of discernment and you add the different kind of fears that people hold in their hearts and the conditioning of certain religions and you have one big fucking mess !

So I think that if we are to investigate this subject and we really want to know about the prevalence of mental illness (lack of self-awareness/cognitive disturbances), we need to look honestly at the whole population of people claiming contact. Any research into the subject of mental illness among professed abductees/contactees, must develop a sense of looking at the whole picture because it’s the whole picture that’s creating many of the stories, ideas and myths that pass as true – whether they are or are not.

Taking John Mack’s side, I think it’s important we drop the label of mental illness and start looking at what the so-called ET contact experience says about the nature of real contact experiences and imagined contact experiences. And I think the best way to do that using the tools we have now, is through Transpersonal Psychology. Of TP wikpedia says (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transpersonal_psychology) :

“Transpersonal psychology is a sub-field or “school” of psychology that integrates the spiritual and transcendent aspects of the human experience with the framework of modern psychology. It is also possible to define it as a “spiritual psychology”. The transpersonal is defined as “experiences in which the sense of identity or self extends beyond (trans) the individual or personal to encompass wider aspects of humankind, life, psyche or cosmos”.^[1] It has also been defined as “development beyond conventional, personal or individual levels”.”

Normal psychological models are hopelessly inadequate and ill equipped to embrace the totally of the ET contact experience. They either pathologize the experience of the human condition or frame it in the context of what is considered normal or acceptable by societies standards. Further in Blowing the Western Mind Dr Mack says :

“The fact is that academic departments of psychology and psychiatry, and even therapeutic models, are dominated by a mechanistic, dualistic view of the psyche based on the Newtonian/Cartesian world view. Defenses and rigidly defined mental structures, compartmentalized divisions of the psyche, and self/other or self/object dichotomies are the stuff of everyday discourse in the psychology and mental health fields. However, change is occurring gradually, due to the influence of several factors: experiential and growth-promoting transformational models, the transpersonal psychology movement, the introduction of non-Western healing methods, a new emphasis on spirituality in therapeutic dialogue, and the feminist-inspired emphasis on relationship and connection. But fear of subjectivity and “mysticism,” confusion of spirituality with traditional religion, reliance on exclusively sensory/empirical or cognitive/intellectual knowledge, and habitual dependence on quantifiability for academic respectability and advancement have made the psychology professions particularly slow to move toward the new world view.

New psychological or, more accurately, psycho-spiritual, approaches are helping to accelerate the shift in world view within the psychology field. These techniques include meditation; various bodywork techniques; Grof breathwork; affectively powerful art, music, and dance; new forms of educational mentoring; men’s and women’s experiential workshops; and the judicious use of psychedelic agents. All share the healing and assumption-shattering power of nonordinary states of consciousness. By reaching affectively to the deepest levels of self-awareness, these methods release creative psychic energies and, most important, overcome the dualities that the Western mind has assumed are the only ways of experiencing reality. These techniques also bring us into contact with spiritual realities outside the material world, force us to confront the cycles of birth, death, and rebirth, cut through the intensity of our attachment to the material world, and allow us to discover our true place in the universe.”

So, as Dr Mack so elegant suggests, we do have the tools to understand this phenomenon. But what really matters is how the tools help us to interpret the phenomenon. When, for example, is a professed experience of ET contact, reflecting projections from within the psyche, in an attempt to express some deep inner need and when does it reflect an actual encounter with something outside the small self ? Or when, for example, does a professed experience of ET contact, suggest an encounter with something physically tangible in this reality or an encounter something equally real in another reality. And what about when an encounter suggests that something is both without and within ?

I don’t believe any research into the ET contact phenomenon, has any real value, unless we look back at ourselves and ask “How do I interpret this, why do I interpret it this way and what does this mean to me ?”. Tools like TP show us that we live in a far greater reality than we are led to believe.A reality that is both subjective and objective. A reality that is within and without. The real difficulty for those interested in learning the truth, is how to discover when experience is purely subjective and when experience is both subjective and objective – in some discernible way. Perhaps this is where the greatest difficulty lay, in that ET contact often takes us beyond ordinary states of consciousness and outside the realm of what is believable or accessible to others. Somewhere in all of this, there is a fine line between real and unreal, actual and imagined.

Although I disagree with the fundamental conclusion John Mack had about the prevalence of so called mental illness, I believe that he was a pioneer in thinking about how we could approach the phenomenon of ET contact. If only John Mack was still here to light the way !

Channeling your inner Bright Garlick

Feb 23

Posted by brightgarlick

This might sound a little egotistic but I like how My Name used his inner Bright Garlick and the questions he came up with regarding our perceptions of our ET friends and ourselves : http://getcrn.ning.com/forum/whats-in-a-question . I think they are critical questions that are worth asking.

We need to continually ask questions to discover who we are, before we try to discover what others “out there” are. I’ve always argued that the best way to know our cosmic family is through self awareness.

When we look at many of our ideas about ETs, what we see is not the reality of how they are, but the reality of how we are !

So if you were channeling your inner Bright Garlick, what questions might you ask ?

😉

Posted in Rants

2 Comments

Why I don’t report my UFO sightings or ET contacts

Feb 15

Posted by brightgarlick

Twice in my life I have attempted to report UFO sightings and on both occasions, no one returned my call. But regardless of this, over the years I have developed this sense that these are MY EXPERIENCES. I don’t need to tell someone else what I’ve seen and have them come out and document my experience. What would I gain from that ? People don’t have researchers document their sightings of angels or ghosts or hearing the voice of God or something invisible call their name do they ? Maybe they do and my head is just out of the loop ! ET contact is very personal to me. I am happy to share my experiences but the last thing I want is someone to come point a science stick in my face and compile a report of my UFO sighting or ET contact ! I suppose there is the argument of doing it to benefit humanity but is it necessary to document what a person saw or experienced for a network of people who wish they were having their own experiences or feel alone because they are having experiences ? I’m not really sure that I see value in groups like MUFON, that seem to be dominated by egotistic personalities and hijacked by the ideas of popular culture and what’s hot and what’s not !

So now I’ll say something you may see as a contradiction.

I have decided that I will pursue the Global ET Contact Research Network because I think it’s important that we discover more about what ET contact teaches us about who we are. I can learn nothing through this network about the ETs. I don’t really see a personal benefit in this network, which is one of the reasons I almost dropped the whole thing. I learn through my contact experiences. But I can learn about people through looking at their experiences. And I think that’s the information that has greatest value to humanity and that’s the information that is most lacking. John Mack was the only person to get close to that approach to researching this subject. If along the way, the masses learn more about the ETs and the truth of our cosmic family, all well in good. But it’s the human element that matters most to me.

So do I think that reporting a UFO or a contact experience has any value at all ? I’m not sure but I can see value in knowing that a certain place has had sightings or contacts. One of the things I did many years ago, was cross-reference places in Australia where crop circles had been reported and places in Australia where UFOs or ET contacts had been reported. It helped me to map certain suspicions I had and to validate those suspicions. But do I think every person who witnesses these phenomenon ought to make a report ? No, of course not. It is up to them to decide how personal the experience feels to them. Each person ought to ask themselves, “Why do I need to report this ?” and decide whether it’s in their best interests first. Bugger humanity, think about your own needs first.

Is my attitude contradictory ? Yes. But it’s OK to have contradictions ! I’m human after all !

Posted in Rants

9 Comments

Tags: aliens, ETs, MUFON, rants, UFO reporting, UFOs

Our Cosmic Family

Feb 15

Posted by brightgarlick

Afra from Tarazat Films (https://www.youtube.com/user/Tarazatfilms/about) has apparently put some of my audio into this brief video. I can’t remember when I said this but I stand by what I said then. The cosmos is teeming with compassionate life forms. I think whatever I said then, pretty much sums up how I see ETs and many of our responses to them.

It’s a bit weird when you see or hear yourself re-quoted or in someone elses work ! It’s like, “Do I know this guy ? Oh, it’s me !”

Thanks Afra.

Posted in Rants

3 Comments

Tags: aliens, Bright Garlick, ETs, Tarzat Films

Base Lines, inheriting fuckedupness, ideas, contagions and memes

Feb 13

Posted by brightgarlick

There are all kinds of base lines. Behavioural base lines in psychological states, base lines in financial needs, base lines in biology, baselines in construction, base lines in medicine, bass lines in music and a host of kinds other bass lines. Base lines are a kind of zero point, a kind of comparative ground zero, a kind of point of reference.

When I was growing up as a young boy in the city of Adelaide, I used to go on holidays up the coast and I spent days wading through the rock pools, exploring all the amazing life forms that lived there. The pools were teaming with fish, crabs, shellfish, blue ring octopus, and loads of weird crustaceans. When I went for a walk in the hills behind where we lived, I could walk all day, without ever seeing a soul and entertain myself with unbroken wheat fields and forests. When we went out, we knew there were bad people around (like the one’s that committed the Truro Murders : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truro_murders) but mostly we enjoyed our freedom and rarely thought about locking our doors or being scared of strangers. I was lucky enough to grow up with ABBA, Wings, KISS, Nana Mouskouri, Freddy Fender, John Denver, Slim Dusty, The Bee Gees, Suzie Quatro, Elton John, The Jackson Five, Michael Jackson and disco. Is aw the first 3 Star Wars movies when they first came out; I had a dial phone I could feel turning before I was connected to a voice; I watched Paul Hogan in the outdoor cinema fondle the breasts (tits back then) of a topless woman before he was Crocodile Dundee; saw the best movies from the comfort of my car at the local drive inn; was awe struck by the BBC Micro and Apple Mac; played Paddle Tennis on the first console; paraded my Sonny Walkman like I was a God; had the first digital watch I had ever seen (A Texas Instruments red LED watch my Dad picked up in the US); watched nudity on Number 96 in black and white; spent my afternoons lazing in front of Gilligan’s Island, Roger Ramjet, Astro Boy, Bewitched, Gomer Pile, Bonanza, Get Smart and a dozen other popular shows; hung out with Fat Cat, Humphrey B Bear, Basil Brush and Mr Squiggle; spent my summers watching and playing cricket; celebrated Australia winning the Americas Cup; thought Mad Max was scary as fuck; and basically had an awesome childhood that was abruptly interrupted by my parents getting divorced and my getting dumped in boarding school. All of this was my BASE LINE. I no nothing else. And it is against this I contrast my everyone elses life and use to make sense of my early life.

So, now I look at how the world has changed and the rock pools are no longer teaming with life; television has gone HD, thin and live; my old stomping ground is now a never ending suburb; the world is seething with dangers and threats; Star Wars in now pushing up episode 7; Disco is Dead; Hashtags and tablets have replaced the chunky radial phones I once loved; Paul Hogan has a new face and doesn’t touch anyone’s tits in public; I no longer give a fuck about a Yacht race; I look at weddings and wonder if they’ve had any relationship counselling before getting married; see that the burbs are no longer the cool places I thought they were but represent an unconstrained explosion of the human population; and now know that many characters on children s programs were pedophiles, tax cheats and homosexuals yearning to come out of the cupboard. The world is a vastly different place now to what it was when I was growing up. And yet, and yet – people are fundamentally the same.

I have spent a great deal of my life talking to people of all ages. When I listen to people who are older than me, I realize that I inherited a different base line to them. And when I listen to people who are younger than me I realize that they have inherited a different base line to me. They inherit fuckedupness in the same way that I and my generation did, because they don’t know any different. In the state of Victoria, there is now only 12 % of the original vegetation and it is rapidly dissapearing. 150 years ago – 7 generations ago, much of the original vegetation was intact. in 3 or 4 generations, there may only be 1 % of the original vegetation intact, unless drastic conservation measures remain in place – measures which constrain the growth of the human population in this state. But for my great grandchildren whatever vegetation that remains, will be part of their base line. It will be all they know.

So here we are in 2015. Every generation that is alive now will be dead in 150 years and the people of 2164 will inherit a different set of base lines than the ones that each of the current generations alive experience or accept.

Our current technology provides us with the opportunity to change so much. Everything, except perhaps human nature. Technology is helping us to share and evolve new ideas, to catch contagions just as we catch yawns and the lawn mowing contagion on a Sunday afternoon and share memes just as we share the Hashtag meme in our technology and language and the romantic ideal of the Alien Disclosure meme. Our base lines are evolving with our technology and what we accept as society and culture.

One such base line that we currently live with and many people accept, is that we live in a world, in which beings from other worlds are starting to interact with us. Some people see them as a threat, some don’t know what they represent, some see them as our saviours and some see them as our cosmic family. Our base lines vary according to our conditioning.

Think of each of our individual and collective base lines as ever evolving and transforming fractal lines. Each base line creates further and further diversification and consolidation.

One such base line includes the idea that we are being visited and controlled by Reptilians and Greys and that there is a Galactic Federation of Light and Indigo Children and Crystal Children and Hybrid Children and a never ending war of good versus evil. All of these bizarre ideas are laying the foundation for new base lines in future generations. Base lines or points of reference that will be so foreign and bizarre to many of us , that we will scarcely believe what people will believe in the future.

We are creating reality in every moment. It is our choice how to perceive reality and what to believe and what to remember. Our base lines become what we allow them to be. So just what will we allow our base lines to become ? What will we allow to become our normal ? Do we wish to live in a world dominated by fear and a belief in dark controlling forces that extinguish our human will ? Or do we wish to live in a world dominated by compassion and a belief in the power of choice and good will ? What ever choices we make individually and collectively , will be reflected in our base lines and in the outer world we create. It will be reflected in the well being of people and the well being of our planet.

So how would you like your base lines to feel ? Groovy, cool, dark, uplifting, imaginative, chaotic, symphonic, transformative ? If you want to know where we’re heading talk to people outside of your own age group. Find out how older folks see their baselines and then find out how young people feel about their base lines ? See what patterns you can notice and from their you will see the face of the future.

Posted in Rants

1 Comment

Tags: aliens, base lines, baselines, contagions, ETs, ideas, memes

Extreme Journeys Into the Heart

Nov 15

Posted by brightgarlick

Many years ago, I was a keen long distance runner. I had dreams of doing a solo crossing of Australia after I read my first Novel “Flanigan’s Run” and I watched 61 year old dairy farmer Cliff Young run the first Sydney to Melbourne race in 1983. But age, a child, losing a kidney and tumours put a stop to all that. From time to time the dream comes to visit but I think it’s just youthful fantasy ! If ever I did it, I would walk and walk very slowly.

Ever since I was young, I have been fascinated with other people who go on extreme journeys. For a long time I was fascinated with Antarctic journeys and read everything I could on the subject. I also read about journeys to the Arctic. My favourite books were :

Scott’s Last Journey by Peter King http://www.amazon.com/Scotts-Journey-Robert-Falcon-Scott/dp/006019670X
With Scott to the Pole http://www.amazon.com/With-Scott-Pole-Expedition-1910-1913/dp/0747569681
Icemen : A History of the Arctic and Its Explorers by Mick Conefrey and Tim Jordan http://www.amazon.com/Icemen-Mick-Conefrey/dp/0752224476
We Die Alone by David Howarth http://www.amazon.com/We-Die-Alone-Escape-Endurance/dp/1599210630
The Voyage of the Narwhal by Andrea Barrett (fiction) http://www.amazon.com/The-Voyage-Narwhal-A-Novel/dp/0393319504.

I was conscious that most people who went to the poles were either extremely driven ego maniacs, people in search of something elusive or people who wanted to discover themselves.

I’ve always wanted to go to Antarctica but it’s not easy to get a foot in the door. You have to have something significant to contribute to your field of endeavour. i thought I’d eventually get there as a writer (not this type of writer !). Gone are my days of scientific research and studying people. But who knows, anything is possible.

People take on extreme journeys for all kinds of reasons but often it’s for a special cause – the environment, gay rights, global warming, against the war, indigenous rights, women’s rights, cancer etc. You name it, someone is out there taking an extreme journey for that cause. Forrest Gump’s followers were a testament to that ! You can run, ride or walk wearing nothing at all or dress up as your favourite character. You can do it solo, with a team or have someone tag along to look out for you.

Humans take on all kinds of extreme journeys. We make the body move by running, walking, running or walking backwards, swimming, flying through the air or climbing. And then we fly, sail, dive, climb or do things to the body to break down the ego (or strengthen it). We take journeys to find ourselves (not that we were ever lost), to raise awareness, to provoke a response, to grow spiritually, to see what our body’s and mind’s can endure, to be the first or follow in the footsteps of others, or to find God. We always seem to have a reason. But sometimes like Forrest Gump, we take extreme journeys for no reason at all. At least it seems that way at the beginning.

Sometimes our extreme journeys help us to grow up or to evolve spiritually and sometimes they seem to help us to escape who we think we are, the places we came from, people we no longer want in our lives, our past and all the things that would confine us. But no matter how hard we try, we are still who we are and the I is still the I.

I know a woman who has climbed the highest mountains on every continent. But when she’s home for more than a month, she gets severely depressed. So she rushes off to help children in Nepal or somewhere else exotic, oblivious to the needs of poor Aboriginal children in her own community. I once met a man who traveled with nothing but a bible, offering the word of God to anyone who would listen.

Sometimes we undertake extreme journeys because we have to. My father used to fly P-3C Orions around across the oceans that surround Australia doing maritime surveillance. He’d frequently fly for 12 or more hours, doing his job, protecting our country. Later he would fly some of the longest commercial airliner routes in the world. He’d come home exhausted and then do it all again a few days later. One of my uncles used to be a truck driver and for many years he drove from Melbourne to Perth and then back to Melbourne and up to Brisbane and back to Melbourne again.A total of 10,400 km in less than a week. Today he only drives 900 km per day 4 days a week. I had a cousin in the country who used to travel 200 km each way to school, before the school on the air was available. And no doubt you’ve heard about children in many remote regions of the world, going to extreme lengths and taking extreme risks, just to get an education.

But it’s not just humans, who take on extreme journeys. Many animal species do too. When I lived on the coast I heard about eels who leave the mouth of the Hopkins River in Warrnambool (southern Victoria) and travel to the Timor Sea (on the far north west coast of Australia) – a journey that might be close to 10,000 km each way and recently a cousin of mine, told me that she has been doing DNA profiling on a lobster that travels from Western and Eastern Tasmania, all the way to New Zealand (a one way journey of almost 7 hours by plane). When I was on the coast I was fortunate to witness one half of the life of the Short Tailed Shearwater, a bird that migrates 15,000 km up to the Aleutian Islands near Alaska.

A few years ago I passed a man on the highway, who I had seen on television. He was from Queensland and had travelled 2,500 km on foot to visit his sister here in Victoria. He lived on the road, where he ate the odd roadkill and food and drink that other people had tossed out of their car windows. I always wanted to talk to him but I never could find him again. I can only imagine the taunts he endured and the dangers he escaped. But most of all I am curious about what forces a man into such an extreme journey of isolation from his fellow human beings. That man spent more than 20 years living on the road. He liked his own company and the freedom of being a “man without an official identity.” Such people exist everywhere on Earth.

People also take on extreme journeys of deprivation to cleanse some part of themselves. They go without water or food or air or sunlight in the misguided belief that they will reach some point of enlightenment or perfect health. In a more ordinary way, people everywhere go on diets to cleanse their heart, their liver, their gall bladder, their brain. You name it, there’s a diet for some problem. Some of you will have heard of the Indian Aghori – an extreme sect of Sadhus, who eat human flesh and excrement and do all kinds of objectionable things, because they believe they are one with everything and that they will merge with the absolute, if they lose all sense of identity and the need to protect the self. Such an extreme journey, seems to miss the point of the Buddha’s teaching on the middle way (the avoidance of extremes) and seems to me to reflect deep conditioning and a lack of awareness of the possibilities for human experience.

Many years after Cliff Young finished running ultramarathons, I drove past him not far from where he lived in Beech Forest. I gave him a big wave and he waved back. He ran in gum boots most of the time or crappy KT26 sneakers (the Kmart el cheapo). But when I saw him that day, I saw a man who loved what he did. He didn’t need a reason to do it.

I’ve heard of all kinds of journeys. And no doubt you’ve experienced some of them your self or met others who have undertaken them. We are all on a journey somewhere. Our ultimately journey will take us from the separate self, back to the Greater Self, when all sense of individuality merges into the Light. But until then, anything is possible, as part of the human condition.

We sure are a weird mob !