John Mack

COPYRIGHT CANADIAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION

INTERVIEW WITH J. MACK 2

in my own heart of hearts, I know something is going on of extraordinary importance here. I don't claim to understand it, I don't even call it extraterrestrial. I don't have language for it. It just know that there's some kind of experiential energy force, beings, intelligence, whatever you want to say, that are entering people's lives, powerfully affecting them. They are authentically reacting with the extraordinarily intense emotions when you give them an opportunity to express, ah, express that. And there simply is nothing in the psychiatric field that can begin to account for it. It's a mystery of the most extraordinary proportions. And part of me, the naive, innocent part of me, says, Why doesn't the profession grasp this, why are they so busy trying to demonstrate that it's child abuse, it's, it's, you know, their parents did this, their mother did this, you know, they've been raped, and they've displaced it on to the - they know better. They know that displacement is an adaptive, coping function, it doesn't invent whole realms of being consistently among thousands of people who don't know each other. It's not what displacement does. They know better. And yet they are so , for some reason, frantically trying not to let this in as some kind of powerful, authentic mystery that they will make up the craziest stretchings of the familiar procrustian beds of their own field to try to fit this into it. And, you know, I'm just astounded at that, in part of my mind. The other part of my mind understands it completely. That's what people do, you know. That's the way ideology works, that's the way world views work . That's what wars are about, wars are about fighting over points of view. The early Christian church had this, ah, you know large numbers of people were excommunicated if not killed over whether Christ was one being, or two beings.

I understand that ideologies are these, ah, structures of thought that, ah allow people to feel that they can control and understand the world they live in and not face the anxieties of the mysteries of the unknown, and this is why debates over fine points of dogma, like in the early Christian church where they're, they're, whether Christ was one being, or two beings led to - if not excommunica- more than excommunication, actually killings and wars over the point of view about the fine points of, ah, religious eschatology. So I know what it's about. And yet - I always think that when presented with information that so clearly is something of the unknown, something that should stretch us, that people will do that. But they don't do that. They , they're so busy trying to place it in some familiar context. And, worse yet, what they tend to do when they can't do that is they then attack - in our modern form of attack, which is called analysis - the person who brings the unwelcome challenge to what they already believe.

so I haven't been badly dealt with, really, except behind my back. I mean, but, I hear second-hand people are saying behind my back, What's going on? There's nothing to this. And they don't even bother to look at the - a lot of people don't even bother to look at the data. They don't even want to hear about the data. I mean, I was, uh, a friend of mine, ah, the other night at dinner, I mean he basically said to me, Look, I don't care what the information is. What you are reporting is not possible that we can be invaded by extraterrestrials because the space-time coordinates don't work out, and the idea that this could be something entering from another dimension is simply - there's no room in his ideological structures to let that in at all. And, ah, it's a little scary because, you know, if something is, - @@ I think we, it's come to me, and I've sort of known this, but people are more attached to their world view than they are to one another. And that's a really rather terrifying notion.

I mean, the friendship will go before the worldview goes. Intimate friendships will be lost, rather than somebody thinking, Maybe my friend has something that I have to think about.

there's a way in which, by limiting and controlling our world we maintain some equilibrium, some sense of comfort. Ah, we don't let in too much. Um, so stretching of who we are to the unknown, to forms of intimacy that stretch us beyond what we've known, that's scary, that's - you can't tell who might come in next. It's kind of like leaving your - you know, you lock up your house and you close all the windows because the world is a dangerous place, even though it really probably has very little bearing on whether anybody ever steals your goods or not, you know. So it's like this sense of you can control your world, your environment. The fear of loss of control is so fundamental. Now, in a general sense - now in this particular phenomenon , the alien abduction experience - it threatens the control in the most profound way. First of all, it - if the, if the - if we are not alone, as the primary intelligence in the universe, we are an intelligence. We're not even necessarily the preeminent intelligence on earth, but we're certainly not - this shows we're not the preeminent intelligence in the universe, that there are powers and forces that have a kind of quality of aliveness, ah, beings, intelligence that can do with us what it will. Uum, then, we are not preeminent in intelligence, we are not in control, we are open to any number of possibilities

Life form can come into our world at will, let's say the UFOs and then you can imagine if you're a SAC commander in charge of defending the air perimeter of the United States and these UFOs can come flipping in and out of air space at will, totally making all our technologies of defence and assault irrelevant. Imagine the helplessness of that person who is charged with the air security of the United States. What is he to say to his secretary of defence. Well we extend that analogy through the whole society, that none of us have any control over what's occurring, and you're dealing, you have nothing left but faith at that point. And faith means that if you surrender the sense of control ultimately to the forces that exist in the universe, that those forces will be on the whole benevolent. Well we haven't been taught to believe that. Our experience is that the universe is modelled after our worst nastiness. So that means that if I cannot have faith because I'm so nasty and angry and aggressive in myself and I have star wars because I think the world is full of people wanting to shoot missles and blow up my cities, and I have guns in my house because I think people want to attack me and I'll shoot them if they shoot me, and that's my view of the world. So how can I possibly have faith if I extend and open to the universe that the creatures will not be, not destroy us. So, and I have no defences against them so I'm caught in a terrifying dilemma. I have no defences against them in the conventional physical shooting down sense, but I don't have any faith because my model of a human identity is as an aggressive ethnically violent racially constricted battling creature who has no trust in anyone other than his immediate huddle group. So I'm trapped in terror if I'm faced with the reality of these beings. That's the dilemma I think that I'm facing, and that's where my innocence has to stop and get a little sophisticated because I have to recognize that to open up to the existence of this force, this power greater than we are, not in the religious sense but literally greater because it can physically do what it will with us and open us up to any number of other possibilities we don't even know of, admitting our helplessness in the face, in the terror of the face of the unknown, we have lost faith so we cannot trust to these great powers that exist in the universe. And so we are, we are really trapped in the psychological nest that we have been fouling for thousands of years.

I think that the information I get from the experiencers which is my main source around this matter, I have my speculations and interpretations are not there's nothing much to them other than what I gain from working with the experiences themselves. And what they convey is that we're in a kind of a time race that this is one powerful, it's not the only one, but this is one powerful consciousness expanding force that's opening this up to a different sense of our place in the cosmos, opening this up to the paradise that the earth is. Sometimes it's very literal. Somebody will be taken up on the ship, go up and see the earth, much like an astronaut sees the earth, not necessarily from that far away as blue and with clouds, but a perspective that, of the human species in the universe and appreciating what we do to animals because of what's done to them. And what we're doing to the earth. And they've given information on the ships about that but they also on their own because of the sense of another reality, beings that exist beyond. They get this sense of stewardship and responsibility about the earth, a different perspective. But they also feel that time is short, they feel that this is a kind of awkward struggle that is going on in consciousness in the universe to change our predatory ways. Its not the only one but it's like it is a form of spiritual stretching that speaks the main language we know which is the language of the body, the language of terror, the language of the physical world and it comes to us in that form and so it is particularly communicative and powerful as a way of speaking to us as a people who have, as Rilke put it, whose very senses by which we once knew the spiritual world have atrophied so the introduction or the recovery of those senses must come through the senses that remain, which are the senses of the body, because the spirit as such no longer @@ the spiritual knowing that was part of the human condition and the western condition until the 17th century which is part of the way of knowing of other peoples on the earth has shrivelled to virtually nothing in the western experience. So if we are to learn, it must come through the body, though terror, through expanding our physical self. And a lot of the abductees will say that, that its only through the actual experience of the physical intrusion and the terror and the opening up to the reality of who these beings are, that the revival of a spiritual sense can occur and everyone has that potential. Why the particular people were abducted and have that development and others don't, I don't know. **

it has to do with power at the core, new forms of power. That power, the evolution of notion, power is a fundamental human expression and need, perhaps the most fundamental. It precedes sexuality, it precedes aggression, it precedes everything else becuase power is fundamentally the sense that I affect my world in some way. I am not utterly helpless. I can impact existence in some way, that's what power is at its root. I participate in the energies of the universe in some way where I leave my case, and that essential need for power has found its expression primarily in the power to control, to dominate, to win, to exploit economically, to take physical wealth out of the earth. And that way of expressing our sense of power, whether its primary or defensive against helplessness and powerlessness, that way is no longer viable. If that is the, because first of all there's no limit to it because it doesn't meet the fundamental need for a sense of value and power and so what you will have then is a hunger to exploit more and more and more until the earth is just used up and destroyed and people still feel helpless and powerless and unfulfilled. So the fundamental shift which I believe this is about, is discovering new forms of power. That is, discovering that, and there's where there's the most profound paradox that I have ever encountered, is the power and ...knows this, its the power of acknowledging total helplessness. And we saw that in the interview that we did earlier today, that in the acknowledgement of total powerlessness, of surrender, of recognition that aggression and rage, no matter how strongly expressed, are ultimately forms of impotence, powerlessness, and that the real power comes from acknowledinging powerlessness surrending to powerlessness, and then out of that new forms of power seem to grow. A power to love, to appreciate, to experience the esthetic beauty of the planet, to find joy in resources that are spiritual, that are about connection with the earth, with one another. So the paradox is that by showing us our powerlessness in our old way, that is our aggressife let's shoot down the UFOs, let's beat up the Bosnians, let's cleanse the Jews, whatever, that those old forms of technology driven power are really the heart of, lead us to impotence in a dead planet, this phenomenon shows us that and the only way to encounter this phenomenon, this is what I found in doing the regressions over and over and over again, when the individuals, they want to fight the aliens, they resent it, but when they surrender control and they say I'm helpless, then they suddenly discover new power in themselves, new creativity. They become leaders, teachers in their community. They stand for something, they stand for an expanded reality. They stand for this is the truth, they stand for the fact that we have to stop doing what we're doing to the earth and so there is this paradox of helplessness, surrender, lack of control that this phenomenon inevitably brings each experience or two, and when they open to that experience, then we discover these new forms of power which are life sustaining and are creative. And that's what I see is at the heart of this phenomenon.