John E. Mack — “Anomalous Experiences and the Transformation of Consciousness” (2002 lecture)
- Speaker: John E. Mack, M.D. (Harvard psychiatry), solo lecture. Recorded 2002-10-25. ~1h09m.
- YouTube: https://youtu.be/5I2KX9ercFQ (posted on the official “John E. Mack” channel)
- Captured: 2026-05-29 via yt-dlp audio download → Whisper (speech_to_text_remote.py).
- Primary for mack-harvard-abduction-research. His fullest mature statement of the consciousness/transpersonal thesis, plus a first-person account of the Harvard investigation.
- NOTE: Whisper auto-transcript; verify any quote against the audio before load-bearing citation.
What I want to talk with you about this morning is the relationship between anomalous experiences and worldviews, particularly shifting worldviews, because we’re in the middle of a time of shifting worldviews. Maria White is an investigator who has a library of collecting types of anomalous experiences, has a taxonomy, and these are the classes that she has. First she had nine, then she added a tenth. The nine that she had at first were death-related, desolation, low, nadir kinds of experiences, dissociative, encounter experiences, exceptional human performance feats, healing, mystical, peak, and psychical experiences. Now I guess she must mean in there things like psychokinesis, as we heard from Jeffrey Mishlove, and perhaps past life experience. I don’t know where she puts those. But then she added a tenth, which is experiences that are, where somebody seems to be taken over by some kind of diabolical, demonic evil, which is mysterious. Now she recommends anomalous experiences for expansion of human potential transformation. I don’t think she recommends the tenth one, though, in that regard. Now very often people will keep their anomalous experiences to themselves. In other words, they recognize that by definition, these experiences are not going to be very welcome. In my Harvard encounter, which I’ll tell you a little bit more about in a few minutes, the chairman of the committee said, with a lot of anxiety in his voice, if what you’ve been writing about is true, that’s a terrible threat to the laws of science. Because we know them. As if that was a bad thing. It’s always been dangerous to get too involved with anomalous experiences, and maybe we can do a little bit about that. Probably will continue to be true in some degree. Faust, in Goethe’s Faust, speaks of the foolish few, who with such knowledge fail to keep their wealth of intuitions in their hearts, reveal their feelings and their visions to the rabble, having all times been crucified and burned. Well, we don’t do that now. We just ruin people’s reputations, or try to. Now, having spoken of the secrecy that connects with unusual experiences, in the workshop that follows this, this is going to be an opportunity for people who feel that enough trust has developed here, that they’re willing to share some of the experiences they’ve had with the group that wants to do that. There are many paths to this expansion of consciousness, the awakening that can occur from unusual experiences, which Rhea White defines as anything which does not fit the scientific paradigm of the time. But there is a tendency, which I think is somewhat problematic, for us to have become rather specialized around anomalous. There are people who work with near-death experiences, and then there are people who work with past life experiences, and people who work with alien encounter experiences. Yet they all come together in a kind of confluence toward one, not one experience, but one domain, one opening of consciousness to spirit, to source, to the possibilities that go beyond our immediate, everyday consciousness. At a conference in 1999 that grew out of my Harvard struggle—I guess that’s a good way, I keep giving it different names—there were people from various disciplines there, and one of them was a Harvard professor of the history of science. And there were workshops, or small groups divided, six or seven people, with an experiencer assigned to each group. And she was the chair of the subgroup on light and energy, which was one of the major phenomena that came out of the discussion of the so-called abduction phenomena, which we were then looking at from a multidisciplinary point of view. And she said, it’s really strange in our discussion, every time we start by talking about light and about vibration, and we end up talking about God. So it’s as if these experiences all lead to some kind of spiritual opening as the awakening occurs. Now the question always gets asked, so I’ll jump ahead on this, of how a self-respecting Harvard-trained and faculty member academic ever got into a wild field like this. And as you, I’m sure, all know, your life, in retrospect, has much more coherence than it does as you’re living it. So I look back, and I try to create a thread of some sort, which is somewhat artificial. But I was raised, it does make some sense, I mean, I was raised in a very secular academic family in New York City. There’s something about New York City, too, which people from New York City tend to challenge things all the time. Maybe that’s good. The intellectual background of my family was to ask questions, to inquire. And that may be important, but I still went through the kind of very mainstream education. But when I think about it, some of the places, like I went to Oberlin College after leaving high school in New York. And Oberlin College is a really pioneering place, when you think about it. It was the first place, first college to admit blacks, it was the first co-ed college in the United States, and it was a station on the Underground Railroad that hid slaves from the authorities. So, maybe Oberlin College fits in, in a way I’ve only recently begun to think about. Then I went to Harvard Medical School, and then things really got straight and narrow, which was, you know, regular psychiatry, psychoanalysis. But even psychoanalysis is supposed to be about inquiring, openly looking into the depths. Although, I must say, I’ve had, in some ways, more difficulty from psychoanalysts than from almost any other group, among my colleagues, which is a little strange. But I guess one year’s transformative, innovative field becomes the next year’s orthodoxy. And that’s, I guess that could be traced historically. Now, I had begun to do work with non-ordinary states because I had that kind of restlessness with psychoanalysis. And I got involved with Stan Grof and holotropic breathwork, and the opening to transpersonal experience, which means the recognition that we are not limited to these bodies, but that ourselves can separate and move into other domains, other identifications. And I had in that work what I guess could now be looked upon as a past life experience, where, to my astonishment, there were Russians in the room, and I, because we were working, it was a Soviet-American conference that I had this experience, and I became a Russian father. Not that I had a fantasy, I became a Russian father, a little bit like Hank Wesselman reported. I was literally that Russian father in the 16th century whose four-year-old son had been decapitated by the Mongols, and I felt suddenly this tremendous empathy with the Russian experience, which was enormously helpful in the work we were then doing on the dynamics and the conflict, the Soviet-American conflict. Nevertheless, when Stan Grof gave me a chapter of a book on spiritual emergencies that he and his wife, Christina, were working on, this chapter was on UFO encounters. I had a great doubt about this, and I kept asking, is this real? Is this true? You know, the Jungian interpretation, all that. And of course, as you know, if you ask a question too hard, it’s a little dangerous because you’re going to get information related to the question that you may not be totally prepared to receive. And so, not long after that, I was introduced to this encounter phenomenon, which when I first heard about somebody who took this seriously, I thought, this person must be quite mad, and he’s dealing with a new form of psychosis, no matter how much my consciousness had been opened by the Grof experience. However, when I began to work with these individuals, and I never went public to admit that I was doing this for about two years, but after I’d seen about 50 of them, I realized that I could not explain this psychiatrically or by any psychosocial trend in the culture or anything of that kind. These were people who didn’t know each other, who had everything to lose, and who were confessing, in a sense, to whomever they could trust to tell that they had had encounters with strange humanoid beings that had entered into their lives in a powerful and incontrovertible way. So I thought this was pretty important and quite exciting, and people would ask me, well, why are you interested in that? And I’d say, how could you not be interested in that? This is something of huge significance. So I finally, in 1994, I published a book which was mainly a case study of 13 experiences in which I did some speculation about what this might mean. And I thought, naively, that my colleagues at Harvard would think this was a great advance in knowledge. But that is not the way it was received. What happened was that a committee was appointed by the dean of the medical school to investigate what I was up to. And what this was about, no charges were made, it was kind of Kafka-like, but what this was really about was revealed when the president’s lawyer, this is how serious this got, said to my lawyer, well, what do you think it’s like for the dean of the medical school to see one of his professors on Oprah Winfrey saying that little green men are taking people into spaceships? Well, I was on Oprah, but I, of course, never spoke about little green men. But I was considering the possibility that people were really being taken into spaceships. And I don’t know if they’re physically, literally being taken into spaceships, but something very significant that happened to these individuals. Now that, as I’ve looked more deeply into that experience of that, my 14-month ordeal with that committee, which, in a way, I’m kind of grateful to, painful though it was, because I learned so much about worldviews and how worldviews work and the clash of worldviews that that represented. And I’ll say a little bit more about that later. But I learned that changing worldviews is much more, requires much more than data. I’ll give you an example of something that happened in the committee. In my, one of the first interviews that I had with the committee, the chairman of the committee said, well, every responsible scientist knows that UFOs can be explained as hoaxes or misperceptions or human-created phenomena. Of course, I didn’t agree with that. But then when I hired a lawyer, he said the same thing in a committee meeting. And of course, that was challenged. Then the same thing was written in the draft report that came out. And then our side amassed a huge amount of evidence in testimony and letters from experts in the UFO field, showing the hard evidence for the reality of UFOs. And yet, when the final report came out a few months later, the same statement was in there. UFOs can be explained. As if totally ignored, even though, as I say, national experts on this subject had submitted these briefs to the committee. And it became clearer to me, though, when we asked Rudolf Schild, who is a world-renowned astrophysicist who worked out using laser gravitational means when the Big Bang occurred. And he had written that he had himself discovered there was hard evidence for the reality of UFOs. So we asked him if he could be a witness to the committee. And in the final report, and I know they didn’t know what they were saying when they said this, they wrote, it was asked that we interview Rudolf Schild. We declined to do that because we knew his opinion and we didn’t think interviewing him would further our purposes. Now, if they had known what they were saying, in other words, how revealing that was that they were defending an ideology, I don’t think they would have said that. So an ideology, when it’s deeply ingrained, people don’t know it’s an ideology, they think it’s the truth. Now I’ll say a little bit about the encounter phenomenon for those of you, well, some aspects of this I think are less familiar than others. The so-called standard UFO encounter phenomenon is a person is in their home at night usually, but not always, sometimes they’re in a car during the day driving and there’s a bright light and they’re paralyzed, usually taken through walls up into a craft where there’s various procedures are done which can be quite traumatic and it seems to have often a reproductive element. Now that’s the kind of the, I mean, that’s a huge abbreviation, many of you know a lot about this. But I want to emphasize some other elements in it, which there’s a very large informational aspect to the UFO encounter phenomenon. People are shown images of the destruction of the earth, for instance, what’s going to become viscerally concerned about that. Or they learn things, artistic things, languages that they didn’t, they couldn’t otherwise know. Credo Mutwa, the Zulu medicine man that I wrote a chapter about said that he learned how to use telescopes and he learned about how double hulled ships could keep oil from spilling. Things that he couldn’t have known from where he resided or known in as much detail. Another thing is that experiencers are drawn to shamanism and they’re drawn to shamanism because the phenomena of the abduction encounter experience, the light phenomena, the vibrations, the trauma, moves them into realms, much like a shamanic initiation, into the realms of symbol, of metaphor, of, and so they get to know shamans often, they’re drawn to conferences where shamanism is being discussed. And many experiencers will speak of their own encounters as if like they were initiations and they have that kind of transformational power. There’s also a strong spiritual dimension to the encounter experiences which is under-emphasized, I believe, in the literature. In other words, people who have these experiences are often drawn to what they call source or home or the divine. And they will weep in my office when they are brought to the frustration that they can’t be there all the time, they can’t be home. And then finally, there’s a kind of odd element which I’ve gotten interested recently which is many experiencers will have encounters with reptilian beings. And these could be quite large and some of them feel they’re vile experiences, terrible, aggressive, but others will experience this reptilian encounter as something that is generative, that is even powerfully sexual in a positive way. So I’ve come to see these reptilian encounters, again, as both real but also metaphoric as representing the coming forth of the suppressed reptilian, if you will, that instinctual part of ourselves that emerges in the abduction encounter experience. Now out of my Harvard encounter, one of the recommendations which was kind of a standoff in the end, the dean said I should watch my enthusiasm and meet the standards of the Harvard Medical School in my future work, never said I hadn’t or what they were exactly, but it was a very cordial ending. But one of the recommendations was that we form a multidisciplinary group to look at this phenomenon and other anomalies much as had happened in matters like eating disorders, sleep disorders. So we put this group together and many questions came out of them, but one of the central questions was that we really did not have what might be called a science of human experience or what Richard Tarnas calls an epistemology of the heart, in other words, a knowing that is not just a knowing of rational mind but a knowing of our, through our total being. Now there is a, there is some reason for that, of course, but science, whatever way we critique it, has the possibility of refutation, it has the possibility of control, studies of certain kinds of ways of establishing the validity of knowledge. And when experiences are being reported, we don’t necessarily know what to trust. Every experience from, reported to be from the divine or on high, is not necessarily a reliable blueprint. So I’ve become interested in that and the, and I realize that when it comes to these experiences, powerful and important as they may be, we do not have criteria for deciding. And, I mean, the criterion that is principally used is sort of clinical evaluation. Is this person of sound mind, you know, or is there, they have some motive for this or is this, or can we do psychological studies which will show that they’re people who are intact and that kind of thing. But that kind of evaluation, it leaves something major out that I think I’m beginning to get some sense of what is needed. And ironically, perhaps, the clue to this came at a conference in San Marino where a prelate still in good repute with the Vatican, he came in a cassock and this is Father Corrado Balducci. And he gave a talk in which he said, the church takes very seriously the UFO encounter phenomenon because there seem to be so many reliable witnesses. And then he went on to say that the church through the thousands of years has had to know how to judge who is a reliable witness because people, all kinds of folks are coming forth reporting miracles and they have to decide which ones are for real. Now he didn’t say how they decide, they’re, and, but that’s got me thinking about how do we decide what is, who is a reliable witness to something anomalous or from the beyond. And I’ve gotten a lot of help from this from one of the experiences I’ve been working with, a woman who uses a pen name of Lisa Oakman. And the quality that has emerged that is that the person who is a witness to something beyond that there’s a kind of fire that seems to consume all other matters in their lives. She’s written to me that there is something on the part of a person who we would call a witness who feels compelled to bring that story out and it’s a sacred kind of calling. The great witness releases, as she put it, tremendous powers or spirit. They’re usually reluctant to come forward even if they have fully come to terms with their own experience because of what we’ve been talking about here, the way they’re likely to be received in the culture. And then here’s the way we put it together. This is her writing. Yet when they speak, all recognize they have been in other realms. Now there’s, when you’re in the presence of a witness, you have that sense. Sincerity and truth and power of spirit are just as measurable as inches and pounds. In other words, trying to find that, what would be scientific here. But not in the same way. The measuring rod is the sense of pattern ringing true that one feels in the presence of such a person. Now obviously to get that in any kind of standardized way, that probably won’t happen. We have to honor that sense that we’re in the presence of a reliable witness. Now I want to return to the question of worldviews. Worldviews are fundamental to who we are. They hold the psyche together. They make us feel part of the groups that share that worldview. And we hold on to them, we’ll give our lives for, we’ll fight wars for, we’ll do anything to preserve a worldview. I had an experience recently when one of the experiences, as you’ve been hearing, often become psychic. And one of the women that I worked with in Boston worked for a major industrialist in the Boston area. And he began to learn something about her experiences. He said, Judy, tell me about, I want to learn more about this. And she knew that he really wasn’t ready for this. Now he had a responsibility to protect the July 4th events, celebrations, and there was concern about terrorism. And she did a lot of psychic reading to figure out what the danger was. And she knew how to bless the whole area to help protect it. And she said, he asked her to tell him something that would be concrete. So she told him that there was going to be a skirmish in a certain quadrant of this Waldorf area, and that it would be minor, and that the police would come, and everything was going to be okay. So this came to pass, he saw this, and he absolutely freaked out. He fired her from the company, withdrew into a depression, and she knew this was going to happen. He could not handle this in-his-face demonstration of a shift in worldview in such a dramatic way. As indicated, people want to know that they know what’s real. I had an amusing example of that not long ago when I got a letter from the stepmother of a 12-year-old girl who was terrified of beings she experienced in her room that she said had turned her to stone. So she couldn’t move. It was something very familiar to me by that time in other cases. So she and her husband held the girl at night and told her she’d had a bad dream. It was real, Dad, she insisted. The parents persisted in telling her it was a bad dream. And she kept insisting that it was real. Finally, with some exasperation, her father said, Honey, have you ever seen anybody walk through a wall? That’s just not reality. Well, Dad, she replied, you don’t know anything about reality. Again, this is not just about data. Neil Grossman, a philosopher at the University of Illinois in Chicago who’s an expert on the near-death experiences, his colleagues, he says, are not receptive to the fact that people can have these experiences when the brain is not active. So finally, one of his colleagues had the candor to say, well, that if he had had one of those, it wouldn’t matter. If he’d had an experience like that, he would be sure it was a hallucination. In other words, no data that Grossman could present would change his mind. And I had the same experience myself in 1992 with a science writer in Boston who kind of made fun of the conference we were having at MIT about the encounter phenomenon. And he, I was encouraged to call him up because people said he was a reasonable fellow. And finally, in exasperation, I said, Chet, look, a UFO could land on the Boston Common and all the media could cover this and there’d be videotape of it. You still wouldn’t believe it was real. And then he thought about it and he had the decency or candor to say, you know, you’re right. I just wouldn’t be able to believe that it had happened. There are enormous vested interests in worldviews, psychologically, economically, politically. I had a kind of amusing incident regarding this matter a few years ago when I was going to have lunch with Rudy Schill, the astrophysicist I mentioned. And at that time, I was living across the street from the Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysics labs. And he said, you know, John, and he said this kiddingly, but there was truth to it, I can’t be seen here with you. He said, because if what you’re discovering is true, then he waved his hand at all these beautiful buildings and turrets with telescopes, he said, what you’re, all this may not be able to hold up if what you’re discovering is valid. So the society will resist change and I think it’s important to understand the forms of that resistance. Now nature has a way of helping in this. And there are phenomena, variously called the trickster or Patrick Harper, who’s a wonderful English writer, calls daimons that interfere with the culture. When the culture gets kind of set, the daimons, the tricksters, tend to break that up. And every culture has daimons. The city of Galway in Ireland, or the coyote of the West, or in Greek culture it was Hermes. And the daimons keep the culture on its toes. When the culture gets too far and pushing away what Victor Sanchez called the nagual, that part of our, that darker part of ourselves we don’t like to look at, the tricksters and the daimons tend to tear this up, rip it up. And Harper has looked at the way the daimons can open us up and disrupt that stability of the, that set way, that rigidity that the culture may fall into. And he’s a beautiful writer, he said, we could say that the suppressed unconscious grows so important that we are, we’ve been compelled to invent psychology in order to contain it. Being immortal though, the daimons cannot be done away with, but will always return to subvert the very ideologies that deny them, tormenting the over-ascetic in their cells or labs. Remember the movie, Pauly, when they capture this talking parrot? And so the parrot, they want, and they want to study him in the labs and the parrot, Pauly says, what do you want to do that for? Well, we want to see if you really can talk. Well, what do you mean? I’m talking to you. Why do you need to take me to a lab to find out if I? The over-ascetic in their cells or labs, maddening the over-rational with their irrationality. Scoured from nature in the 19th century, they reappeared in our drawing rooms as spirits of the seance. Banned from the planet, they return from on high as menacing extraterrestrials. Denied by urban sophisticates, they cry out with alien voices from the psychoanalyst’s couch. You know, it’s interesting that Harper also makes the point that the daimons hang out in the subatomic world, which I think is very interesting in the light of what John Hagelin said about how reality becomes ambiguous when you get to the subatomic level. The certainty dissolves and you have this variability. I don’t think he was familiar with Hagelin’s work, but this is what Harper wrote. He said, the word subatomic particles could be substituted for the word daimons without any loss of accuracy. This is not a coincidence. The subatomic realm, like the unconscious, is where the daimons took refuge once they were banished from their natural habitats. He also has a whole kind of mythology, daimonic mythology of, or cosmology, UFO, black holes, for instance, being like a devouring charybdis of the universe. Now what is to be done? I think we’re in a time when the world view that we’ve known, that a number of people have spoken about, the scientific materialism, whatever we want to call it, the Cartesian, Newtonian world, is falling apart. But as many things fall apart, there’s sometimes an après-midi or deluge kind of experience where the very growth pains of the society can be so destructive. And this is what I think, it’s not about whether the worldview will change, the worldview is changing, it’s how to be part of that change or contribute to it in a way that is loving, creative, and not ultimately destructive as we are, the threat we’re facing at the present time. So I have just some recommendations and some of these you’ve already been hearing in the conference. First, honor the anomalous. Now you all do that, but enable people who’ve had anomalous experiences to feel that they are part of the culture, that they are not marginalized, that these experiences are sacred and that they’re not pathological. Court the extraordinary. Now you can’t court a near-death experience and you can’t court, I suppose, a UFO encounter. I guess some people seem to be able to do that. But most of the time we have to court the anomalous through our open-heartedness, our willingness to listen, our availability to hear the extraordinary, to be open to it in our own lives, to listen to our dreams. We need to develop this science of human experience, this scientia sacra, as philosopher Syed Nasr has called it. In other words, develop criteria that can allow us to go forward with, say, there are ways of deciding whether information coming from the other side or people having extraordinary experience are providing some valid information. Because I think that will make a great difference in terms of this trying to bring these ideas into the mainstream of the culture. And then there’s the question of leadership. I believe that there is a time for new leadership in this regard. Now, each of you, each of us, are in some way leaders. I think that we, insofar as we take responsibility for our participation in the extraordinary, we have become leaders in making the extraordinary not so extraordinary. The extraordinary be part of the human experience and recognized as such. And yet, at the same time, we do need leaders that can enable us to bring this shift that is occurring forward in more creative ways. The old leadership, I’m talking now at, say, a political level, will tend to, as Mark Gerzon, who’s writing a book which he calls Leaders Beyond Borders, a very, I think, beautiful title. The old leaders work within borders. In other words, they work within, say, a national definition or an ideological definition, a religious definition, and they find the other outside evil or to be destroyed. Do not look at the other within themselves, but a leader beyond borders will see that they are connected, interconnected with the other. And there are examples of that among us. Max Dupre was a business person who was a leader beyond borders in his business practices, and he said the first job of a leader is to define what is real. Now, if a leader is living within the dualistic mode and playing on the dualistic part of the mind, the demonizing tendency that we’re all so familiar with, then if that’s the ontology, that’s the reality, then what will follow will be destructive. But if the ontology is the ontology of oneness, of interconnectedness, of the harmony of life, the web of being, then if that’s the reality, then a leader coming from that definition will be an altogether different sort of leader. The leader beyond borders challenges the basic assumptions that hold the culture together. And we’ve seen examples of leaders of this kind in this conference. I don’t have to name them. You know yourselves. Nelson Mandela is often cited as a leader beyond borders, somebody who saw that in order for South Africa to not erupt into racial violence, that the blacks had to embrace and connect with the white population there. Václav Havel has even spoken of the necessity of a revolution of consciousness in the planet, which means this extension of the boundaries of the definition the leader has of his realm. Roy Vagelis is a doctor who was actually a resident when I was an intern at Mass General Hospital, and he became the CEO of the Merck Company. And they discovered a medicine that could cure river blindness in Africa, onchocerciasis. But the traditional definition of the job of a corporate head was to make a profit. And there was no way the African population could, people who needed this could pay for this. It was just impossible. So he determined to give this medicine to anyone who needed it in Africa through the company as a contribution. And the company has gained back from this in its own reputation and its own development. But that’s not the main point. The main argument he made was a redefinition of the responsibility of the CEO. In other words, he said, our responsibility is not just to make money, but to improve the quality of life, whatever that may mean. That’s a leader beyond borders. We’ve heard a lot in the conference about the need for a new kind of education toward interconnectedness, toward wholeness, toward understanding the inner life, the spirit. And again, that will take new leaders in the field of education. And then the final notion is that, is the one of engagement. Now there’s a tendency that I’ve recognized, and I see it in myself, to want to withdraw from the sort of political process. It’s so rotten in many ways, and so terrifying, that we pull back and we want to stay within our own kind of evolution of consciousness world, not to try to sully ourselves by direct engagement in the political process. But that’s, I think that the citizenship element requires something more of us in that regard. William Lloyd Garrison, who is probably responsible for more than any single person for ending slavery in this country, would have nothing to do with the political process, the leaders in Washington. But when Lincoln came along, he changed. He said to his people, he said, we have to, to the other abolitionists who are so more extreme than he was at that point, we have to participate now with this man, with the political process. And many of his followers objected to this, but he said, the time has come. We have to engage with the mainstream of the society. And maybe we’re reaching that point now. And then finally, it might be called the courage to tell the truth. Now, telling the truth we’ve seen is dangerous. I mean, many reputations have been, people have had their struggle with telling the truth, and yet ultimately the truth has a way of prevailing. And I’m going to end this with a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson. I think it’s appropriate. I’m from Massachusetts. I should bring a quote from Emerson. And this is from a speech he made in 1838 to the Harvard Divinity School. Now, in that time, most university education, at least at Harvard and maybe nationwide, was theology, teaching about religion. It wasn’t much science in those days. So he was railing in this talk against the stultification of religion in Cambridge and Boston, the way in which the Congregationalist churches had stayed within their own walls and very limited and rigid notions and were not open to the transcendent spiritual elements that Emerson and his circle were engaged in. This is what he said to them. But speak the truth and all nature and all spirits help you with unexpected furtherance. Speak the truth and all things alive or brute are vouchers. And the very roots of the grass underground there do seem to stir and move to bear you witness. Thank you. Okay. All right. We have 10 or 15 minutes for questions. Maybe those of you that are going to join the workshop, maybe the ones that are not going to be in the workshop might…well, it doesn’t have to be like that, but that’s a suggestion. One possibly. That’s what David…anyway, blaming David for that. So we have time for some discussion. I have a question. I have a friend whose sister has had many anomalous experiences. She sees spirits that aren’t in bodies as if they were, and she can’t tell the difference sometimes. And for me and for my friend who is her sister, it’s a really wonderful thing. But for her, it’s a very frightening thing. And she’s gone to the place where she really wants to create a life where that isn’t acknowledged. And her fiance, who’s a very nice man, has no idea that this happens and they’re getting married soon. The question that I have is I don’t have the words to talk to her about that and honor her experience, given that it frightens her so much. And so I’m just wondering if you have any suggestions around that. It’s a wonderful question. I bet everyone in the room has a question of that, of someone in a situation like that. You know, can you stay up for a minute? Why do you say that you don’t have the capacity to honor her experience? You know, it’s not that I don’t have the capacity to honor it. I wish that I could change how she sees her experience. And I don’t feel the capacity to do that. Well, do you have a discussion, it’s well put, how she sees her experience. How do you see her experience? I see her experiences as wonderful. I can certainly understand where not being able to tell the difference between when you’re seeing someone in a body and someone who’s not in a body would be very disconcerting. But I see it as a gift. And you say this to her? Not yet. I’m not saying saying that to her is going to suddenly make it possible for her to make that discrimination, but it can help. In other words, if you discuss with her this in terms of the kind of thing we’ve been talking about, that these are experiences she’s a person who is tapping into that deeper stratum of reality, and that this is part of the human birthright. And if she feels more sure within herself, that this is okay, it may strengthen that part of her that could make the discrimination. I’m not saying this should all be left to you. I mean, I think there are, I don’t know what city you live in, but there may be other people that you know that she could talk about this. But I just would be afraid that she’d go to, does she function okay? I mean, she lives her life. If she goes to a sort of an uninitiated mental health professional, she’s likely to get put on medicine and the whole thing gets suppressed. So it would be important to help her if she, particularly as you say, she’s going into a kind of work area that this would not be respected, that she develop a support community, like people like yourself, that she can talk about this with. Right. So simply honoring it is just good enough. It’s a beginning. It’s enough. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. I didn’t mean to lay the whole thing on you like that. I think it, you know, you’re part of the helping process here as well. I’m saying. No, you didn’t. You didn’t lay it on me. I just, I always want to have something better to say than what I can think of before I approach a situation like that. So I can’t think of anything better to say that, than what you said, that you, you see this as a gift. I mean, what better could be said? Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Wonderful talk. Thank you. Did you, do you have any explanation for sleepwalking? Does it fall into one of these categories or just a medical thing? You all heard the question about sleepwalking. I think there are many experiences that we’ve tended to medicalize as some kind of pathology that may have a meaning. If we look at it, say from a, like a shaman might look at it as a spirit calling a person. This is a guess, I don’t know, but you know, it gets, well, it’s a certain kind of EEGs go with this and the person is, it’s a sort of waking in the non-REM stage. And if you take this medicine, it’ll stop. And, you know, rather than the person may be called in some way, like sleepwalkers will often know where they’re going, you know, sometimes they’re just wandering around the house, but other times they’re actually going to find something. They’re, they’re, they’re in that dissociative state at, at night, they’re, they’re seeking to discover, and it’d be, I think, important to look at what happens more specifically in the sleepwalking journey. But I, I mean, I, I, you know, you’ve opened the question for me. Yeah. Thank you so much for your wonderful talk. You said that it’d be good for people to have a support group when they have these types of problems. And I wonder if you have any thoughts of developing a support group for leaders without boundaries? I mean, usually a support group starts with the person that raises the question of signing a support group. Y’all know that, right? I think it would make a wonderful group of people to invigorate each other, give them courage to march on your, the ordeal you’ve been through is, has been extremely long and excruciating and expensive. And your leadership in that area, I’m sure would be very helpful to others and already is. Let, let me say something about support groups because I, I, I mean, the logistical aspect, how you find out other people and get together and, you know, I think that can kind of take care of itself, but I, there’s a philosophy that I’ve been developing around support groups, which the initial support groups that, a support group that I started myself in 1991 or two for the people that I was seeing, I was still in a kind of pathology model that, not that I labeled these people, but that I saw this, these people are having problems. Okay. And they could get together and talk and overcome their fear. And, you know, that would be okay, or at least they have the support so they wouldn’t be victims, right? There was a kind of joining, but then I began to realize more like the first person’s question here that, that first of all, people were at very different levels of their development. Some people were still in the trauma phase and were shocked, didn’t want to admit it was really happening, whereas others had gone deeply into the experience and were at a whole nother level. Now, some, so some structuring in terms of people who are in the group who are able to be guides to the others, that’s another element, but also how the experiences are regarded by the leader. I mean, they can be leaderless in a sense, but there has to be somebody who kind of convenes it and there has to be a little bit of order in it. So if their experiences are regarded as transformative, as a gift that people are enabled to pass through that initiatory phase, that dark night of the soul, the terror that goes, the traumatically, it becomes traumatic if there’s nobody to hold them through the, through the terror. So I think the, the, what am I saying? That the, the support group it’s important to support group, not see this like a lot of support groups, you know, self-help groups, people have a disease, they all get together and, you know, they share the problems of having that illness. Well, this is more than that. I mean, this is, has a different kind of creative transformative possibility. So I, I just think it’s, it’s a kind of outlook on support. It’s still supportive in the sense of people getting together, but it’s, it’s a kind of philosophy related to the experiences is what I’m speaking of. I was sort of thinking of Charles Tart’s group about scientists who’ve had transcendent experiences and they’ve put these experiences on their website and I’m sure that’s been very opening for many other scientists to start admitting that they’re having these unusual experiences. Well, Pat, Pat, would you stand up? Pat has some cards or copies of cards which will show our website and email. So we, you know, be glad to hear from you and just think, think about it further, you know. Yeah. It sounds from what you’re saying as if this whole area of mental illness has to be totally reconsidered and I was wondering if you might comment a little bit on some of the things that we label as hallucinations, as schizophrenic behavior, how you see, how, how you see that these might be in a, in a different sort of paradigm. That’s a huge and excellent question is what is the implications of this for the whole mental health field? And I think they’re enormous. I don’t, I don’t go as far as Thomas Saz and said, there’s no such thing as mental illness. But I, I do think many things that get diagnosed as mental illness or are extraordinary experiences or are people who look at things in a way that doesn’t fit the mainstream around them so they get a label pathologized. Or as Patrick Harper was saying that our psychological profession was created not to engage the daemons, not to see the creative power there, but to keep the daemons at bay, you know, and with medicine or whatever. Now I think, so before I get a specific recommendation, I think that an understanding that we’ve done that in, in many respects, not, not y’all, but you know, the mainstream psychology and psychiatry has, you could almost see it as created to keep the, the dark side under control, you know, as a kind of instrument of suppression. So there are many questions about how we look at people’s experiences that are called, as you say, pathological. I mean, even diagnosis that of what gets called bipolar illness, manic episodes, maybe people who are having ecstatic openings to other realities that need to be again, honored and looked at in a different way. So, you know, that’s something we’re very interested in, in Cambridge is starting a kind of clinic that would make it possible for people that are having all kinds of experiences of this sort to come forward. And then also teach in the medicals in our hospital about the range of possible experiences that we call pathological that may be better thought of as anomalous. Yeah, do we, how are we doing on time? What? Are you up for a question, David, or, or just. She’s not coming to your talk. She wanted to ask. Sure. I, I just, it’s so wonderful to have someone from a scientific community, you know, acknowledge that all these other, you know, anomalous experiences really are valid. And sometimes when I’m talking to people like about UFOs, for instance, and, and like, there’s, even though there’s hard evidence, how do you, how do you deal with it? I get so frustrated because, you know, when you’re, when you’re trying to open up someone else’s awareness or, or even just have a conversation about it and they’re just so shut down and they’re absolutely certain that nothing like this exists, you know, why is it they, they’re so unable to, you know, even with like hard evidence that they can’t accept something like that. Yeah. Well, as you could tell from the talk, I’ve, I’ve shifted in my strategies on that. I don’t anymore rely on putting hard evidence in people’s faces as the illustration I gave about the Harvard committee. So what I tend to do, my approach has shifted not so much to getting the truth across or facts across. I don’t know whether we’d have the truth anyway. So, but rather to recognize the mind at work here. Notice I’ve, I’ve had the experience when I work, I’ve lectured to psychiatric residents who’ve had enough curiosity sometimes to invite me to speak with them. And, and, and I’ll say, here’s what you, you’re going to hear this material and here’s what you’re going to do. Okay. You’re going to say, oh, let’s see, that must be crazy. Well, is that crazy? And what diagnosis? And anyway, how does he know for sure? And what, how reliable is that? And, you know, in other words, the mind will do everything it has to do not to take in the truth. But if you kind of in a loving way, show the person their mind and how it’s going to work, you actually open up some space for something to come in. It’s a kind of meeting somebody where they are, I guess. You know, and it’s a small shift can happen. I mean, it depends, you know, who your audience is. Some people like, I had experience of, this is kind of amusing, I, you know, the psych ops, the, the vigilantes of science that the, they want to make sure that nobody studying the paranormal is able to endure. Well, they, they invited me the chapter in Boston to speak to them. And I knew I was in trouble with that, but I went along, you know, I didn’t think I should. I showed a videotape of a experiencer. This is in the days when it was a little more blood curdling and I felt you had to go through the traumas. And, you know, so he was, you know, I thought that would get through to people, you know, so he was going through a terror experience. It was a small group. They took their chairs and they turned them around and faced away from the video. They simply could not bear it. They didn’t even realize when they turned the chairs around that their bodies were moving away. So you wouldn’t, I wouldn’t have done that again. I wouldn’t have shown that videotape because what’s the point? You know, I’m not trying to, you can’t do anything, but you do try to figure out how, how the structure of resistance in that particular instance is working. And then you take that in and address it. I don’t mean this in a patronizing sense. I mean, you honor the resistance as part of the evolutionary process. In terms of the tape, we are out of time. One of the things I wanted to comment on your speaking, John, is I really appreciated the way that you obviously paid close attention to the other offerings here at the conference and have integrated them into your speaking. It’s kind of like, it was a beautiful experience for me of you summing up the impact of the conference on me and us. So I wanted to thank you for, even though it wasn’t set up to be that way, being that kind of encapsulator for us. And the question that I want to ask you, well, John talked about the effect of meditation on healing mental illness in the sense of having the right and the left brain interact with each other. OK. So one question is, what do you see as the necessary prerequisite actions that could possibly bring that type of modality into the education of people in institutions so that they could become whole? But the real question I have is about, given that you’re a medical doctor and that many of us in this audience have been fully awake for many years, that there’s a connection between diet and whether or not we’re ill. Is the relationship between diet and the health or illness of our mind? Yes. But I don’t claim any expertise in that area. The other question is really a question of educating neuroscientists and neurologists so that they honor the idea that their synchronization and communication between parts of the brain is not just fixing the trouble, but is actually creative and enhancing. Again, we keep coming back to educating in the mainstream. It’s very interesting that it’s come up very often in this conference, more than in most transformationally oriented conferences, of this gradually moving into the mainstream of the culture. A base has been developed, in a sense, to do that. A number of people are working in that way. Yeah. I just have a quick question. A lot of people think that the government knows about all of this, and that they want it quiet. Since you are coming out with so much information, have you had any contact with them to talk? Have they harassed you, or have they asked you to talk to them about it? Have you been involved with the government somehow in that helping them to see what it is? Because you’re bringing out wonderful information from these people. Thank you. Well, to paraphrase H.L. Mencken’s remark about the American people, nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American government. I don’t believe the government knows as much about this phenomenon as we might think. What the government seems interested in is technology. In other words, studying the spacecraft, or discovering the mind control elements, or not even that so much as what can lead to the weapon improvement. I’ve had no contact with anyone in the government in terms of coming to me about my work. Now, you can speculate why that is, but the most economical explanation is they’re not that interested in it. They might want to leave me alone because they don’t want to get into it. I don’t know. But I’ll give you an example of how things get turned around. In 1994, Lawrence Rockefeller, who again, there’s all kinds of conspiratorial things around Lawrence Rockefeller, but the fact is, because I know Lawrence Rockefeller very well, he’s been on the forefront wholeheartedly supporting transformational movements in this country for 30 or 40 years. And I’ve never seen him in any kind of negative conspiratorial activities. In 1994, he invited a small group of people to come to his ranch in Jackson Hole. And one of the people that was there was Bruce McAbee. Bruce McAbee is a Navy scientist who’s written about 80 papers on UFOs. He’s probably the leading expert on the photography of UFOs, the technical aspect of UFOs. The CIA invited McAbee to make a presentation to their rank and file because they did not know much about UFOs. So he gave several lectures to them, and they took it in, and that was their education. Now, the UFO literature around this was McAbee has been co-opted by the CIA. He’s really working for them. He’s working behind the scenes. So his contact got turned into something else. So I’m not saying the government doesn’t do bad things, but the assumption that they not only that they know a lot, but that they’re engaged in some kind of systematic nefarious activity, suppressive activity, I’m questioning about that. I mean, yes, people have been sworn to secrecy who know about this, but particularly because of the technical aspects. But there’s a lot on this disclosure thing that happened in May of last year. A number of very prominent experts came forward and spoke about UFOs shutting down silos and a tremendous amount of evidence. How big a ripple did it make in the society? And why is that? Is that because of specific military suppression? I don’t think so. I think it’s about worldviews. I think it’s just about what’s both. But I think the change occurs not just through evidence. It occurs through transformative experience, individual and collective. All right, I guess we should stop. We’ll continue. Those of you that want to continue this, we can do it in the workshop at 10.30. Thank you.