Acariya Mun’s UFO Experience

Acariya Mun (1870 – 1949) is a famous Theravadan monk who lived in Thailand and is credited with reviving the Forest Monk or dhutanga tradition. He is widely held to have had considerable what we would call psychic powers; specifically, the ability to know exactly what was going through anyone’s head and the ability to converse with nagas, devas and others.

The Forest Monk or dhutanga tradition is a rigorous, ascetic and only loosely institutionalized form of Buddhist practice that focuses on training one’s awareness. This is a form of Buddhism perhaps most closely mirroring Buddhist practice as it was during the Buddha’s lifetime and shortly thereafter.

It just so happens that there’s a very readable biography of Acariya Mun available for free in English. The book is fascinating from perspectives anthropological, mystical, historical, Buddhist, and so on. The author, Acariya Nanasampanno (‘Acariya’ is an honorific), one of Acariya Mun’s disciples, has a very natural, direct, engaging way of telling a moving and incredible story. I especially appreciate that he always mentions where he got his information – if it was from Acariya Mun himself, another disciple, local villagers, or what.

In the first chapter of the book, Acariya Mun is still a young man experimenting with and striving to perfect his technique of meditative practice. This is when he had what a Westerner might interpret as a UFO experience.

“Acariya Mun’s citta [roughly, attention] converged into a state of calm and a vision arose spontaneously. The mental image was of a dead body laid out before him, bloated, oozing pus, and seeping with bodily fluids. Vultures and dogs were fighting over the corpse, tearing into the rotting flash and flinging it around, until what remained was all scattered about. The whole scene was unimaginably disgusting, and he was appalled. 

From then on, Acariya Mun constantly used this image as a mental object to contemplate at all times … he continued in this manner until, one day, the image of the corpse changed into a translucent disk that appeared suspended before him. The more he focused intensely on the disk, the more it changed its appearance without pause. The more he tried to follow, the more it altered its form so that he found it impossible to tell where the series of images would end. The more he investigated the visions, the more they continued to change in character – ad infinitum. 

For example, the disk became a tall mountain range where Acariya Mun found himself walking, brandishing a sharp sword and wearing shoes. Then, a massive wall with a gate appeared. He opened the gate to look inside and saw a monastery where several monks were sitting in meditation. Near the wall he saw a steep cliff with a cave where a hermit was living. He noticed a conveyance, shaped like a cradle and hanging down the face of the cliff by a rope. Climbing into the cradle-like conveyance, he was drawn up to the mountain peak. At the summit, he found a large Chinese junk with a square table inside, and a hanging lantern that cast a luminescent glow upon the whole mountain terrain. He found himself eating a meal on the mountain peak and … and so on, and so forth, until it was impossible to see an end to it all. Acariya Mun said that all the images he experienced in this manner were far too numerous to recall. 

For a full three months, Acariya Mun continued to meditate in this way. Each time when he dropped into samadhi [meditative absorption] he withdrew from it to continue his investigation of the translucent disk which just kept giving him a seemingly endless series of images. However, he did not receive enough beneficial results from this to be convinced that this was the correct method. For after practicing in this manner, he was over-sensitive to the common sights and sounds around him. Pleased by this and disappointed by that, he liked some things and hated others. It seemed he could never find a stable sense of balance. 

Because of this sensitivity, he came to believe that the samadhi which he practiced was definitely the wrong path to follow. If it were really correct, why did he fail to experience peace and calm consistently in his practice? On the contrary, his mind felt distracted and unsettled, influenced by many sense objects that it encountered – much like a person who had never undergone any meditation training at all.”

Acariya Nansampanno (2003), Biography of Acariya Mun, pp. 8-9

Acariya Mun concluded that directing his attention to external phenomena like the translucent disk is a flawed method and from then on centered his investigations on his own body.

I’ve read fairly widely in English translations of various Eastern mythological and esoteric traditions and this is one of the more stand-out accounts of something that might count as a Western UFO. Translucent, hovering disk that shape shifts (or reality warps) and can float you off in a basket? Check, check, and check. Acariya Mun doesn’t exactly call the phenomenon self-negating, but it is described as an endless series of images which even as you chase after them keep changing. Maybe I’m projecting, but by the end of the story it sounds to me as if he decided the whole hovering translucent disk thing is just a waste of time.

Anyway, if you are up for a taste of something new, check out Acariya Mun’s biography. Bhikkhu Dick Silaratano’s English translation is very accessible to non-Buddhists and there’s some good stories in there (like The Hypercritical Naga).

One of many ways to read the book

Rh Negative Folkore

We all know the UFO field is intellectually crippled (present company excepted of course), and the rain of inanities that continues to fall from the lips of UFO pundits about the Rh negative blood factor as being somehow linked to manifestations of the phenomena is just more proof of this. I admit to getting exercised about this issue; the whole Rh neg thing gets my panties so twisted that I doubt even Dr. Jacobs could straighten them out into one of his books. It’s a sad statement about the intellectual desert that UFO/phenomena studies finds itself in that even the people I hold to be the most informed and interesting thinkers in the area make themselves sound like idiots when talking about the Rh blood factor. Possibly they feel forced to address the bizarre approach ufology takes to the topic because Nick Redfern recently published a craptastic book on the topic. If that’s the case, then Redfern has done a much greater disservice than bilking me out of ten dollars; he’s promoted complete bullshit to the top of the paranormal agenda.

In the age of Trump and Brexit, it may seem quaint to get upset about something like the Rh negative factor being used to resurrect racist and eugenic agendas. If America is about to leave behind even putatively mythical values like religious tolerance, freedom, democracy, etc., why fuss about long-ago bankrupted pseudoscience being used to prove that one race is somehow superior to another? Don’t worry; we’re not talking about intelligence this time—now it’s paranormal sensitivity. The compass needle has swung; it used to be that natives and savages were considered to be more sensitive and superstitious, but with the Rh factor mythology, whites (with a little admixture of Cherokee thrown in for good measure) are now reclaiming direct access to the gods and the privileged knowledge that entails.

Is the Rh factor mythology gaining popularity in ufology as a measure of ufology’s waning, as nativism is gaining in white national communities unable to adapt to changing economic and demographic circumstances? However, it’s pointless to ask that question until people recognize the Rh factor myth as a myth, or trope, or meme, or narrative – whatever term your generation uses. Which involves recognizing it as NOT FUCKING BASED IN ANY SCIENCE WHATSOEVER.

Sorry. Had to pause and unknot the knickers once again. How anyone can get through a college or even high school education and not have enough basic knowledge to see through the whole nativist Rh factor argument is just beyond me. Like I said, though, even the best and the brightest in the paranormal have swallowed it hook, line and sinker with only a couple nervous, giggling hiccups of references to “well, we don’t want to be racist now; we’re not being racist, are we?”

And yeah, they were all white guys. In a way, you can’t blame them; how would they even know? It’s like telling a fish about water. A fish obsessed with algae: “I can feel it all around me, and sometimes I can see it; I KNOW it’s out there!” and you’re like, “And there’s this matrix it travels in, it’s called water—” and the fish is like, “That was a blue one! Yesterday I saw a green one that was smaller.” “The thing about water is—” “Holy shit! Was that a purple, round one? Right over there by my nest? Holy fucking shit!”

Setting aside the subtexts, though, how anyone with a basic education in science can give the Rh negative mythology any time of day at all is just beyond me. Something like Project Core that collects self-perceptions of Rh status as data points isn’t a problem; the problem is people who don’t seem to have the intellectual equipment to think critically about applying a not very difficult idea from the world of science to ufology and ufology’s confreres.

Originally I got exercised about this topic after listening to an episode of Where Did the Road Go. I felt like writing something to express my opinion but didn’t want to be just another asshole on the internet. Later, going about my business while listening to an old time radio podcast, I heard a character protest to cop/hero Danny Clover (Broadway is My Beat), “I am from Rh negative blood, Lieutenant.” That was 1949, folks. Very, very close to the period when blood antigens were becoming better understood and in particular the all-important Rh factor which affected childbirth and blood transfusions. If this mention in an old radio show is any indication, inchoate claims of superiority due to possessing Rh negative blood factor appeared in popular culture almost as soon as the discovery of the factor did. If that’s true, than UFO pundits are just the latest in generations of dupes and we’ve got a very interesting case of scientific folklore to investigate.