Of Mind and Memory and Tea Trays

Less than ten people stayed after meditation for the midweek dharma talk. With a small group like that, things are bound to be more casual. Reverend Master told some funny stories about back when the order kept milk goats and he served as goat monk. Then the talk veered toward cheese and started to get rather lively.  Once again, I became aware of how close we were to the local gourmet ghetto. At the last possible second Reverend Master swung the conversation away from the approaching iceberg of an extended consideration of the technical aspects of enhancing melting qualities in cheese and invited us instead to contemplate uncertainty.

After the talk was over, I picked up the tray and started to collect everyone’s tea cups. One woman who had been talking a bit excessively during dharma talk was now standing and chatting with Reverend Master like they were at a cocktail party. I held out the tray to collect her cup, doing the smile and half bow that is the local etiquette. She smiled back and, instead of placing her cup on the tray, took the tray from me. Apparently she wanted to collect the tea cups, so I gave it to her.

(The whole smile and half bow thing is GREAT for those of us who don’t do names. I knew Talking Woman, but had no clue what her name was. She was just another one of us older middle aged white ladies. I know my own name and think of all the other females as Mary. The guys are all Paul. Most post-ceremony potluck conversations I have start out with at least one person saying, “I’m sorry, but I’ve forgotten your name.”)

Talking Woman wasn’t completely familiar with the local etiquette, but so what? If you do a practice, your understanding will develop over time. The exactitudes are not important; etiquette is merely a tool for developing awareness. For instance, last week Mary showed me how to turn on the meditation hall lights. Of course I know how to turn on lights, but being shown how to turn them on for ceremonial observances felt like getting promoted in martial arts.

The moment after I handed the teacup tray to Talking Woman, the entire incident vanished from my mind. I petted the temple cat and went to put on my shoes. Mary was putting on her shoes, too, and we had to cooperate to make use of the limited space by the door. The tea tray incident flickered briefly into my mind again. Talking Woman’s behavior was like that of someone used to receiving things from subordinates. It was easy to imagine situations where those kinds of roles played out. It’s funny how much people’s behavior reveals about their background and character, I reflected, and then forgot about it.

I was buckling my seatbelt when I thought about it again. I knew Talking Woman, but from where? It really was a puzzle. It will come to me in time, I thought. These things always do. She was definitely familiar. Mainly, though, I was thinking of goats and cheese and shipping wax.

Approaching the highway on-ramp a few minutes later, she popped back into my head again. This was really annoying! There was nothing I could do about it until I finally remembered. There’s just no conscious way of intentionally remembering something, after all. You either remember it or you don’t, right? Why did I even care?

I got onto the highway. There were shoes and ships; it was night; I had my tunes playing. Then: I’m going to remember this. Not actually remembering, but the knowledge that I am now in the process of remembering and will soon have remembered. Verb tenses don’t even convey the experience! The fire was lit, the kettle was on the hob and the deep was bubbling. The question of Talking Woman was really nagging at me now. Why did I care? Why was I so sure that I was going to remember?

The whole thing unfolded over a 15 minute night drive home. I was playing tunes and thinking about a book I was reading, but the image of Talking Woman’s face as she smiled back at me over a tea tray she almost certainly didn’t want to accept kept rearing its middle-aged head. Where did I know her from? TV? No, it couldn’t be; She wasn’t British and I don’t have a TV. It really couldn’t be TV; it was highly unlikely to be TV. Why was I thinking TV? I let it go again and enjoyed the night drive.

It was TV, I was just going to have to accept that. I could feel the memory approaching. It’s like when you feel like you’re going to have to take a crap soon; I could actually feel the memory starting to emerge. This was not someone I had met in person; I was just going to have to accept that as a fact that some part of me knew to be true, even if my conscious mind was playing catch up.

If it was TV, that means Netflix; Talking Woman was a middle aged white female, and that narrowed the field considerably. What movie had I ever watched in which a middle aged white female smiled the way she did when inadvertently taking the teacup tray from me? I queried my brain.

By the time I got to the highway off ramp near my home, I thought I had the answer. I couldn’t remember the actor or the name of the movie, but I had definitely watched it on Netflix. Once home I was able to find out the name of the movie, look up the IMDB listing and confirm who Talking Woman was. Then I watched the movie again because it really was very well done. Afterwards I realized that if I ever ran into her again it could be tricky. To me she’s that character in that movie, while in real life she’s someone I’ve never actually met.

The mental unfolding of the tea tray incident was rather remarkable. We’re talking about a split second of an interaction which I put behind me as soon as it was over yet still presented some problem that my mind really wanted to be allowed to solve. None of the mental events were particularly volitional and the topic was not of conscious interest to me, but my mind kept worrying away at it like how your tongue feels around the hole a lost tooth leaves behind. The mental sensation of feeling an actual memory coming closer and closer before I actually had it was also quite interesting. It was almost like being able to predict the future, at least in terms of my own mental content;I knew I was going to remember something before I knew what it was I remembered.

House Builder, Thou Art Seen! Well, at least glimpsed.

Integrating Theoretical Approaches in the Study of the Parawhatsit

I was listening to Paratopia Oculus the other day when Jeff Ritzmann mentioned that in his writing he was struggling with integrating the notion of anti-structure he adopted from the works of George Hansen (1) with Greg Bishop’s co-creation theory (2).

Wow, that has got to be some rough going, I thought, even before you add in any element of the supernatural, paranormal or whatever the currently fashionable term is. The reason being that the theoretical underpinnings of the two approaches are themselves at odds. Hansen’s work is based on a type of social theory called functionalism that takes a systems approach to explaining social phenomena. Co-creation theory, to the extent that I understand it, is basically a social constructivist approach focused on how shared understanding creates social phenomena. In the case of co-creation theory, one of the entities sharing the understanding happens to be differently incarnated (i.e., non-human and possibly non-physical), but otherwise it’s straight constructivism.

Why does this matter? All theories put forward for explaining and understanding human social phenomena take certain things for granted. Sometimes these assumptions are explicitly named, but more often they go unrecognized. Moreover, most theories excel at explaining certain types of things but fail miserably at accounting for other stuff; they all have their strengths and weaknesses. In the case of functionalist versus constructivist theories, some of the assumptions they are based on are antithetical, that is to say, completely opposed to one another. Also, the things each theory tends to be good or bad at explaining are wildly different. Trying to integrate functional and constructivist approaches is sort of like mixing oil and water; Jeff Ritzmann has cut himself out a ridiculously difficult task.

But then, salad dressing tastes good. That’s even before you add in the paranormal croutons. If you try to integrate functionalist and constructivist explanations AND make it account for parastuff of various ilks, I definitely want to taste that salad – but I can’t guarantee I won’t snack while I wait for it to be ready.

Because there’s a further question. From a purely theoretical perspective, we still have not resolved the question of whether the stuff of parastuff is OUR parastuff or THEIR parastuff. Hansen’s functional approach seems to suggest that liminality or anti-structure breaches reality enough for an external reality of ontological others to break on through, but doesn’t address how the encounter then goes. Co-creation doesn’t address how the encounter begins, but posits that as it’s happening both an ontological other and a human being participate in shaping the nature and meaning of an event. Then we have Eric Ouellet with his recent book Illuminations arguing that the whole thing can be put down to entirely to human activity, albeit in the form of as-yet-poorly understood psi, or perhaps social psi, activity.

We are now very far from CSICOP territory, were everything has an explanation and nothing is not normal. However, that is no reason to give up on theoretical rigor, rules of evidence and meticulous attention to the logic of argumentation. I bow to the unknown, but I do not submit to it. We press on.

I find Ouellet’s theory extremely attractive; it overlaps with several areas of my own education and previous research and holds out the promise of being a powerful explanatory approach. But to me, the most exciting part is the gaping hole it seems to have. If all this parastuff can be put down entirely to as-yet-not-fully-understood human psi or collective psi abilities, WHY IS IT SO OFTEN EXPERIENCED AS AN OTHER? Specifically, as radical alterity – aliens! – not only non-human, but outside known reality – an ontological Other.

If Ouellet’s assumption is wrong, ontological others do exist and we occasionally interact with them. That is totally cool in my book. If his assumption is right, there are certain circumstances under which we define our own experiences as so foreign they can only be understood in terms of an ontological Other; we are in effect creating UFOs, ghosts, poltergeists we occasionally experience; we ARE the plants that speak to us in dreams and visions. Either way you answer that question, I’m in my happy place. In fact, you don’t have to answer the question at all (an answer may in fact be impossible) and I’d still in my happy place, which is the sociology of knowledge.

What kind of boundary work is involved in perceptions of radical alterity? How do we draw lines around what counts as us and what counts as Other? It’s rich philosophical territory and also open to empirical enquiry. How much fun is that?!?!?

Bibliography of Three Books I Have Not Actually Read, Although I May Have Heard Other People Talk About Them On Some Podcast Somewhere: 

1. Hansen, George (2001) The Trickster and the Paranormal

2. Bishop, Greg (2016) It Defies Language!

3. Ouellet, Eric (2015) Illuminations

(I have not figured out blog comments yet so if you want to talk to me you are going to have to remote view my email address.)

Theory of Everything

"Mindfulness. Situational awareness. Control over emotions. Being present. Clear analysis of threat indicators. Adapting to changes in both environment and circumstance. This is how Kali shackles your demons, brings you inner peace, sharpens your focus and gives you control, discipline and purpose."

- Doug Marcaida

Hybrid Dreams, Alien Invasion

I listen to Seriah Azkath's podcast show Where Did the Road Go?

Listened to the 3/18/2016 show with Cutchin and after hearing the hybrid show of 3/5 mentioned went back and listened to that. I have a general idea that talk in ufology about aliens and hybrids inevitably maps onto discourses of race/ethnicity and power. There’s a few people who have floated that idea before e.g. Christopher Roth. Listening to the hybrid show in the context of my current social/political climate, that idea got reinforced.

I grew up in an all-white area and moved to a very multi-ethnic area later in life. Just by living and working there I ended up learning new social skills and knowledge in order to relate to and interact with people from completely different backgrounds. It’s often struck me that people who live in monocultural settings are at a disadvantage when it comes to interacting with more global or multicultural society because they lack those skills, that knowledge or I guess what sociologists might call social capital. It’s not necessarily bigotry or intolerance but just ignorance due to lack of exposure to social others and developing more social skills and knowledge.

Learning about the Native American Holocaust in grad school, one of the things we read about was how tribes kept their culture intact even when all the leaders of the secret/sacred societies were being killed off. Even after all the designated spokespeople for the supernatural had been killed off, a dream might come to someone who was not a member of a sacred society. If it seemed like a good dream, the remaining community would run with it anyway. Kind of a preservation of old ways and adaptation to new realities.

That’s what I was thinking about listening to the hybrid show. (On the physical level all this hybrid nonsense is bullshit, but on the social-emotional level it’s highly significant.) Specifically around the 43 minute mark where the female guest is speaking. Her words are a pretty good description of what it would take for someone from a monocultural setting to open up and adapt to the fact that people radically different from them are also a part of the world they live in. Was she dreaming a dream meant to teach skills for interacting with an other? (By other I mean anything we consider to be other, either socially or ontologically.)

Then I listened to the Ouellet episode and realized it could be argued that the displaced social tension of a numerically diminishing white majority in a culturally shifting North America and Europe could be a springboard for generating hybrid dreams. From a white point of view, the aliens are definitely invading.

It all makes sense! It's in the data! 19.5

Co-Creation and Psychosocial Theories of the Paranormal: Part I

Introduction

Co-creation and psychosocial theories are two approaches that have been suggested to explain paranormal phenomena like UFO sightings or other unusual experiences. Of the two, psychosocial theories have a bit more of an established pedigree and cachet of scientific legitimacy. Co-creation has been less explicitly articulated and can in some ways be seen as a subset of psychosocial theory. Part One is a critique of psychosocial theories. Part Two will push on into the unknown territory of co-creation theory.

Part I

Psychosocial theories hold that paranormal phenomena can be explained by individual psychological and social context variables operating in various combinations. However, as Jerome Clark notes, paranormal phenomena usually involve two different things: an event and then someone’s experience of that event. Often psychosocial theories are used to explain away events by explaining a person’s experience of the event in terms of psychological and social variables. However, psychosocial explanations are not required to be so hardline. For example, one can remain a materialist, posit the reality of some sort of anomalistic event and then focus one’s study on people’s experiences of the event. This kind of psychosocial agnosticism can be a quite scientific way of going about things; it is a good path for people who may be unsure about the nature of anomalistic events or who downright believe in psi, ghosts, UFOs or whatever but want whatever research they do to be valid.

The problem is that while psychosocial approaches can leads to a better understanding of how variables like personality and culture shape our experience of anomalistic events, they leave unaddressed the anomalistic event itself, which tends to be what we want to know about. On the other hand, when faced with truly bizarre stuff going on, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to separate out the effects of our own shocked perceptions and activated cultural filters from what the “real” event is? The long and the short is that while psychosocial theories are often invoked to dismiss the reality of an actual anomalous event, that’s due to the predilection of the researcher, not the logic of the theoretical approach.

Psychosocial theory is a sort of abbreviated multidimensional or multiphasic theoretical construct that is often invoked when people struggle with conceptualizing complex system phenomena. (1) It’s in this sense I say that co-creation is a kind of subset of psychosocial theory. With respect to hardline psychosocial theory, co-creation of an event/experience might be shaped, for example, by interactions between individuals or conflicts within an individual between their sense of personhood, status and/or role. They may operate by means or mechanisms that are not always well understood or visible (e.g., emerging social tensions expressed as witchcraft accusations) but are ultimately knowable. However, a non-material, ontological Other (2) is not involved.

On the other hand, with the agnostic flavor of psychosocial theory an ontological Other might or might not come into play. If it does come into play, it will be stipulated on the basis of individual or sociocultural beliefs. In these cases the Other is not thought of as having agency, existence, or identity. It will be thought of as something that people believe has agency, existence and identity and by so believing make real in human terms – hence the idea of co-creation. We’re now much closer to admitting the reality of our beliefs, at least as they affect this life, but still on comfortable enough terrain for science, that delicate flower, to grow.

However, the theoretical notion of co-creation, at least as far as I understand it, goes a bit beyond where psychosocial theories go. I will make an analogy to the difference between the academic fields of anomalistic psychology versus parapsychology. Both study the same phenomena; anomalistic psychology studies paranormal experiences assuming paranormal forces do not exist, while parapsychology assumes the existence of something called psi and tries to understand how it operates.(3)

Co-creation theory, as articulated by Greg Bishop and several other interesting thinkers, assumes the veridicality of anomalous events and of ontological Others as individual actors involved in such events. This will be discussed briefly in Part II.

 NOTES

(1) I’m thinking specifically of Showalter’s book Hystories, a paper by Vallee and someone else that I’m too lazy to dig out right now, and the Marwaha and May presentation at the 2015 Parapsychology MOOC.

(2)  i.e., Alien. In my opinion, the word alien is increasingly being used to mean ontological Other rather than any specific entities associated with the extraterrestrial UFO hypothesis and/ or Stan Romanek.

(3) Simmonds-Moore PowerPoint from 2015 Parapsychology MOOC

Scoriton Mystery Terminus

I forgot to mention something in my post on The Scoriton Mystery. The author, Eileen Buckle, paints a good picture of her impression of Ernest Bryant, the man who met saucer-riding Yamski in a field one day in 1965.

Bryant, whose face was suntanned and deeply lined, was obviously used to rouging the elements out-of-doors, but underlying the rather rough-hewn exterior I could detect a deep sensitivity. He was rather quietly spoken, with a sober manner. As time went on and we felt more at ease, flashes of humor sparked from him. He told us about his family - he was happily married with three children, a son aged 17 who was working, and two daughters aged eleven and nine. He was 51 and had a wonderful job as a gardener/handyman at the old people's home in Newton Abbot . . . He had lived at Scoriton for the previous eight years, for the past seven residing at Hawson Farm Cottage which lies just below the field where the metal pieces were found. An ex-Commando and a seaman during the war, he had worked as a security officer at Gibraltar and afterwards became a prison officer at Dartmoor where he was stationed for five years. (p. 53)

In their first interview, Bryant tells Buckle that he had gone to the doctor due to the strain of his experience. Apparently two or three days after the contact he began experiencing attacks of migraine at two-day intervals which wore off after a fortnight. Buckle was, of course, interested in this phenomenon as possibly a manifestation of UFO interference in the human electromagnetic system.

Actually, Bryant died two years later from a brain tumor, at least according to a couple of different internet sources (Mysterious Universe does not count). Maybe the incipient tumor allowed him to see UFOs? Maybe it forced him to see a UFO (i.e., hallucinate)? Interestingly, Buckle got him to sign an affidavit a few months before his death about his experiences. So basically from the time of his experience up until his death various people were harassing him about his experience and What It Meant. That must suck even if you're feeling healthy.

If you have a low tolerance for uncertainty it's easy to find places on the internet that will show you how the Scoriton affair was all a hoax. However, I have to tout Buckle's book again because it still stands as decent front-line, participant-observation research. She's reporting on her lived experience of the affair which, if we're honest with ourselves, is all we're going to ever know about it anyway. This is a great ufological book and deserves  more attention than it has gotten to date, at least from the sociology and history crowd.

However, it strikes me as weird that the fact that her main informant was dying from cancer as she went to press with a book in which he was a central character didn't even rate a mention. Is that a British thing? A 1960s thing? A ufology "use 'em and throw 'em away" thing? Apparently Bryant had a brain tumor and died. No wonder his wife and kids were upset with all the ignorant. irrelevant UFO types traipsing in and out of their lives.

The Most Excellent Scoriton Mystery

While for the longest time I viewed the topic of UFOs with great disdain, I have always been a complete sucker for anything with the word ‘mystery’ in the title. It turns out The Scoriton Mystery by Eileen Buckle is in fact about UFOs, but that did not keep me from finding it an excellent read. It’s full of unusual events and bizarre characters, it’s engaging and well written, and even 50 years later raises important questions.

Poking gently at the Scoriton mystery with a stick made of Google, it would seem that as a UFO incident it never garnered enough supporters to make into the UFO mainstream. Some of the reasons for that become fairly obvious when you read the book. However, I would argue the work has lasting value as part of Fortean literature and quite possibly as a record of an actual Fortean event (or series of events).

Published in 1967, The Scoriton Mystery is by Eileen Buckle with an assist from her investigative partner Norman Oliver. Both were members of the British UFO Research Association (BUFORA) in 1965 when they heard about an unusual encounter experienced by one Ernest Bryant. Bryant had been out walking one evening when a flying saucer appeared in a field in front of him. One of its three occupants identified himself as Yamski and made a series of puzzling statements that seemed to have some connection with the famous and recently deceased UFO contactee George Adamski. The occupants then gave Bryant a tour of their vehicle and parted with a promise of returning with “proof of Mantell”— Mantell, of course, being a pilot who allegedly died chasing a UFO in 1948.* A month or so after the encounter, Bryant saw a strange light in the sky descend to the ground and the next day discovered a few pieces of worked metal in the same area.

Buckle and Oliver set themselves the task of chasing down the facts about Bryant’s experiences. They did so under their own aegis rather than that of BUFORA, being aware of the UFO-political sensitivity of the story. One of the interesting things about the book as a whole is that without engaging in ufological muckraking Buckle includes enough information about persons, personalities and agendas to help the reader understand the complex social context surrounding and shaping the Scoriton mystery. In that regard, her narrative has a light but deft touch and comes close to resembling an account based on participant-observation research.

Buckle and Oliver had a number of tasks before them: talk to Bryant to assess his credibility and flesh out his story; get in touch with Desmond Leslie, who had been Adamski’s co-author and was apparently mentioned by Yamski during the encounter; and examine the pieces of metal Bryant had picked up to assess if they were in fact “proof of Mantell.” So far, we are safely on the royal road from contactee ufology to nuts and bolts ufology. However, Bryant’s conversation with Yamski included a monkey wrench:

“[Yamski] also spoke of the dangers of forces from another planet which were taking people from this world for what he described as procreation purposes. When I asked him how we could expect to know that they had arrived . . . Yamski told me they were already here in the guise of what we termed poltergeists.” (p.63)

Enter the paranormal, stage left! Chatting with Buckle and Oliver in the pub after one of their interview sessions, Bryant told them that Yamski had also mentioned a family that mysteriously disappeared from a house in the nearby town of Yeovil. Were they taken for ‘procreation purposes’? A chapter is devoted to their exploration of that tangential case.

Meanwhile, Buckle took the bits of metal Bryant had collected, the putative ‘proof of Mantell,’ for psychometric readings, because, well, that’s what you do to see if something’s from a downed aircraft, right? This again is an area where Buckle’s touch is deft; she describes her thinking, gives a detailed account of the psychometric readings, and then considers the whole thing analytically afterward. In her own way she’s critical and thoughtful and gives the reader enough material to be critical and thoughtful as well.

Which is a good thing, because the ride only gets bumpier. Further and more mundane analyses are made of various trace evidence until we run up against Scotty, The Atomic Physicist. Buckle’s profile of Scotty and his role in the investigation is superb and presages the key public characters of ufology in the 1990s**. As a reader and assuming that Buckle is writing about a real person she encountered, one can only sit and marvel.

From the initial encounter with the Atomic Scientist, events move rapidly and chaotically as Buckle, Oliver and various other intrepid UFO hunters roam a British countryside bristling with synchronicities and hidden messages. After meeting a visually impaired man with special abilities, EVPs in rhyming couplets (!) start to appear on Oliver’s cassette tapes and seem to hint at some sort of emerging subtext between the two investigators. It’s at this point that UFO purists may throw up their hands, as things are now far, FAR off the royal road of Ufology and well into the forest of despair. However, the rest of us can safely keep reading; Buckle continues to adeptly detail the chain of persons and events involved in the investigation as it unfolds. Oliver’s own analyses are included as a counterpoint.

I would especially note that, while the explanation of synchronicities and hidden messages has been an excuse for some of the most execrably boring writing in the history of paranormal and esoteric studies, Buckle gets it right. She gives enough detail to allow readers to share the sense of wonder felt by participants in the events while managing to avoid pounding rotting mounds of horseflesh into already putrescent lime.

While I found the book an enjoyable read that was thought provoking in many ways, there are a couple of main things I would like to point out.

1. Welcome to Me! Bryant had his experience and that would have been that had he not eventually come onto the radar of Buckle and Oliver at BUFORA. The bulk of the investigation that the book is about is really due to Buckle and Oliver’s insertion of themselves into the story of Bryant’s experience. In a sense they created the mystery as they investigated it. I don’t see them as being bad or wrong or insincere, but their investigation is an interesting variation on the practices of later, more explicit story harvesters like Jacobs, Mack and Hopkins and Robbins. There is something about the UFO mystery, I theorize, that makes you think the story has to be about you.

The cool thing Buckle did that I don’t think many people recognize is to report on events and impressions more or less factually, in detail and in close to real time. That lends her tale of unlikely events more credible to me, because she gives me access to data that would let me assess her credibility. This is consistent with doing good participant observation research - a methodology ufology has not seem to have as yet heard of.

2. Proof or props? Yamski promised ‘proof of Mantell’ and then worked bits of metal appeared in a nearby field. Thinking of stories I’ve heard about the famous Skinwalker Ranch told I believe by George Knapp, it seems there’s a deliberate element of the theatrical to our interaction with certain aspects of radical alterity (aliens). Why did the metal bits that appeared in the field have to be actual Mantell plane debris? Maybe they were to be understood as props in a dramatic presentation. You wouldn’t walk onto a stage and try to rattle a doorknob on a painted door to prove that the play was about a locked room murder; that would just be silly.

3. Theories of agency and power. There are a couple of interesting dynamics in the book but I’ll save discussion of that for another time.

4. Boundaries between various Fortean phenomena. It’s interesting that Buckle and Oliver, out from under the aegis of BUFORA, undertook a wide-ranging exploration of various aspects of the experience they were investigating. This was not entirely inappropriate, given the unique aspects of the encounter. Was their investigation scientific? No. Did they have any credentials or institutional legitimacy? No. Was Buckle clear and concise in her account? Yes. She reported on what they thought was interesting and what happened when they tried to take a closer look at it. She gave what she thought was her interpretation of it at the very end of the book.

Perhaps The Scoriton Mystery is one of those models of small-group UFO investigations that Greg Bishop would approve of. It ignores what Adamski followers cared about with respect to Adamski’s “resurrection” and focused on what Bryant actually reported. Buckle and Oliver weren’t afraid to go down roads that would alienate ufology as they knew it and/or piss off Adamski believers, but from Buckle’s account they kept people from those camps as well as others involved in their ongoing adventures. Maybe we can all be friends.

* Further details on Adamski and other contactees can be found in Aaron Gulyas’ Extraterrestrials and the American Zeitgeist and on that and almost anything else in Jerome Clark’s Unexplained.

** As heard on Art Bell, at any rate.