UFOlogy's Big TOE

...and back I am...

WHO ARE WE REALLY?

The throng of Visitors involving themselves in human affairs, even human families came to us BECAUSE THEY KNOW US BETTER THAN WE KNOW OURSELVES.

As member Skizicks alluded, when it comes to mind games, God is in play. Like the Jewish deity YHVH or Jahweh whose Hebrew name approximately translates into 'I Am That I Am'. Sounds as if God is talking Bob Dole style about himself, even to himself. God is effortlessly 'one self' as well as 'many selves'.

Right now I realize that at times I'm not feeling myself. I also catch myself talking to myself. Disagree with myself, especially when my conscience questions my actions. Actually, talking about pets, family, the workplace, being within your circle of friends or outside it, among strangers, I have learned to switch to as many 'selves', VERSIONS of myself as life requires. As a cat person I have an entirely different mode of speech, language use and even simplified logic when dealing with my cats. Although I suspect cats don't really care what speech I give them, as long as it ends in handing out kibble.

Still, normal minds can be seen creating many, tens or an infinite number of Personae.

If you were paying attention you will have noticed I am winding up for a 'way of being human', for a Theory of (the human) Mind which accounts for any ET giving us the time of day. OF COURSE WE ARE DAZZLED BY FLYING SAUCERS AND THEIR TERRIFYING / GODLIKE OCCUPANTS!. The question is, why they (some factions) seem so interested in us.

What makes you interesting to aliens is first of all that your body and mind are modular: a massive bunch of body and mental organs co-exist, compete, negotiate and cooperate to create the EXPERIENCE of being one self in one body. To my mind such Oneness is felt most readily while seated in a comfortably cushioned armchair, sipping the warmth of a ruby port, with all the world around you safe and at peace. Paradoxically, the freedom to let your mind wander, range into new areas, even look at reality afresh, is an outcome of previous generations' bitter conflicts and bloody wars to secure the land. Our minds and bodies are not formed by peace but by Selection Pressure. SP is at work in both the species and family groups. The world around us seeks to inflict pain, injury or death and our early human ancestors fought, as do we today, young and old fight to survive whatever onslaught life throws at us and become ancestors ourselves.

Now take a deep breath.. (seriously, no rhetoric.... breathe in...and breathe out, be calm and relax your body, you are the smartest animal on earth, time to GO ACTIVE and think your way through really weird information). The picture I have begun to paint of a human being, of being YOU may be quite different from how you see Mankind / yourself. You may well have come to see yourself as one person, or if you include your body: one single organism, body and mind working harmoniously to create one functional to thriving individual. Plus if raised & educated in the West there is the ideal of 'being your self', the modern version of fevered philosophizing vaping off the 1789-1799-- copious outpour of noble and patriotic blood in revolutionary France under King Louis XVI, TO WIT: ...that humans are all born equally innocent and good and honest, and children should be raised carefree, freed of the irrational burdens of Sin and having to Obey God's Commandments (in a Europe arguably held in a Catholic stranglehold), naturally culminating in a utopian society ruled by such motto as:

LIBERTY, EQUALITY AND BROTHERHOOD [OR DEATH] which fourth element to the revolutionary tripartite was the actual addition during French Revolutionary days and boy these folks were not kidding).

uh... if you're like me and need to re-familiarize with the history go click here on the French Revolution.

Whenever you feel like it, here's one more Click on Enlightenment Philosophy, hitting on the foundational way-ahead-of-the-times thinkers of 'the West' I irreverently referred to as 'fevered': they exploded into human consciousness the basis for imo the 'best' or 'least worst' form of human cooperation to ever exist on the face of the Earth, Democracy AKA the Enlightenment Society. On the other hand their modern ideas dealing with freedom, being open and honest in dealing with ones fellowman, equality applying to all men (including women too was as yet centuries in the making), and for icing on the cake: basing our societies on Reason and Science (rather than God, the Pope and the Church, revolutionary thoughts by Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau) proved too much to absorb/process for the day, for the angry and often hungry revolutionary factions, the street mobs, the gangs of robbers roaming the countryside. Instead of freeing every Frenchman and embracing them as a brother, the revolution turned into targeting and killing the rich and the learned (wealth and learning highly suspect as an affront to 'equality'), isolating and executing the King, his innocent wife and those associated with him and the 'obsolete' power of the monarchy, incarcerating and shamefully causing the death of Louis XVI's young son (called the Dauphin), and finally in an increasingly hellish fest of bloodletting trying/railroading/guillotining everyone who disagreed with whomever was in power. Human nature and its wandering mind kinda coming full circle, as Ronald Reagan so finely put it once "Kill that tree before it kills you".

Utopia.. BE GONE. Brotherly harmony.. BE THEE GONE. Looking at the French Revolution as a large scale social experiment with allowing human nature to roam free and imprint its true self on the world, the ominous outcome seems to be that Homo Sapiens is a competitive beast, competing fiercely and murderously individually and between groups. I so hope humans will keep moving in the right direction and make a wonderful and kind future. But we did not come from a kind and peaceful past, nor from freedom, equality or loving our neighbor. If ever during the past 100,000s years Before Present there was an early line of humans who were simple souls who lacked the inclination or heart to outsmart, outbluff and outfight any and all other life forms, let alone wipe out and (let's say you're really really hungry) go Hannibal on well fed, call'em PLUMP neighbors, I betcha they near instantly vanished from the evolutionary record, lining the stomach of every carnivorous mega beast and drooling cannibal in their environment, leaving at most the odd gnawed, chiseled, broken and finally petrified bone fragment to bemuse present-day anthropologists.

SURVIVAL IN THE GLOBAL THEATER

It's very hard to look at ourselves back in time, checking up on various historic conflicts and wars, like the French Revolution (I recommend Simon Schama's beautifully written Citizens to get an in depth sense of what transpired in 18th century France) helps some, also pre-state societies have been found to have been making a lot of war, even the stories in the Christian Old Testament provide clues: I read in Steven Pinker's books that the biblical account suggests that Middle Eastern peoples during the millennia BCE on occasion waged horribly cruel genocidal war, killing every living thing on the opposing side, except perhaps taking alive young virgins for wives. This in my belief is the kind of dangerous world our minds and bodies evolved in, not for 3000 but well over 300,000 years. We came not from safety, but danger from every direction, be it hungry predators hunting humans using stealth, superior speed and strength or modern/early human cannibals using conceivably guile, the pretense of hospitality to lure victims to the ultimate dinner experience. And living in nature (NOT the same as that marvelous hike with the fam and doggies through a national park) you have to deal with diseases mysteriously spreading and decimating your tribe, floods, droughts, famine, volcanism, cosmic body impacts and CLIMATE CHANGE (yes, our climate has been 'changing' for millions of years, including at near extinction level severity) and then probably ended up carrying your strident in-laws on your back wherever you sought shelter. Human history is Hell on Earth and today we are the children of a modern human line who adapted their way out of it. (Out of hell, not history.)

You already know. Physically, humans are tough, withstanding the greatest hardship. If you're a serious athlete, or participated in some form of extreme sports, you've discovered you can train or compete to exhaustion, and then will yourself to go on until you hit a secondary exhaustion limit. This is not healthy but Extreme Performance carrying real risk of heart death. You may be in a car crash that seems like the end, or struck by terminal illness and yet you fight your way back to recover and live on. Our bodies hold reserves and redundancies beyond belief. At the end of such Herculean effort however awaits the ultimate selection pressure. You are lucky and blessed to be alive. Or you die. The evolutionary process of Natural Selection is less 'natural' than it feels wasteful and cruel. Evolution is no walk in the park. Losing people and pets and friendly animals is one of the horrors of this world. The principle for any body is that anything that works gets selected over what doesn't work. More of a secret is that our body's organs, also called modules in Evolution Science, follow the same selection principle. Again, not when taking your Chihuahua Hercules to the park after a long day at work and doze off on the bench as he (happily without success) tries to mount a lady Alsatian. But when you're hiking through the forest at sub zero temperatures for a full day of walking along a set route and distance, planned to reach the relative comfort of a cabin (or get to camp out and freeze your bud off if you get lost, or lose time, or godforbid sustain an injury). This is how I liked to challenge myself in my younger years, think what you will, but however fit and prepared I started out, looking back NATURE HIKES ALWAYS INVOLVED DANGER, there's invariably surprises, you do not make time as planned, you take your strength and smarts and endurance to limits you didn't know existed, and in the increasingly unpleasant to painful cold your heart joins your brain to compete with other body modules. With warm oxygenated blood at a premium, this precious medium gets concentrated at your body's core, and feet and hands begin to freeze. And if you fail to get warm, can't reach shelter in time, heart and brain continue to prioritize their own function at the cost of more and more 'non-essential' parts shutting down and beginning to die off in order for the body to survive. Fortunately I never made it into serious injury, but instead tremendously enjoyed challenging myself involving some calculated risk. I remember the one 1970s Summer vacation walking high up in the Swiss Alps where our family took a wrong turn and but for the grace of God we would have fallen several km off the mountain. I noticed the sudden increase in angle of descent and we quickly turned back and climbed to safety. Over decades my nature hikes have changed my perspective on the human body. This I believe (and I hope that any of you young 24/7 gaming couch potatoes inadvertently stumbling unto UFO Casebook will give the following due consideration):

THE HUMAN BODY APPEARS DESIGNED FOR EXTREME STRESS AND EXERTION and

AT THE FINAL LIMIT SEQUENTIALLY SHUTS DOWN ITS LESS ESSENTIAL MODULES=ORGANS

IN ORDER TO STAY ALIVE AT ANY COST

...in short we didn't evolve into anything remotely resembling a potato. We're uhh... bod-asses?

ENTER THE MIND MODULE or 'ALL THE WORLD'S A STAGE'

There we were having sheer fun, setting a sweet pace, talking and laughing, with the entire Dutch family on a glorious summer day walking down and up and down a Swiss mountain path and suddenly, while I was on point, the path was no path, having begun to slope down too radically and ...OH GOD... I was aware of my folks very close behind and bearing down on me. I felt the group momentum. I had a glimpse immediately ahead of vast emptiness, an EDGE beyond which we all would fall to our death. Right now, as I write this so you may share that long past moment, that glimpse of vast emptiness, the closeness of death taking my whole family, FEAR of death hitting like a jolt.... Adrenalin kicking in... that 'glimpse' I can still see right before me, as if Reality (nothing gets more real than facing death) opened a window to ah.. SUMTIN... and then kept it open. What I 'see' is that when we die (happily for us not on THAT day, not on THAT mountainside), then our soul continues existence, then we are reborn in a new physical life. And maybe... maybe.. God is there for us, wherever our path takes us, even if straight down to THE END. Maybe God decides that, for his own purpose, we will not fall today.

Adrenalin kick. Life-or-death Vertigo. As I quickly turned and commanded those descending without a care in the world to now halt and reverse back up, I shoved with every ounce of strength at the familial bums precariously struggling upwards. In fact I shoved so hard that we got back on a safe, level pathway before all of us realized the danger we had been in. I truly believe our body and mind has superpowers at such moments.

The hormone system exemplifies a body module that releases hormones helping us survive terrifying, life threatening situations, imbuing our muscles and mind with almost superhuman power. In the mountain scare above I model this as body modules joining forces with several mind modules (aka 'mental organs') to ensure survival. Note that my visual system went big time weird as we walked to the edge of a mountain. I saw the downward slope becoming too radical which is part intuition and part calculation. I glimpsed empty space ahead where normally I'd expect to see indications of the continuing path. This too is a calculation, sensing an incongruously absent value, namely next leg of the path, as my mind would piece together the path in a sequence of sections, more easy to remember than the entire route. Then in a flash combined realizing we were about to fall with 'BOOM' Fear of Death with simultaneously springing into action (shouting "Stop now! We must go back!" and pushing the fam upwards) and deciding we must do our utmost to survive. The subsequent personal insights into an eternal soul, God and reincarnation developed slower in the years after this event.

Some of the Modules involved:

Rational Mind - calculating risk/danger

Visual System - seeing and memorizing landscape, including extreme features like a sheer drop off

Emotions - fear and loathing of death, love of family

Common Sense - having sound judgement, including snap judgements in life-or-death situations

A Sense of Self - a new self, the Warrior (there seem to be as many versions of you as needed) enters centerstage to courageously face up to imminent danger (or any other of life's challenges)

Speech and Hearing - giving directions and exchanging information

The Executive = Decision Maker - decides a course of action 

The Body - springs into action

Religious Sense - developing beliefs about death, souls and God
 

If you have the time and inclination you might examine if the list of 'modules' or 'mental organs' just above could be observed within your own mind and life experience, especially if you encountered some life threatening situations. But the most interesting, for want of a better word, is of course the mechanism by which a whole new Self or Persona or Role (like a 'Warrior') is called forth by life's pressures, dangers and our changeable environment. One popular misconception associated with the idea of having many 'selves' is that it indicates Schizophrenia, also known as split personality, however in the psychiatric disorder such split involves being out of sinc with reality (like when one would hallucinate being on a mountain, while actually sitting in a therapist's office  ) rather than solving real world crises by somehow selecting a more effective (version of your) self. Averting real danger to oneself and your loved ones by any means imho is the sanest thing anyone could do.  A rather intriguing parallel may be drawn with yet another mental disorder, Disassociative Identity Disorder (DID) where patients appear to switch from one Self to an often radically different (varying in gender, personality, education and even personal history) other Self, where multiple personalities are active in the one person's life, some of whom may engage in criminal or violent acts WITHOUT THE OTHER SELVES BEING AWARE OF WHO'S DOING WHAT! DID seems most often rooted in childhood trauma, where a young vulnerable mind gets so threatened, so terrified by physical or sexual abuse, or say the horrors of war, it generates an extreme 'protector self' to handle/contain the terror, yet cuts the connection with its childlike self/selves because this person is too young to bear the horrific side of life. Selves get literally split, DID sufferers attempt to live several lives at the same time, for a time unaware that some of their identities act out in the most bizarre or harmful ways.

I hope it is obvious that the descriptions of Physical and Mental Modules in this thread, including a mechanism capable of creating many or an unlimited number of Selves to deal with challenges and dangers in the real world refers to the workings of a healthy human mind. I believe having the capability to use many selves from an evolutionary standpoint is an adaptation that works.

It would make sense if creating many selves both by Disassociative Identity Disorder/DID patients and by normal minds adapting to real world threats is based in the same mechanism, a module/mental organ generating as many roles, personae as the situation warrants. The difference being that in the illness DID the self-factory kinda got kickstarted into action by trauma too severe for that young mind to handle, so one or more Selves were sacrificed to contain and isolate the traumatic memories, leaving the child's organization of selves in a state of discord and disarray. In a healthy development the Many Selves emerge, are called forth through effectively engaging an unpredictable and dangerous environment and you learn to play the role of your life or risk getting removed from the stage. Healthy Selves act together  !

One of the big questions left unanswered here is "what is the true self?". My best answer begins by saying what it is not. Your true self is not the persona you express by making an effort to always 'be your self'. Because if you succeed in consistently displaying this supposedly 'authentic' mode of personality, you actually hide from those around you the other selves your mind holds in reserve for various other, perhaps more adverse circumstances. As a fun sidenote I feel like submitting the notion that with many (perhaps unlimited!) selves to choose from it seems hard, call it near impossible to be anything other than your self. Think about it. Trying hard to be yourself is like uh... Michio Kaku trying to be a brilliant Theoretical Physicist, who of course if he did this more strenuously would be just that still, and if perchance in a forgetful mood stopped trying, he would yet be the very same insanely smart scientist. I suspect that as we delve ever deeper into the endless layers of selves created by our mind no single true self will be found. I suppose that if you really want to know another person, you must spend lots of time with them under many different circumstances, in order to get familiar with all their various selves!

And after all.... STILL-THIS-NOT-THE-TRUE-SELF-IS: we have considered a mental module, an amazing biological machine creating roles to survive a deadly Earth theater. Selves from this perspective are just 'stuff', special material to mold and move around for effect. Selves are neither true nor you, merely useful. I conclude the Sense of Self does not include a true self because it's one of a formidable array of modules we evolved to fight for survival. Rather than the path to authenticity, selves are a special weapon of war. Bible verse Proverbs 24:6 adopted as the motto of Israel's awesome intelligence service Mossad perhaps captures best our selves' essence:

"BY WAY OF DECEPTION THOU SHALT DO WAR"

As I write these words I wonder if a true self exists, a unique pattern broadcasting to the universe and all life 'this is me - I WAS HERE' and all I can come up with is: all of my actions and words. Whatever these words and actions truly were, once said and done, they are me, they are truly you forever.

FINISHING OFF WITH SOME BIG MODULES

Two come to mind and they are big. Did I say big? I actually meant ...big.... and they also differ from the previously listed/described modules of the mind and the body in that they are located both in our body and seem to extend way...way.... outside it. Let's go.

This mental organ = Mind Module I model as our ability to imagine, that is: to create a vivid image in our mind, of other life forms, especially of other persons and predatory animals. By now it has been hard wired into our brain over 100,000s of years, because it 'works', helped our ancestors survive (while early humans sporting alternative sets of modules became extinct), as demonstrated in the phenomenon of Pareidolia (go click on it here!), a human bias to recognize patterns as faces regardless of whether a face is really there or not. On the ahh.. face of it this works as entertaining overkill to recognizing family members as distinct from strangers, but there's more: in prehistory human nomads, always traveling with the seasons, between hunting and foraging grounds, making camp for rest or nightfall at defensible locations, were like the McDonald's for hungry carnivores, anything with big teeth and big stomachs to fill like Smilodon, Dire Wolf, Mega Croc you name it closing in from miles away on the smell of cooking meats and other human activities, going for a juicy manburger to sink those ivory sharps into. In pre-hike pre-safari days when Homo Sapiens easily made top of the endangered list you might want to keep your ears pointed and eyes peeled for predators using stealth, camouflage and natural cover to close in unnoticed. Pareidolia then was a life-or-death talent to make out anything resembling a face, applying a hit and miss mode, where it paid off big time to see a face in bushes, treetrunks, tall grass whatever NEVER MIND IF OFTEN NOTHING WAS THERE because you could not afford to miss that one perfectly concealed Smilodon mere feet away, pointedly smiling at its Happy Meal.

A closely related, literally spectacular example of vivid, visual imagination at work is the talent for seeing Autostereograms (click here!). In humans living today not everyone has this talent, yet in the many that do its real world function facilitates one to observe the largely random, chaotic visual patterns in ones surroundings and lo and behold suddenly a 3-D shape kinda POPS UP. Amazing unbelievable stuff don't you agree? This near 3-D vision capability, running mostly on automatic pilot, effectively unpacks a prey animal's attempt to hide / camouflage itself by blending into its environment, and possibly assisted our primal hunters ferret out a small, elusive quarry. On a larger scale this allows us to see our surroundings, like a panoramic landscape to be viewed, not merely in the 2 dimensions of a camera lens, but in a 'relief' of terrain features (like mountains and valleys) represented by the hard working Visual System as a virtual world within our mind, a whole lot of brain activity resulting in: 'seeing'.

and some simple yet striking shapes should jump into view!

Now the long and short of our visual talents is that they were shaped by Natural Selection (hostile nature killing off bloodlines that failed to see things right) coupled with terrible Selection Pressure testing all life forms, humans, every body, modules and sets of modules to the very limit. In evolution, the wages of 'stuff not working' are death/disappearance. There's ALWAYS sumtin ready to take a bite outta you . Thus our ancestors ended up with a visual system that saw everything required to survive into the present. But the demands on the evolution of human vision were so extreme that we also saw more than the survival minimum: beyond mountains and cliffs and deep holes in the ground, animals and fellow humans we began to see people after they had passed, as if alive. Perhaps it was a mix of human visual prowess (as just exemplified), imagination and mourning the loss of a loved one. But at some point in the evolution of modern humans WE BEGAN TO SEE DEAD PEOPLE. Right now I imagine, and along with me a great many others throughout time, that when one dies the body stops functioning, leaving our remains, yet an essential part of the mind continues to exist disembodied, as an eternal soul. The evolutionary explanation for such extraordinary phenomenon could be that minds contained in living bodies are not only brain based (inevitably ceasing existence when the brain dies) but also a discrete, robust electromagnetic field that lives on when our body is gone. What might cause souls be so indestructible, impervious even to physical death? Perhaps the soul is the creature of another dimension, the Spirit World, which operates alternative laws of physics keeping souls/spirits in a stable state, alive if you will, allowing for its denizen spirit entities to be born, live and die on Earth, then return safely home.

I also wonder if our imagination holds the power to create the things we imagine. In such a model our strong emotions bonding us to the ones we lost, our thoughts and fantasies and dreams of their After Life over 100,000s of years have been forming a place where, somehow, life goes on.

Today I look around and see Mankind has imagined a wealth of spirits, gods, angels and demons for so long it has evolved into a hard-wired DNA-carried Religious Sense, expressing in some 90% of the world population whenever you measure, the majority of humans hold some kind of belief in God, or a Higher Being. Evolution presumably retained our faiths because so far they 'worked' helping believers survive. It helps to conquer with God on your army's side. It's a model for problem solving, like Einstein confidently pursuing his logical avenues of research because God must have created the Universe with underlying order. Then faith in God and life eternal offers comfort when we lose the people we love, and makes us feel less alone on Earth.

I believe women have been making a special contribution to the Religious Sense by protecting children and meeting their needs, in particular their emotional needs, thus providing growing men and women with a formative experience of nurturing, of the love of a Mother. Rinse and repeat for 300,000 years and a kernel for gentleness and empathy and being GOOD was introduced to human psychology, starting the development of World Civilization and a Faith that is kind. It's a work in progress.

ALIEN ATTRACTION

You and me gaze upward into the biggest module of all, the Multiverse. I cannot imagine us being the only intelligent species doing the gazing, so I assume all sorts of smart folk on distant planets, galaxies and alternate worlds going through their own evolution and if at all possible explore the space around them. Surely a bunch of them already have arrived here, did a bit of gen tampering with early humans, went for gold or water or other earthly resources, apparently one crew tried flying a tinfoil disk across New Mexico that went all awobbly and then splattered the big tamale over Mac Brazel's ranch, simply: who'all they might be, they're very much into this blue planet and its inhabitants. This topic deals with the appeal we hold for the Visitors. Starting with the modular nature of human bodies and minds, this just shouts 'powerbank' to my thinking, all those modules, redundancies and energy reserves that evolution has harnessed within us to survive for decades, even a century on a hostile Planet Earth might well tempt an advanced (but not overly ethical) alien faction to try harvesting said energies. Same goes for the Mind Modules, which I postulate include an indestructible soul. Human energies could be used for healing or rejuvenating ailing or injured space travellers. Sounds awful, but captured human eternal souls might constitute an unending energy source for a perpetuum mobile interstellar drive.

Parasitic aliens treating us like cattle we really don't want to know, and ought to be considered hostile.

With luck some of the Strangers were of a relatively decent and curious variety. They instead love us for our minds, to be precise, for the path a soul takes through hundreds of lives and sojourns in the Spirit World awaiting rebirth. The knowledge such aliens seek is all the ways and selves and actions over 100,000s of yrs. of one reincarnating individual, perhaps cross referencing with bloodlines, nations and all of human history as well as other versions of us living alternate lives in other Dimensions/Universes. Given such alien scrutiny, they truly would know us better than ourselves.

There could be aliens who have a use for human pregnancy and birth. Hybrids from partial alien heritage might work the ships or walk the Earth. But the big secret of human life is that our bodies are amazingly well adapted biological survival machines, so one worthy objective could be for alien agents to be born on Earth to a human mother, and then live the human experience, fall in love, marry, have kids and cats, have a career in quantum physics, grow old and silly, go all in. That would be a mission in itself.

awaiting rebirth, seeking the knowledge of one reincarnating individual.

From the perspective of an ET who traveled the universe and did not see God anywhere, our deep and personal faith in our God must be intriguing or downright weird. WE SEE GOD HERE. One theoretical alien study project might be to gain insight into why people believe in God, to the extent that they talk to God, proverbially walk with God and experience God as a living person, even a Friend. One outcome of the alien study may be we're all mesjugga. Then again, our religious sense could make us uniquely equipped to connect with God for real. Maybe there is a band of extraterrestrials of wonderfully open minds and intense curiosity who keep monitoring Man in hopes we're on to something, that is: finding God. However smart you get or savvy on space... discovering God... now that would really be sumtin.

purr