High strangness. The Tic Tak.

Yesterday,  I remembered the Tic Tac. I saw it on September 7th and I was in Bromsgrove. I had got out of my car and as I looked up, I noticed an odd, white, flying thing. To be honest, my first though was  -  is that a peddle bin?

I watched, and tried to make sense of it, and I gave up!

But it was absolutely not a bin. It wove in and out of the cloud. 

When I arrived at my friend's house, I said ' I think I've just seen a UFO' and everyone else decided that 'it was probably a drone' - and a part of me agreed and I said  'it was probably Google'!

'It was probably Google' that makes even less sense!

So I had forgotten about that until yesterday, almost forty days ago now!

Why?

And why hadn't I asked myself questions about what it could be?

The first reason is the miasma of fear surrounding these things. I actually felt scared when I thought of talking about it. Fear is part of the UAP experience it seems. But the second, more interesting reason is other people's reactions. So, people have been seeing UAPs / UFOs forever, and ghosts and poltergeists.

Therefore for sure, something happens.

I am well acquainted with 'Uncanny' and other ghost stories and YouTubes, and with the feelings associated with the story telling techniques, how the stories are told. And I want to be clear, I think that how the story is told is integral to the whole thing. There are dispassionate security camera footage shots, there are shocked and surprised home owners with cowering pets, there are lights in the sky that travel in odd ways, too fast, too slow and too random! When the story is told, experts are brought in to provide explanations - often someone who believes and someone who doesn't. I suppose I'm getting bored of it? And also I find the sense of mild anxiety combined with the lack of any resolution or explanations creates a feeling similar to gambling? A type of porn almost - but for sure it is an addictive format - the sense of mild threat hooks the mind - what if it happened to me, are they lying, Why would they lie, all sorts of unanswerable questions become open loops. And so this explains the presence of experts, who can't solve it because there hasn't been any actual research. 

Surely we can do better - is what I find myself thinking.

I feel like I'm only just beginning to catch up with all this, but the best term for it is High strangeness - from Erik Davis and Jacques Vallee. High Strangeness is a mix of physical and psychic unusualness, often combined with the deeply absurd. 

I can't help feeling too, that since the invention (reification) of the subconscious and mental illness, so the reported experiences of High strangeness stopped being understood as primarily a Spiritual experience, now reframed as pathology. The mild sense of paranoia that goes with the territory doesn't help. And for someone to be out about their UFO and paranormal experiences, this person has to be able to either feel anonymous (to be comfortable with speaking up) or someone who doesn't care what other people think. Having stepped into it, I can see that the UFO -paranormal experience creates the symptoms of mental health problems entirely through social forces. Or worse, through targeting and disinformation as in the case of Paul Berkowitz (Mirage Men: A Journey into Disinformation, Paranoia and UFOs.) But, if we return to the concept of Spiritual Emergency - This was something I attempted to address in my research project; people who are living through times of incredible stress sometimes have an experience that radically alters how they understand their life, and what is happening. The fact that they are stressed can add power to the experience, but regardless! The experience happens anyway - High weirdness - Erik Davis -  or High strangeness occurs whenever, but a potential is there for the person to read the experience almost as hieroglyphs spelling out a message that suddenly shifts and alters forever, their world view; a synergy between physical and psychic events, a synchronicity.

Poltergeists are interesting, as they are often a shared experience. Actually, hauntings are often a shared experience. Psychological theories are imported to place the locus of the experience solely within a person's 'mis--perception, as opposed to just going with the obvious, that it is probably an outside and independent something. My experience of the Poltergeist felt like an intrusion, as if something was intruding into my reality. 

Ioan P Couliano describes it best, referring to Flatland [By Edwin Abbott Abbott, first published in 1884] and asking the question, what would we see if a 4 dimensional object intruded into our 3 dimensional world?

We could only see the parts that corresponded with our reality. 

My poltergeist didn't go in for the absurd though. The physical manifestation was mostly things falling at me. It felt violent and it felt aggressive. Now I think about it, I realize that I behaved very well towards it - I said out loud 'Use words if you want me to understand you!' But if I interpret its action as communication, it seemed to be speaking my husband's missing truth - the poltergeist's actions told me what he would not (the track that played randomly on the CD in his car) and if the things falling at me expressed his rage and desire to harm me (he had left the house and surrendered his keys by this point) I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was his rage.

So it would be a thought form then?

This is a Theosophist way to understand, that has been drawn from the Vajrayana, and a similar idea was used to create "Philip Aylesford". Philip was a made up ghost, who actually attended his own seance. There is a book: Conjuring up Philip: an adventure in psychokinesis. And of course, Dougie Jones - Agent Cooper's tulpa in Twin Peaks! I digress into absurdity? And I don't know what it says about me that the idea of a thought form seems less far fetched than 'it was probably Google - I don't have any way to explain how a thought form could manifest though. But, my husband had a track record of causing damage at a distance (or was it coincidence?) because someone else was once the target of his hatred and rage. This person found his car's windscreen smashed - twice - in two different towns on two consecutive days, and my husband hadn't physically been there to do it.

So why on earth would I even think for a second that it could be him?

Coincidence is not causality, yet the event felt true. It possessed a hyper-reality. A significant coincidence feels like 'writing on the wall' because it illustrates and makes clear a true story that underlies the situation - especially when there is denial. Sometimes these hyper-significant events light-up the non-verbal thinking part of the mind, and the sensation is almost a bolt out of the blue feeling! Mostly there is a shiver and the awareness, or sensation of weird.

We try to run this process the opposite way around in ceremony - using sounds, objects, words that link real life events such as death, marriage, shifting seasons...to powerful memories. I do the same when I use the knowledge gained from solution focused therapy to talk to people, memory is our reality...

But back to the Tik Tac, I feel frustration when I think of it, because a part of me is certain that someone must know what they are. One best guess is the Silent Ventus Drone?

Have I reported it? 

Just told a couple of UFO investigator groups on FaceBook. But I wish that I hadn't.