"For nearly twelve years I have been working with people in this and other cultures who have reported profound, life changing experiences, through encounters with human-like beings, reaching them apparently from other dimensions. In speaking and writing about these people, I have come to appreciate the problems that readers and audiences have in thinking about matters that seem so far outside of the bounds of reality that have been defined by their education and upbringing.
Although there was in some instances physical evidence that something had happened to my clients—UFOs seen in the vicinity, corroborating observation by others of at least a part of the encounters, unexplained marks on their bodies, etc.—the evidence that I had was largely experiential, i.e. the reports themselves. I could not prove, for example, that my clients had been literally taken by alien beings into space craft. I came to realize that the problem I was facing was not simply a matter of evidence but the persistence of a narrow worldview and of the ways of knowing that sustain it.
The worldview that continues to be more or less dominant in Western society, and those cultures we have influenced, is called variously Newtonian/ Cartesianism, scientific materialism or anthropocentric humanism. It radically separates the objective from the subjective domains. The objective world, matter and energy, is treated as virtually synonymous with reality, and knowledge of it is gained by the scientific method, viz. hypothesis, controlled experiment, measurement and replication. Unless the presence of beings, or any other intelligence including God Himself, can be proven to exist by this method, reports of such encounters can be dismissed out of hand or relegated to the purgatory of the subjective."
Read the entire Essay HERE
"Passport To the Cosmos" HERE
John E Mack Institute HERE
