Perhaps the tile should have ended with “…to name a few” as herein we continue, from part 1, part 2, part 3, considering Whitley Strieber who has been the poster child for UFO and alien related subjects of decades just as much as the grey/gray alien has been the poster child for the same. We will consider statements about Strieber made by his acquaintance the self-professed possessed professor Jeffrey Kripal’s book Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal (a book which I reviewed here).
In pp. 293-294 Kripal wrote:
“In my own term’s now, we might speculate that any deep encounter with the sacred involves a temporary dissolution of the ego. If the psyche is ready for such an ego death, the encounter will tend to be experienced positively, even ecstatically. If the psyche is not ready, however, the encounter will tend to be experienced negatively, even demonically. The angel can quickly become the demon, and the demon can just as quickly turn into an angel.”
This is actually very much like that which many satanists will tell you about their view of satan. Many will claim to not actually believe that there is any such personal being as satan but that satan, demons and various other such beings, are merely reflections of their psyche. Jeffrey Kripal and others have simply applied this to aliens, visitors or whatever they call them.
Kripal continues the thought thusly:
“Perfectly faithful to his double-edged, both-and nature of the sacred, Strieber, as an ego with extensive spiritual training, has known what he neutrally calls ‘the visitors’ as both…”
Both angels and demons then just like the horror writer Clive Barker put it in his series Hellraiser, “Angels to some, demons to others.” And yet, by definition, real angels and demons are ontologically different and one’s perception does not change that.
Back to Kripal’s text:
“Strieber has read deeply into comparative mystical literature, including into the Asian contemplative traditions of Zen Buddhism, Chinese Taosim, and Indo-Tibetan Tantra…he often invokes categories like the Koan of Zen practice or the Kundalini and ‘third eye’ of Indian Tantric Yoga.
Has had described to me how, as he became more familiar with the visitors, he noticed that they smelled of soil and he thought of them as miners. He would even sometimes hear drilling below the house—a kind of personal hollow earth.”
This goes towards the point we made in part 1 which is that some think that Strieber was:
“just minding his own business and all of a sudden they are being accosted by unusual beings. Yet, the fact is that he, just like many others who have similar experiences, had a prior history of engaging in occult practices—by any other name.”
Jeffrey Kripal continues:
“He also describes his early fascination with Egypt and his personal involvement in the early discussion about the Viking discovery and 1982 photographic resolution of the ‘face of Mars,’ which he instinctively associated with the ancient image of the sphinx.
The Hawk-headed Egyptian god Horus, or a visitor posing as the god, even showed up in his cabin one night before a stunned houseguest.”
This makes for an interesting correlation to Aleister Crowley who was likewise fascinated with Egypt and had interaction with various beings who pretended to be Egyptian gods.
Kripal then goes back to the point about “alien” versus “visitor”:
“Although, Strieber consistently rejects and avoids the language of ‘the alien’ (for its bad sci-fi b-movie allusions), he has written five provocative nonfiction books on his encounters with the visitors, which clearly invoke, even as they resist, subvert, and complicate, the earlier symbolic frames of the alien and the UFO. All of this, moreover, was first signaled in a bestselling book, Communion, which featured on its cover a female being, whom Strieber describes as ‘spider-like.’
Ted Jacobs would make this being’s huge, black, wraparound eyes immediately recognizable through his iconic paintings of her on the book’s famous cover. Whether understood as ‘other’ or as some deeper aspect of ‘us.’”
As you can see at this link there is also a correlation between Aleister Crowley’s illustration of a being called Aiwass and the just referenced being on the cover of Communion.
In pp. 296-297 Jeffrey Kripal gets into how Strieber’s background became his foreground:
“Strieber’s central mystical notion of ‘communion’ is all about moving from an awareness that we are being written or manipulated, even sometimes seemingly raped or mind controlled…to an active, shared, fully reciprocal, even loving coauthorship with the alien other of a shared supernature.”
This is what the Secret School is all about; it is one of the most extreme examples of Stockholm Syndrome of which one could think—he is now encouraging us to just passively sit back and accept being manipulated, raped and mind controlled because, hey, the visitors know best so, just trust that the ends will justify the means.
“In this same realized and now authorizing spirit, he invokes quantum physics again in order to make sense of the radical participatory nature of his visitor experiences, that is, the mysterious ways that the observation of an encounter event in the external environment is in some sense dependent on the subject state of the observer.
Not unlike John Keel, Whitely Strieber understands deeply that observer somehow helps create, literally bring into being, the observed. In our secret lives, Strieber suggests, we are really and truly participating in the authorization of reality itself, and in ways that remain largely unconscious at our present level of evolutionary development….we are, together, a giant awakening into our own unbelievable powers.”
Here are the basics of how Whitley Strieber’s world was turned upside down:
“On that night, he experienced a dramatic abduction by a group of transphysical beings in upstate New York in his own forest cabin-home. In Communion (1986), he recreates that night, its foreshadowing that earlier
October, and its various deep threads back into his childhood through conscious memory, journal entries, and, eventually, some hypnosis…
Strieber in fact had no coherent understanding of what happened to him that night until he sought out medical attention for his intense psychological sufferings and physical symptoms, which included, he learned to his shock and horror, clear physiological evidence that he had been raped. According to Strieber, Dr. [Donald] Klein [Strieber’s hypnotist] originally approached his symptoms, which had developed into PTSO or posttraumatic stress disorder, as signs of a crime.
An early short story entitled simply ‘Pain’ (1986) represents an immediate, largely indirect or unconscious attempt to work through the experience before he began to articulate it through hypnosis, the UFO phenomenon, and his own doubleconcept of the visitors. Strieber wrote this short story in the days immediately after his abduction in what he describes as ‘a state of extreme terror and excitement that somehow involved a provocative, even devastating, female figure. The story reflects my first attempt to cope with the explosive, profoundly confusing combination of ecstasy and terror that the experience inspired.’”
This provocative and devastating female figure is the one depicted on the cover of Communion and has served as a catalyst for the figure of the gray/grey alien which is so well known within pop-occulture.
In concluding this segment, note that Kripal writes (p. 301):
“For Strieber, in any case, what the visitors are probably about is not invasion, but a profound and sufficiently gradual change in our worldview and our souls. He is in some good company here. After corresponding with military officials and contactees in the States, no less an intellectual than Carl Jung had read the flying saucer craze of the 1950s in a very similar light in his classic and still prescient Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth Seen in the Skies (1958).
Jung’s conclusions were subtle, prescient, profound, and humble. He turned to parapsychology for suggestions-which were never any more than that-that these ‘things seen in the sky’ might be planetary poltergeists manifesting a profound dis-ease or metaphysical imbalance in our present materialist worldview, that they may be, as it were, a manifestation of consciousness setting itself aright after a long night of materialism and mechanism. The crisis for Jung, in other words, was not yet environmental. It was primarily intellectual and spiritual.”
So, visitor aliens are here to change our worldview and souls—think about that. It is important to note that the likenesses between Whitley Strieber and Carl Jung are not solely about their conclusions but the fact that they both engaged in occult practices.