What motivated this post is not just "John_-_Winston" bashing, it's peoples willingness to dismiss anything that doesn't fit well with generally accepted views of physical reality.
For the people reading this in alt.alien.visitors, I am cross-posting this to lobby, a local news group on a public access Unix system I run known as Eskimo North (eskimo.com) so that those folks can also get a better understanding of my background.
For those reading this in lobby, originally I was going to post this message to alt.alien.visitors, but after spending several hours composing this I thought, this would also be a good opportunity for you to know a little more about the operator of the service you are using, my background, interests, motivations, etc. John Winston is a frequent poster to alt.alien.visitors.
I am concerned that some of what I am going to say is going to offend some of you who have decidedly different views of the nature of reality, spirituality, etc. But by the same token, I expect at least the possibility of some sharing of experiences with those of you who have had similiar experiences.
A lot of John's posts sound like, occasionally are, tabloid material, but also quite frequently I read things in his posts, accounts from various people that are things that have happened to me, or phenomena that I have experienced that very rarely do I see or hear about elsewhere.
There is more to this reality than most of you know. I am not claiming a monopoly on "the truth", I am still exploring and trying to gain a better more complete understanding of the complete nature of reality. But one thing I have come to understand, the mainstream view of the nature of physical reality is severely incomplete and possibly entirely wrong.
I know that the generally accepted picture of physical reality is wrong, or at the very least incomplete, because I've had some personal experiences that flat don't fit accepted physics. I personally don't ascribe these experiences to anything particularly mystical, I simply believe that our mainstream view of the nature of physical reality is either wrong or incomplete and exactly how wrong or incomplete I don't know because I have not personally had enough such experiences to map it out.
I am interested in gaining a better understanding about the true nature of physical reality and all that it encompasses, and one of the things that seems key to doing so is finding more examples of things that fall outside of what the accepted picture of reality defines as possible, and yet assume some degree of credibility. When enough examples are found then it becomes possible to make some hypothesis about the real nature of reality and test it.
In Johns posts, from time to time I see examples of the kinds of things that have happened to me happen to other people. And many of you blow them off and acuse John of being everything from a twit to a disinformation agent, yet I >KNOW< that some of these things have a basis in truth because they are things I have experienced myself.
If you haven't experienced anything like this, WHY do you have to attack John? Why can't you just skip it if you aren't interested, and allow those of us who are to learn from each others experience?
Allow me to speak for a moment of a couple of themes I see quite frequently in John's posts, and a few others who have been lumped as "friends" of Johns, amount them:
The new-age concept of "reality creation" and channeling.
The idea of time-travel or future contact.
The shifting of the earths axis and earth changes.
Several years ago, when eskimo was a small public access Unix site, no Internet, on a Tandy 6000, with about 70 subscribers, one of those people (whom I'm not naming here because she may not wish to be associated with this) gave me a copy of Jane Roberts (who channels Seth) book, "The Nature of Personal Reality". Whether or not Seth was a genuine seperate entity that Jane channels, an aspect of Janes subconcious mind, or an intentionally created fictional character, the material that was presented I found to be of value. To the person who gave me that book (you know who you are), thank you!
In my mind, I've got this store of events, items, observations, that "don't make sense", don't relate well to the rest of the reality I know. In reading this book, I found little insites that time and time again I found myself thinking, "I never thought of it that way, but it makes sense, if this is true, then this and that and all these things now make sense". And the principal of reality creation, has certainly changed my life. Eskimo has over a very short time grown from a Tandy 6000 isolated save for Usenet, to three Sun servers with a T1 internet connection and nearly 1000 subscribers.
I wish I could remember his name, but there was an individual who posted some material a while back from a person who believed that the future creates itself by reaching back and setting the seeds of it's own creation.
There is an article in this months (March 1994) issue of Scientific American, (it ain't quite Nature, but it's a reasonably mainstream accepted source) entitled, "The Quantum Physics of Time Travel".
In it, it talks about resolution of a couple of paradoxes, one known as the Grandfather paradox, in which someone goes back in time and kills their grandfather, or in some other way prevents the birth of their parents and thus themselves, and another paradox called a knowledge paradox. It resolves both of these paradoxes with a multiverse, an infinite number of parallel universes.
The information paradox is generally stating that information can not be created without creative effort being expended. In the example they give, an art critic from the future travels back into the past and visits a person who, in the future time frame is a renouned artist, but who at the time visited is rather mediocre. The time traveler brings with him samples of the artists future work, which the artist deligently copies, and the copies are essentially the works to become the future work. An artistic free-lunch, which the author believes is ruled out by common sense.
In the multiverse solution to this paradox, a universe exists in which the painter is mediocre initially, and one in which he is great. The work is not created out of thin air in a timeloop, but rather tranferred from the universe where the artist is a great painter into the universe where he is not.
Personally, I do not believe that the possibility of the future creating itself can be ruled out simply because it is non-sensical. A lot of things happen in quantum physics which are non-sensical, the dual wave/partical nature of everything for one, electron tunneling, etc. Often things seem non-sensical only BECAUSE WE DO NOT UNDERSTAND THEIR TRUE NATURE!
There is a BIG HINT here folks, not just with regards to John's postings, but to every aspect of your life.
Whether the true nature of reality does involve a whole multiverse or simply the ability of events from the future to impact the present and past, the effect is similar. In either case, it is possible for information to come into our present reality from the future or seemingly out of nowhere. I know this happens because it happens to me. I can't prove it to you but I know that if you look you'll find out there is a lot more to reality than you presently know. It is far far more flexible than you imagine. There is a lot of truth to reality creation. Whether or not you can completely create your reality, you certainly can influence far more effectively than can readily be accounted for by mainstream thinking.
With regards to earth changes, or axis shifts, also see this months Scientific American (March 1994), read the article entitled, "The Earth's Mantle below the Oceans", it at least provides a physical mechanism for such a shift to occur and provides evidence that such a mechanism exists. Whether or not a rapid polar shift (and we are talking about axis of rotation here not magnetic shift, though it's easy to see how a magnetic shift could/would accompany such a shift) ever has occured or ever will I don't know. The point is there is at least a mechanism for how it COULD happen.
I am going to relate some of my experiences here that I've been referring to, some of them I have related to before, but I want to try to put some of them into context. I realize some of you won't believe me. That's ok, I am not trying to prove anything to you. What I am trying to do is show you that possibilities exist, and also I am hoping to perhaps catch the attention of others who have had similar experiences but have felt disinclined to communicate them for fear of being criticized the way John Winston often is.
When I was in my first year of Jr. High school, I lived on the nearly on the top of a large hill, and the school I went to was down in a hole, there was probably about 200 feet of difference in elevation which made it real easy to run to school and a real drag to climb out of the hole coming home.
The first block I went down was a long block down hill, and about 50 feet from the bottom there was a fire hydrant. I used to run down this street every day. The sidewalk was cement, the kind with little dividers every two feet or so, squares, in the concrete. When I'd get to the fire hydrant I used to do a long jump and see how much distance I could get out of it, and I don't know in any absolute terms what the normal jumps I'd get were but they certainly wouldn't qualify me for the olympics or anything else.
One morning though, SOMETHING happened. I jumped, and I knew I got a good launch, and I pulled my legs up under me as tight as I could to reduce drag and get as much distance out of it as possible. Something strange happened, I went up into the air about as much as expected, but then instead of falling back down, just kind of hung there, kept moving forward, way past where I would normally land, past the end of the side walk, across 17th, and landed part way down the hill on the other side. I looked around wondering if anybody had witnessed what just happened, didn't see anyone, so I turned around and walked back up the hill to 17th and continued on the way to school.
This happened in my first year of Jr. High school, and every school day after that I tried to reproduce it, and never was successful at achieving anything beyond the normal jumps I had done before that. What happened that morning is presently beyond my understanding, but it was not explainable given the mainstream view of the nature of physical reality, but that didn't stop it from happening, although it might be sufficient to stop some of you from believing it happened.
During my last year of Jr. High school and through high school, I either ran a bootleg radio station or participated in one being run by friends. The first I was involved with was run by someone in Wedgewood, a neighborhood about 3 miles east of where I lived and about 1/2 mile to the south. Even after I started and was running my own pirate radio station I continued to participate in the other along with a number of other people. Towards the end of the time that station was operating, I was driving, and had driven over and was on my way back. There was a pretty good thunderstorm going and I was driving a '68 rambler with a three in the tree manual transmission with no synchros in first (and none that worked in any other gear). The relevant point here is that the transmission was difficult to shift rapidly, if you tried the strange ball and rod linkage it used would pop apart and the transmission would jam up.
On the way back I was driving along 17th which is the same north-south street I jumped over that one morning, and I was a block south of 90th, the street I lived on. Just as I crossed 89th, there was this big lightning strike over lake Washington. It could only be seen while crossing 89th as houses on either side obscurred the view. I stopped the car and backed back into the intersection, the lightning strike instead of lasting milliseconds lasted long enough to do this, and it turned from a blue-white color to red in the process.
No, my understanding of lightning is that once break-down occurs the ionized atmosphere is a good conductor and so discharge occurs very rapidly, but this one time it must have taken at least ten seconds. And what caused the color of the bolt to change from blue-white to red in the process, I don't know. I imagine that there is some exceptional circumstances that could allow ordinary physics to explain this but I don't know what it is. It was cool to watch though!
Speaking of lightning, I was at home during one storm. In Seattle, lightning storms are usually pretty wimpy, not real impressive, not like back in the midwest where you can drive by nearly continuous lightning during a good storm at night (I went through one like this in North Dakota, it was really cool). Anyway, I had this TV antenna I had put up outside really hokey, I had a couple of sections of mast with an antenna on top strapped to a railing on the side of the porch with twinlead coming down through my bedroom window, no grounding of the mast, no lightning arrestors (which are generally wasted here anyway). There was a lightning storm and it was getting pretty heavy by Seattle standards, and I thought, maybe I should disconnect that antenna and put it out the window before lightning hits it and blows my television all to hell.
So I reached for the antenna wire on the back of the TV and when I was about two inches from it there was a nearby lightning strike and a spark jump about two inches from the antenna to my hand. Man that will really get your attention! My whole body jolted, but there wasn't any obvious damage, my arm at first felt like I had slept on it and cut off the circulation, it was numb and paralized, hanging by my side limp. I couldn't do anything with it, but after about a minute of panic I started to be able to wiggle my fingers, and feeling started to return, and in about fifteen minutes everything worked again, except it felt like I had been holding a bowling ball straight out at arms lenth for several hours. The next day it felt normal again but my TV didn't receive hardly anything any more. I went out to inspect the damage to the antenna, and while the antenna was intact, the twinlead had these weird gaps about every three feet where about two inches of insulation were melted away. Kind of transformed the twinlead into ladder wire. Anyway, it shorted to the mast. I replaced it and everything was almost back to normal. The set was an "off-the-line" tube set, and apparently the discharge cooked the capacitors to the antenna leads and turned them into conductors so I'd get zapped by the TV if I or antenna if I didn't unplug it before doing anything with it after that.
Well, no special physics involved in that experience, just related to the lightning thing, the spaced gaps in the twinlead can be explained by resonance and standing waves in the line. I feel like I was lucky to come away with no permanent damage though, and it kind of reminds you just how fast things can happen.
One of the reasons I am attracted to alt.alien.visitors has to do with an experience I had when I was about ten. I had no history of sleep-walking, but one morning I woke up with a high-clay mud on my pajama bottoms. There wasn't mud like that around the house, but there was at a school I went to about six blocks away, and that's about the closest source I know of for high-clay mud like that. I dreamt I was take aboard a UFO.
So, did I have an abduction experience, or just freaking out because my parents were going through a divorce and all at that time. I don't know. I do remember some things from the dream to this day though. The ship was not very large, and the aliens were about the same size as me. One thing that fascinated me in particular, there was this tube around the circumference of the craft, several inches in diameter, about a foot off the floor and about a foot from the wall. It looked like a glass tube filled with mercury (not saying that it was, it just had that appearance), and at one point on the tube there were some coils of copper wire wound around it, and they connected to what looked like a lead-acid car battery except there were only three cells and they were maybe five times larger than the cells of a car battery, and the posts were different, but basically it had that appearance.
I find it interesting, that in so much of the fringe-science literature there are claims of electromagnetic means to anti-gravity or FTL travel now, and when I was only ten, the dream I had of being aboard a UFO prominently features apparatus that appeared to somehow utilize electromagnetism (why else copper coils connected to a battery). The function of the thing that looked like a tube full of mercury has me puzzled. Wondering if there was any strange physical effects of mercury and electromagnets I took a mercury thermometer and wound a coil around it and hooked it to a battery, nothing obviously interesting happened.
When I was running the bootleg station, for a while I had a part time job pulling orders in a warehouse. One night I had a dream that I played a record and announced it as "The Late Great Elvis Presley", now some background, I've never been an Elvis fan, and he wasn't dead at the time. The dream was so odd that I told a bunch of people at work about it. Then about 10:30 they announced on the P.A. that Elvis Presley had died. (theme from the Twilight Zone plays in the background)...
Some years ago, when the cold war was still going strong, I was having a lot of lucid dreams. When I have lucid dreams, I can go anywhere instantly by thinking about it, I mean, zing, and I'm there, even faster than normal reflexes, just instantly, except when it involves time.
One time, while having a lucid dream I decided to go back in time, and the most wild experience I've ever had happend. I felt myself accelerating backwards, and I saw time as a physical dimension I was travelling through, and I saw things in four dimensions, there is no waking experience to compare this to, sounds went by and lights went by and the feeling of accelerating backwards was overwhelming. Unlike other places I travelled, this was not instant, travelling through time took some period of time. I found myself standing on this brick road at night. There was a telephone pole with an incandecent street lamp with a tin reflector above it. There was a fence and behind it a bi-plane painted orange and white. The scene felt absolutely real. I got scared and thought what if I can't get back? As soon as I had that thought, the sensation of accerating happened again, forward this time, and I saw things go by in reverse, again I saw things in four dimensions, and then I woke up in my bed.
Well, this was wild, and I continued to have lucid dreams, and since I had gone back in the past, now I wanted to go into the future, but I was afraid to. At that time, the threat of nuclear war seemed very real, and I was afraid that any minute we'd blow ourselves all too hell. I was afraid that if I went into the future, I'd find out that everybody was gone, civilization was destroyed. Finally, I got the nerve to go like one week. And I tried to find a paper and look for something that I could remember and take back as a test. I found a paper and opened up to the business section and tried to look at the stock values. I did not intend to go buy stock and get rich this way, I was only trying to determine if this was real information or just imagination (assuming at this point that the two were not closely coupled, something I no longer believe). Well, I couldn't focus on the numbers. No matter how hard I tried, the numbers would not become clear. I got frustrated and returned.
Later, in another dream, I got more brave and decided to go farther into the future, way into the distant future was my original goal, I wanted to find out what would happen to the human race, what would become of the earth. The travel seemed to take a long time so I became impatient and stopped. Where I stopped, I didn't know what time/date it was, so I tried again to find a newspaper, and did. When I tried to read the date on the paper it was like with the stock reports, I couldn't focus on it. But I could read the headline which said, "Quake Devestates Berlin, Germany". This struck me as odd at the time because the cold war was still going strong, and the idea that Germany would ever be unified again was ridiculous, east was east and west was west. Somehow I knew this was the implication of the headline, and now over time this has happened. Germany is Germany, Berlin is Berlin, and the wall is down. I am still waiting for the devestating quake.
On the subject of earth changes, I am not predicting anything, I want to make that very clear. But I also want to say that I think it's possible that large rapid changes will occur. The article in Scientific American I made reference to provides a mechanism.
I've had reoccuring dreams, since early childhood, of this happening. One of my earliest dreams involves a time when I am visiting my aunt who lives about a mile from me. She lives on a dead end street with a culdesac at the end. In the dream, the pavement splits and a few rocks fly up into the air, and then more and more and a cone starts building, slow at first and then more rapid, and I realize, where I live is not safe from this volcano that has just formed.
I've had many many dreams where all of the volcanoes in the cascades which are presently inactive become active, and the ground beneath my feet is hot, and we make an attempt to escape via I-90. As we get just over the pass a volcano to the south and slightly behind us erupts violently but we keep going. We make it all the way through washington, and into idaho, and are climbing a hill. The roads are all buried in volcanic ash, and the ground is hot under our feet, (there are many people fleeing), but we keep walking east, there is the sense that if we go far enough east the ground will be stable.
I had this one dream where I was at a small town in eastern washington and there was a swimming pool and we were swimming and all of the sudden a mountain to the north erupted and the ash was coming down around us and we had to get out of there in a hurry.
I had a dream of being on 5th N.E. in Seattle, and my father and his wife were over from Yakima visiting, and I was looking up in the sky and thought I was looking at the moon, and then looked over and saw the real moon and realized this thing I was looking at was not the moon but some object on a collision path with earth, at least I had the feeling this was the case.
Well, it's time for me now to go to sleep and have some more dreams as it is 2:30am and I have to work tomorrow. So hope I haven't bored everyone too much or ticked too many people off or made it sound like everything is ominous. There is potential for good and bad and I think we have a part in which way things go.
Goodnight all.
kiwi@spiritweb.org