When Professor John Mack was alive, a tenured Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Pulitzer prize winner for his 'A Prince of Disorder', he delved very heavily into the UFO abduction phenomenon and wrote a number of books on the subject of alien abductions. As a result of his work he coined the term 'Ontological Shock'. He describes 'Ontological Shock' as Quote: "everything they (abduction/contactees) thought was real is shattered by this" Unquote. Taken from the BBC documentary 'Everyman', (1998).
Every contactee/abductee has had some form of this 'Ontological shock'. I was no exception and it traumatized me and put me into a form of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome). I would suppose everyone who has had their paradigm shattered with near death, alien abduction, and alien contact, could react the same way. Quiet suddenly your mind is blown away with the concept you were wrong about human life all along, The box you were living in no longer exists. It is a life shattering experience.
This post delves into my own 'Ontological Shock', and how I perceived it. Maybe it will be relevant to someone out there?
I was brought up in probably one of the most conservative areas of Utah. Very mormon and I would suspect ninety five percent of the residents of the small town of a couple of hundred people were practicing that faith. Back in the day they decided they wanted to build a second church to worship in so the residents all got together and built it with their own hands and money from their own pocket. It was a very tight community. And again, very conservative. In fact one day as I was driving down the street I saw a democrat standing on the street corner by themselves with a large sign encouraging people to vote for him. That was probably his whole campaign fund right there. I felt sorry for him and pulled over.
"You have got to have the loneliest job in Utah", I said as I pulled up to him.
He just laughed and replied, "yea, I think so!"
I gave him a couple of dollars I had in my pocket and wished him luck. He needed more than that, though.
So when I had my awakening experience in 1984 it was just that...ontological shock. I was a born again, repentant soul. I was a died again true blue believer and I was very fervent in projecting my faith. I wanted everything my faith had to offer and took it all and ran like a bull in a china closet. I was absolutely sure I was going places within my faith. I was a teacher in the Sunday school, mens quorum, and eventually was in charge of the whole Sunday school program. I was absolutely convinced I was heading to heaven and was going to sit on the right hand of God. I was totally bought into the program. This is kinda what I felt like.
This was the beginning of the internet that Al Gore had just invented. You know, dial up aol that you installed with a floppy disk? 14k modem? The dials, the beeps, and if someone picked up the rotary phone you lost the connection and would have to start all over again. All on a desktop computer with the computing power that would fit on a chip on our cell phones now. On the internet I was able to find a guy named J. Allen Hyneck from Northwestern University in Illinois who had just set up an organization called CUFOS, (Center for UFO Studies). So as soon as the house was empty I found a corner of a room where no one would hear me and called the number listed on the website. I was relieved when the phone was answered by what must have been an intern and we talked for at least an hour. In the end he asked me to write down everything that had happened and send it to him through the postal service and that they would respond as quickly as they could.
In spite of camping out at the mailbox when I knew the mail was coming I never heard back from them and was never able to get back in touch with anyone at CUFOS. So I buried the whole experience in the back of my mind and put on a good front within the religious community I was involved with and carried on. I literally had no idea on what else I was supposed to do with the whole event. I was totally lost.
I hid this event for thirteen years. I tried to pretend it never happened. I really had a hard time trying to understand why this could happen to one of 'Gods chosen ones'. This is really where my mind set was at the time and man, I will tell you, the PTSD was real. I really couldn't figure anything out in regards to religion and how it fit into the universal scheme of things. Teaching lessons about something I was questioning was showing through by my lack of enthusiasm and after awhile I dropped the church teaching thing. I had read all the literature about UFO abductions I could find, which was not very much, and was languishing. I couldn't pull anything stable together.
It's kinda like this. In life you have a box in your mind. Everything you learn is placed in the box and you are able to put the pieces of the box together called your mind, ethics, cultural beliefs. In a sense, the box is your belief system. Along comes something like a near death experience, UFO contact/abduction experience, and before you know it another box is introduced to your psyche. So just what is your belief system now? Box A which you have been taught exists? Or box B which has just been introduced to you through the new experience?
What ended up happening in my case is I just kinda blew up both boxes. Nothing made sense so the 'Ontological shock' just kept on going for thirteen years. I had in reality, set up a floating belief system. There was a lot of stuff in box A I kept just to keep me somewhat grounded. Though that can be debated. And it took a long time to try to figure out what was in box B. After thirteen years I was sitting alone in the back of the church worship meeting, watching all the families in the congregation do their thing. Mormons are very big in the family realm. If you are single, and more specifically a man as a single parent, there isn't much use for you. It gets really awkward. One Sunday I just looked around and asked myself what the hell I was doing here and got up in the middle of the meeting and walked out. After that I was determined that the only answers I was going to find rested inside myself. What choice did I have? I couldn't deal with the religious faith anymore. It was at that point I started a journey inside. I was really determined to find out what had happened to me thirteen years ago and I made up my mind I wasn't going to stop searching for answers until I could find the truth about why, what, etc... I even asked them, whomever them was, to take me down the rabbit hole. The answers were there somewhere.
I spent the next twenty years on a shamanic/mystical path, only to understand the rabbit hole would take several lifetimes to explore. I only have one. Live this life now or it passes you buy.
'Ontological Shock' affects people differently. The level of PTSD associated with it can be intense, or it can be almost unnoticeable. I would find myself lakeside during the middle of the day screaming at the top of my lungs, "WHAT THE HELL DO YOU WANT FROM ME!" While at other times reveling in ecstasy for nights on end at the stars in the sky. I had a whole summer like that. Until you get a handle on this 'Ontological Shock' which Dr Mack so eloquently described, you are an experiment. Like Pavlov's dog, you chase the light.
So all in all, just be at peace for what you are, the great, I AM.
SHABALLA
No comments:
Post a Comment