Back in town, moving slowly . . .

Hi everybody,

I said I’d get back in the saddle today, but am moving much more slowly now that I’ve been off-screen for a week. (Very slow internet connection at the conference center, so I basically let it go completely. Feels good!)

I will be adding reports of various presentations from this Congress over the following weeks and months, and will hopefully get more up to speed on other topics starting tomorrow.

But first, a few impressions off the top of my head from the five-day conference in Scottsdale, Arizona:

• At least four or five presenters spoke of their practice of daily meditation as the anchor and center of their lives. Some confessed to being daily meditators for over 30 years. One woman who works with sometimes dark energies (the shapeshifting, trickster, Middle Eastern “Jinn”) is not only a daily meditator, but she told me personally that she makes sure she keeps her body very fit, visits a Taoist exorcist when necessary, and consults regularly with a medical chi kung healer. I really appreciated her obvious balance and integration, given the difficult nature of her work.

• The practice and efficacy of group meditation was also stressed by several presenters. More than one mentioned an experiment where a group of just a couple of thousand meditators reduced the global crime rate by 70% during the time of their meditation. More than ever, a number of presenters stressed the idea that whatever future lies ahead for humanity and the Earth, it will be a global out picturing of our own expectations. Again and again, this mantra: choose love over fear.

• There were two different panel discussions at this conference that had to do with various forms of media, both mainstream and alternative, and their relationship to “disclosure” of ET. All very interesting, especially the carefully nuanced dance that Lee Speigel (of huff post) plays out with each of his UFO stories. Despite his own personal feeling that UFO/ET is very real (drawing on his decades of research into the subject, with deathbed confessions and documents, etc.) you would never know it from the stories he writes, since he’s careful to use words each time like “reportedly,” “allegedly,” “supposedly.” My question: once he retires, will he still be striving for this kind of fake objectivity? Overall, what I came away with especially was a re-emphasis of my own sense that culturally programmed “ridicule” has been and continues to be the strongest deterrent to any serious consideration of the paranormal.

• Especially appreciated presenter Whitley Streiber’s deep emotional nature, and how his profound eloquence seems to arise directly out of that. Very unusual, for a man. Also interested in his evolution. Referring to his first UFO book, Communion, he says now that it was his fear of the Other that led him to a negative interpretation of his experience with ETs. Presenter Travis Walton (google him) says the same thing about his view of his experience with ETs now. He was horrifically afraid when it happened, so saw it as bad. Over the decades he has changed his view, saying that they took him onto the spaceship to help him, not hurt him.

• Even so, there is still a split in the UFO community between those who think all ETs are good, and those who feel there are many different kinds of ETs with many different agendas, not all of them aligned with humanity’s best interests. I tend to fall more and more into the latter camp. Am getting more comfortable with realizing that just as it is here, so it is elsewhere! Good guys and bad guys, as usual. Plus, as presenter Anne Streiber mentioned, she has noticed that those who see negative ETs (like so-called negative “reptilians”) are often negative themselves.

• In general, I sense more and more blending of internal and external, of seeing what’s going on outside as a reflection of what’s going on inside. Blending of dimensions as well: More prevalent this year than in the three previous congresses that I attended, presenters spoke of trans- and inter dimensional beings as being of perhaps even more interest and importance than extraterrestrials.

• In line with the above, presenter David Sereda (google him) said something that startled me into a totally new feeling of utter and complete surprise and delight: he had been talking about the microscopic “quantum field,” where researchers have discovered that some particles seem to blink into and out of visibility, and that some of them remain invisible, but are known to exist purely through the traces they leave. Then he jumped to the macro level, and talked about planets as particles, also capable of blinking into and out of visibility. In other words, given the fractal nature of the universe, the galactic field as itself a quantum field. Then he speculated about the current reported slowing down of the rotation of Venus, wondering if this is because there is an invisible planet that is influencing its rotation.

Meanwhile, go here for openminds.tv’s report on what went on.

If you’re thinking about ordering some of the presentation DVDs, here’s the ones I took home with me: Antonio Hunneeus, Lee Speigel, Peter Robbins, David Sereda, Rosemary Elen Guiley, Bryce Zabel, Jaime Maussan, Whitley Streiber, Steven Greer, Colin Andrews, and all three panel discussions. If you only want to order two DVDs, I’d make it Hunneeus (a dedicated researcher’s wonderful overview of the long history of UFOs) and Maussan (for his incredibly eloquent presentation of what he thinks is impending disclosure).

In general, there was a surprisingly rich emotional/spiritual resonance to the entire conference, in contrast to what I’d call the nuts-and-bolts, downed-and-crashed crafts and bodies of the “show me the physical evidence of UFOs” bias of past conferences.