Each of us who work in the area of consciousness evolution seems to have a limit. Some people say "well, that parapsychology stuff is okay, but astrology, no, I can't buy into that." Or other people will say, "Well, I can even take astrology and parapsychology, but the UFO [Unidentified Flying Object] abduction stuff--that's too far out. I can't accept that." And that was my experience as well, as I will explain. One of the things one has to do working in this field is to disimpact certain of our words. Language is for making categories, and the categories we have do not work very well here. People ask me, for example, is that really true, or, did this literally happen to people? Is it real? But real and happen are the kinds of words that have to be looked at again from another point of view--or inside and outside. Is this something in the external world or something in the internal world? Again, those categories do not hold. What I will do is to tell first of my own experience, how I got into this area, then give a bit of the history of the field, touching the high spots of this huge subject. Then I will present some of the phenomenology, assuming that a number of you are not that familiar with the abduction phenomenon itself. I will speak about who the abductees are, how I use nonordinary states of consciousness in my own work, will say a little about the physical evidence, what effect being abducted has on the abductees, and, finally, how I have put together the meaning of this phenomenon. I refer you to four books for those of you who would like to explore this subject further. One is by Ken Ring, who is with us in Prague. It is called The Omega Project. Another is by Keith Thompson, called Angels and Aliens. Budd Hopkins's book Intruders, published in 1987, is a classic in this field. Finally, I recommend David Jacobs's very recently published book, Secret Life: Firsthand Accounts of UFO Abductions. My experience with the abduction phenomena is fairly recent. In 1989, Stan [Grof] gave me a paper by Keith Thompson, which was being prepared for a book Stan and Christina were editing on spiritual emergencies. Thompson's chapter contained a Jungian interpretation of the UFO phenomenon, but I kept asking myself as I read the chapter, yes, but what are the data? What is this about? What is really going on here? Late that fall, a friend, who was a member of my holotropic breathwork class, asked me if I wanted to meet Budd Hopkins, and I said, "Who's Budd Hopkins?" He is, of course, a pioneer in this field. One day in January 1990, I had some time in New York. It was one of those dates that you tend to remember exactly, when something shifts in your life. January 10th. What was so powerful for me when Budd told me about [481 lines left ... full text available at <url:http://www.reference.com/cgi-bin/pn/go?choice=message&table=05_1997&mid=3156000&hilit=HYPNOSIS> ] -------------------------------- Article-ID: 05_1997&3155814 Score: 86 Subject: Re: HypnoVision - The largest selection of self-help tapes on the planet!