Paola’s Interview with Dr. John Mack

“How would this planet be different if the emerging worldview became the dominant worldview? We would be connected to all living beings, not just those around us, and with all Nature and Spirit, which would make it impossible for us to treat Nature in such an exploitative way. For example: we would be able to identify with other peoples, other religions and with all animals, so we would not treat them just as products to consume. With this deeper reality, we could appreciate that we are connected to the Divine, the Creative Principle, which would be more fulfilling than the material focus that is so dominant today. So it would be like a ‘global awakening of the heart.’ I might add, ‘opening of the heart’ has been a fundamental aspect of alien encounter experience, I learned from my dealing with experiencers.” — Dr. John Mack

Establishing A New World View
By Dr John Mack

Florence, Italy, 16 November 2003
Lecture Transcription from Audiotape
Read the translation into Spanish

Thank you to the Gruppo Academico Ufologico Scandicci (GAUS) and Paola Harris for inviting me to Florence for this conference. What I’d like to do first is give an overview of the, so-called, Abduction Phenomena and lead into questions of how do we know, or what are the ways of knowing, when we are dealing with something this strange. I also will discuss the implications of this, and phenomena like this, for our world.

I am a Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst and I have a special interest in extraordinary experience. I’d like to discuss how our language shapes the experience. For instance: words like abduction and alien shape the conversation a certain way. The word abduction is off in two different ways: first, it implies that every person who has this encounter experience is taken against his or her will, like an abduction in human terms. It also implies that each person who has an experience is physically taken; the whole body is taken up into a craft, which is also not true in all instances. Another aspect of contact is transferring information to humans telepathically or showing us images. A lot of this information has had to do with what our species are doing that is destructive to our planet. It is as if what we are doing ecologically with the planet is creating some kind of larger problem in the Galaxy. Also the “Experiencers” are given certain skills, certain capabilities that they were not given in their schooling. For instance: they may discover that they may have a great artistic ability that comes from this contact. Also, they may have been given important mathematical and scientific knowledge that goes way beyond anything they learned in school and yet they are downloaded the most complicated mathematical formulas, and when the scientists and physicists recognize that there is truth coming from these individuals, and sometimes more than the physicists themselves know, they recognize it as genuine. I have personally seen many examples of these.

I’d also like to speak about the question of evidence; how do we know that this experience is true? How do we evaluate these reports and how do we determine truthfulness? For example: when I evaluate, I become clear that people of sound mind have no reason for making up this story. It is sure that they did not get it from the media because often they know more than the media. But there is something missing in what we have to evaluate or determine when a person tells us a story so bizarre: whether he/she is telling the truth and whether we should take them seriously. As yet, we have had no criteria to evaluate the truth of such encounters. So, I am working on just this and I’m just beginning to establish a Science of Human Experience. Now, in traditional science, when we observe certain phenomenon, we bring some objectivity to what we have studied, but when you are trying to understand something so profound and important to a person you cannot stand back but you must enter into the consciousness of that person. So when the critics will say, “What you are learning is too subjective,” here is the problem: if you are going to learn about something this profound, then the learning needs to be “intersubjective.” So still there is the problem of discovering the truth. If I say, “It just feels like they are telling the truth,” then this is not enough. So we have to start with the “holistic” way of knowing. This is close to what we know as intuitive knowing. It is like a knowing of the heart and a knowing of the spirit, which has been part of traditional cultures for hundreds and thousands of years but has been lost in the West.

I received some help in this matter from a Vatican representative, Monsignor Corrado Balducci, who says, “We, in the Church, take this UFO Encounter Phenomena very seriously and the reason for that is that there seem to be so many reliable witnesses. In the Church, we have had centuries of having to evaluate miraculous reports by some kind of criteria and so they had to develop the notion of the “reliable witness.”

So I began to apply this idea of the reliable witness to these cases. How do we know who is a reliable witness? For my cases, it not only had to do with the fact just that these people who were trustworthy reported something but it had to do with the power of their communication that came across to me. I would experience with these people when they would be reliving their experience, the most powerful vibration. I was in the presence of something awesome in its intensity. The experiencers themselves would give language to that. They would say something like: “

Every cell in my body was vibrating!” When you are in the presence of that, it passes your judging mind and you feel it in your whole being. Going back to “What is a reliable witness,” it has to do with a resonance between the person who is reporting or sharing the experience and the clinician. It might be called a “direct knowing.” You just know with your whole being that this person is telling the truth. There are other examples of this “direct knowing,” as demonstrated when the Tribunal, that was hearing testimony of the torture in Bosnia, questioned witnesses. The Judge said after hearing the testimony of a particular woman about how she was tortured, “I do not need any more testimony. I can just tell that it is not possible that she is not telling the truth. That is sufficient.”

Now everyone knows torture exists. That is accepted. But it is not accepted in our society that these UFO encounters exist. Therefore you need to have evidence of a pattern of such similarities that is showing up in hundreds, if not thousands, of cases. One of these experiencers is helping me out with this statement she made about witnesses: “When a witness speaks, all recognize that they have been in another realm. Sincerity and truth and power of spirit are just as measurable as inches and pounds but not in the same way.” It is ironic that experiences like alien-abduction encounters, UFOs, Crop Circles, and near-death experiences are called anomalies. In other words, in our culture, what lies outside the realm of the cultural agreement about what is real is called anomalous. Therefore a huge amount of human experience is called anomalous. When I have discussed this with Native Americans, they say, “It is not anomalous. We know about this. It is part of the human experience.”

Establishing a new worldview

In the last minutes, I want to talk about the matter of a worldview and how it works. It has always been referred to as a paradigm and it has more of a scientific connotation, but I prefer to call it “worldview” because it refers to something bigger. A worldview is the way we organize reality. It is the way we believe things work. In a way, it is like an instrument of navigation. Our worldview is what holds the human psyche together. What I came to realize with the Harvard Committee was that I was threatening the scientific-medical worldview by which they were living. What has been the dominant worldview in our society could be called “Newtonian-Cartesianism” or “Anthropocentric-Humanist.” It is a worldview that puts the human being as top of the cosmic hierarchy of intelligence. The simplest term for this is that which I call “Scientific Materialism.” In this worldview, matter and energy is the primary reality and there is no larger intelligence in the Cosmos. The principle method of study is objective reality, which separates the investigator from the matter that is being investigated.

In recent years, this view, which has dominated our society, is failing. It is failing in every important element that the worldview is supposed to serve. Firstly, there is a huge amount of phenomena, which it cannot explain nor deal with. There is no method of study for many things that we are talking about today. Secondly, it leads to terrible destructiveness because it treats the entire planet as simply physical resource to be fought over by those who are the most powerful and most important countries. Thirdly, “Scientific Materialism” does not give human beings any real satisfaction. It leaves us without spirit and it leaves us with an empty feeling because all it has to offer are more and more material things.

Now we have a new, emerging worldview that is different. In this worldview, there is intelligence dwelling in the universe. That experience which happens to my clients is one example of the intelligence dwelling in the universe and the beings that have come to my clients are another example. The Crop Formations are also evidence of this intelligence that is trying to communicate with us. Also, it is a model of the universe and us in it, which says that everything is connected with everything else and we know that cutting edge physics is supporting this worldview. So it includes not only new ways of knowing but it also involves a spiritual awakening.

This change, which is happening around us, is met with enmity and a great deal of resistance because there’s a huge psychological, economic and political investment in maintaining the Old worldview. I will give you one example of the UFO resistance because books being written which discuss this new paradigm are being called “New Age,” “pseudo-scientific,” and “psycho centric,” in order to dismiss them out of hand because some people who write such books do not hold themselves responsible to any scientific standards whatsoever.

I will conclude by speaking about the implications of this new worldview. We see around us all kinds of forces, which are supporting the emergence of this way of thinking. People around the planet are opening up to new ways of thinking. Young People, like the GAUS (GRUPPO ACADEMICO UFOLOGICO SCANDICCI), are committed to the new emerging paradigm. How would this planet be different if the emerging worldview became the dominant worldview? We would be connected to all living beings, not just those around us, and with all Nature and Spirit, which would make it impossible for us to treat Nature in such an exploitative way. For example: we would be able to identify with other peoples, other religions and with all animals, so we would not treat them just as products to consume. With this deeper reality, we could appreciate that we are connected to the Divine, the Creative Principle, which would be more fulfilling than the material focus that is so dominant today. So it would be like a “global awakening of the heart.” I might add, “opening of the heart” has been a fundamental aspect of alien encounter experience, I learned from my dealing with experiencers. Sometimes experiencers get information from these beings that we are not just a menace to the Earth but we are a menace to the Galaxy. In conclusion, as this emerging paradigm, this emerging worldview, takes hold, we might become more responsible citizens of our galaxy instead of becoming the eminent menace we appear to be!