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They can appear to us
coming out of the sky, at the foot of the bed, or even inside our heads.
They may seem subjective as a dream yet leave a physical trace of their
visit. They may feel real to the touch yet abruptly dissolve through a wall.
However they appear our lives are never the same. As momentous the encounter
may be we hesitate to mention it to anyone less our credibility be
questioned.
Jesus and UFOs have a lot in common. Their
appearances in people's lives actually share similar traits with apparitions of Mary, and
angels as well as demons. All such visions are occuring more frequently than before. There
is a foreboding feeling that in this "age between gods," there is a hole in the
ozone layer of the psyche leaving us vulnerable to alien thoughts and images which, like
awesome asteroids from the far flung corners of mindspace, threaten to collide with our
worldview.
There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose
time has come. What if the idea is something that spells the end of the world as we've
known it and the end of the future as we've imagined it? One definition of the millenium
may be that it is the time in the crack between the worlds when all that is imaginable
becomes real and all that was real becomes imaginary. Maybe "New Age" means the
world is undergoing a visionary siege accompanying a near-death experience.
It is perhaps no coincidence then that it is
Raymond Moody, author Life after Life, who writes the introduction to the new book by
Gregory Scott Sparrow, Witness to his return: Personal encounters with Christ
(A.R.E. press). Sparrow, who's previous work, Lucid Dreaming: Dawning of the Clear
Light, is generally regarded as a contemporary classic, now brings us accounts of
people who have had personal experiences of Jesus, face to face meetings with the Messiah
returned. These stories of encounters with special beings of light who inspire awe, who
perform physical healings, and who transform lives carries the same sort of potential
impact as Dr. Moody's groundbreaking book about near-death experiences.
Sparrow's book should stimulate excitement and
debate on many fronts. Think of Sophy Burham's surprising bestseller, A Book of Angels
(Ballantine). It spawned an immediate sequel, Angel Letters, because there were so many
more people who had had these encounters than the author had originally realized.
Sparrow's book is so convincing that a sequel feels inevitable.
Was the encounter real or was the person just
imagining it? This question may be the hallmark of the mentality of the rational age. By
giving the first name, "Just" to imagination, the rational mind clearly puts the
experience in its place, a spot inferior to "reality."
One of the paradoxes of these apparitions,
however, is that they are challenging our views about the imagination and blurring the
distinction between subjecive and objective, inner and outer. The rational age seems
threatened with extinction. Nowhere is this threat more clear than in UFO sightings and
abductions.
A new book, Angels and Aliens: UFOs and the
Mythic Imagination is probably the most profound book on the UFO controversy yet to
appear. That a respected academic press such as Addison Wesley published the book makes
you take notice. The author, Keith Thompson, an independent scholar who, by first
interviewing Robert Bly in New Age Journal, is credited with unleashing the Men's
movement. Here Thompson chronicles the unfolding of the UFO story from flying saucer
sightings in 1947 to the millenial mythologizing they've stimulated today. Rather than
deciding whether UFOs are nuts-and-bolts flying machines or subjective, symbolic
experiences, he allows that they are both and then some. Denizens of the mythic
imagination, they are messengers from a deeper reality, he theorizes, who have come to
help us let go of our old world and prepare for the new. Like Sparrow who writes that we
tend to "create our identity by excluding aspects of ourselves rather than by
embracing our wholeness," Thompson suggests that UFOs force us to grant reality
status to the imagination, thus admiting into our world regions we've long excluded.
That it is the imagination indeed that is both the
source and the target of what we call the "New Age," or millenium, is a subject
treated with even broader historical perspective in another recent book, Reimagining the
World: A critique of the New Age, Science and Popular culture (Bear and Company). A record
of a public dialogue between two great metaphysical philosophers, David Spangler &
William Irwin Thompson, it is an intellectual feast that provides a good context for
digesting Sparrow's and Thompson's reports. The authors are both mystics who have
"retired" from the "New Age." Spangler, once of Findhorn, and Irwin
Thompson, once of Lindesfarne, identify the imagination as the creative spiritual force
moving us into a completely new future. They condemn the "New Age," however, as
vulgarized by the media serving our desire to "perpetuate the familiar in the guise
of the new." Specific images of the New Age must die, THEY ARGUE, for the New Age to
live. Worship no graven image. It's too easy to get stuck on a particular
"image" of the future, they contend, rather than the force of imagination
itself.
The new wave of the imagination sweeps upon our
shores many travelers. What type of passport will help us discern the dark invaders from
the bright avatars? The encounters Sparrow describes all have constructive
side-effects--lives are changed for the better. There is no such consistent positive
impact in the encounters Keith Thompson surveys, even when he places them in the
politically correct context of shamanic initiations. This distinction readily suggests the
ideal of "fruits of the spirit." God is love, Jesus is comforter. Yet if we
assume we can always recognize the fruits, how do we know we might not exclude a new form
of fruit never before encountered? Prepare to imagine the unimaginable.
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