2019-1121

Lights In The Sky & Little Green Men

Comments Off on Lights In The Sky & Little Green Men[Author: Category: Non-fiction, Paranormal, Religion, Reviews ]

Lights In The Sky & Little Green Men, A Rational Christian Look at UFOs and  Extraterrestrials, by Hugh Ross, Kenneth Samples, and Mark Clark. The book is published by NavPress, Bringing Truth to Life, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 2002.

In addition to numerous other qualifications in education, Hugh Ross has received master’s and Ph.D degrees in astronomy, Kenneth Samples has a master’s degree in theological studies, and Mark T. Clark is a Professor Emeritus of political science. The authors are active in Reasons to Believe, “a nonprofit organization providing research, publications, and teaching on the harmony of God’s revelation in the words of the Bible and in the facts of nature.” There is no hesitation in this compact book of 255 pages to take on the worst human UFO-related disasters of the twentieth century and point directly to the cause, which is demonic.

In the Preface, Hugh Ross writes “Speculations about unidentified flying objects and extraterrestrial beings just won’t go away. They continue to crop up in conversations all over the planet. Almost everyone can tell a story of seeing weird lights in the sky – lights that seem to defy explanation.” Little green men are those beings who fly overhead in spaceships, sometimes landing. “We hope this book will compel people to explore beyond surface explanations.”

Kenneth Samples opens the first chapter with references to sightings from antiquity through the twentieth century, with an increase of sightings by pilots during World War II, who speculated that these anomalies, called “Foo Fighters,” were advanced enemy aircraft. “From the late 1940s through the 1960s, the United States Air Force investigated UFO reports through various projects and committees, concluding with the “Condon Report,” which states that “further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby.” However, the subject has obviously not gone away and has continued to be carried, e.g., by NASA’s SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), professional ufologists, social scientists, UFO enthusiasts and debunkers, New Agers, UFO cult members, and Christian theologians and apologists.

Author Kenneth Samples examines Types of UFOs in Chapter 2. “There are plenty of crackpot UFO enthusiasts out there, but many ufologists are respected scientists and other experts who are going about their task in a professional way.” Subheadings in this chapter include Systems of Classification, Natural Explanations, and Two Leading Hypotheses. The hypotheses for the phenomena are extraterrestrial (ETH) – the most popular explanation among Americans – and interdimensional (IDH). Regarding the IDH, this is “sometimes described as the paranormal or occult view of UFOs. Some ufologists, (especially Christians) have ascribed an angelic or demonic interpretation to this interdimensional presence. Even a number of leading secular ufologists have argued for a correspondence between UFO phenomena and the occult or demonism.” Significantly, the authors refer throughout the book to the concept of the RUFO, or the residual UFO, “those unexplainable yet real phenomena that remain after all naturalistic explanations have been exhausted.” The “Condon Report” aside, there should be much to learn about cosmic and human existence – as this book testifies – from UFOs and RUFOs. (RUFOs are later described as “both real and nonphysical” in a chapter titled A Closer Look at RUFOs.)

As Hugh Ross writes in Chapter 9, Nature and Subnature, “Ever since publication of Robert Jastrow’s landmark volume, God and the Astronomers, in 1978, references to the supernatural – and specifically to God and theology – have become commonplace in books by astronomers and physicists. If a person scans the science shelves at a local bookstore, he will find books with titles like God and the New Physics, The God Particle, God and the Cosmologists, Reading the Mind of God and Through a Universe Darkly. What’s going on here? Is a mass conversion taking place? No, it’s not a mass conversion. Rather, this development arises from research findings. A mountain of evidence compels the conclusion that reality must exist beyond the physical universe.” Under one of this chapter’s subheadings, The Nature of Supernature, Hugh Ross writes, “For those who care to investigate, nature holds abundant clues to its supernatural source or cause. And that investigation may hold keys to unlocking some of the mysteries of  UFO phenomena.”

Mark Clark tackles Government Cover-Ups in Chapter 7. “True believers in UFOs are frustrated at not being able to convince the world that a residual portion of UFO sightings are for real. Could someone be making their task more difficult?” The U.S. Government. “And so the loaded word ‘cover-up’ enters the conversation.” He continues on with the subjects of Roswell, the Classified Information that came out of the Cold War, Project Blue Book (the Air Force response), the CIA, and Bureaucratic Politics. Then a second full chapter, Government Conspiracies, includes the topics of Political Culture, The Psychological Dynamic, Contrary Evidence, Popular Opinion and the Ockham’s Razor dictum.

This is a remarkable book that should be on the shelf of every conscientious twenty-first century citizen. It is not easy to read through Chapter 14 on UFO Cults by Kenneth Samples, where he describes The Aetherius Society, The Unarius Academy of Science, Heaven’s Gate, and The Raelian Movement. These unimaginably horrible realities of human behavior and error are followed by The Bible and UFOs, Chapter 15 – quoting Ezekiel 1:4-28;10, 2 Kings 2:1-12, and Revelation 1:12-18  –  and a Summary, Chapter 16, stating that “RUFOs … are consistent with the Bible’s descriptions of demons.” Adhering to the “doctrinal statements of the National Association of Evangelicals and the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy,” Reasons to Believe has admirably taken on the UFO phenomena. The book concludes with three Appendixes (e.g., Appendix A, Fine Tuning for Life on Earth), extensive Notes, a Bibliography, and Subject and Name Indexes.  – Martha Keltz

References:

The Incarnation of Ahriman: The Embodiment of Evil on Earth: Seven Lectures by Rudolf Steiner, Given Between October and December, 1919, Skylark Books, on Amazon.com.  

Astronomy and Spiritual Science, The Astronomical Letters of Elisabeth Vreede, SteinerBooks, on Amazon.com.

On-Line references:

Cosmic Christianity & The Changing Countenance of Cosmology: https://wn.astrosophy.science/Books/Cosmic/Cosmic_index.html

The Ahrimanic Deception: https://wn.rudolfsteinerelib.org/Lectures/AhrDec_index.html

The Influences of Lucifer and Ahriman: https://wn.rudolfsteinerelib.org/Lectures/GA191/English/AP1993/InLuAr_index.html

The Cosmic New Year: https://wn.rudolfsteinerelib.org/Lectures/GA195/English/RSPC1938/CosNew_index.html

The Mission of the Archangel Michael: https://wn.rudolfsteinerelib.org/Lectures/MissMich/MisMic_index.html

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2019-1022

The Gnostic Jung And the Seven Sermons to the Dead

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The Gnostic Jung And the Seven Sermons to the Dead

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The Gnostic Jung And the Seven Sermons to the Dead

Reviewed by Frank Thomas Smith – Quest Books: 4th printing 1994

The Seven Sermons to the Dead is a mysterious, little known or understood work of C. G. Jung’s, which was privately printed in German, without copyright or date, sometime between 1920 and 1925, and distributed to a select group of friends. Stephan A. Hoeller copied, then translated it from the original. Then he wrote a book in which he not only calls The Seven Sermons a Gnostic document, but also claims that Jung himself was a modern Gnostic.

The Gnostic Jung is essentially an attempt – and a very good one at that – to interpret the Seven Sermons, and they certainly need interpretation. Along the way Hoeller, an almost worshipful admirer of the “Wise Man of Küsnacht”, gives us a clear, skillful elucidation of some of Jung’s essential ideas. But the question is: Was Jung really a Gnostic? Certainly he admired Gnostic thought and his works are liberally sprinkled with references to them. But he never called himself a Gnostic; on the other hand, he never identified with any philosophical or religious stream but his own psychoanalytical specialty.

Without doubt Jung’s kind of psychoanalysis was different, approaching what could be called a path of initiation, the analyst becoming a hierophant and the patient a neophyte, or disciple. Mental illness was considered to be a divided or incomplete condition and health as a state of spiritual wholeness – or near wholeness. Jung always insisted that his writings were based upon empirical evidence and personal experience – and not mystical speculation. After his death and the publication of his autobiography, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, and disclosures by his most intimate disciples, it became clear that Jung underwent an intense period of spiritual experience between 1912 and 1917. This may explain his insistence on the word “empirical” to describe his investigations. The only fragment of his writings from that period which he permitted to be published was The Seven Sermons to the Dead, using terminology and style of second century Gnosticism. Jung attributes the authorship to Basilides, a Gnostic sage who taught in Alexandria around A.D. 125-140. Whether this implies some sort of mediumship or automatic writing is a matter of speculation. However, it should be borne in mind that it was the practice for centuries to ascribe authorship of spiritual treatises to someone who the real author considered to be more spiritually advanced than himself.

It would be futile to attempt a synopsis of Hoeller’s interpretation of The Seven Sermons to the Dead here. At best we can consider a few aspects which especially interested this reviewer.

Western materialism has caused many seekers of spirituality to direct their search toward Eastern mysticism. Jung, surprisingly, contended that the search for the wisdom of the East had almost darkened the mind of the West and that it is a search that continues to lead many astray. It isn’t only the impact of alien cultures that can be dangerous to the Western soul. Much of Hindu and Buddhist thinking is directed towards the obliteration of individual consciousness (ego-lessness).

When desire is snuffed out by a variety of meditation and concentration practices, what remains is a psychic corpse from which the libidinal cosmic force of the vital urge has been artificially removed. One can perish of psychic pernicious anemia as well as from its physiological analogue, and the fulfillment of such objectives as desire-lessness and ego-lessness may very well lead to just such a condition. The desire for self-knowledge is just as much a desire as the desire for food or sex.

In his work The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious Jung restates the message contained in the Second Sermon when he says: “Evil is the necessary opposite of good, without which there would be no good either. It is impossible to even think good out of existence.” Jung was insistent especially on the reality and titanic magnitude of evil, for he felt that western humanity, beginning with Christian theology, has consistently and disastrously dwarfed the picture of evil as arising from the unconscious of humanity. In Civilization in Transition he wrote that evil “is of gigantic proportions, so that for the Church to talk of original sin and to trace it back to Adam’s relatively innocent slip-up with Eve is almost a euphemism. The case is far graver and is grossly underestimated.”

President Bush was criticized for calling bin Laden and the terrorists responsible for the World Trade Center destruction “evil”. The critics are not saying that bin Laden is “good”, rather are they implying that evil doesn’t exist, and we should look for reasons in socio-economic injustice. Although it is not possible to deny that social injustice exists in the world, it would be difficult indeed to characterize these terrorist acts as anything but evil, if we take Jung’s point of view seriously. Of course, there are many other kinds of what seems to be pure evil in the world. According to Jung, good and evil are not two opposite poles of a linear dimensionality. They resemble a circle wherein going far enough in either direction is likely to associate one with the opposite polarity. He said that there is no good that cannot produce evil and no evil that cannot produce good. More »

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