IAC

To the Editor:

Volume 1, No. 1 of the Journal of Conscientiology gave good basic information on your fundamentals of conscientiology, but I am primarily interested in projectiology. I hope you will have articles on it in each issue of your Journal from now on.

Jack Elrick
IIPC Member

To the Editor:

Something exciting is happening.
I’d like to share my unresolved sense of excitement with other JC readers. It’s not the same excitement as, say, discovering someone has programmed all the speed dialing numbers for your telephone so it auto-dials your Helpers. No! its not quite that, but let me attempt to explain none-the-less.

Historically, humans have taken wonderful advantage of the Universe’s gift of the freedom to personally (and socially) make mistakes. Our societies have been free to base their more colossal mistakes on the foundation of millions of our lesser personal mistakes. Great armies and the equally destructive great belief systems have been forged from the blind power of the few and the blind fear and naiveté of the many (us). Only in the last few hundred years has the meta-religion of Science started to differentiate itself from the ancestral quagmires of unsupportable assumptions. This gave us a recorded system of assumptions that, in essence, depersonalized a belief system. It certainly was less risky to say things like "here’s a new theory", or "we’ve found limits to that Model" than it was to say to the King or to the Pope, "Boy! Are you full of it. Uh… Your Eminence".

Then, around a hundred years ago, a logical filtration and melding of the many religions lead to the creation of Spiritualism. This was the first popular attempt to express, in Western terms, the many commonalities of the popular world religions and the possibly related, but rare, para-natural phenomena.

Now, in this last decade, has emerged a set of scientific studies (Projectiology & Conscientiology) dedicated to a public attempt to model the entirety of human experience. This, plus a return to the methodology of respect for the sensorial perceptions of individuals while maintaining the importance of documentation, reproducibility and logical analysis (consciential paradigm). This emergence has invigorated a social dialog on a range of long ignored or even forbidden phenomena, a phenomenal spectrum not easily sensed by the electronic consciousness of modern Science.

Personal reports of NDE’s, OBE’s, past life recalls and many other para-normal experiences all expose the softly measured properties of our nature. These are reports that mainstream Science can’t easily reproduce and certainly not explain without revising their Models or resorting to the ancient tactics of proclaiming the reporters as misguided or even socially evil (anti-science).

The Group-Karmic attitudes of Lucid Projectors towards this resistance of mainstream Science is understandable. No group likes to have their collective experiences discarded. Some of us would like to march to the gates of the temples of Science to scream and shout and stamp our collective intra-physical feet! But in a calmer moment we might ask:

"Should one proclaim a thermometer to be evil just because one can’t fully explain or foretell the temperature it measures? If a group of 1% of all our thermometers behaved in an unexplainable manner, a manner that was consistent within the group but divergent from the other 99%, what should we do?"

Doctors and High Priests might discard the ill behaved thermometers but open-minded scientists shouldn’t. Their scientific-religious training is an exercise in the appreciation, not only of the great range of applicability of modern scientific Models but also of the subtle types of clues that occur when a Model has exceeded its limits. Noticing and studying these clues and discrepancies is, for the most part, what Science is.

If it isn’t already, it should be one of the Ten Commandments of Science –Thou shall not ignore or discard ANY data! Of course, scientists CAN legitimately ask the following questions: who did the measuring, how was it measured, how was it calibrated and are other experimenters, using other thermometers, getting similar results. These are questions that any thermometer user or Lucid Projector should be willing and capable of answering.

The IIPC research programs have accepted the responsibility of collecting the answers to these same questions. For the para-normal fields this maturity of research protocol, at a unified international level is new. Maybe it is this that I find so exciting.

 A difficult road ahead for the IIPC
Sessons from our great history of mistakes have shown our most successful scientific fields of study to have evolved from a process not too dissimilar from the battles of great religious armies.

In the 19th Century, every scientist knew, with utmost certainty, that the Eather existed. It had to. The then-standard model of wave dynamics demanded it to exist. In this climate the birth of the field (theory) of Special Relativity was not a painless process for many researchers of the era. The Eather theory was entirely based on a simple and intuitive, but totally unsupported, analogy –if waves of water and sound travel through a medium then the seemingly wave-like phenomena of light must also have a medium. The Eather metaphor lost a protracted battle against the overpowering forces of new data and better theories.

As with any new scientific field, we should expect Projectiology & Conscientiology (P & C) to experience these same natural birthing pains. Pains that other new fields have endured and sometimes, but not always, survived. In addition to death-by-unsupported-analogy, many past theoretical fatalities were caused by miscalibrated human perceptions and motivations. (The story of the discovery of N-Rays is another humorous case in point the reader may wish to look into). The historically proven difficulties inherent in using human perceptions as measuring instruments represents much of what motivated scientists to prefer electro-mechanical means.

On the other hand, scientists also know –even if only from reading history- that human perceptions also have a long success story as detectors. The earliest electrical multimeters where human volunteers saying "OUCH", and the first Geiger counters where underpaid graduate students sitting long hours in complete darkness counting phosphorescent flashes.

An indicator of the difficulties we can expect P & C to endure may be seen in the vastness of the yet unexplained. It is a pitiful understatement to say the Extra-Physical World is not wholly understood. In fact a more accurate (and opposite) statement might be that we Humans have no Models with proven applicability beyond our own physical domain. We do have metaphors, but do we have useful Models?

The purpose for the existence of sentient life on Intra-Physical Earth has had many metaphoric Models… Garden, Nursery, Hospital, School, Energy-Factory, Prison…my personal favorite is Comedy-Club. You take a bunch of fun-loving souls, blindfold them, take away their memories and send them down to the stage so the audience can watch them stumble around making mostly outrageously funny mistakes. The Truth may be that none of these metaphors are even close to Modeling the Big Picture of answering the question "what’s it all about"?

We would like scientists to be more open-minded with regards to meta-physical realities, but how open-minded are WE willing to be? Are we ready for the painful intellectual struggles that history dictates the successful birth of P & C may require? Are we personally ready for struggles against, inaccurate facts, false initial assumptions, immature (or wholly wrong) theories, personality cults, self-fulfilling prophecies and the many unforetold others?

The history of our mistakes is scary, but still….I find any new Birth to be … rather exciting!

A Superset of promoting consciential evolution?
One of the biggest mistakes of our early belief systems, (one that unfortunately often continues) was Homocentricity. We could call it the "Everything revolves around Us" mistake. In politically correct TV English we’ve learned to say "it’s not about Us"! But if not us, then what’s it all about?

The IIPC has many purposes, that is, besides acting as a mid-wife. I postulate that the many stated purposes of the IIPC –education, research, promoting evolution and the study of the Consciousness- may all fall under the umbrella of comprehending and promoting the "Earth’s Existential Program". By "Earth" I mean the physical domain that is known to us.

What is Earth’s Existential Program? How do we find it when we’re so busy trying to discover our individual Existential Program? I suggest this investigative diversion because it may be of fundamental importance to each of us and to fulfilling all of the IIPC programs. To painfully continue the "birth" metaphor, one could say this is the "mother" question. Our personal level of Cosmoethics could be dependant on our current relative-truth understanding of this greater purpose.

At the physical level, Earth is an incredible supplier of resources useful to a seemingly infinite variety of Intra-physical life forms. Land, water, air, nutrients, energy, ecosystems, (stage-lights)… the Earth has it all. Should we not assume this immense usefulness extends into extra-physical dimensions? I’m reminded by the types of dilemmas often experienced by Park rangers and game preserve administrators …It would be nice to reintroduce lions, tigers and bears to the park and allow the deer population to expand and let natural fires spread unhindered and let Girl-Scouts have camping trips…But all these intentions have requirements and conflicts. Should the Earth’s Existential Program be any less complex? Is the promotion of human evolution really the only game in town?

Our Cosmoethics are based on our level of understanding of the purpose for the world we live in. Concepts like right vs wrong or good vs evil, are based on communal assumptions of how things should be or how things should become. If the Earth’s Existential Program is as vast as some believe, and the non-homocentric view that human consciential evolution is only one of the "many games in town" is true, then the obvious conclusion is that we need to be careful how we "play".

Stay with me for another trip to the "Park" analogy. If I was a deer I might wonder why the Universe allows wild-fires to burn so much grass. If I was a lion or tiger I might wonder why the Universe allows so many thistle bushes for the deer to escape into. If I was a bear I might wonder why I’m not allowed to eat garbage in the Girl-Scout’s camp ground. If I was a Girl-Scout I might wonder why the Boy-Scouts aren’t allowed to visit. The point is that for each Park user the limitations imposed by nature are often indistinguishable from the "artificial" limitations imposed by the Park rangers (and Girl-Scout leaders). Each Park user has a personal viewpoint or metaphor of what their purpose is (with-in the Park) and this viewpoint effects their assumptions of what the overall purpose for the Park is.

The bears’ Existential Program may indeed be to "find food and eat it" but if the bears extend their interpretation of this Program to the seemingly logical conclusion of breaking through fences, eating garbage and an occasional Girl-Scout, then something is going to happen. Park rules & fences or other limitations, that seem inexplicable and contrary to the user’s assumed purpose, may in fact be warning indicators of potential conflict with other Park users.

With this in mind, and from the point of view of this human-animal Earth-Park user, there seems to be two dominant questions regarding our position within Earth’s Existential Program. Questions, based on two of our biggest limitations, whose answers may have profound effects on our personal and social evolutional progress. These questions are ancient. And Spiritualism and Conscientiology, while making some progress, have barely begun to resolve them.

The first is "why is there an Energy Gap?" and the second is "Why do we forget our previous lives?" There certainly are many other human limitations and their respective questions but I suspect that if these first two were answered the others would quickly fad from our interest. They each seem to represent a manifold of phenomena or a related set of semi-natural barriers. As humans, we tend to view both of these phenomena as inexplicable impediments. We would like to converse freely with our Helpers; they would too. We’d also like to learn from the mistakes of our previous lives. I call these semi-natural barriers because humans (and probably Helpers) seem so capable at knocking down natural barriers. Only a barrier that is, in some sense, being artificially maintained would seem likely to survive for so long.

It is easy to rationalize it all away by saying "when I’m evolved enough, these barriers will no longer exist for me". Well, this sounds nice, but how are these barriers helping me to evolve right now? How are they helping the Helpers? There are lots of possible answers to these questions, but my favorite analogy is simply that these barriers represent "the rules of the Park". Laid down by the Park Rangers, these rules are made and enforced to help maximize the utilization of the Park. These rules may not, in fact, be optimal for any one of us or for any one species.

At some point we evolve to where we no longer need any of these limitations to protect us or to protect others from us and then the Park rules become irrelevant. These rules, like any system of regulation, should be based on a set of rational objectives. These objectives represent, to me, the Earth’s Existential Program. The fundamental agreements expressing its purpose and utility.

Where-in the danger lies
All our personal and social mistakes of the past have been made under the watchful noninterference of the Helpers. The IIPC has its share of Helpers, but I’m sure they will allow the members, teachers and officers to make their own decisions, right or wrong. A series of mistakes, blindly followed by the membership would probably result in another historic, and tragic, failure. This could happen but I’m betting on the IIPC’s survival and prosperity. I’m betting that more Lucid Projectors will be found, more instructors trained and more researchers pulled into the quests.

But, there are some dangers. To make another silly example: It might be fun to urge our scientists to study the Energy-Gap. To probe, measure and theorize about it. To eventually build an Energy-Bridge. We could then virtually walk back and forth between Earth and the higher dimensions, have camp-outs with our Helpers, they could come on down and have pizza. Of course, then our armies will want to hold the high frequency "ground" and even worse the extra-physical tourists will ruin the place.

Alternatively we could simply let the scientists play in the Park, to have their own little camp-outs while studying nature, each other and the wild animals. I suspect that mainstream scientists will probably continue to study what the rules of the Park suggest they study. Should it be any other way?

Something exciting is happening. Maybe it’s the double challenge of scaling the Energy-Gap without tearing it down, of reaching the other side –and our memories- without doing something we will later wish to forget. It’s the excitement of maybe, someday, becoming a Park ranger and then possibly even watching the lions, tigers and bears naturally stay far away from those scary Girl-Scouts.

William Bliss
IIPC Member