Hi you two. Funny to have seen you a few days apart at the Bodhi Tree. In case you don't know each other, Hallucinogens: A Reader, meet Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics. And both of you meet a third brother who drifted into my life this week: Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey Into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism. Daniel Pinchbeck's Website – www.breakingopenthehead.com – says, "He supports the perspective of Christ in the Gnostic 'Gospel of Thomas,' who said: 'Open the door for yourself, so you will know what is.'"

Here's another choice piece of his writing – from an essay on the site, "Walter Benjamin and the 'Dialectic of Awakening'" (read the whole thing at http://www.breakingopenthehead.com/about_the_author_ce3.htm):

"Intoxicated, entranced, by the new world of commodities, the West lost its contact with the communal 'ecstatic trance,' those archaic Dionysian festivals and annual Mysteries celebrating the transformation of primordial chaos into order. The loss of rituals that compelled 'ecstatic contact with the cosmos' posed a threat to humanity: 'It is the dangerous error of modern men to regard this experience as unimportant and avoidable … it is not; its hour strikes again and again, and then neither nations nor generations can escape it.' Humanity needed such periodic rites of regeneration – to avoid hypnotic episodes of feverish destruction, which served the same purpose at a much greater cost."

Hi David,

I have worked out, with the help of some friends of mine, a theory about the abductions that is related to but different to your theory. I believe it makes more sense. It also explains to some extent the reason for the formation that was put down at the end of last season. Ready?

Before I write this, I want you to know that I come from a fairly rational and originally atheistic perspective. I have written features for Esquire, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, etc. I have also written a book on psychedelics and shamanism that is coming out in the US in the fall. The book is titled Breaking Open the Head (some sections are posted at www.breakingopenthehead.com), and it includes my voyage to Gabon in West Africa where I went through a tribal initiation, then a visit to the Amazon to work with shamans and take ayahuasca, a visionary medicine. I started out the book cynical and jaded. I ended up completely convinced of the existence of spiritual dimensions and the accuracy of the shamanic conception of a "World Tree," with ghosts and evil demons down below and higher beings and powers up above, and human beings squarely in the middle.

A very interesting book you might want to check out is DMT: The Spirit Molecule by Dr Rick Strassman. It describes a study of the effects of DMT (dimethyltryptamine), a fast-acting completely immersive hallucinogen that lasts 5 - 10 minutes and often leads to experiences that are almost identical to "alien abduction" scenarios. I assume, also, that you know about the "holographic universe" perspective of Michael Talbot, a concept originally developed by the physicist David Bohm?

Writing my book, I began to reach an esoteric or occult perspective on reality - writers such as Castaneda, Gurdjieff, Dion Fortune, William Irwin Thompson became increasingly important. I was also introduced to the ideas of Rudolf Steiner, who I now think offers the most essential of all Western esoteric perspectives. Steiner believes that different types of spiritual beings act on humanity all the time, negative and positive and neutral ones. The most dangerous and important ones include "Lucifer" and "Ahriman." Lucifer (the name means "light bringer") is the being that draws us up towards escapism, imagination, fantasy. Ahriman (called Mephistopheles in Faust) is the being that drags us down towards the material world, the mineral realm and death. Ahriman's goal is to enslave us in matter. For Steiner, the goal of human evolution is to find a balance between these different forces. In earlier stages of human development (Egyptian, etc.), we tended towards the Luciferic realms. Right now, Ahriman (materialism) is in absolute ascendance, and is the greatest danger that humanity faces. (Lectures by him on Ahriman and Lucifer can be found at his e-library). Our "rational" science is completely Ahrimanic.

Okay, let's look briefly at the UFO phenomenon. I see it as a kind of theatrical staging that has been organized in phases. First of all, 1947, thousands of UFOs seen all over the world. Then in the next years, people saw spacecrafts landed, and aliens working on the outside of the ships. Roswell happened (whatever actually happened, I have some ideas). Then the abductions started in the 1960s, and those events have become increasingly specific in form in the decades since. Now the crop message, which seems to annouce a new act in this 50-year production.

There is, really, no evidence that these aliens are extraterrestrial, and many suggestions that they are in fact subterrestrial or intraterrestrial. There is a strong similarity between these events and goblins and fairy encounters from pre-modern cultures around the world (Vallee's Passport to Mangonia and Evans Wentz The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries). Even the Men in Black had medieval precedents. The silliness and inexplicable weirdness of many of the encounters must be noted. Sometimes, when asked where they are from, they have taken out a paper star map and pointed "There." This is ludicrous if they are really so highly technologically superior. I think it is important to recognize the theatrical character of the entire enterprise: It is very much like they are putting on a "Show" for humanity, trying to convince us of a certain scenario that started out a bit indeterminate but has become more specific as we have given more energy to thinking about it. Our thought-forms feed the phenomenon.

The Islamic tradition also recognizes these beings as "Djinn." They are soulless and "pre-Adamic" entities that exist on the boundary of our reality and are desperate to enter into our realm so that they can incarnate as real beings. This seems to be, in some way, not precisely a physical process, but one that draws on our psychic energy to help them will themselves into reality.

So, the thesis is that the aliens are subterrestrial Ahrimanic or Mephistophelean beings who are seeking to incarnate into human bodies and enslave us in materiality. Somehow the process involves their technology and our belief in them. According to Steiner, writing in the 1910s, Ahriman would incarnate as an anti-Christ around the end of the century. It seems these aliens are attempting to do just that.

According to Steiner, Ahrimanic spirits are much more cunning and clever than human beings. Clearly, they have their own technology that is more advanced than ours in many ways, utilizing subtler levels of materiality. But their inner realm is entirely barren, and in fact they are suffering horribly for their inability to feel, for being desouled. That is why they have need of human beings - that is why their children are trying to learn how to feel (and failing). (Jacobs describes abductees brought on board the UFOs to play with alien-hybrid children. The children play with toy blocks that do not have colors or letters on them; instead, they radiate different emotions when they are touched. The entities are seeking to teach feelings to their progeny.)

What is hard to comprehend because it bends our dualistic categories is that, in some way, these beings are both "imaginal" (in a sense created by us) and real, in that they possess an independent existence. Do you know about the Tibetan Buddhist conception of a Tulpa? It is a thought form that a magician or a lama concentrates on until it begins to take on independent existence. Golems were such Tulpas, created by Kabbalists. Some writers believe that Neolithic giants were also thoughtforms of druidic mages (the writer John Michell thinks that these thoughtforms became solid enough to move huge rocks to Neolithic sites, and that later heroes had to dispel them through further acts of magic!). What I am telling you here is that magic is real – a new English book titled Where Science and Magic Meet lays down a good scientific framework for understanding this.

We now come to your book, The Threat, and my criticism of your perspective. The problem is, because you do not understand the deeper nature of the alien phenomenon and have concretized events that are happening in an "imaginal realm," you may actually be feeding the alien agenda. It seems to be the case that our thoughts or beliefs are actually a form of energy that beings in the nonphysical dimension can consume (Gurdjieff said that human awareness, when it was not developed to a high level, was food for spirit beings.) These "Greys" are clearly feasting on our fear and our belief in their extraterrestrial technological power, and they are utilizing our ignorance as a means of entering into this world and taking root here. (As you say in your book, right now they can only do this for a few hours at a time.)

I have to add that hypnotic regression seems to be a dangerous field, and much more similar to "black magic" than we yet realize. You will never be able to say how somebody in the hypnotized state is producing their information, whether they are channeling information that is coming off of you in some way. Without meaning to do it, with the best will in the world, you may have somehow tipped the narratives of abductees in a more specific direction simply by your own thought-forms and thought-patterns. In other words, it is possible that you are also being used by these beings. Last week I saw the hypno-regression therapist Delores Cannon speak, and I could actually feel (because shamanic work has made me sensitive to it) waves of evil coming off of her. She spoke in a numbing tone of voice and I realized she was entirely working for these aliens, trying to numb people’s suspicions so that the entities could attempt to penetrate into their minds. (Remember also that some abductees have been told they "agreed to" the abductions in the pre-life state between incarnations). I suspect that Cannon is fully aware she is working with these beings, and is in fact a wicked black magician engaged in creating a powerful and dangerous Tulpa.

This may sound nuts, but I don’t think it is. I really would like you to consider this perspective. You want to make sure you are working against this phenomenon, not aiding and abetting it in some way. You need to look into the shamanic perspective. There are so many great books that might be instructive.

By the way, my hypothesis is that only a few of the crop formations are created by these malevolent "Greys." If you take the time to investigate it and look at the images of the recent glyphs, you might understand that other beings – I suspect, highly benevolent ones – are working in those fields as well. The "Greys" of course want to take credit for the entire phenomenon so we will once again think they are super-powerful and destined to take-over the earth. In fact, they are Ahrimanic parasites from the imaginal realm who we must overcome through power over our thoughts and thought forms.