Читать книгу Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds - Jerome Clark - Страница 9

At most given moments, human beings live in two worlds. One is pedestrian reality, the other the one we experience in dreams and speculations. Each world has its wonders and its horrors, and each can elevate or bring us down. Both are tricky to negotiate. To the unwary, both offer false certainties that, just as we are most sure of them, can fall out from under our feet.

Tricks of certainty respect no educational level or social class. Anyone can become obsessed with a belief that seems sensible, even empirically grounded, and some go to their graves unabused of a notion even when most other observers think it has been conclusively discredited—for example, Percival Lowell and his Martian canals. So unyielding was his advocacy, even in the face of what others saw as growing disconfirmation, that it lived on decades past his death and was at last abandoned in the face of evidence that even the most resolute could no longer deny. On the other extreme, many followers of flying-saucer contactee George Adamski, who claimed associations with Venusians, Martians, and Saturnians, refused to be persuaded by clear and specific indications that his stories were conscious fabrications.

If some things are purely imaginary—and no less interesting and revelatory for that—other things are something else, something not quite wholly real and something not quite wholly dreamed up. Something, in other words, that can be experienced vividly in ways that resist both prosaic explanation and lazy categorization. Call them encounters of the liminal kind, visions on the threshold of possibility, or—as I prefer—experience anomalies, as opposed to anomalous events. The latter can be demonstrated, or at least potentially demonstrated, to have occurred in consensus-level reality. They exist in the world, and you can prove as much, even if not always easily.

Experience anomalies, on the other hand, are visions of the otherworldly, and nothing brings them into or keeps them inside this world in any but an experiential sense. They are preserved in memory and testimony and nowhere else. That, however, makes them no less mysterious. Indeed, they are highly mysterious, so much so that they transcend language itself. To the extent that vocabulary tries to encapsulate them, it conjures up the noun and adjective “visionary,” which translates as “powerful hallucination,” except that hallucinations by definition are subjective and personal. The contents of experience anomalies are subjective—in the sense that (as this book will demonstrate) they tend to be culture-specific—in other words, in forms that are at once supernatural and recognizable—but they are also collectively observed. More than one person can have the experience of “seeing” a strange being, creature, object, or landscape. Ordinarily, collective perception settles the issue of whether or not the perceived something is “real,” but not in this third world. Here, we learn that an experience of the otherworldly can be, indeed, experienced. We also learn that an experience is not automatically an event, and it is all the more mind-bogglingly puzzling for that.

Among the consistent themes of the human presence in all times and places is the longing for fantastic places with populations of fantastic beings to match. Such realms may well exist on extrasolar planets astronomers are now discovering almost daily and in parallel universes about which physicists continue to theorize. But if they exist as so-far-unproved possibilities, we human beings are not content to await validation from authority. In the meantime, we do as we have always done: explore those hidden realms of the imagination. Even more evocatively, those realms enigmatically continue to open themselves to our experiences of them, and for a brief time, before they fade back into mist and memory, we live them.

—Jerome Clark

Minnesota

August 31, 2009