Having said that, Whitley Strieber also sometimes reminds me of the guy who was in his backyard digging a hole for a tree one day, and was flabbergasted when he struck oil — and so was everyone else! So surprised in fact that a bit of a tourist industry grew up around this "luckiest of the lucky," a bestselling author in his own right, whose national fame over this incident propelled him in new and unexpected directions, eventually taking the form of a sort of "seer, sage, and soothsayer." (But... not entirely. And not so fast. Because a dash of "Carnac the Magnificent" gets tossed in along the way.)
Because if Whitley Strieber is anything, he is a publicist with a gift for promoting himself.
So yes, there was SOME real oil. Of course there was. But Whitley Strieber is still mining that oil for all that it's worth, even after the well itself appears to have run dry. (It hasn't, really, but a tendency to monetize everything also has the tendency to put a cap on wells.)
What irritates me a bit about this chap is that, in his continuing efforts to promote himself and his one-time experiences, he tends to elevate them (and himself) over the equally profound treasures that lie directly beneath every-single-other-person's backyard, too — no matter how well-hidden, disguised, or unacknowledged those ubiquitous treasures may be. And usually are.
Now. That's just "me," playing my assigned part in this stage production. Simulist's opinion, as it were. But I think there is Something quite a bit deeper still — and I'm not at all sure if I can adequately describe that deeper Something this afternoon. But I'll try.
Jason Horsely wrote:Before reading Kripal’s article, I responded to him that, while I agreed with his premise, I thought there was a distinct danger that trauma-induced spirituality would be informed by the trauma, in other words, that it would be compensatory. I suggested there might be an authentic enlightenment in contrast to a form of dissociation, or fragmentation, which might feel, and even look like, enlightenment, but was not it. Learning to recognize the signs of this latter, I said, might be one of the fruits of studying a case like Strieber’s.
Indeed. However, a somewhat cautionary thought on an implication of this; namely, the idea that there is, in the final analysis, "authentic enlightenment" and "inauthentic enlightenment." Now, in one sense, this is certainly true — and so obviously true, in fact, that I'm tempted not to question it. But in another sense however, light put through a prism breaks into all sorts of colors — maybe some colors we might not currently be looking for. Colors, that if we're looking for a particular color — and that color only — might not appear fully "authentic."
In other words, the purpose of our presence in a world where all "persons" are wearing "personas" — stage masks — may not be what that purpose might so evidently seem. Because at the ultimate level, the level of real enlightenment which surpasses all words and attempts to describe it, "authentic" and "inauthentic" is a dichotomy that becomes meaningless, just as whether a character in a play is really a "good person" or a "bad person."
After all, the character, strictly speaking, is not a real person and really does not exist at all, as such.
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