John E. Mack > Quotes

“Virtually every abductee receives information about the destruction of the earth’s ecosystem and feels compelled to do something about”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“this is not received merely cognitively, like a lecture. Abductees experience powerful images of vast destruction, with the collapse of governmental and economic infrastructures and the total pollution and desertification of the planet. This knowledge is felt profoundly in their bodies, and I have been greatly moved as they sob on the couch and experience heartache so intense that they can barely bring themselves to speak of it. It is the kind of knowledge that must be translated into action. Writer and futurist Jean Houston, at the Congress of the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in September 1993, commented that all myths begin with a form of betrayal. Perhaps the human betrayal of the earth itself is giving rise to a new myth of interspecies relationship and creation.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“Some have speculated that the alien beings have mastered time travel and come to us from the future. Sometimes they even communicate that this might be so. We do not know. But the guiding or regenerative myth of the abduction phenomenon offers a new story for a world that has survived many holocausts and may yet be deterred from a final cataclysm. The abduction phenomenon, it seems clear, is about what is yet to come. It presents, quite literally, visions of alternative futures, but it leaves the choice to us.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“Changes in the perception of time and space in association with the abduction phenomenon are sometimes accompanied by a sense of the existence of, or of moving into, other realities or dimensions. This may be difficult for experiencers to articulate clearly. Here is Karin struggling to express her ontological confusion, the altered perception of space and time during her encounters, and their interdimensional quality:”
― John E. Mack, Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters

“Karin calls the other reality she perceives during her experiences the “fourth dimension.”“It’s what we call illusion, but it’s not illusion. It’s not illusion. It exists. It’s there. That’s where they live. . . . You don’t use language when you’re in this other experience. You use color, and you have vibration and everything else.” Space/time in this dimension, she says, is “irrelevant.”
― John E. Mack, Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters

“For me and others who have attended the sessions, as well as for the abductees themselves, it is this intensity of recovered emotion that lends inescapable authenticity to the phenomenon.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“I have never encountered anything similar to this in patients I have known to be traumatized by humans, or in psychotic patients suffering from delusions.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“asked how he went into her womb. “I just went into her one night in the winter,” he said, “everybody was asleep, and there was a little bit of a fire left in the fireplace. I went into her womb. I knew that’s where I wanted to go. When I went in she became pregnant. She was laying there sleeping and I went into her.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“For it is, to a large degree, the scientific and governmental elite and the selected media that it controls that determine what we are to believe is real, for these monoliths are the principal beneficiaries of the dominant ideology.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“As philosopher Terence McKenna has suggested, “To search expectantly for a radio signal from an extraterrestrial source is probably as culture-bound a presumption as to search the galaxy for a good Italian restaurant” (McKenna 1991).”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“Or they hope that I will find some sort of psychiatric explanation that can be treated so that the experiences can be stopped.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“Eva wrote, “that our focus should be on mutual communication of some form and on some level with our alien friends, learning, accepting, and integrating alien wisdom within our world and culture. Time, money, and energy spent solely on providing proof of alien existence is fruitless.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“But I believe there is a core belief in our culture that is violated by the alien abduction phenomenon, namely the total separation of the spirit and the physical world. We have made that gulf inviolate, relegating to religion the spirit (subjective) world and assigning to science the material (objective) domain. We simply do not know what to do with a phenomenon that crosses that seemingly inviolable barrier. It shocks the foundations of our belief structure. Our minds have no place to put such a thing.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“When the experiences are recalled consciously, or during hypnotic sessions, the abductees go through an emotional reliving of great intensity and power. Otherwise quite controlled individuals may writhe, perspire, and scream with fear and rage, or cry with appropriate sadness, as they remember their abduction experiences. This emotional expression appears altogether authentic to those who are unfamiliar with the abduction phenomenon and witness it for the first time. For myself, being with abductees who are going through these experiences requires every bit of holding energy and caring presence that I can muster. There has not, as yet, come to my attention in any case an alternative explanation for the basic elements of the abduction experiences that these individuals are reporting in such overwhelming and vivid detail.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“The information that abductees receive is concerned primarily with the fate of the earth in the wake of human destructiveness. Scenes are shown of the planet wasted by nuclear war and especially of the earth’s environment devastated by pollution and toxic clouds. Sara and Arthur, for example, were shown great black clouds or “blobs” suffocating the earth’s living systems, the effect presumably of environmental catastrophe. A number of abductees have been shown apocalyptic images of the earth itself literally cracked open or broken up, followed by elaborate triage scenes in which some people will die, others will survive in some way on Earth, and still others will be transported to some other place where human life will continue in a new way.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“Hopkins has documented a case, now being widely discussed, where a woman made an unsolicited report to him that from the Brooklyn Bridge she saw his client, Linda Cortile, being taken by alien beings from her twelfth story East River apartment into a waiting spacecraft that then plunged into the river below (Hopkins 1992, 1995). These observations corresponded precisely with what Mrs. Cortile had told Hopkins happened to her when he recovered information about a reported abduction that occurred in November 1989.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“And I did not foresee how fundamentally challenged the view of the world in which I had been raised would be.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“It bears repeating that no case has yet been reported where the alien abduction story masked another kind of traumatic experience. The reverse, however, has frequently been noted, including in my case experience – i.e. that a client presenting with a complaint of possible sexual abuse or trauma has discovered a history of alien abduction experiences, even when being treated by a therapist unfamiliar with the phenomenon and certainly not expecting that an abduction story would emerge.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“The connection that human beings experience through looking into the eyes of the aliens seems to be a central feature of the acknowledgment of the existence of the beings and the establishment of the bond itself.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“As we, like the abductees, permit ourselves to surrender the illusion of control and mastery of our world, we might discover our place as one species among many whose special gifts include unusual capacities for caring, rational thought, and self-awareness.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“It’s like I have access to an entirely different part of me that I don’t have access to in normal waking consciousness.” In this altered state Catherine feels she knows “more of them. I know more about them. It’s not like kind of half-knowing maybe something happened like when I’m awake.” The knowing, she said, is just as real as in our ordinary consciousness. “It’s the same thing as knowing something here, but it’s just like that, the door was shut in my mind and I don’t have the key to it and they do.” In the hypnotized state she was fully present to this other realm of information”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“and the session concluded with Paul speaking with Pam of human domestication of animals into pets as an expression of our need “to control everything around us because of fear,” the narrow perspective of human identity, and the “twisted,” competitive, and intolerant culture we have evolved.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“through natural catastrophe, especially a more communicable form of AIDS. This kind of apocalyptic vision is common among abductees, but we have no way of knowing whether it is authentically predictive in the physical world – it certainly is not inconsistent with what we know to be occurring on the planet – or represents some sort of metaphoric prophecy or wake-up call.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“The aliens themselves seem able to change or disguise their form, and, as noted, may appear initially to the abductees as various kinds of animals, or even as ordinary human beings, as in Peter’s case. But their shape-shifting abilities extend to their vehicles and to the environments they present to the abductees, which include, in this sample, a string of motorcycles (Dave), a forest and conference room (Catherine), images of Jesus in white robes (Jerry), and a soaring cathedral-like structure with stained glass windows (Sheila). One young woman, not written about in this book, recalled at age seven seeing a fifteen-foot kangaroo in a park, which turned out to be a small spacecraft. I heard recently of a case where a number of children were transported into the sky in a small craft that appeared to them initially as a booth at a carnival in which aliens disguised as humans asked if they wanted to go on a journey.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“We need to learn that even though “we look different” and “we think different . . . we’re all life.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“believe that there is a better answer to this question, one that is more consistent with the information contained in this book. The intelligence that appears to be at work here simply does not operate that way. Despite its brutality, it is also subtle, inviting, reminding, permeating our culture from the bottom up as well as the top down, perhaps opening our consciousness in a way that avoids a conclusion, different from the ways of knowing we traditionally require. It is an intelligence that provides enough evidence that something profoundly important is at work, but it does not offer the kinds of proof that would satisfy an exclusively empirical, rationalistic way of knowing. It is for us to embrace the reality of the phenomenon and to take a step toward appreciating that we live in a universe different from the one in which we have been taught to believe.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“This book describes a clinical map of the abduction territory, which I believe shows that we are dealing with a phenomenon that may not originate in our physical reality but penetrates variably into it or manifests within it in a variety of ways.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“They experience the aliens, indeed their abductions themselves, as happening in another reality, although one that is as powerfully actual to them as – or more so than – the familiar physical world.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“needs to be stressed that we do not know if any of the above phenomena exist literally on the purely material plane of reality, despite the apparent physical manifestations, such as perceived pregnancies and hybrid babies.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“Sometimes this not remembering appears to protect the abductees from a distress that they could not handle, especially in the case of children. But we have little understanding of how this repressing force works, or, for that matter, why an altered state of consciousness, facilitated in a caring, protective setting, is so effective in recovering abduction memories.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens