From Harvard:

“In addition to being a Pulitzer Prize-winning author [for a biography of Lawrence of Arabia], Dr. Mack was a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and the founding chairman of the department of psychiatry at The Cambridge Hospital. He was named chief of the hospital department in 1969 and was named professor at Harvard Medical School in 1972. He was instrumental in the department’s affiliation with Harvard Medical School, and continued to lead the department until 1977. From 1980-1986 he was Chairman of the executive committee of the departments of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.” http://www.challiance.org/media_center/newsmakers/040929_john_mack.htm

From the Cambridge Chronicle:

“He began 20 years ago to extensively interview ‘experiencers,’ as he coined them, of alien abductions and study the effects of such encounters. ‘Dr. Mack found … that men and women had been touched by a part of reality they hadn’t been prepared for … and after supportive therapy were able to be more spiritual, deeper people,’ said Will Bueche of the John E. Mack Institute, Mack’s organization dedicated to his research. ‘He was obviously widely rebuked at first.'” http://johnemackinstitute.org/center/center_news.asp?id=227

From a sensitive newspaper obituary:

“Asked what his message would be if he could broadcast to the world, he replied, ‘I would be humbled’, but offered the following prescription: ‘Wake up, find your way, whether it is with prayer or psychedelics or abductions or shamanic journeys or talking with gurus or seeing movies like The Matrix and The Truman Show, whatever it is, find your way to break out of the program, the commercial materialist program.'”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/09/30/db3003.xml&s

 

From me:

The shut-down of this civilization’s opening to the numinous is the great and tragic trade-off for the technological advances that have come from the reduction of the real to what can be described by empirical science. We treat parts instead of wholes, and parts become competitive and then antagonistic toward o­ne another. John Mack was a rare scientist who stayed in the establishment yet pursued possibilities which that establishment does not recognize. It must be because of his greatness that such a thing squeaked through the grip of our zeitgeist, making the kind of rip in the fabric of so-called reality that we so desperately need to return us to a sense of o­neness with which we can build the beautiful together.

I reunited with John this summer, in England, when he and I were both o­n the program at the yearly crop circle conference in Glastonbury. He was the speaker from outside the crop circle community, in a tradition where some luminary in another field gets a featured spot. It had been crop circles all the way for John and me, since we had met at my house, in 2001, when I hosted an event for his foundation the night before going to England for two and half months to make a crop circle film. To be honest, I was a little in love with him. For real. What a mind, what a soul, what a possibility for the world. With him having been swept up in the crop circles in England that weekend, where he was met by how compelling the evidence is for something extraordinary, my colleagues and I were thrilled to have a new champion.

When I got home, I got a copy of John’s latest book, Passport to the Cosmos. I was in the middle of it, where my love for a kindred soul deepened, when he died.

“Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters was as much the culmination of his work with the ‘experiencers’ of alien encounters (to whom the book is dedicated) as it was a philosophical treatise connecting the themes of spirituality and modern worldviews.” (From John Mack’s website —

http://johnemackinstitute.org/center/center_news.asp?id=227 — where tributes keep coming in.)

So everyone can hear John spinning his provocative web for reweaving the world, here are some quotes from Passport to the Cosmos. As you read abduction ideas, think crop circles, which also “seem to operate so far outside of the laws of physics (as traditionally understood) that they may require a new paradigm of reality to include them as real and an expansion of our way of knowing to explore them.”

“It is argued that if the aliens are so concerned with the Earth’s fate, why do they not do something more directly to help its cause? The answer, I believe, has to do with issues of responsibility and how human beings grow. The alien abduction phenomenon may, in fact, be thought of as a kind of intervention that may have the purpose of bringing about change in the ways of humankind. But when it comes to our responsibility for the fate of the Earth, the ‘method’ seems to be to bring about psychospiritual growth or the expansion of awareness.”

“[An experiencer said], ‘The entire Western civilization is based upon a blatant lie, the lie that we human beings are the cocks of the walk in this world, the lie that we human beings are the highest evolved forms in this world, that we are alone and that beyond us there is nothing.’ He spoke too of the dictatorial religious falsehood that there can be no other godlike beings but ‘the’ God of the Bible. He experiences a cosmos that contains ‘many, many great beings, some of which we don’t’ even remotely dream about.’ He speculated that if we were to announce to the world that ‘the aliens are here,’ people would look behind government facades of power and challenge ‘the corruption, the government lies,’ and the ‘rotten industrial system.'”

“Until perhaps the middle of the eighteenth century, people in the West — as well as the indigenous peoples of the Earth, who have never lost their connection with the Creator — experienced their advancing understanding of the material world in the context of a cosmos that was ensouled, in which God continued to inhere. But sometime in that century — perhaps in part because the methods of empirical science were also applied to studying the creative principle itself and by these methods It could not be proven to exist — many people in Western society became in large part ‘secular.’ They lost their sense of connection with the Divine, the sacred realms, the Source, God, the Creator — or whatever other name is or was used to describe an ultimate creative principle. The universe came to consist largely of dead matter, energy, and space, and our pleasures, for the most part, became restricted to earthly emotional connections and material satisfactions.”

“The abduction phenomenon seems to be o­ne of a number of intrusions into our reality from other realms that are contributing to the gradual (at least so far) spiritual rebirth taking place in Western culture. It seems to have something to do with the human future. Each of the principal elements of the phenomenon…contributes to the ‘daishingyo,’ the great ego death, that is marking the en d of the materialistic business-as-usual paradigm that has lost its compatibility with life in the world as we now know it.”

Here’s what’s posted o­n the crop circle magazine site,

http://SwirledNews.com, by a brilliant geometer who also had spoken at the crop circle conference and had spent time with John this summer.

From Michael Glickman:

As they say in Victorian novels, I had long admired John Mack from afar. We had never met, though we had friends in common. In particular, I was astonished by the way he took o­n Harvard University and won. This story has become o­ne of the most telling incidents of our time, throwing light o­n scientific fundamentalism and academic arrogance, but, above all, o­n John Mack’s radiant integrity.

A tenured professor of psychiatry, already the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of T. E. Lawrence, A Prince of our Disorder, he was drawn to investigate the accounts of people claiming they had been abducted by non-terrestrial beings. Though he started with the conventional assumption that he would be dealing with some kind of delusional disorder, he soon came to be impressed with the consistency and similarity of the accounts.

He wrote a book, Abductions, in which, he admitted that, while he had no ‘explanation’ for these events, having come to believe the veracity and profound significance of the stories he had an obligation as a scientist to pursue his investigations.

This was too much for Harvard. The idea that o­ne of their tenured professors was involved in such ‘Mickey Mouse’ nonsense was intolerable. They set up a panel of investigation which wanted simply to get rid of this apostate. John fought back and, fourteen months later, Harvard retreated.

This narrative speaks volumes about our society’s terror of the new, the challenging, the as-yet unexplained.

When I heard he was to be a keynote speaker at the Glastonbury Symposium, I was thrilled. John was delighted with the crop circles and saw immediately the wider implications for human consciousness. He was fascinated, and I believe that there was no doubt that he would have become a precious member of the crop circle community.

We would all have benefited from his courage, his gentleness and his wisdom.

Though we knew him o­nly briefly, his death leaves a terrible void.

 

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