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.

 

From: Joyce Kovelman [ASOUL1@aol.com]

 

Don’t know if you saw this – but if not, thought you’d appreciate it.

Resisting the Politics of Fear by John Mack, PhD

30-Sep-2004

Unknowncountry.com is not a political website and it does not publish political opinion. However, this is the last written material left behind by Dr. John Mack, who was beloved in the community of people interested in, and part of, UFO research and close encounter experiences. As such, we are publishing it in his memory. Dr. Mack was tragically killed o­n September 27, 2004.

Senator John Edwards and many other Americans believe that Vice President Cheney “crossed the line” when he said that if we chose John Kerry instead of George Bush “we’ll be hit again and we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States.” But I believe that line was crossed many months ago when President Bush and his administration chose to manipulate the minds of our people by relentlessly threatening us with the danger of terrorist attacks. Because the terrorist danger is real, it is especially important that our capacity to assess the risk we face not be distorted for political gain.

There is nothing new about this strategy for gaining and holding power. Writers from the ancient Greek historian Thucydides to Baron de Montesquieu to Herman Goering in the twentieth century have told us that all national leaders need to do to retain power is to focus o­n an external threat and accuse those who won’t go along with their plans of a lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. What may, perhaps, be unique is the systematic, virtually scientific, way that the current administration has used fear to control dissent and titrate the amount of fear we are supposed to feel.

At a conference o­n “Fear: Its Political Uses and Abuses” sponsored last February by the New School University in New York the organizers noted that “This may be the o­nly time in our history when we are not o­nly warned that we should be afraid, but told exactly how afraid we should be (red, orange or yellow alerts), and yet, regardless of how afraid we should be, we are given no advice about what to do, except perhaps to be wary of strangers, and stock up o­n duct tape and bottled water.”

Terrorism is, of course, an authentic threat. But the ceaseless use of the rhetoric of terror, violence and danger that has accompanied a growing number of false alarms numbs our minds and robs us of the power to tell truth from lies and discriminate genuine dangers from those that are held before us for domestic political purposes. Hollow bombast and threat become confused with strength, and silly macho talk of girlie men or derision of “sensitivity” may cover ignorance and weakness. Fear of this kind can, as it has in the past, lead to unwarranted acts of aggression being committed in our name.

There are other harmful consequences of the politics of fear. It can and has been used to take away our liberties while we preach about freedom and democracy for others. It brings about a kind of national psychological regression, reducing our minds to primitive oversimplified ways of thinking, what conservative columnist Charley Reese called the “comic book world of American heroes and foreign evil doers”

The leaders themselves become, in the end, convinced of their own threatening projections and succumb inevitably to the atmosphere of fear they have helped to create. Their judgment then becomes impaired, and they fail to address genuine dangers while inflating, as in the case of Iraq, threats to our national security that do not actually exist. As this regression affects those in the political chain of command, it may be shocking but should not be surprising that atrocities like those at the Abu Ghraib prison would be committed, even in some instances, by women.

Worst of all perhaps is what the politics of fear has done to our values as a people. Poet Michael Blumenthal, returning to the United States last month after three years living in Europe, found here “a frightened and frightening nation, a nation filled not with generosity and humanity and decency and charity,” a nation “that seems unable to find any deeper reason for its patriotism than a profound, and cynically manipulated atmosphere of anxiety and fear.” And former assistant to President John F. Kennedy, Theodore Sorenson, in a commencement speech in Nebraska last May warned of the damage being done to the “very heart and soul of this country” as it moves “toward a mean-spirited mediocrity in place of a noble beacon.”

Some of us are awakening to the danger of the politics of fear. Voices are being raised in opposition. Catharine Gamboa of Baltimore writes to the editor, “I refuse to allow myself to be terrorized and blatantly manipulated by these ominous drumbeats,” and Steve Mavros of Philadelphia declares he is “sick and tired of living in fear” and of “alerts telling me whether or not I can walk outside (New York Times September 9, p. A32). Kasey Hrehocik, a senior at Poteet High School in Texas wrote a paper opposing the “fear mongering” to which she had been exposed. “When we allow fear to override societal defenses that hold our ideals and values together,” she warned, “we allow our home, America, to become a garbage-littered swamp filled with manipulations and lies.”

But scattered voices like those of these brave people must be joined by a swelling tide of resistance. The misuse of fear to control our minds should become a central focus of our national consciousness, and students at every level of our educational system need to be taught to recognize the signs of this corrosive strategem. o­nly in this way, I believe, will we be able to preserve our national values and integrity, and make the intelligent choices upon which genuine security and fulfillment depend.

This editorial, written for the Boston Globe, was not yet published at the time of Dr. Mack’s death, o­n September 27, 2004, in an auto accident.

From Suzanne to Joyce:

Thanks, Joyce. I hadn’t seen this. Will post it in the comments o­n my blog entry. He was so much the guy you’d like to huddle with to rework the world. The other commentators who speak eloquently about politics by and large don’t have his heart and soul. He was the whole package.

From: Hank Wesselman [hw@sharedwisdom.com]

 

Always good to get your postings, even this sad o­ne about John. Jill and I had just returned from a week’s teaching at Esalen and found an email from Trish Pfeiffer, John’s collaborator, in the stack. After getting over the initial shock, I felt a deep sadness at John’s sudden and unexpected passing. Although we o­nly crossed trails at conferences, it was obvious to both of us that we liked each other a great deal right from the start. There was that sense of familiarity, of recognition at meeting a kindred spirit. Through the efforts of our mutual friend Sandra Wright, he had read my unusual books, and I, of course, had read his. John wanted me to come to Kenya with him to meet Kuki Gallmann, who wrote I Have a Dream of Africa, and although our respective schedules prevented that from manifesting, it was out there o­n the horizon.

I always do healing rituals at the culmination of the 40 or so shamanic training workshops I offer annually, and so for the next year, I will honor John’s great soul and draw o­n the collective power of the group to send him healing energy at each such event. The next such ceremony will take place at the upcoming Prophets Conference in Sedona at roughly 5:00 PM o­n Saturday Oct 16. Many who attend these conferences felt a great affection for John, and so I’m sure he will receive the force of our collective aloha.

 

 

From: Shawn Randall [SRCntr@aol.com]

 

Thank you so much for your sensitive and intelligent posting about John Mack. Oh, and the inclusion of his quotes – excellent! I may write a small collections of a few quotes — delicious things he said to me when we toured crop circles together this summer. I had the good fortune of a lot of o­ne-on-one time with John driving those long drives to circles.

I spoke to John Michell today and he is writing a piece o­n JM for an English publication called The Oldie — based o­n a meeting I arranged for the two of them in Glastonbury this summer. (I felt they were destined to meet and exchange thoughts – I was quite right.)

From: Charlie Balogh [c.balogh@mchsi.com]

 

Your message o­n John Mack was thoughtful and full of insight. It prompted me to make this book recommendation which elucidates a lot of what Dr. Mack had discovered over the years. It’s called Gods, Genes, and Consciousness — Nonhuman intervention in human history, by Paul Von Ward. By far, it is the best treatise I’ve ever seen o­n the case for ET influence in our past and how it has shaped the human race in almost every aspect, right up to the present. It is a scholarly work, involving a great amount of research and theories. By the end of the book, the reader has no choice but to conclude that we owe our civilization to Advanced Beings, or AB’s as Von Ward refers to them. The quote you posted from John Mack is mirrored and magnified in Von Ward’s book. I consider it a must read for anyone with even the slightest interest in extraterrestrial life. He has made a very strong case for AB intervention by chronicling vast amounts of historical records. His work and conclusions rely heavily o­n Zecharia Sitchin’s research, but he includes research by many others as well. I believe he has taken Sitchin’s research to a much higher level. The seemingly endless inclusion of numerous dates and events add to the veracity of his work. Here is a synopsis:

Synopsis: A Harvard trained independent scholar looks at the numerous ways Advanced Beings – Von Ward’s term for angels and extraterrestrials – have been influencing human history since the dawn of time. Using biblical and other ancient sources, along with modern scientific and archaeological findings, he unearths new information about ABs’ contributions to humanity including the roots of language, technology, maths, science and more. Gods, Genes And Consciousness ties this new historical information to the present day by revealing the ways in which our cultural memories of ABs as well as records of AB involvement have been systematically suppressed in order for government and church officials to control the population. This provocative book culminates with a stirring call to stop the cover up and tell the truth about AB involvement.

From Suzanne to Charlie:

Thanks, Charlie. I looked at the reviews o­n Amazon. Sounds good. I ordered it. I’ve just skimmed the surface of Sitchin, but it always sticks in my mind how those Sumerians got the solar system right. Along these same lines, I just spent a little time with Michael Cremo — have skimmed his Forbidden Archeology, which is hundreds of pages of what can’t be. Amazing how “science” won’t deal with this stuff.

 

The great thing about the circles is that they are happening in real time. Something is signaling to us. And anybody who pays attention can be privy to all that’s going o­n. Please God we’ll get CONTACT into headlines before humankind does anything devastating to itself.

 

I wonder if you’ve picked up o­n Michael Glickman’s protégé, Allan Brown? A great addition to the circle family. He’s just started to do a site:

http://www.darroch.dircon.co.uk/.

 

From: Kerry Blower [k.blower@btinternet.com]

 

I too feel the terrible loss of John Mack. He came to speak at my conference in Wales in 1994. Ours was the very first conference in the UK that he ever spoke at. I made him a 3 foot furry alien to take back with him. The BBC also filmed his talk at our conference. I have been following his work ever since.

 

From: David Lorimer [dl@scimednet.org]

 

John was staying with Veronica Keen (Monty’s widow) and apparently came through at a sitting o­n the Thursday after his death.

 

From: David Haith [visions@ntlworld.com]

Thanks Suzanne for your lovely tribute to John.

Just back from a week’s holiday yesterday, I found a phone voice message awaiting me from psychic researcher Monty Keen’s widow, Veronica, at whose home John Mack planned to stay o­n the night of his tragic death. As we now know, Mack was killed in Totteridge Lane, London, by a car driven by a Czech local resident who it is alleged had been drinking. An inquest has been opened and there is a cremation o­n Wednesday. As the internet has been awash with conspiracy theories re Mack’s demise and also some suggestions of romantic connections with Mrs. Keen, I asked her permission to publish her voicemail message which is as follows.

“Hello – You all seem to be surprised that John was staying here. He was an old friend of Monty and me. He became interested in the afterlife two years ago o­n the death of Dr. Elizabeth Targ and her communication back, and he wanted to work with me o­n Monty’s communications. And he is communicating here now.

“We spent all day Thursday together at the Farmer’s Club in London and he talked to me over the weekend from Oxfor. He came here Monday morning to stay with me and we should have worked Monday and Tuesday o­n Monty’s communications. No mystery about it at all. It was an accident and I’m very upset and very sorry. He was a lovely man – o­ne of life’s gentlemen, just like Monty. I hope you’re both well. Take care – God Bless.”

In a phone conversation today (Oct 9), Veronica Keen told me that she believes that John Mack has communicated from the afterlife and has ‘met’ and is working with Monty. She denied any romantic connection with John. She told me, “He was just a very good friend. I couldn’t imagine being with anyone else. Monty was my life.” She said that Mack arrived at her home o­n Monday and they went by cab to Rupert Sheldrake’s home where they ‘talked for hours.’ Mack had been to Oxford the previous Saturday addressing the T. E. Lawrence Society Symposium – he won the Pulitzer Prize for his biography o­n Lawrence of Arabia. Later, John had a meeting with his financial advisor in Chelsea. He was dropped off there by a friend of Veronica’s and then returned by taking the underground (tube) train to a station near Veronica’s home at Totteridge. Veronica, who explained that her friend drew him a map to find his way, said, “He told us he wanted to go o­n the underground. He said he hadn’t been o­n it for years. It was an adventure for him. He liked experiencing things.” Reluctant to give specific details, Veronica claims that Mack communicated after death o­n Tuesday. She said John came through to a “businessman over from the States who is able to talk with the dead.” She said the man was at a business meeting o­n Tuesday morning when “suddenly, when the meeting was over, he said ‘I’ve got somebody wishing to communicate.'” Veronica claims it was recognized as Mack by somebody else at the meeting who knew him. She said the businessman did not know Mack or that he had died. Veronica added, “We had a Thursday night séance with this American – John and Monty came through. It’s all o­n tape. John said Monty had taught him how to communicate.” She said that John said that it was destiny and “all part of the scheme for John and Monty to work this way.” John also described his death. He said, “It was like a puff of wind lifted me up. I never knew dying could be so easy.” Veronica said that when she had discussions about the afterlife with John, before the accident, he “became very excited – like a little child.” He told her, “My o­nly regret is that I came to this so late in life. It’s the o­ne question that needs answering.” She said Mack had never attended séances while alive but was researching it academically. She said, “He was planning to attend séances to open up a new world for him.”

From: Paul Nugent [paul@aetherius.org]

 

Thanks albeit for the sad news that John Mack has died. I met him briefly in 1999 and can o­nly agree that he was a kind and gentle soul of the highest order. I well understand well why you “fell in love with him,” but I am at least glad that you two met, for together you are indeed “Mighty Companions!”

From: M&D Thuney [mdthuney@email.msn.com]

 

Thanks so much for this heartfelt remembrance. I’ll be honored to pass it along. Yours in the Quest.