It is here worth looking at the case of Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa, a South African sangoma (shaman), and the spiritual leader of the Zulu sangomas and sanusis (a combination of clairvoyant and a keeper of knowledge). Being one of the most famous healers of his kind he is also an historian as well as an author in his own right. Upon meeting him Mack noted that his ‘understanding of African spirituality and culture is astounding, and he knows that contained within this great body of knowledge there are truths that can benefit humankind in our time of crisis’ (199).
Mutwa’s initial ‘shaman’s illness’ occurred after the very this-worldly experience of being raped by mineworkers in 1937 at the age of sixteen. Becoming increasingly ill and feverish as a result, this experience nearly proved fatal. Like many abductees and shamans this trauma resulted in a form of inner-transformation, and a heightened degree of extrasensory powers like mindreading and the perceiving of ‘auras’ of those around him. It was his grandfather, Ziko Shezi, another sangoma ––whom Credo’s Roman Catholic father ‘despised as a heathen and demon worshiper’––who in fact brought him back to health through traditional African practices. His grandfather identified the illness as a typical ‘sacred illness which required that [Credo Mutwa] had to become a shaman, a healer.’ The trauma to transformation process required, in Mutwa’s case, little supernatural agency, for the trauma was brutally terrestrial in origin.
Turning to a ‘heathen’ belief system that was considered not only heretical but also demonic, Mutwa found himself somewhat an outsider. His spiritual as well as personal development mirrors that of Walking Thunder’s initial social ostracization. After travelling extensively ‘for knowledge, in search of clarity of mind and in search of the truth about my people,’ he found to some degree of satisfaction his life’s purpose. A brave and noble one, it consisted of the daunting task, as Louis Proud describes, ‘to help preserve the culture of his people, and to help mend the problems in his country, of drugs, unemployment, crime, disease and poverty.’ It was, however, Proud continues, Mutwa’s belief that much of ‘humanity’s difficulties can be explained by the negative influence of manipulative extraterrestrial beings’––particularly from whom he calls the mantidane.
Mutwa’s uniquely anomalous form of trauma reportedly happened in 1958 when he was out collecting medicinal herbs in the sacred Inyangani Mountains of Rhodesia. Suddenly, he recalls, the familiar sounds of birdsong and the rustling of gently windblown trees was replaced by a ‘strange silence’ which ‘lasted only a few moments’. This was followed by the occurrence of an obscuring blue mist that seemed to envelop the landscape. Without apparently any transition Mutwa suddenly found himself in what he describes as ‘a place made of iron’ which was ‘round, like a tank, a water tank lying on its side’ (210). A common description of the interior of a UFO. Becoming aware of shiny and oily doll-like beings, which appeared to move in a staggering and awkward manner, there was one which stood out as distinctly female.
This feminine entity appeared cold and procedural, and she proceeded to insert some unidentifiable instrument into both his thigh and his head. He describes the experience as ‘a terrible witchcraft’. While undergoing a rather austere and passionless form of sexual intercourse with this female entity, which seemed to him oddly boneless, he appears to have been used as a part of a now familiar ‘breeding program’. Indeed, he was even shown a fetus of an unborn baby suspended in pinkish liquid contained in an apparently glass bottle. This traumatic experience, with many familiar elements of a typical UFO abduction case, he again attributes to the mantidane.
Both Mutwa’s brief biographical account and his related experiences present a challenging case, for it combines both an insight into the shamanic experience, as well as an essentially negative and brutal abduction experience. Another difficulty is extracting Mutwa’s own influence upon and interpretation of (recall Kripal’s ‘making the cut’) the phenomenon itself, for his difficult and traumatic background may indeed generate or bias the content of his experience. Furthermore, his claims of the experience granting him extraordinary powers and an apparently miraculous access to new forms of knowledge makes the case very difficult to disentangle. There is, of course, also the problem of distinguishing between the mythological and traditional interpretations of his people, particularly in regards to its lineage of folklore which owe its longevity to a long-lasting oral tradition.
Nevertheless, Mutwa’s consistency with the themes and experiences of Western abductees is also too present in his testimony to ignore. And with such unusual and potentially universal reports of a similar nature, it would be unwise to dismiss what this impressive high sanusi and sangoma has to say.
One emerges from Mutwa’s account with a sense of gloomy fatality. The mantidane appear to be infinitely superior beings which are essentially driven by nothing more than selfish, cold survival, with little respect or warmth, at least on any deep level, of humankind. And yet, paradoxically, Mutwa shares his own experiences in which he accesses degrees of almost superhuman states of consciousness which seems to infer that we, mankind, may not be so fatally destined after all.
There are two such examples. The first concerns his sensation of something bursting ‘from the small of your back’ during an ecstatic initiatory dance. This force, he continues, rises up through your spine and bursts forth through the top of one’s head and ‘explodes into space and seems to float towards the stars’ (126). One is, Mutwa describes, overcome by the force of the ‘hidden one’, ‘the ncumu’ in which a sensation of leaving your body is achieved and one enters a state of blissful ‘eternal peace’ in which consciousness is felt to be universalized, expanded to incorporate, experientially, all of creation. Elsewhere, he describes his belief that ‘the human mind is capable, under certain intensely emotional circumstances, of achieving what one might call the impossible’ (137). This, the reader may recall, bears some resemblance to Ouspensky’s account of his emotionally-charged experiences under nitrous oxide.
Mutwa even goes on to suggest that our minds can not only influence reality, but can also create thought-forms, a kind of tulpa, in which we can ‘create ghost figures that other people, no matter how skeptical, can perceive’ (137). Individuals, who gather together, he claims, can also form one single mind––so, one wonders, what sort of realities, or thought-forms, might perhaps emerge from a collective mind, all focusing upon a singular purpose?
A second example takes place after a sacred dance in which he knelt before his teacher, Felapakati, and experienced what could be described as a peak experience. With almost mystical intensity, which, again, consisted of a ‘strange explosion inside my head’, Mutwa describes the sensation consisting of a ‘silver fog’, followed by ‘a strange and totally inexplicable burst of joy’ (126). The now familiar state of the universal consciousness once again flooded him, and he could hear millions of voices of people apparently from afar––both of the dead and the living…
In concluding his brief biographical account and exploration of his beliefs, he shares a symbol of cosmic death and rebirth, in which the whole universe, in its final stages, ‘recalls each fugitive galaxy and runaway star, when the planets are once more called to become one with the great mass where a new universe will be born… in the eternal dark, until the voice of God is heard again, and creation is reborn’ (143).
It is, perhaps, this poetic cosmology, consisting of vast scales of death and rebirth, which is reflected in the individual’s transition from trauma to transformation. For, as Mack says, it is this resulting ‘psychic chaos [of trauma that] is a metaphor for the precosmogenic chaos’ out of which a new universe––or consciousness––is reborn. Possibly, at some crucial juncture in our social existence ––in which the Western hemisphere with its constricting materialism is incurred upon by entities from beyond. Entities that nurture the birth process of a new potentially transformational paradigm. And thus, in themselves and through their actions, provide us with evolutionary metaphors for a new age.
> Another Way Outside––A Cosmic Conclusion?
[T]he lurid character of so many of these contacts prevents them from being taken seriously by the scientific establishment of the target society, and instead these experiences are allowed to sink into the deeper, dreamlike psychical substrate that defines the mythic folklore of that culture.
–Jason Reza Jorjani, Prometheus and Atlas
In this final section it is not my intention so much to conclude but as to expand the question; to widen our field of enquiry in the hope that, by examining paradigms, we may evolve our metaphors and our conceptual frameworks. With such a field as ufology it would, of course, be absurd to make premature conclusions. One can at least hope to provide a philosophical context which can absorb some of its more challenging contents. This, as we shall see, opens up many new pathways towards a more general understanding of the phenomenon and ourselves.
Paradigms are in themselves models, which, when they become incompatible with reality––or with a new and prevailing paradigm––are often painfully, sometimes bloodily, discarded as a new shift takes place. ‘A paradigm shift,’ Jason Reza Jorjani explains in Prometheus and Atlas, ‘is a change in worldview that occurs when anomalies pile up and lead to a crisis wherein competing factions fight for different new paradigms’ (2016: 4). These shifts are rarely rational, Jorjani concludes, for each contending paradigm has differing standards of evaluation.
Simply, then, this final section will aim to understand the birth of paradigms as they might occur if, that is, the evidence and speculations availed from ufology is to be integrated into a newly emerging worldview.
If we combine what we have explored so far––each with its unique set of implications––we may create a ‘creative resonance’18 from which we can gestalt a new evolutionary model. In doing so, we may gain an interpretative lens through which we can glimpse a Wilsonian ‘bird’s-eye view’ of the phenomena.
The subtitle of a recent book by Thomas Sheridan, Sorcery (2018), is ‘The Invocation of Strangeness’. And if anything this essay has been precisely an attempt to do just that. After all, the enjoyment found in creativity and unusual juxtapositions is precisely because of their newness, their exciting perspective that reminds us that the world is a wondrous and mysterious place full of implicit potentialities awaiting actualisation. Our consciousness, as we have seen, is precisely buoyed up by symbols, and it is precisely this intensity of the intentional apprehension of symbolic realities that reveals their inner nature, Lachman’s ‘knowledge of the imagination’.
Maurice Nicoll, for example, warns us against becoming ‘sunk in appearances’ for we quickly become dead ‘through lack of realisation of the mystery of the world’ (1976: 216). ‘We are dead,’ Nicoll continues, ‘because we do not try to understand, because we never face the mystery of existence with any real thoughts of our own, because we are satisfied with explanations which prevent us from beginning to think’ (216). The symbolic and metaphoric offers us an intuitive means with which to acknowledge the mysteries of the inner world, for here, clearly, nothing is as it seems. It wasn’t a random act of hyperbole that Jeffrey Kripal began The Super Natural with the warning of an ‘apocalypse of thought’ waiting the reader’s actualisation; for it is very much about a new world being recognised. Indeed, the birth pangs of a whole mysterious universe are at stake.
In his book on cosmology and astronomy, Starseekers, Wilson notes how the left hemisphere of the brain proceeds logically, step-by-step, and ‘operates by imposing a rational structure on the world, which has the effect of “familiarizing” the environment’ (1980: 26). It is a crucially important survival mechanism which, in imposing ‘a kind of gigantic grid on the world’, provides a degree of control over what would be, without rationality, logic and an understanding of quantity, a certain doom for our species. We’d be adrift in chaos without all of the benefits of prediction that comes with familiarization. For this we have the ‘robotic’ part of ourselves to thank, for it provides order and control over chaos and results in the uncountable benefits of modern civilization.
And yet, Wilson continues, ‘the idea of the infinity of space makes it dizzy, while it doesn’t seem to bother the right brain––our “intuitive self”––in the least’ (1980: 26). This, of course, applies to any anomalous phenomenon for it frustrates and challenges familiarity by introducing the unpredictable, the strange, and denies the ‘grids’––paradigms––with which our whole left brain relies. In contrast, the anomalous, for the right brain, is quite energizing and interesting, it reconnects us to a healthy balance of wonderment equal to the familiar; a dynamic interaction between the two. In Coleridge’s words it: ‘excite[s] a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustive treasure’ (2012: 173). It benefits a type of novelty which reconnects us with our inner world, rather than, that is, a jarring or shocking form of ‘newness’ that is symptomatic of the disconnected, essentially nihilistic, postmodern worldview… ‘[T]o create merely mystery not damage’, as Watson said in Miracle Visitors.
Many of the UFO experiences have, of course, many elements of shock and forcefulness, but once these are correctly integrated they become, as we have seen, a deeply enriching and integrating phenomenon. Wilson argues, however, that a more ‘positive intervention would be self-defeating, since the aim is to persuade human beings to take the crucial step themselves’ (1999: 337).
In attempting to make sense of the phenomenon one is forced to creatively re-contextualise––to alter our understanding of various deeply entrenched beliefs and laws––for the phenomenon simply cannot be explained, to any degree of satisfaction, by materialist science or even conventional logic. Many writers, including Wilson, conclude their books on the phenomenon with recourse to the equally baffling, but no less insightful, world of contemporary research into quantum physics. Reality, cause and effect, and so on, in these subatomic worlds, obey radically strange and novel laws.
Similarly this is also reflected in books on evolution itself, for in his book Evolutionaries (2012), Carter Phipps concludes that, ‘Over time, our understanding of the evolutionary process trends towards theories of development that involve more creativity and agency and that are less deterministic’ (349). Increasingly modern science is becoming ‘well schooled in the indeterminacies of quantum physics and the unpredictable self-organizing outcomes of complexity theory,’ says Phipps. And, certainly, this opens up as many creative and speculative avenues (admittedly with some fatalities of unrealistic or illogical conclusions). Nevertheless, it is in such transitional times that new paradigms occur, and it makes one wonder if such fields as ufology are indeed a result––or a symptom––of a worldview increasingly in a state of flux. There is, after all, an ‘other worldview’ that is projected from its very premise.
In a sense, what we are coming up against, in a culture breaching the perimeters of its current paradigm, is the recognition of Gödellian incompleteness. The axioms of the past are extending their limits, with the dizzying result of an infinite regress in which the ‘conceptual grids’ that were firmly set in place begin to disintegrate. This is why Jorjani says that paradigm shifts are rarely rational, for the standard methods of evaluation breakdown and the creation of new models and methods, in their first stages of development, occur out of the flux of ‘recombinational delirium’. Rather the emergence from chaos happens in an urgent unification, brought about by circumstances that are testing the paradigm’s limits, between two modalities of thinking and perceiving. Indeed, one thinker we shall discuss soon describes a model which corresponds to the transformational potentialities of trauma––echoing the ‘chaos’ from which new paradigms are birthed.
The problem with modern science, it seems to me, is that it works under the assumption that it is a closed system, and promises––within its own conceptual, axiomatic and epistemological boun
daries––an all-encompassing ‘theory of everything’. An increasingly disturbing phenomenon is the dogmatic assumption that science, at its present stage of development, has, within its reach, a miraculous key to unlocking all the ‘problems’ of existence. As Gary Lachman points out, the mysteries, in the eyes of science, are never mysterious or wondrous, but become in themselves mere ‘problems’, which, with the application of logic, will yield to the harsh light of the inquisitor’s powers of reason. The problem is of course whether these very assumptions may in themselves obscure, or even ignore altogether, realities, in the form of anomalies, which would precisely expand the spirit of the scientific endeavour for truth, knowledge and insight.
Instead what we are dealing with is not healthy scepticism and intelligent receptiveness to data of great potential importance, but a rigid set of parameters that have turned the enquiring spirit of science into the belief system of scientism.19
What instead concerns us here is a model which can incorporate, philosophically and cosmologically, what we have already learned from esotericism, psychology, ufology and shamanism. What emerges from all of these subjects is an outline of a radically different reality. A reality, perhaps, that is finally converging precisely at the point where our current paradigms fail to address and integrate.
The metaphor, therefore, of two worlds converging becomes poignant, for at which point they collide may turn out to be either enhancing or evolutionary; or, if unacknowledged and repressed, dangerously inhibiting to our development. It is also suggestive of two minds converging, and one, it seems, may act as a sort of nursling for the other’s transition into a new dimension of laws: synchronous rather than causal; metaphoric rather than literal; meaningful rather than meaningless; and finally negentropic rather than entropic.
Stuart Holroyd, in ‘A Sense of Crisis’,20 sums up the direction that we shall take:
Evolutionary Metaphors Page 14