Agreed. Perhaps the “tuner” can also be activated accidentally.

I contend this: There is a doorway (or maybe tuner?) in the brain that can be activated by “hallucinogens.” It can also be activated by individuals who have turned on that biological system undiscovered by Western science involving kundalini energy & chakras. It can also be activated by outside intelligences accessing the place at the base of the spine through which kundalini enters.

In other words, it doesn’t begin and end with the brain unless you’re taking a drug for it. The fact that you can take a drug for it leads us to ignore the entire system. It’s unfortunate that we (again, in the West) invented the drugs prior to seeing the system. This is like inventing cold & flu medication with no clue that there’s an immune system.

So there is this system, see? And it can be manipulated, myeah, myeah….

I saw that one when I was a kid too. It’s a British movie called “Quatermass and the Pit” (American title: “Five Billion Years To Earth.”

IMDB link:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062168/plotsummary

At this point in the film I stood up and started screaming, “I’ve seen that! I’ve seen that!” My siblings, embarrassed by my shenanigans, dragged me out.

I just wonder…

I would also like to thank John S., plastic_jeezus, and red pill junkie, above, for their input.

All of your comments provide food for thought. I suspect Greg comes closest, in suggesting the nature of reality is much more complex than our normal, everyday consciousness and focus usually permits us to experience or see, and think his comments on how other non-western cultures and their ways of “being” or seeing/interpreting can aid us in considering anomalous experiences.
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It may be duplicative, but I just posted the comment below to Mac Tonnie’s posthumanblues blog, and thought I should also post it here, as, even though my relative’s “mantis” sighting was addressed here, the incident that occurred to me in mid-July of this year is the one I’m most concerned about, and since I withheld details of that, thought I should provide some more data about it in order to see how others here reading this might help, offer an opinion, or suggest pointers or references to what I may have observed.

[Greg, I personally doubt an individual can manifest externally something equivalent to what you have noted before and is also part of Tibetan Buddhism, which is a tulpa, but my experience noted below seems to enter into that realm of possibility.]

[On the other hand, it may have been a hallucination of some kind, but I've never had one before or since, so that is an unsatisfactory potential interpretation or explanation, also.]

My experience seemed and still seems very real, and externally generated. I just do not know how to “deal” with it, or how to interpret it in any reasonable manner.

Regardless of whether, depending on whether I somehow internally, psychologically generated what I observed briefly, or, in turn, was external to me, and may have been created or displayed to me for other, unknown reasons, it is still completely inexplicable, which I find somewhat disturbing, but I avoid speculating too much, as I noted in my first comment here, as that, I think, leads to misinterpretation and false belief. But whatever it was, it happened, and I do know how or why.
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Posted to posthumanblues.blogspot.com/
earlier today (Oct. 23, 2007):

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Hmmm. It’s been days since I posted the comment above, and still no response whatsoever.

I also posted my comment above on ufomystic.com, and no pertinent responses there, either.

I guess I was interested in seeing if others might know of similar “mantis” incidents where there was no ufo component or DMT or ayahuasca influence. I was also curious about what tools, techniques, or data might be available for use in attempting to come to terms with or better evaluate such an incident, but no one has apparently wanted to post if there is some better way of looking at this kind of incident.

The only two possibilities I can think of to explain the incident above are 1) some aspect of brain function created a very realistic hallucination, which I think is the most likely explanation, or 2) there was some kind of actual entity there, which I find extremely unlikely, but should be considered as at least a remote possibility.
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In the experience I personally had in mid-July, my way of now rationalizing it or considering what happened and what I observed, was that perhaps a state of “hyper-vigilance” or “premonitory expectation” was in play, and that for some reason or in some way my brain generated a very strange, spontaneous hallucination. Of course, that is speculation, also.

The other rational possibility is that some light source somehow reflected off my glasses and/or eyes, but I went out the following night to the exact same location, and tried to see if I could observe the same effect, but nothing happened or was seen.

I hate to say that I may have had some kind of hallucination, as it still doesn’t really explain what I saw, which seemed like a grey flurry of smoke that suddenly occurred out on a golf course at 3:50 am in mid-July, and that almost instantly transmuted into what I can only describe as a translucent, greyish-white, eye “pupil-like” shape in appearance, 3 to 5 foot diameter, manifesting itself at my upper right plane of vision, about 15 to 20 feet above the ground, which then jumped very quickly to right in front of me, about 10 to 12 feet distant, and then jumped again to my upper left, and then disappeared.

While I refer to the “object” or whatever it was as “pupil” like, it was not _my_ pupil(s) reflected in my eyeglasses, which was what I at first thought of as an initial explantion–the greyish translucent disk had rough, rugose edges, and there was no hole in the middle, and there appeared to be gaps or radiating “rents” in the smoky disk that jumped around.
I closely examined my own pupils in a mirror afterward, and they are distinctly different.

The disk-like object, btw, was not horizontal, or edge-on, it was vertical, like someone holding up a very large plate face-on.

The entire “display” took no longer than 1 second. But the thing appeared at my upper right for a fraction of a second, moved to right in front of me, slightly elevated, and then moved to my upper left before simply vanishing.

I’ve tried to search the net for any other similar sightings, but have found none. So, I’m still very perplexed as to what I saw. I have never seen anything like it before.

Being a rationalist, not prone to supposition or idle speculation, I can only describe what I observed, and have no firm conclusions about the experience in any concrete manner. But I know I did see it, it seemed external to me, and I have no way of interpreting the incident at this time. It is a complete unknown. Which is slight perturbing, to say the least.

While I tend to consider I might have had some kind of “brain-anomaly”, and that the experience _could_ have been internally generated, that also seems unsatisfactory.

Does anyone reading this have any kind of opinion or know of anything like this having been noted before? References or pointers?

I’m still very curious as to what I saw and what it might have been, but don’t have a clue about how I should consider or interpret the experience.
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I would appreciate others’ comments here on what they think could have occurred to me, as noted above.

I’ve had/ heard of similar experiences. It seems that sometimes the psychedelic (depending on which one is ingested) works on certain aspects of the individual, lighting up particular areas of the brain that “need work.”

You have of course heard of the Stanford Prison Experiment (the real one, not the music band) where Tim Leary used LSD combined with individual and group therapy to drastically reduce the recidivism rate in a prison.

There is also the substance called Ibogaine which has been used as an aid to breaking addictions and/or ingrained habits that an individual wants to change.

See my comments to wintermuse.

Re: our comments about OCD-types and their expanded awareness- It is well-documented that people with “nervous dispositions” tend to see/”hallucinate” strange stuff more than the rest of us.

In an interview I conducted with the late psychologist Dr. Mario Pazzaglini, he suggested that a random number generator or some such well-tuned electronic device could be placed in a mental institution or juvenile detention facility and allowed to run and see if its operation was affected by the storm of emotion and psychosis which would rage around it. Parapsychologist Dean Radin also had similar ideas along these lines.

Who knows? An experiment like that might tell us something that would point us in the right direction.

Your comments are well-taken and intelligent, and pretty much echo my take on these weird things.

Yes, Nick and I try to make some sense of things in non-traditional contexts, but that is becuase so few people seem to be doing this. This does not make our theories “correct,” at all. It is, as you say, an attempt to lead us to some sort of understanding or change in our thought processes to get us closer to what these expriences mean to the human race, if anything.

The case of your relative reminds me of an account that Robert Anton Wilson related in one of his books. It seems that he saw a “giant spider” (something like 5 feet across) in the garden when he was a small child. If I remember correctly, he tried to make some sense of the experience by explaining his theory that strange things are probably going on around us all the time, but that we may be enculturated to shut them out as we get older. Either that, or as our brains mature, they become entranced with “normal waking consciousness” and that turns off some innate perception that we may have from birth.

Some of us may keep this ability into adulthood, or have flashes of it from time to time.

All of this points us the ephemeral nature of “reality” and how entheogens (AKA psychedelics) may allow us to tune into this wider spectrum on demand.

Not having had any of these experiences myself (that I can recall) I am afraid I am at a loss for an “explanation” or how to proceed when one wants to integrate it into his/ her view of things.

After the initial shock, I might feel lucky to have seen into another facet of our “reality continuum.” Or, it might just disturb me forever.

I don’t know if any of that helps, but an expanded view of reality is definitely in order for the greater part of western society and the cultures it has infused with its worldview.

Of course, our brains are complex, with many possible ways of reacting to stimuli. It may not be the mirror neurons that are firing, but others, so that maybe the effects of some substances might sometimes, by chance, be very targeted, triggering specific parts of our brains that contain images of things we’ve seen, so that under the influence of these substances, we think we’re seeing these things instead of simply picturing them in our heads. One substance might trigger certain neurons that store images of insects, and other substances might trigger other neurons that store other images, maybe of different insects, or animals that we take to be spirits, etc. Our brains sometimes like to become schizoid during drug trips, with one part showing the part that we normally consider “ourselves” things that “we” wouldn’t normally consider. When I was a teenager in the early 70s, I took my first (of only a few) hit of what I was told was acid, but it may have contained other substances; a fantastic variety of imagery was triggered when I closed my eyes and watched, of things I’d seen in my life, or imagined, so for me, whatever I took was non-specific in the types of images produced, but other substances might have very targeted effects. When I opened my eyes, I could see my surroundings in a normal fashion, but when I closed my eyes again, the show continued. In addition to the vast array of imagery, much of it was trying to tell me many, many things, by re-running many of my experiences through my mind quickly, with many such scenes all clustered around each other, new ones moving aside others even before the previous one was finished with its lessons. Much of it was memories I recognized, but some part of my mind was busily trying to show and teach me things during this trip, things I’d missed when I first had the experiences being shown to me, fitting things together faster than I could usually follow. At one point during this trip, many of the images collected around enormous rings, with a tunnel of rings containing these images, receding into the distance, curving up into the sky. Images that bore some relationship to other images were clustered near each other, with more zooming in from the surrounding area, to further illustrate all the things I was trying to teach myself ; I knew of mandalas at the time, so maybe that’s where I got that aspect, but I felt as if the drug had taken control of me, coalescing much of my lifetime’s experience, trying to show me so many things so quickly, that for me, it illustrated that our brains are actively figuring out many things even when we don’t totally realize it. After that experience, I could easily believe someone could take LSD or some other substance, or have something happen in their brain apart from any outside drug, and “see” things they were convinced were outside themselves, showing them things, and yet the whole show being produced from within our own brains, by some part of our brain that delights in being a ringmaster to help us, and by doing so, to help itself too. I have no idea if this could have anything to do with something as simplistic as left brain/right brain interaction, but I tend to think it’s more complex than that.