I Cannot Believe My Eyes !!!

I hope this is the correct forum for this topic

Started off pondering, as you do, about reality and perception. If what we see is 'really' there...and following on from that do we ever see everything that is there ?

So bear with me, if you can, I would love to read your responses / thoughts.

There has been, and continues to be much speculation surrounding the UFO phenomena. What / who are they ? Where do they come from ? etc
Obvious parallels have been drawn between recent and current reports of UFO activity going way back into recorded history. Lights in the sky, ancient astronauts and visitations of gods and angelic creatures. So... while these reports and historical records may seem similar in a lot of ways, they are not exactly the same. An ancient Sumerian had dealings with the Annunaki and gods from the sky, while a logger out in the middle of Arizona is abducted and taken aboard an extra terrestrial craft...a couple on a dark road in NH observe a strange craft in the night sky following them.
What do they all mean, what have they in common... if anything ?

Popular culture dictates our perception of the world around us. Does life imitate art or is it the other way around ? It is my opinion that popular culture influences these other worldly encounters just as much as it impacts any other facet of our lives. Someone living in Salem in the 17th century might witness a coven of witches dancing around by the light of a full moon deep within in a forest. While a group of girls shepherding sheep in Portugal in the early 20th century receive a visitation from the Virgin Mary.

So what is it.... what are these realities that are perceived by some and not others ?
All throughout time humans have been seeing things that our cognitive senses tell us shouldn't be there. So are they real ?

I would say yes...yes these lights in the sky / UFOs / are real, and how they have been conceived throughout the ages is only a notion put forward by our brains, our consciousness and heavily influenced by the popular culture of that particular time.

Multiple dimensions and super string theory puts forward the concept of multi faceted worlds surrounding us, the possibilities these theories suggest to us are incomprehensible...at least for me and my brain's capacity...I cannot fathom the levels of reality that these theories would encompass. makes my wee head hurt just trying to think about it. Fascinating though, it really is.

But if we as 3 dimensional creatures were to try and explain a sphere or a cube to a 2D being...what language would we use? How could we even begin to approach the definition of a sphere to a being that only ever knew length and width ?
If we tried to describe a bright yellow balloon to a person who had been blind since birth, how would we convey the colour of yellow ?

As humans we actually 'see' things in a 2D format, our brain converts the information received into a 3D visual representation giving depth to it's form. What our human eyes see is light, light being refracted, reflected and bent according to the different substances it comes into contact with before it reaches our cornea. The light may be interfered with along the way. An object submerged underwater ' looks ' different to our eyes when it is out of the water. Once the light is captured by our retina it is transmitted along the optic nerve to our visual cortex. it is our brain then that makes sense of it all for us and our brain that then tells us what we are looking at. Research in this area of visual perception has shown that there is a division of labour in the way our visual system works. Colour, motion, and form are all processed independently although simultaniously, through different pathways in the brain.
When vision has been impaired or sight partially lost, our brain will ' fill in the gaps ' so to speak, to produce a full picture of what it determines we are looking at.
There is one particular study, that has looked at how the brain reacts to visual stimuli when light and dark are reversed, and we are viewing in negative. Faces are particularly difficult to make out and the sense of reality is seriously affected as the brain tries to cope with what it knows about light and dark.
We see what our brains think we should

Around 1 in 23 of us experience Synesthesia, a recognised condition with a neurological basis that has a strange effect on perception. People with this condition can ' hear ' the colour of musical notes or can identify numbers or letters as a certain colour as they read them. Synesthesia is the stimulation of one sensory pathway leading to an automatic response in a secondary sensory pathway.
Hearing Colours

If our brain makes sense of what our eyes see, and what our eyes see is really refracted / reflected and deflected light, then how would our brains translate and interpret 4th 5th or 6th dimensional events / beings / perceptions. If at some level, light particles can appear in the 3rd dimension, but originate in a higher dimension, and our eyes can catch a glimpse of these .....what would our visual cortex do with this information ? Our brains are trained to make sense of light and shade, and translate it into an acceptable visual reality for us to process. But what if the very thing our eyes are looking at is indecipherable to us, given our level of understanding ? Does our consciousness try to fill in the gaps for us ? And of course being influenced by 21st century pop culture, we wouldn't ' see ' dancing witches, or Annunaki.... we see little grey aliens, or pulsing lights dancing across the sky. The experience is real, but the perception is contrived and projected by our brains. If these encounters are inter dimensional then is this the way that our brains describe and translate the episode to our 3D minds ?

By no means am I trying to collect all of our UFO reports under one banner of ' it is just our eyes being tricked by our brains ' it is only conjecture. I would like to believe that we are being monitored / visited / helped by super intelligent beings far more advanced that us. Just waiting on some hard evidence, is all.

It's a stock reply to paranormal experiences, ' Pics, or it didn't happen ' ....but if our eyes are only regulated by what our brain tells us we are seeing, we could, in theory perhaps develop new technology that can capture 4th 5th or 6D fields of energy. Kirlian photography for example, has been around for a long time now. I remember reading about this method of electrophotography many years ago. Our eyes cannot 'see' this energy field being emitted, but this technique captures photographic evidence of energy fields
Photography of Energy / Light / Aura

Our brains are fooled by our eyes,( optical illusions ) or is it our eyes that are fooled by our brain ? Does our brain process what we 'see' simply how our consciousness expects it to, or is there a built in safety mechanism that won't allow us to to perceive things out of our scope of understanding except in the way we have been influenced to perceive the world around us, through, religion, art, media and literature.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in our philosophy.
- Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio

If you believe something is real, then it is real to you.

Do I believe in aliens? My mind is open, I have not experienced anything that says they are real. I have not seen any flying objects that I cannot explain yet, and no aliens ever took me up on my offer to come over for coffee and cookies, except of course, my son in law who is a resident alien.

Everything we see is 99.9999999% empty space. We see nothing and everything simultaneously. Wrap your mind around that for a second.

a reply to: cosmickat

A very intruiging post.

I smell colors. Always have. I also can appreciate the beings that are here we, in our human construct, most do not see. The awakened mind is a powerful tool, when used in expansive purpose, and can provide truth far exceeding 2D or 3D reality.

Thank you for you work on thiis post. S&F.

a reply to: cosmickat

As humans we actually 'see' things in a 2D format, our brain converts the information received into a 3D visual representation giving depth to it's form. What our human eyes see is light, light being refracted, reflected and bent according to the different substances it comes into contact with before it reaches our cornea.

It is a weird concept to explain. I know because I have dealt with it all my life, but you learn to adjust.

I was born with undeveloped rods and cones, then later developed a brain tumor that interferes with my optical nerves.

I have the tendency to see things in the negative. I see the space around the object before I see the object. My brain is pretty quick in filling in the spaces, unless it is something that I have not seen before, or is in a place it would not ordinarily be. Then my brain scrambles to play catch up.

Sometimes it gets stuck, and I have to ask someone to identify it for me, or get close enough to it to give my brain more data to work with. It is a truly odd feeling when this happens, but I embrace it because it is just another part of my learning process and experiences. But what you see is what you brain has been programmed to see.

a reply to: cosmickat

I have seen a lot of things:

2 Angels dancing in the sky over the English Channel.

3 Bangs and flickering lights in the night as I walked in a rural area. The lights would just burst in front of me. I got to a high point and they were flickering everywhere all over the county.

4 When a kid I was with my two uncles, all sleeping in the same room. They said I was moaning in my sleep "They're here, quick phone the police", after which a huge light shone horizontally across the curtained bedroom window from the back garden. I woke up to that and was crying and very scared (I was just a boy). My two adult uncles looked out of the window and saw a pole of light in the garden. It stretched up as tall as a house, moved from the centre of the garden and stayed for a time. One of my uncle's shone a torch on it and the beam actually rested on the pole of light as though it had solidity and was not as bright as the torch beam. I was too afraid to look out the window. I still occasionally mention it to them. They remember it, but they just shut up after that and don't want to talk about it.

5. My auntie is schizophrenic. I was with her when she was breaking out in a really bad way. The whole house was charged with a weird kind of electricity and I knew some serious stuff was happening. When I challenged her over the dining room table by the back window as I was sensing some really freaky stuff happening a Stephen King novel unravelled, lol. It was like a horror movie, I'm not joking. A black shape made a loud bang on the back gate and leaped over it to the back door. I was dumbfounded. She said, "Now, you've see it, too", and was warning me, "Don't open the door." After that she poured her heart out and she had to go to hospital for a time to get sorted out. In the hospital a nurse also saw something near to her. My auntie also repeatedly guessed every card correct while doing that thing Aldous Huxley liked to do. She also has accurately dreamed and predicted the deaths of all our family members. I told her not to tell me if she ever dreamed about me.

6. If I ever I want it there is a voice that helps me. It is not like a physical hearing voice. It is a voice that is in the soul. It has done some crazy guiding. It does not tell me what to do. It has told me about hidden foot paths, old secrets that I have no way of corroborating. It is not a bad voice. It only ever says very nice and helpful things.

7. In Israel in the Old City some very subtle yet profoundly life changing things happened. I spent a night on the Mount of Olives overlooking Jerusalem where Christ used to go with His friends. People used to go on spiritual pilgrimages and for very good reason. Do you think they would do all that hard travelling if they did not get something out of it? I highly recommend it. If you are interested and can do it visit Jerusalem at least once in your life. If you want it you will gain something. The things that happened to me are out of time. They are still happening to me now. I have a very wonderful and rich inner life. It is to make up for the desert that is my physical life. Didn't Christ say that His Wealth was not the same as the world's?

Other things have happened; some I have told you about here before, others not.

It is not just fantasy and mind/biological tricks. Aldous Huxley and those of us who have had similar experiences know how quickly this dimension breaks down if you even mess very slightly on a molecular level with the usual chain reaction. Shamans have relied on this being the case.

We can't explain it all away as tricks. So many of us have personal experiences that can't be accounted for and sometimes as I tried to show they are shared experiences, not just in one mind.

Sorry to bring the religious into it. Disciples and others saw very strange things happen around Christ; transfiguration, voices from the sky, John saw the spirit like a dove when he baptised Christ. Even in the mainstream religions the mystical is present. Sorry, i am a bit texted out. Usually a bit more analytical and better expressed. I better take a break. Thanks for this interesting thread, OP. I've done so much experimenting with my own mind. I never had responsibilities of partner and children so I had some time to mess and did not have to consider others. There are a few perks to not being blessed with a family, not many, but a few. Also, I live in a very quiet rural place and spend a lot of time alone. I had a very hectic full life, bu now I am very quiet, analysing former experiences.

a reply to: cosmickat

But if we as 3 dimensional creatures were to try and explain a sphere or a cube to a 2D being...what language would we use?

Our voice would frighten them, seemingly coming from nowhere.

If we pulled them 'up' out of "flatland" to our 'world', they would literally disappear from theirs, the other flatlanders in the room would see them disappear before their very eyes. If we put them back they wold just as suddenly reappear from 'thin air'.

Its an interesting parallel, one Carl Sagan addresses in the video below.

The same thing applies to our perspective. If 4 D denizens talk to us, their voice seemingly comes from nowhere, if we go there we disappear, and reappear here as if from thin air.

Except we can't just disappear, our bodies are stuck in 3D land.

Its our spirit that transcends this dimension to the next 'plane' or phase of our lives.

This happens to everyone eventually, for everyone has a spirit and everyone 'passes' away.

a reply to: cosmickat

A nice piece that covers a lot of ground, but it suffers from a lack of appreciating the "other." By that word I mean the other forces in nature that may have access to our physical and mental worlds that we cannot/will not accept as genuine despite the best evidence of personal experience allowed/given to us.

Strangely, cultural myths, religions and personally witnessing an "paranormal" event are all relegated to the back of the memory. I assume that mere act of existence in whatever reality we suffer from is enough to block the realization that there are things out there that defy what we want to believe.

As for the discussion of ETIs, they undoubtedly are beyond our daily, mundane comprehension. If I say as honestly and careful as I can that the ETIs can intercede into every aspect of our existence and may have done so since our beginning since they absolutely know the human character, then that comment gets discarded instantly as being insane, not worthy of further discussion. The old anthropocentric brain is always on the defense. Until it can reason with itself to understand that being a human is not the pinnacle of life in the universe then we will continue to suffer from our fallacy.

The cultural shifts today across the world, some vastly different than others, the growing awareness of a possible consciousness of the universe, and scientific investigations that are seeking out evidence of ETIs are coming together for the shifting, awakening of humankind that has never been dream about by the average person. --Maybe mentioned on ATS, but attacked and vehemently denied as the possible true nature of Nature itself.

(Sorry gotta run.)

originally posted by: rickymouse
If you believe something is real, then it is real to you.

Do I believe in aliens? My mind is open, I have not experienced anything that says they are real. I have not seen any flying objects that I cannot explain yet, and no aliens ever took me up on my offer to come over for coffee and cookies, except of course, my son in law who is a resident alien.

I agree in we are limited to a somewhat subjective reality. Each of sees colour in a slightly different shade from the next person, and what sounds like truly amazing jazz music..can be just a cacophony of disharmonious notes to the next person.

Our experiences be they normal or paranormal ...spiritual or earth bound are of course real to us.
Do I believe in aliens ?
I would like to believe. I remain open minded and like to consider alternative realities.

a reply to: Aliensun

I failed miserably in making my main point in this thread that everything, what we think we know about everything, we ourselves, our every thought is an artificial construction built by a brain sparsely connected to the whole facade as we understand it, and thus, limited to the entire a personal view. --Some will say, "Why, of course, what other ...."

originally posted by: 3NL1GHT3N3D1
Everything we see is 99.9999999% empty space. We see nothing and everything simultaneously. Wrap your mind around that for a second.

That is reality magnified a gazillion times...super strange to our brains where we try format everything around us and make sense of it all.
But yes, mostly space with everything we see and touch just a commotion of atoms.

Hard to wrap my mind around..thinking about stuff on a quantum level always does that to me, but fascinates me too.

originally posted by: NewzNose
a reply to: cosmickat

A very intruiging post.

I smell colors. Always have. I also can appreciate the beings that are here we, in our human construct, most do not see. The awakened mind is a powerful tool, when used in expansive purpose, and can provide truth far exceeding 2D or 3D reality.

Thank you for you work on thiis post. S&F.

Thank you for your input...and as you can smell colour, what a brilliant ID !
Can I ask you a Q ?
what colour has the best fragrance ?

originally posted by: NightSkyeB4Dawn
a reply to: cosmickat

As humans we actually 'see' things in a 2D format, our brain converts the information received into a 3D visual representation giving depth to it's form. What our human eyes see is light, light being refracted, reflected and bent according to the different substances it comes into contact with before it reaches our cornea.

It is a weird concept to explain. I know because I have dealt with it all my life, but you learn to adjust.

I was born with undeveloped rods and cones, then later developed a brain tumor that interferes with my optical nerves.

I have the tendency to see things in the negative. I see the space around the object before I see the object. My brain is pretty quick in filling in the spaces, unless it is something that I have not seen before, or is in a place it would not ordinarily be. Then my brain scrambles to play catch up.

Sometimes it gets stuck, and I have to ask someone to identify it for me, or get close enough to it to give my brain more data to work with. It is a truly odd feeling when this happens, but I embrace it because it is just another part of my learning process and experiences. But what you see is what you brain has been programmed to see.

thank you for sharing this experience...it never fails to amaze me how our brains can adapt to all different kinds of situations. And when you think that we only ever use such a small percentage of our minds capacity / brain function it really makes you wonder how much more we as humans could be capable of.

I like this post.

I think of things in three basic separate realities.

One is the measurable world of science. This is where the confirmation of my beliefs come from.

Two is the philosophical which uses logic to decipher ontological questions.

Three is psychic/intuition. The type of knowledge that comes from silence rather than thinking. I don't mean psychic like palm reader x men but something perhaps coded that can be picked up.

Essentially in physics we are starting to think of packets of information that spread. The exchange of these information packets is mysterious. Virtual particles and entanglement etc. It's quite possible we are very off in our concept of reality.

In my speculatory scyfy brain I start thinking if these myths of old from Zeus to Brahma are talking about a knowledge of dimensions that was lost. Is it possible these characters came through and seemed well,..out of this world.

Sometimes it baffles me.to think the same human learning how to trap and gather 200k years ago could create computers. The same brain, same hands. You could teach a factory full of humans from 200k years from children age on and would probably be able to produce computers with those people.

The thing they lacked was the knowledge that is all...

So what happens in a cataclysm if no engineed survive? Or not enough biologists?

Do you start over?

No, I can't believe my eyes. Nor yours. Seeing is not believing. Belief is impossible, as far as I can tell.


I just eventually came to the decision that all I have is what I can describe experiencing.... the "true" objective nature of that might be completely out of my ability to grasp or know. So ...whatever. I go with what I got, without clinging too tightly. When with others, I will lean to shared perceptions, because it makes things easier.

But basically my best and worse attribute is that I am flighty: In perception , belief, focus and thought.
It makes me adaptable, and unreliable.

Pay attention to everything
Believe nothing.

a reply to: cosmickat
Think about it. Everything that you think you know is known to you because you have either interacted with it before, or because someone has educated you on it, or has initiated the possibility of it in your mind.

Like the parable of the blind men describing an elephant, we only know what we know.

It is a very unusual sensation when you view something that your mind does not recognize and cannot categorize. You can almost sense the demand for more input, and it does not rest. You bounce between curiosity and confusion. It is strange that fear doesn't usually ever surface, and if it does, curiosity will generally outweigh the fear.

Seeing is nothing but light and reflection, recognition and knowing is what makes what you see come into focus.

I remember seeing a reddish-orange glowing object with strange white lettering next a valley stream in Edinburgh. It was actually the "Orange" blimp seen from near straight on. Still wondering why they "landed" next to the stream.

abpic.co.uk...

originally posted by: Revolution9
a reply to: cosmickat

I have seen a lot of things:

2 Angels dancing in the sky over the English Channel.

3 Bangs and flickering lights in the night as I walked in a rural area. The lights would just burst in front of me. I got to a high point and they were flickering everywhere all over the county.

4 When a kid I was with my two uncles, all sleeping in the same room. They said I was moaning in my sleep "They're here, quick phone the police", after which a huge light shone horizontally across the curtained bedroom window from the back garden. I woke up to that and was crying and very scared (I was just a boy). My two adult uncles looked out of the window and saw a pole of light in the garden. It stretched up as tall as a house, moved from the centre of the garden and stayed for a time. One of my uncle's shone a torch on it and the beam actually rested on the pole of light as though it had solidity and was not as bright as the torch beam. I was too afraid to look out the window. I still occasionally mention it to them. They remember it, but they just shut up after that and don't want to talk about it.

5. My auntie is schizophrenic. I was with her when she was breaking out in a really bad way. The whole house was charged with a weird kind of electricity and I knew some serious stuff was happening. When I challenged her over the dining room table by the back window as I was sensing some really freaky stuff happening a Stephen King novel unravelled, lol. It was like a horror movie, I'm not joking. A black shape made a loud bang on the back gate and leaped over it to the back door. I was dumbfounded. She said, "Now, you've see it, too", and was warning me, "Don't open the door." After that she poured her heart out and she had to go to hospital for a time to get sorted out. In the hospital a nurse also saw something near to her. My auntie also repeatedly guessed every card correct while doing that thing Aldous Huxley liked to do. She also has accurately dreamed and predicted the deaths of all our family members. I told her not to tell me if she ever dreamed about me.

6. If I ever I want it there is a voice that helps me. It is not like a physical hearing voice. It is a voice that is in the soul. It has done some crazy guiding. It does not tell me what to do. It has told me about hidden foot paths, old secrets that I have no way of corroborating. It is not a bad voice. It only ever says very nice and helpful things.

7. In Israel in the Old City some very subtle yet profoundly life changing things happened. I spent a night on the Mount of Olives overlooking Jerusalem where Christ used to go with His friends. People used to go on spiritual pilgrimages and for very good reason. Do you think they would do all that hard travelling if they did not get something out of it? I highly recommend it. If you are interested and can do it visit Jerusalem at least once in your life. If you want it you will gain something. The things that happened to me are out of time. They are still happening to me now. I have a very wonderful and rich inner life. It is to make up for the desert that is my physical life. Didn't Christ say that His Wealth was not the same as the world's?

Other things have happened; some I have told you about here before, others not.

It is not just fantasy and mind/biological tricks. Aldous Huxley and those of us who have had similar experiences know how quickly this dimension breaks down if you even mess very slightly on a molecular level with the usual chain reaction. Shamans have relied on this being the case.

We can't explain it all away as tricks. So many of us have personal experiences that can't be accounted for and sometimes as I tried to show they are shared experiences, not just in one mind.

Thank you for this, extremely interesting.
Do you think that some people are more disposed to experiencing the mystical / spiritual ?
I have noted while reading both on and off of ATS that the majority of people who have one experience that cannot easily be explained will go on to have more.
I have often wondered about people who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia, in that who are we [who don't have this experience ] to say that what they are seeing and hearing around them is not real. Could it be that they are having an inter dimensional interaction.We just don't know enough about brain function really.

Shared experiences too ...can be extremely fascinating topics for discussion. Folie a Deux for example where a hallucination can be shared.
Folie a Deux
Not that I am in any way diminishing any of your experiences at all....I do believe in things that are mystical and spiritual and cannot be explained.
I have also had some very strange experiences that have mystified me and have no rational expanation..but I do know they were real and did happen.
I have never been to Jerusalem....I think the experience of visiting would change a persons outlook on life and spirituality.

originally posted by: intrptr
a reply to: cosmickat

But if we as 3 dimensional creatures were to try and explain a sphere or a cube to a 2D being...what language would we use?

Our voice would frighten them, seemingly coming from nowhere.

If we pulled them 'up' out of "flatland" to our 'world', they would literally disappear from theirs, the other flatlanders in the room would see them disappear before their very eyes. If we put them back they wold just as suddenly reappear from 'thin air'.

Its an interesting parallel, one Carl Sagan addresses in the video below.

The same thing applies to our perspective. If 4 D denizens talk to us, their voice seemingly comes from nowhere, if we go there we disappear, and reappear here as if from thin air.

Except we can't just disappear, our bodies are stuck in 3D land.

Its our spirit that transcends this dimension to the next 'plane' or phase of our lives.

This happens to everyone eventually, for everyone has a spirit and everyone 'passes' away.

This is what I believe too, having had many OOBE I do know that our physical shell is just that a shell...and we are so much more than just flesh and bone.

originally posted by: Aliensun
a reply to: cosmickat

A nice piece that covers a lot of ground, but it suffers from a lack of appreciating the "other." By that word I mean the other forces in nature that may have access to our physical and mental worlds that we cannot/will not accept as genuine despite the best evidence of personal experience allowed/given to us.

Strangely, cultural myths, religions and personally witnessing an "paranormal" event are all relegated to the back of the memory. I assume that mere act of existence in whatever reality we suffer from is enough to block the realization that there are things out there that defy what we want to believe.

As for the discussion of ETIs, they undoubtedly are beyond our daily, mundane comprehension. If I say as honestly and careful as I can that the ETIs can intercede into every aspect of our existence and may have done so since our beginning since they absolutely know the human character, then that comment gets discarded instantly as being insane, not worthy of further discussion. The old anthropocentric brain is always on the defense. Until it can reason with itself to understand that being a human is not the pinnacle of life in the universe then we will continue to suffer from our fallacy.

The cultural shifts today across the world, some vastly different than others, the growing awareness of a possible consciousness of the universe, and scientific investigations that are seeking out evidence of ETIs are coming together for the shifting, awakening of humankind that has never been dream about by the average person. --Maybe mentioned on ATS, but attacked and vehemently denied as the possible true nature of Nature itself.

(Sorry gotta run.)

thank you..yes..I did sort of get a bit carried away with the post..there was so much more I had been thinking about, but really didn't want it to run on too long..one page is enough ..for now

I sort of agree that we do close our minds off to the supernatural..wonder why that is. Are we conditioned to do that ?
and why would we be ? as is always the case with these subjects...questions seem to lead into further and bigger questions.

A consciousness of the universe ! there is a thought !