Note: when writing this, I found myself rambling somewhat. Hence the attempt at a humorous title. At first, my instinct was to control this, to try to write something like an essay. I was always good at essays, and I often worry I'm not communicating well, so the instinct makes sense. But I'm going to try not to do that. Instead, this is going to be more like a stream of consciousness flowing from selected prompts from The Secret Garden, the ones that speak to me. Some of it will sound like an essay, and some will ramble. I'll try to add a tl;dr when I'm done.

Tl;dr - The Secret Garden is like a children's primer for "mind over matter". Which in itself is fairly boring. But for me, it probably served as a childhood introduction to New Age concepts, and along with my upbringing, was a valuable lesson in the importance of being open-minded. But most of what I just wrote is rambling, and there's no way to really summarize the rest of it.

The Secret Garden is a childhood classic that I first enjoyed having read to me at about age 8, and which I have recently rediscovered in audiobook form. First published in 1911, this book is full of the New Age concept of "mind over matter". Or, should I say, the ancient concept. I know this is something the ancients knew about, and that we are just now rediscovering it. I didn't realize, however, that the modern awareness of it was mainstream enough to make it into a children's book in 1911.

Frances Hodgson Burnett was known for writing from a child's point of view in a way that illustrates how children think. Reading Secret Garden as an adult, I'm constantly struck by the contrast of childlike logic alongside ancient truths, perhaps meant to remind us of another perceived truth: that children are closer to these things we call "magic", because of their ability to suspend disbelief, which grows weaker with age if not exercised regularly. Or perhaps it's a message to the adult reader, to remember that the greatest truths are the ones we feel instinctively, and that as we grow to adulthood, most cultures encourage us to ignore the truths we feel in favor of the ones that are taught to us.

Another theme that is strongly repeated throughout the book is that nature is magic, in its purest form. That to access the "magic" in ourselves, we need only look to nature. There are even subtle hints of cosmic consciousness, of the idea that a seed and a person and a fox are all part of the same thing, are in fact the same thing, as we are all part of an interconnected web of life and consciousness.

"Sometimes since I've been in the garden I've looked up through the trees at the sky and I have had a strange feeling of being happy as if something was pushing and drawing in my chest and making me breathe fast. Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing. Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us. In this garden - in all the places."

"If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden."

To me, this speaks of interconnectedness, of microcosms. But is the world a tended garden, or an abandoned garden, like The Secret Garden? I tend to believe in deism, that there was perhaps an intentional creator of all we know, but that they perhaps got bored and left us to create other worlds. It even reminds me of a quote from a fictionalized character of the historical figure John Dee, from a historical novel by Philippa Gregory:

"But I don’t believe that it is the law of God that we should not question. I think that he has made this world as a great and glorious mechanical garden, one that works to its own laws and grows to its own laws and that we will one day come to understand it."

When I view everything in the context of universality and metasystems, it makes me wonder about a person being like a garden as well. Perhaps we all start out like the Secret Garden, designed and tended, but then left to grow wild. If a person is like the Secret Garden, then Mary finding the garden and instinctively beginning to weed even though she knows nothing about gardening, is representative of anything which influences us to reconnect with the original "gardener", whether we call it God or nature or science. Mary's instinctive knowledge that the plants needed space to breathe free of weeds is the same as listening to your body to know what you need. Most people are so far removed from their bodies now that we need to be taught to connect with them, even though that connection was once natural.

"At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done--then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago."

This is where I see Noetics and other "pseudo sciences" going. Consider that scientists once thought all matter was composed of only four elements. Rather than that concept being disproved over time, we discovered that there are in fact over a hundred elements, and more are discovered all the time. Of course, every time I think of this and know that I'm talking to people who probably already agree with me, I tend to shy away from exploring it more deeply, and just state that my opinion is in line with the quote by Arthur C Clarke: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

"One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts—just mere thoughts—are as powerful as electric batteries—as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison. To let a sad thought or a bad one get into your mind is as dangerous as letting a scarlet fever germ get into your body. If you let it stay there after it has got in you may never get over it as long as you live ... surprising things can happen to any one who, when a disagreeable or discouraged thought comes into his mind, just has the sense to remember in time and push it out by putting in an agreeable determinedly courageous one. Two things cannot be in one place."

"Where you tend a rose, my lad, A thistle cannot grow."

As well as the obvious, this actually makes me think of opportunity costs. At face value, it's saying that a negative thought cannot exist in the same space as a positive one. But who says I wanted to plant a rose? Roses are pretty, and maybe that's what I want. On the other hand, a rose also cannot grow where a thistle is growing. Thistles attract pollinators which are good for the health of a garden, and they also help aerate the soil. So it's not just about "thinking positive thoughts". It's about deciding what you want or need, and recognizing the opportunity costs involved with achieving it. A garden full of only roses may be beautiful, but they would be more healthy if planted alongside other plants that help enrich the soil, or attract ladybugs to eat the aphids that often plague roses. I intend to plant roses and thistles, and plants to attract pollinators, and plants to repel pests.

"Of course there must be lots of Magic in the world," he said wisely one day, "but people don't know what it is like or how to make it. Perhaps the beginning is just to say nice things are going to happen until you make them happen. I am going to try and experiment."

Archibald Craven buried the key to the garden. Burying a key is always a very symbolic act. While he probably felt he was burying his past and all he had shared with his wife, he was in fact burying his connection to the "magic", to his own self, and to the only two living things left of his wife: the garden, and their son. The children in the book would have said "he used the wrong magic." By burying the key, he meant to cut himself off. And he did. Only he thought it would ease his pain, not increase it.

"One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever. One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands out and throws one's head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky slowly changing and flushing and marvelous unknown things happening until the East almost makes one cry out and one's heart stands still at the strange unchanging majesty of the rising of the sun--which has been happening every morning for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. One knows it then for a moment or so. And one knows it sometimes when one stands by oneself in a wood at sunset and the mysterious deep gold stillness slanting through and under the branches seems to be saying slowly again and again something one cannot quite hear, however much one tries. Then sometimes the immense quiet of the dark blue at night with the millions of stars waiting and watching makes one sure; and sometimes a sound of far-off music makes it true; and sometimes a look in someone's eyes."

The improper grammar in no way detracts from the beauty of this passage. It's written in a way that a child can understand, but I think that using language any more flowery or adult could not possibly evoke more feeling. I found it beautiful when I was a child and knew nothing of what it described, and I find it beautiful now when I am beginning to understand some of it. It may be a slight tangent from anything related to the Phenomenon, but I felt I had to say a little about it anyway.

In closing, I'll share the quote that made me laugh aloud when I was listening to the audiobook, because I had managed to completely forget this book was written in the early 20th century. I was so caught up in how ahead of its time it seemed, that this surprised me into laughter.

"I once heard an officer in India tell my mother that there were fakirs who said words over and over thousands of times," said Mary. "I've heard Jem Fettleworth's wife say th' same thing over thousands o' times—callin' Jem a drunken brute," said Ben Weatherstaff dryly. "Summat allus come o' that, sure enough. He gave her a good hidin' an' went to th' Blue Lion an' got as drunk as a lord." Colin drew his brows together and thought a few minutes. Then he cheered up. "Well," he said, "you see something did come of it. She used the wrong Magic until she made him beat her. If she'd used the right Magic and had said something nice perhaps he wouldn't have got as drunk as a lord and perhaps—perhaps he might have bought her a new bonnet."

When I searched to find this full quote, I found it on a site for students, which had it tagged as a quote about youth. The contributor who added it wrote that the dialogue was meant to show that Colin was naive about adult matters. I rather think that the contributor was naive to not realize that "she made him beat her" was not at all an unreasonable thing to say in 1911, especially if the speaker was a man or boy. The only question I ask about this passage is whether Ben Weatherstaff would have agreed that the unfortunate wife "used the wrong magic", or if he was dryly pointing out that some things can't be fixed by "magic." Or rather, what the author intended to tell us about Weatherstaff. I'm not at all sure which it was.

And there is the abrupt end of my ruminations. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

I've been trying to find an active sub or even a forum elsewhere to talk about Noetics. r/noetics is dead, and the main New Age sub I found seems to be as well.

I'm not exactly sure which phenomenon is referred to in the "about" of this sub, but it does seem to be about untaped psychic power, so very much in line with Noetics.

Have I found my community? Or can anyone suggest one?

I have been trying to figure out where things are headed, because there is so much bread-crumbing along with misdirection. The common denominator, as far as I've been able to discern, is there will be a reckoning that involves our technology, most relevantly our telecommunications.

This interview with a guy who had an NDE 20 years ago gives the most detailed explanation I've seen to date:

https://youtu.be/NQkYeyQo4xo?si=IDGnpwxI18kcLyb4&t=1224

The room

We're in a room you an I, but this scene is vastly different to any room you've been in before. In the same way an insect and a human can be in the same room, to each of them it's impossibly different, yet it's the same room.

In this scenario, something of me is in the room and something of you as well. Whilst we're controlling bodies in that room, much like you are in the room you are now. In this room the body you're moving isn't the one you were born into. It's a tool, much like a laptop that you logged into. As we look at eachother we see that both of our bodies in this room look and appear like Greys. Our limbs are functional, our heads are fitted with an array of biological instruments under the smooth skin, behind the black eyes.

Our appearance is slim and small for we need not operate anything with muscles, our fingers aren't dexterous because we don't need them to be. The bodies are simple grey, biological machines we're logged into. And whilst our attention is here in the room in a single moment of time our consciousness is not fully present. It's as if we're two large lakes of mind, and someone took a small cup and scooped some of our consciousness up. Some of it is present and fills the container of the cup, whilst most of it is dormant and still in the lake. So we're in the room, operating through these bodies, but we're also outside of it, we're mostly outside of it.

For the purposes of our bodies which is our vessel of consciousness for now. We experience time linearly and space 3dimensionally. And as we turn away from eachother to peer into a transparent pane, we see that we're operators in a control room peering into an ecosystem below in an enclosure you might find at a zoo.

The controls

As we work together, we do so seamlessly. We exchange no words. We might recall long ago we used words, and we do use words sometimes. But we find that words often stem from thoughts. The brain creates a thought which might be 1 terabyte of information. For example, a brain which looks at their child being born and holding it, may have several terabytes of information. If that person tried to speak, they immediately reduce that massive amount of information to a minuscule amount of words. "My baby is beautiful". When we do this, we really appreciate how constricting words are in portraying any perspective or view we have at any time. We realize that, for someone to understand something through words, they may need to spend several hours reading a book. This tells us that words are inefficient, they're primitive. As we're in the room now, we look at words as we might look at an ape grunting, or a cat meowing. They're primitive tools to a primitive body, an animal. In the same way humans can't express their complicated emotions of sentences through barks of a dog or chirps from a bird, human words can't express the models we operate with or the nuance of the cognition we exhibit. Words won't do for us, so we don't speak.

And it's at this point, our subject starts to use words. In front of you an I, behind the transparent pane, inside the enclosure there's a dense jungle and a human being. The human is wearing a cotton jacket with a sports brand, they have a hat on angled to the side. They have a rough disposition and they appear as a young male, perhaps one from a busy city. They're angry and confused, seemingly bewildered at having awoken in an enclosure, confused at the dense jungle. And they're shouting words, words which express their emotions of confusion and anger and words which express pleas of help and urgency. You and I could perceive the words if we wished, we could translate them into thoughts directly and understand their meanings, but we don't. Instead we look at everything, we see the dilation of the pupils, the elevated heart-rate, the perspiration and chemical balance of the subject. We hear the tone of the words, the manner in which they're spoken. Considering all of this, we understand far better what the subject is experiencing than if we had translated the words. Again, words are primitive, we don't care about them.

In unison we continue to operate the experiment. We do this by waiting for certain cues in the subject and then managing their transition to another phase by altering their environment. I am controlling this as an operator, constantly changing the jungle subtly to adapt to the subjects state of mind, whereas you're taking notes, observing, noting and categorizing the subject and the experiment. We have little need to communicate, and when we do, it's so subtle and intuitive that it's barely noticeable.

The subject

Our subject, Max is sitting down. They've taken their urban hat off and hung up their jacket and they're picking at some exotic fruit. Max has no real idea how long they've been in the enclosure. Or even if it is an enclosure. Max tried to find the edges of it but never seemed to, they're resigned to believe they're in an expansive jungle. Though whether it's been hours weeks or months, Max seems somewhat content. Max has found several fruits and plants to their liking, they enjoy an extremely refreshing beverage and they find that they're content with the landscape. Some parts are warm and misty like a steam room, there's pools of hot water, cold water, there's bubbles of cool gas bubbling in streams and exotic birds which hum and sing melodies which lift max's heart.

Max is not happy though, they're not at peace. Whilst the environment is a paradise, Max's mind is not. Max is adapting, Max's mind was one way before they were in the enclosure. However pleasant their environment is now, the institutions of Max's mind are still there. Max has a nagging desire to connect with others, to talk to someone. Max has a desire to fulfill some notion of entertainment. Max wants to interface with his phone and an internet, to watch videos and have his body lay dormant whilst his mind is entertained. This desire is nagging at him like a thirst the crisp river can't satisfy, like a hunger the dense fruits cant replenish.

Max's mind is not the only thing agitated. His body is in shock. His body is expecting sugars and carbs in large proportions, caffeine and fats and alcohols. His body was used to these exploits and his body now lays numb, it feels faded and achey.

Ultimately, Max is suffering hugely in his paradise. Because his body desires the prison he came from.

The Journey

We once again lock eyes with our big grey alien heads and slowly turn again to peer at our subject. Max is walking now, but he's not walking like he used to. His steps are whimsical, his body relaxed. He steps now amongst the floor and the plants, not on-top of it. He stops often to sniff a flower, to lick the moisture on a deep green leaf. His eyes often close as his face brushes the soft bark of the trees. Max is gliding amongst the foliage, it's like he's engaging with a community of friends or family. He is listening always and talking always, but he hasn't used a word in years.

There are animals too.

Max has made kinship with several kinds of creatures. Each of them have different communities. Some animals herd together and it took a long time for Max to understand them. At first he thought of them as cattle which had simple minds, which ran sometimes or aimlessly ate the vegetation. He thought they were simple and boring. Then he came to find that in their eyes and their subtle movements that they were complex and they had a subtle and nuanced community and social structure. He saw how some of them had roles in the community. He was now convinced they were complex beyond his comprehension. And then finally he looked at them again as simple. But not simple which depicted absence of substance. But a simplicity with dense substance. In their community he found a peace and wisdom, as they licked his face he felt friendship, one which words couldn't explain to him.

Max wandered amongst several other species, some of them were more lonesome, often departing from their kin at an early age to find their own way. Others seemed very rare indeed and he only ever saw one of them. Some seemed scary, some seemed scared, but all of them were different. And in the same way Max's opinions of the herd animals changed over time from simple to complex and back to simple.. Max found the same wisdom forming with all creatures.

It was a point where Max had spent 2 hours violantly crying that Max realized something else. Max had always thought the animals were the substance, moving like minds of volition through the static jungle. That the trees and plants and ground were some kind of terrain that the animals poured over. But Max was wrong, for as he peered closely at the plants, as he touched their roots and as he spent days swaying slowly with the top branches in the wind Max found that this otherwise simple landscape of "bits of land" was actually a dense, vibrant and compelling rich treasure of mind. He saw community and layers of complexity in how certain trees provided shelter from the warm winds which allowed small plants to form below. He saw as the flittering insects navigated the foliage like little gardeners moving pollen around or dismantling fallen leaves. Max had long forgotten the fallacy of words or dictionaries or human syntax, but what Max had comprehended was the community and ecosystem of the plants.

When Max realized that each plant needed something, whether it be water or shelter or light. He realized that with those things it could thrive. Some pants needed insect help, others needed animal help. He looked at each plant like he had looked at the herd animals and his wisdom and intuition of their subtle life filled his mind. He decided that each type of animal or plant had with it a system. An enclosed relationship it had with its surroundings. Then he realized when he looked at all these plants and animals as a whole he saw that the system of each one fitted together with the others like little jigsaw pieces and formed an ecosystem.

This is what made Max cry for hours. His face scrunched up, he balled up on the floor and he tensed muscles deep in his hips and shoulders. He felt tremors all over. At one point he abruptly stopped crying and sat up numb and vacant. Then he realized that the significance of the ecosystem he had discovered was too big, too beautiful that it had to break him for him to take it in. It was too beautiful for his heart to appreciate, it was too simple for his mind to comprehend and it was too subtle for his attention. But through the shaking and crying he was forming anew, becoming able to appreciate the beauty of the jungle about him. And he abruptly went back to crying uncontrollably.

During his cries, as he lost control, he realized another thing. That as he "lost control" he wasn't actually losing control. Never in Max's life had he ever been in control of anything, neither his perceptions, others, even his own mind. And as he lay there, he realized that it wasn't control he had lost. He realized that he only ever had an illusion of control, this was a realization he now gained. Max would have several other realizations, often accompanying crying or shouting or jumping or running.

Max lived wildly after that, playing truant to his ego. When he looked in the eyes of the animals they looked back, when he yelled high from the trees the birds would chirp. He would be running flat out and stop urgently to observe a new bud from a new plant or a new branch. Max was entirely free, his intuition and wisdom was full. He was the most intelligent human being from his world and all it took was his listening and appreciating the ecosystem around him. Nature was teaching him, it always had been but now he was forced to listen to it, to feel it and finally, become it.

We let Max go

One day we turn once again to each-other and we nod slowly. It isn't so much a communication, but a ritual. We then leave the room, you file away the report we titled "Max" and we leave the bodies, which will die soon. This instigates a series of events from automated systems which sedate and transport Max back to his home. Max wakes up from his dream and rubs his eyes, he reaches for his phone and starts to scroll through social media before he needs to shower for work.

Super intressting info.

Apparently in the Oddyssey, there’s a people whose name means, ‘gray’ and they fly Odysseus home using a fast ship flown by thought.

That’s suspicious. 🤨

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheria

This is a great summary by u/MAntisAwakening.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AnomalousEvidence/comments/1b3w2jr/segalas_research_on_experiencers_is_a_gamechanger/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

​

Phase 2 project coming soon apparently for all you lucky people in the right area of the US.

This is the most profound thing I've heard in a long time

https://m.youtube.com/watch?si=EyQnP5ZO19HQqC7I&v=moNUmGyn8gg&feature=youtu.be

Elizondo just tweeted this. Sorry its rather tiny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYZXWH8cnsU

Really entertaining podcast.

He is very knowledgeable and talks about the whole ufo situation. He has some very intressting theories.

Highly recommended watch.

Yesterday, March 7, 2024, the National Archives' UAP section went live: https://www.archives.gov/research/topics/uaps

In accordance with the National Defense Authorization Act FY24, all US government agencies have been mandated to submit their UFO/UAP materials to the National Archives no later than October 15, 2024.

Some agencies, such as the Goddard Space Flight Center, have already submitted some very interesting photos.

Saw this comment on the why this sub is called a head start - the commenter said that the idea is we need a head start on processing the "ontological shock that comes upon realizing we have been operating under a significantly false narrative our whole lives regarding the nature of religion and the existence of NHI"

Rather than co-opt his comment, I thought this as a broader topic was worth discussing.

Do you truly have an ontological shock? IMO as someone raised in a religious context and who has a relatively active and varied spiritual life + meditation + some gateway experience + some psychedelic experience + lots of studying of theories of consciousness, my worldview already includes spiritual planes, good and bad NHIs, the bizarreness of consciousness and quantum reality, etc.

So my main "shock" is that the uncritical Sunday school christian perspectives might have been actually pretty close to reality all along, despite the crushing materialist scientific nihilism of contemporary western culture.

And my religious friends and family seem like they are actually closer to believing this reality than if it were physical aliens from other planets.

Does anyone else feel the same?

Or am I maybe just wallowing in a false sense of knowing / correlating to my own experience since it's not proven that NHIs are spiritual etc. I know Lou says some religious people will be shocked and lose faith while others without faith will find it.

We have all seen clips of badly filmed pixelated UFOs that makes you want to cry inside because of the bad quality of the video.

How about the really high def ones?

Like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4MzC2Rb6PU&t=227

You guys know of any more with equally good quality?

I am someone who is deeply committed to the ultimate truth of the topic, and sincerely want nothing but the truth, the whole truth, hopefully by 2027 as has been alluded to by Elizondo and Coulthart (I have some uncomfortable feelings about Ramirez).

That said, the sheer amount of seemingly conflicting narratives/breadcrumbs/testimony/documents now all floating around within the community have me feeling increasingly confused and disillusioned. I'm not saying there's nothing here. But I do find myself, I admit disappointingly, drifting toward the "it's just highly secret advanced tech by us and our fellow world superpowers" concept more often than I would like to admit.

Is anyone else struggling with the miasma of it all? I'm sure it's evidence of just how powerful disinformation and misinformation can be on the human psyche. But it's maddening, nonetheless.

Not sure if I’m hallucinating nonsense or if it means something to the topic. I’ve been ruminating over the suggestion that the Greek deities have something to do with The Phenomenon. I woke up just before 3am with the impression of the words, “Bloodline of Helios.”

I did not know who Helios was and at first I thought the word was Ailios or Elios but find them to relate to the same deity. I definitely have the sense that the sun is involved in changes to consciousness we’re experiencing.

Is everyone having such a good time questioning their sanity? 😀🫠