PAST LIVES, ABDUCTIONS, & "COLLECTING INFORMATION" FROM JOHN MACK
An excerpt from “The UFO Abduction Phenomenon: What Might it Mean for the Human Future?
We have no place for past-life experiences in the Western view of reality, for we have lost our connection with these dimensions of consciousness. Many abductees experience themselves as having a double identity, both alien and human, and we do not understand within our physicalist/materialist paradigm how they can pass from one form to another.
(I) have encountered many past-life experiences among abductees. At a certain point when they are reporting, let us say, an infantile abduction experience, an abductee may say sadly, something like “I have returned here again,” or “I’m back.” If I ignore the “again” or “back,” nothing adverse will happen, except that we will talk more about their childhood experiences, which is, of course, what we tend to do as therapists. But if I pick up the “again,” or the “return,” then what usually will come out is a past-life experience that may be reported with as much authentic feeling as biographical experiences in this lifetime.
I have talked with Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the classic book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. about how scientific paradigms change. He gave what I think is good advice about how to approach my research. He said, “Just observe. Drop all your categories as best you can. Put them aside and just collect raw information. Don’t worry about words like ‘happening,’ or ‘didn’t happen,’ ‘exists’ or ‘doesn’t exist,’ ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ ‘real or unreal,’ ‘internal or external.’ Put all that aside and just collect information.
(Developed from a talk first given at Interface, Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 23, 1993 (and given again at the 24th Annual MUFON Symposium)