John Mack
From The Red Pill
John E. Mack (October 4, 1929 – September 27, 2004) was a Harvard psychiatrist, a Pulitzer-prize winning author, and an anti-nuclear campaigner who became the leading light in the alien abduction research community. The association with such a controversial topic left him to some degree, despite his intelligence and pedigree, an academic outcast.
History
John Mack received his medical degree from Harvard Medical School in 1955. He interned at Massachusetts General Hospital and did his residency at Massachusetts Mental Health Center. Mack joined the Harvard Medical School faculty in 1964, becoming professor of psychiatry in 1972. One of John Mack’s key interests was the question of how one's perceptions of the world affected personal development and relationships with others. This fascination is in evidence in his 1977 Pulitzer Prize-winning biographical study of the life of British officer T. E. Lawrence (better known as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’), A Prince of our Disorder.
Another cornerstone of Mack’s own worldview was that we were living in a time of crisis, separated from our spiritual origins by physicalist philosophy. He campaigned actively against nuclear weapons, and took issue with those who would dismiss archaic thinking as a method of curing our ills, saying that the modern era was a time of…
[blockquote]...extraordinary planetary crisis because of our inability to understand what native peoples all over the world understand, which is that there is a very delicate web of life, and that web of life is being destroyed by this species.[/blockquote]
Alien Abduction Research
Mack’s interest in spiritual consciousness led him to undertake Holotropic Breathwork, a technique for expanding consciousness developed by psychelic therapy pioneer Stanislav Grof. Soon after, his interests in altered consciousness, extra-realities, and personal transformation found full expression in his research into the alien abduction experience, which began in 1990 with a study involving 200 men and women who said they had encountered extraterrestrial beings. For not only did the alien abduction phenomenon seem to exist independently of ‘our reality’, it also appeared to have an underlying motivation of alerting us to the peril we are in – certainly a theme which piqued Mack's philosophical interests.
The main thing, for me, has become ‘what does this mean for us?’ that people of sound mind, hundreds of thousands if not millions of people from all over the world…are having what seem like authentic, incontrovertible encounters with some sort of beings that apparently enter into our physical world and communicate to us about ourselves, and seem in some way to be connecting with us.
His work drew the attention of the mainstream press in 1994 with the publication of his best-selling book, Abduction. Mack followed this book with another on the subject, five years later, titled Passport to the Cosmos. For John Mack, the alien abduction experience was one that had the promise of opening humanity to "a larger sense of self, of identification with others and with a more cosmic level of being", which would "open us to a sense of the divine and a reverence for life, for nature." He believed that such a shift of consciousness was the only thing to arrest what he described as a "downward spiral of destruction."
Mack did not believe that alien abductions were simply hoaxes, delusions and hallucinations. Based on his work counseling abductees, Mack arrived at the astounding conclusion that this was a phenomenon which was 'real', but which didn't so much have its basis in the physical universe (as per the conclusions of abduction researcher Budd Hopkins) as it did in Henry Corbin's "imaginal realms" – accessible only through a widening of conscious perception. This hypothesis is in stark opposition to the current scientific paradigm, which is based on the mechanistic assumption that consciousness is a by-product of a physical brain.
Needless to say, such opposition to orthodoxy comes with its price. Mack, a respected Harvard psychiatrist who had previously won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of T.E. Lawrence, was lambasted by his colleagues and even investigated by Harvard – a time which he described as a "15-month ordeal". This despite his eloquent and detailed explanation of his hypothesis that the abduction phenomenon displayed clear patterns indicating some objective 'reality', and was worthy of further research. Mack's real crime was that he challenged the dogma of physicalism. Not that he would have had it any other way, for he believed that it was important that we began to reclaim a science of the soul:
...in the focus on the material realm to the exclusion of the subtle realms, we have virtually rid the cosmos of nature, rid nature of spirit and, in a sense, denied the existence of all life other than that which is physically observable here on earth...the Western world view, what Tulane philosopher Michael Zimmerman calls anthropomorphic humanism, has reduced reality largely to the manifest or physical world and puts the human mind or the human being at the top of the cosmic intellectual hierarchy, eliminating not only God but virtually all spirit from the cosmos. The phenomena that really shake up that world view are those that seem to cross over from the unseen world and manifest in the physical world.
Mack didn't jump to this conclusion lightly. The hypothesis formed itself over several years of counseling abductees, perhaps part of the reason why he didn't seem prepared for the onslaught against him from the orthodoxy – he was, as he puts it, a frog that died in gradually heating water, never noticing the impending danger. He also admits that the proposal of his extraordinary hypothesis took a great deal of challenging of his own materialist scientific and clinical upbringing.
After a fourteen month inquiry, questions began to be raised by the academic community (including Harvard Professor of Law Alan Dershowitz) concerning the validity of Harvard's investigation of a tenured professor who was not suspected of ethics violations or professional misconduct. Harvard then issued a statement stating that the Dean had "reaffirmed Dr. Mack's academic freedom to study what he wishes and to state his opinions without impediment," concluding "Dr. Mack remains a member in good standing of the Harvard Faculty of Medicine."
Still, Mack welcomed the input of those challenging his hypothesis...
For then if we can embrace the questions and polarities that the critiques represent, perhaps we can go to a deeper level of understanding instead of finding ourselves, as we tend to, in opposition to the people that will not take in what we are trying to communicate.
It’s interesting to note that one of John Mack’s friends during the 1970s was Carl Sagan, and in these two identities we see an almost parallel development diverging only on the question of materialism. Both were deeply intelligent and highly articulate men. Amazingly, Sagan won a Pulitzer Prize the year after John Mack won his. And Sagan went on to become a great proponent of the question of extraterrestrial life, just as Mack did. Sagan though, did so within the context of physical organisms to be found while searching the depths of space, while Mack came to believe we were already in dialogue with the aliens here on Earth. Carl Sagan became one of the main references for skeptical societies such as CSICOP, while John Mack became a reference for those in direct opposition to such groups.
John Mack was just a few days from his 75th birthday when he died on September 27, 2004 – not because of his advanced age, but in a tragic accident. Staying in London after being invited to present a talk at the T. E. Lawrence Society Symposium, Mack was struck by an automobile while walking home from dinner with friends.
Some of those close to Mack said that he had become interested in the evidence for ‘survival’ after-death, and alleged communications from those beyond.
External Links
- John E. Mack Institute
- Website for Passport to the Cosmos (mp3 audio, essays)
