You say goodbye, and I say dratzo

Whilst casting about for a topic for today's post, I stumbled upon an article in Medium from June of last year entitled, "Is the Galactic Federation Real?"

Well, I don't want to leave you in suspense as to the answer, so therefore:

Short answer: No.

Long answer: NOOOOOOOOOOO.

But boy, does the author, one Lisa Galarneau, think it is.  Or, more accurately, the alien intelligence she's channeling, one "Artemis Pax," thinks so.

Yes, I know Artemis is the name of a Greek goddess, i.e., a human-created mythological figure from right here on Earth, and "Pax" is Latin, not Alienese, for "peace."  So this is a little like the episode of the abysmal 1960s science fiction show Lost in Space which featured an alien named, I shit you not, "Princess Alpha of the planet Beta."

Anyhow, Galarneau/Pax blather on a bit about the whole idea, featuring paragraphs like the following:

What we would like to assure you is that ascension into a 5D reality will be more glorious than any of you can imagine. You will all, for instance, experience positive changes to your bodies. Your reality will be flooded with divine love, which will make everyone feel amazing. Your galactic neighbors will also be involved in lifting you up even further, and you will see a technological, spiritual, societal and cultural transformation of your civilization like nothing you have ever contemplated or imagined.

Which sounds pretty hopeful, especially given some of the scary stuff that's been going down lately.  I think we could all use a nice infusion of divine love, frankly.

She goes on to explain the whole thing via a bizarre analogy to The Wizard of Oz, which she calls "a metaphor from your popular culture," further proof that she's actually an alien.  But after reading all this, I decided I needed to dig a little deeper.  Was this just one article about one wingnut claiming to be a spiritually-ascended five-dimensional alien, or was this belief more widespread?

And all I can say is: whoa.

I found the site Galactic Federation of Light, which put to rest any thought that Galarneau/Pax was one isolated nut.  Feel free to take a look at it, but please be forewarned that this site is very slow to load, and in fact resulted in my having to restart my browser twice -- perhaps because the Galactic Federation Overlords were aware that I was accessing their site in order to poke fun at them.

Be that as it may, this site explains everything you might want to know about the Galactic Federation, and features a YouTube channel and Twitter feed that has thousands of followers.

To save you the time and effort, and potential damage to your computer's hard drive, I sifted through the site and pulled out a few highlights.  It's largely composed of a series of dated posts, each stating who said it and some including which Galactic Federation Master (s)he was channeling at the time.  Here is a sampling:

Your planet is literally surrounded with craft from all corners of the universe as all beings vie for ringside seats to the greatest show in the galaxy.  Your world has long been highly regarded as one of the finest spiritual schools in the universe and entry into this University has been highly sought after.  Now, you are on the precipice of a school-wide graduation, and you are center stage for the family that has come from all parts of the universe to attend the graduation ceremonies.  (Galactic Federation through Wanderer From The Skies, July 14, 2016)

Seriously?  Humanity is "highly regarded" and the Earth is "one of the finest spiritual schools in the galaxy?"  Judging from recent events, this doesn't say much about the educational system elsewhere in the universe.  As far as the fact that we're graduating, I suppose that's good, although I hope the speeches are better than the ones at most of the graduation ceremonies I've been to.  And if someone decides to read the names of all seven billion graduates, I'm leaving.

The next three or four months are destined to be eye opening, and you will know for sure that the big changes are on the way...  So get ready to button up your safety belts and enjoy the ride. It can be seen as good or bad as you want it to be, so see the goal that is being aimed for and not the manner in which it is to be reached.  All you need know is that it results in all you have been promised.  It will be an unbelievable time with one surprise after another, and celebrations will be taking place. 

I am SaLuSa from Sirius, and tell you that our ships are gathering for the grand announcement that will allow us to land on your Earth by invitation. (SaLuSa / through Mike Quinsey, 20th July 2016)

Well, given that this was posted a year ago last summer, and I don't remember Autumn 2016 as being all that eye-opening, I guess SaLuSa from Sirius might have gotten his wires crossed somehow.

Sirius, home of SaLuSa [image courtesy of NASA/JPL]

Since the posts were in chronological order, I decided that like the Brothers of the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, I needed to skip a bit, so I scrolled down to more current posts.  From April of 2017 I found the following:

Dratzo!  We return!  The great shift that your world is undergoing was first predicted by the Ancients over 13,000 years ago.  It is part of what they called 'the great galactic year.'  Heaven is to honor this time by establishing a great Light, which will wash away the dark and all its minions.  We were asked, over 20 of your years ago, to come here and be ready at an appointed time to carry out a mass landing of our personnel on your precious shores.  And so we came, and then saw that Heaven's dates for this undertaking were somewhat unclear.  So we adapted, and proceeded to use these moments to get to know you better.  Since our arrival here, we have become part of a sacred movement to prepare Gaia's surface humans for the requirements of the divine decrees for this planet.  One of them specifies the need to resolve the issue of the dark minions' labyrinth of control on your planet through sacred cleansing.  In the main this will start with a formal, immense change in the way your societies operate and in the way you perceive the nature of your reality.  (Washta, Sirius Star-Nation, Galactic Federation of Light & Ascended Masters, 17th April 2017)

"Dratzo?"  Is this some kind of greeting from Sirius, or something?  I think we should all begin to greet each other in this fashion from now on, so that "Washta" and his buddies feel at home when they arrive.  Maybe it also comes along with a cool hand sign, sort of like the Vulcan "Live Long and Prosper" thing, only way more ridiculous.

"Washta" had a further missive that he delivered late last year:

Dratzo!  We return!  We have been informed that several major banks worldwide are nearly ready to transfer ownership and management.  This is part of the massive shift of financial power out of the hands of the dark into those of the Light, and is the result of recent maneuvers by the Ascended Masters.

Furthermore, the time has come to consolidate the funds that were first posited by Saint Germaine in the early 18th century, and by Quan Yin in the 7th century.  These large reserves of gold and silver are the basis for shifting wealth on your world away from a select few over to those who are fully committed to the creation of universal prosperity for the planet.  Accompanying this transfer is the new banking system which will be completely transparent in its varied transactions.  The new banking is rooted in the unprecedented injunction that banks be the divine instruments of the Light.  They are to be used to manage various corporations (special partnerships) charged with specific and temporary mandates: to distribute technologies and related services to benefit the health and well being of your global populations.  (Washta, Sirius Star-Nation, Galactic Federation of Light & Ascended Masters, 24th April 2017)

Well, that sounds hopeful enough. I wouldn't mind it if the banks, and corporations in general, started being more concerned with the health and well-being of global populations, instead of what they mostly seem to be doing lately, which is buying congresspersons and kissing Donald Trump's ass.  But at this point, I stopped reading, because I was afraid my browser would crash again, and also because my prefrontal cortex was beginning to make alarming little whimpering noises.

What strikes me about this is that the people who believe this stuff (and there seem to be quite a few, judging from the posts and the comments that followed) go way beyond wishful thinking into that more rarefied air of delusion.  I mean, it'd be nice if there were some Galactic Good Guys who were ready to Storm The Beaches and reorganize world governments so that they Played Nice, but there's just this teensy little problem, which is that there's no evidence whatsoever that any of it is true.  And this brings up a troubling question, to wit: what is it that makes someone swallow something like this?  I mean, beyond the rather sad answer that the person in question is mentally ill.  And I just can't believe that mental illness accounts for all of the believers in conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, cults, superstitions... and Galactic Federations.

I actually know people who are seemingly quite rational, who hold down jobs and raise families and interact socially, and yet who have some pretty bizarre beliefs on a single topic -- astrology, homeopathy, HAARP, the Illuminati, psychic contact with animals.  What in the human brain can become so untethered, in an otherwise intact mind, that a person loses the ability in that instance (and that instance only) to decide if something is real, has supporting evidence, makes sense?

I don't know the answer, but I do think the whole thing is a little scary.  So I'll end on that note.  Well, I do have one more thing to say: Dratzo!

The voices of the dead

This week I ran into a couple of claims of a type I'd never heard of before -- and considering how long I've been in the game of analyzing the world of woo-woo, that came as kind of a surprise, especially when I found out that this sort of thing has apparently been going on for a while.

Turns out that there are people out there who say not only that they can contact the spirits of the dead,  but that they are acting as the ghost's locum.  In other words, they are guided by the not-quite-departed spirit to perform acts that the spirit itself would have done, if only it still had a body with which to do so.

Which becomes even more extraordinary when you find out that the ghosts are those of people like Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Victor Hugo.

If you're thinking, "Wait... so that means...  No, they can't really be saying that" -- yes, that's exactly what they're saying.  These "mediums" write novels, create art, write music, and then claim that the works came from the minds of the Great Masters, who were just hanging around looking for someone through which to channel talents frustrated by the inconvenience of being dead.

First we have Rosemary Brown, a British housewife who in the 1970s catapulted to fame by going public with the story that she had written music -- or more accurately, written down music -- that had been dictated to her by Debussy, Beethoven, Liszt, Chopin, and Bach.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Some people have been impressed with her work to the extent that it was actually performed and recorded in a collection called A Musical Séance.  Pianist Elene Gusch, who wrote a biography of Brown, said, "It would have been difficult for even a very able and well-trained composer to come up with them all, especially to produce them at the speed with which they came through."

André Previn, conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, was less effusive. "If the newfound compositions are genuine," he said, "they would best have been left on the shelf."

Brown died in 2001, still claiming that the pieces she wrote were actually compositions of long-dead composers.  She even described them; Debussy was a "hippie type" who "wore very bizarre clothes," Beethoven no longer had "that crabby look" because he'd regained his hearing, and Schubert tried to sing compositions to her but "he doesn't have a very good voice."

Skeptics, of course, point out that none of Brown's music goes much beyond the simpler and less technical compositions the composers created when they were alive, which is odd, especially since some of them had had hundreds of years to come up with new pieces.  But she's still considered by true believers to be one of the best pieces of spirit survival out there.

Then we've got Brazilian artist Valdelice Da Silva Dias Salum, who makes a similar claim, but about painting -- that when her hand holds the brush, she's being guided by Toulouse-Lautrec, Cezanne, Renoir, Degas, Matisse, Monet, and Van Gogh.  She actually signs her paintings not with her own name, but with the name of the artist who (she says) was doing the actual work.

"I grew up poor and illiterate," Salum told Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, the reporter for NPR who wrote the story.  "I didn't even know who these painters were.  I had no artistic talent.  But the spirits selected me."

Garcia-Navarro included in her story a drawing of a girl that Salum signed "Renoir."  To my admittedly untrained eye, it looks a bit like the attempts high school art students make to copy the style of the grand masters; there's nothing about it that has that luminous beauty that distinguishes a genuine Renoir.

But what do I know?  Apparently when Garcia-Navarro was researching for her story, she also found a writer named Divaldo Franco who is apparently producing new works by Victor Hugo, and another named Sandra Guedes Marques Carneiro, who has sold over 250,000 copies of romances she says are dictated to her from the spirit world by love-starved dead people.

No wonder they need to get their frustrations out.  When Rosemary Brown was on Johnny Carson, she apparently revealed that according to her sources, there was no sex in heaven, which is pretty damned disappointing.

Not that I'd probably be heading there even in the best-case scenario.

My general feeling about all of this is that as evidence for life after death goes, it's pretty thin.  Once again, we have the spirits of the dead communicating to the living things that don't really reveal to us much we didn't already know.  I find Rosemary Brown the most interesting of the lot -- I have to admit that some of her compositions aren't bad.  But there's nothing about them that jumps out at me and says, "Oh, this is definitely J. S. Bach at work."

The upshot is, as a writer, I'm going to continue to work on getting everything I can written while I'm alive.  It'd be nice if after I'm dead I could continue to dream up stories and upload them to the literal Cloud.  But I'm not counting on that opportunity.

So if you'd like to read something I've written (other than Skeptophilia, obviously), there's a selection at the right to choose from, and my next novel, Lock & Key, is scheduled to be on bookshelves in November.  Because once I've gone to my eternal reward (or just deserts, as the case may be), my general impression is that will be that.

Alien spiritual copyright infringement

"Channeling" is a practice that goes back millennia.  The idea that a powerful being could take over a human's body, use it as a vehicle, and thereby dispense wisdom upon the rest of us slobs has a history that extends from the Oracle of Delphi and the Witch of Endor, through the divine visions of Hildegard von Bingen and Joan of Arc, to the spiritualist mediums of the 19th century and more recent New Age channels like Jane Roberts and J. Z. Knight.

A curious current case is that of Darryl Anka, who claims to channel an alien being named "Bashar" from the planet "Essassani."  Anka goes into a trance, and then speaks in a peculiar, stilted voice (evidently that's the accent people have, over on Essassani), and gives us enlightened messages such as the following:

There is only the understanding of the thing that needs to be taught to every child on the planet, and that is the knowledge that every single individual on this planet is already powerful as he or she needs to be to create any reality desired, without having to hurt yourself, or anyone else, to get it.  That’s how powerful you are.

Whoo.  That's one deep message, right there.  Which, of course, is my problem with all of these people; you never really get any specifics.  The ones who claim to channel people from the past (like J. Z. Knight) dodge any questions about the culture and languages spoken by the people from 25,000 years ago, labeling these things as "unimportant."  People like Anka/Bashar can't give us any information about the technology on this purportedly advanced planet, only tell us useful things like "you're already as powerful as you need to be."

Me, I'd rather blueprints for a working warp drive, holodeck, tricorder, replicator, and phaser than I would vacuous messages about how much inner power I have at my disposal.  But maybe I'm just too shallow for enlightened beings like "Bashar."

[image courtesy of NASA]

Add that to the fact that Bashar claims to come from "300 light years in the future," thereby demonstrating that a super-advanced alien doesn't know the difference between a measure of distance and a measure of time, and I think we have a pretty good case that Anka's pulling a fast one on us.

Fortunately, there are a lot of people who agree with me.  Skeptoid did a piece on him that's nothing short of scathing.  Here's what they have to say about him over at Generally Thinking, along with a video clip so you can see for yourself what a middle-aged bald guy looks like when he's channeling an alien from the future.  Hell, they even shot him down over at Above Top Secret, and that takes some doing.  Bashar, however, was undaunted, and fired back with a video series called "Debunking the Debunkers."

So he sure showed us.

But now Anka/Bashar has taken it one step further.  He's filed a bunch of grievances against users of Tumblr under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a law that protects the intellectual property of individuals distributed electronically, claiming that hundreds of images and gifs are actually Bashar's...

... or will be in the future.

The evidence provided was as follows:

Description: Copyrighted Work: Bashar channeled by Darryl Anka. Copyright 1984-2015. All Rights Reserved. From multiple event productions presented by Darryl Anka on dates ranging from 1984-2014. The copyrighted works can be found at www.basharstore.com/. [sic]

One furious blogger responded:

The claim is that my work is in fact copyrighted by “Bashar channeled by Darryl Anka.”  What?  I looked it up.  Darryl Anka believes that he is channeling information from a space alien from the future named Bashar that lives on a planet called Essassani via telepathy.  

Cool story bro.

What exactly is the legal basis for their claim? Maybe it has something to do with “ ” ?  Is that some kind of alien code?  Or did Tumblr just auto copy and paste the email they got including stray HTML garbage characters?

Now, are you ready for the punchline of all of this?

Tumblr complied with Bashar's request and took down the images and gifs.

Yes, you got it; a man who many believe to be either a swindler or a lunatic, who channels a platitude-spewing alien spirit from "300 light years in the future," is successfully launching a copyright infringement claim against people who have posted their own work, stating that it actually belongs to "Bashar."

I'm trying to think of something to say other than "What the actual fuck?", and failing entirely.

On the other hand, maybe Anka is on to something.  So allow me to make an announcement:

I am channeling an alien spirit, too.  His name is Gleebnorg, and he comes from the planet Thwonk in the third spiral arm of the Andromeda Galaxy.  And Gleebnorg is here to say that he gave Bill Gates the idea for Microsoft back in 1975, and is coming back to demand halvsies.  I mean, fair is fair.

Oh, and Gleebnorg says to tell you all that you're beautiful spirits, and have everything you need in your life to be happy.  More than you need, in fact, so you can unload some of the excess in his direction.

He takes cash, check, or electronic transfer.  Have a nice day.

Akashic fields forever

Yesterday, a student of mine asked me if I knew what an "Akashic Field" was.

I was tempted to say that it was a field that had no buckwheat in it, but that was a rather abstruse pun at best.  So I told him that I didn't, but my intuition was that a term where the first word sounded vaguely Sanskrit and the second word was "field" was probably referring to something that didn't exist, and then I told him I'd look into it and get back to him.

It's nice when your intuition is correct.

A quick Google search brought me here, to the Linda Howe Center for Akashic Studies, wherein we learn that the "Akashic Field" is an energy matrix that allows you to access the "Akashic Record."  The latter, according to the website, is defined thusly:  "The Akashic Record is a dimension of consciousness that contains a vibrational record of every soul and its journey.  It is completely available everywhere...  The energy present in the Record is a very quick vibration with a great velocity. It is also full-bodied and rich.  When opening the Record, a quickening occurs.  The infusion of light accelerates everything in its path. In the presence of light, all darkness is seen and brightened. Individual conscious minds do not need to direct this light.  Infinite wisdom of light goes where it is needed and received to fulfill its function."

Okay, now that we've successfully disabled any readers who have taken a college-level physics class, I'm sure the next question to ask is: how do I get access to this amazing source of wisdom?

"Working with the sacred prayer provides a reliable, deliberate way to move into and access the consciousness of the Record responsibly." Linda Howe tells us.  We then are directed to take one of her classes ($300-500 for in-person classes if you live in the Chicago area, or happen to be near one of the places she's touring, and $25-40 an hour for online classes where you watch a video recording) so we can learn the "Pathway Prayer Process" to tap into the "Akashic Record" and "receive guidance."

Well, sorry, I'm not going to spend $25, much less $300, to find out more about something that sounds like a slightly reworked version of "The Force" from Star Wars.  (Although other websites I looked at said that your access to the Akashic Record had something to do with the pineal gland, the Egyptian god Osiris, and the Orion Nebula, and that modern Americans were losing this ability because of fluoridation in water.  The Nazis were also briefly mentioned.)

The problem is, the whole "Akashic Record" idea traces its origins not to Ancient Egypt or Ancient Babylon, or in fact Ancient Anywhere, but to the writings of noted early 20th century wingnut Edgar Cayce, whose mystical books are still immensely popular (and his followers say that he didn't write them, but "channeled" them).  So let's see what Cayce himself has to say on the subject -- that's sure to be illuminating, right?  "We have explained before that the intelligent infinity is brought into intelligent energy from eighth density or octave.  The one sound vibratory complex called Edgar used this gateway to view the present, which is not the continuum you experience but the potential social memory complex of this planetary sphere."

Okay.  Right.  What?

The problem, of course, is that Cayce et al. seemed to have been really good at making stuff up, and they counted on (and in many cases found) the credulity of the vast majority of the public working in their favor.  For an excellent skeptical look at the ideas of Cayce and other channelers of Mystical Knowledge of the Ages, take a look at this site, which shows that not only is the basic claim nonsense, but the writings that were produced from accessing the "Akashic Records" (such as Levi Dowling's famous The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ) are actually riddled with simple, and easily checked, factual errors.

A little hard to explain if you think, like Linda Howe, that the "Akashic Record" contains accurate information of "every soul and its journey," isn't it?

In any case, the whole thing smacks of wishful thinking to me.  Until someone brings out an Akashic-o-meter and can show that this "Akashic Field" actually exists, and that it's not just someone going into a trance and deciding that she was Cleopatra in a previous life, I'm not buying it.  Me, I'm going back to my previous definition of an "Akashic Field" as a field with no buckwheat, which, you have to admit, is kind of a kick-ass pun.