Obviously got pointed to this by Rigorous Intuition:

Anyways, futher diggings:

From Obscurantists’ article “Associative Indexing”:
http://obscurantist.com/oma/associative-indexing/

If there is no time dimension as we usually assume there is, we may be traversing events by association. Modern computers retrieve information associatively. You ‘evoke’ the desired records by using keywords, words of power: you request the intersection of ‘microwave’ and ‘headache,’ and you find twenty articles you never suspected existed…. If we live in the associative universe of the software scientist rather than the sequential universe of the spacetime physicist, then miracles are no longer irrational events. The philosophy we could derive would be closer to Islamic ‘Occasionalism‘ than to the Cartesian or Newtonian universe. And a new theory of information would have to be built. Such a theory might have interesting things to say about communication with denizens of other physical realities.

(Messengers, 215-216)

From Key 64: “Quantum UFO’s”:
http://www.key64.net/content/post/220-Quantum-UFOs

“It has been said that the relativity theory has lost the subject of the verb to undulate. If so, quantum mechanics…has recovered it, and in a very unexpected form indeed. What is undulating through space-time is no longer the lost ether. It is the amplitude of a set of associated probabilities. Loosely speaking, it is information.“

—O. Costa De Beauregard

Also:

he provided a thoughtful, well-researched book whose incredibly prescient thesis has, so far as I know, yet to be improved upon.

“Messengers of Deception proposes a new theory of UFOs that can be stated in three paragraphs:

1. Unidentified Flying Objects operate according to an understanding of our universe that transcends ordinary space-time physics. If we are living in an “Associative Universe,” as I am suggesting, then we must expect such paranormal effects, possibly triggered by and accessible to human consciousness[....]

2. The main effect of UFOs on their witnesses is a conditioning process[....]

3. The social process caused by the belief in the phenomenon takes the form of new sects, movements, and “contact” cults[....] —Preface to the Bantam Edition, 1980, p. viii”

Maybe since in 1979 few really understood what the hell Dr. Vallee was talking about when he said “Associative Universe”, it is the second and third aspects of Vallee’s theory that have been the legacy of this book, especially since Messengers prominently and prophetically features such characters as Jim Hurtak, Marshall Applewhite,and Claude Vorilhon. But it is Vallee’s theory of the “Associative Universe” which I think deserves further consideration.

In a 1996 interview by Flatland magazine, Dr. Vallee, whose Ph.D. is in computer science, says, “I approach it [the study of UFOs] as an information scientist. I tend to look for patterns in data that’s much more general. I look for patterns in time and in space and so on. That can give you some insight into the phenomena, in some cases better than one single proof.” (Interview with Jacques Vallee by Jim Martin, Flatlands #14, Feb., 1997, p. 6)

He elaborates:

” ...energy and information are two sides of the same coin. So there should be a physics of information which should be organized around events, and not around forces and fields and positions of particles in space/time. They don’t teach this physics. To me, that’s the physics I’d like to learn. If we are in a universe of information, a universe of events, then there may not be any dimensions, dimensions are secondary. The world we perceive is just a series of associations that our consciousness establishes among events. But there’s nothing that says that one event was before another. It’s just that we perceive it that way in a consensus reality that we’re building.” (ibid p. 7)

This, then, is the way synchonicities…and UFOs…are generated.

”...we store information on computers in large databases…actually at random. You sprinkle the data into storage and you have a statistical way to getting back to it when you want it. It’s not going to be precise. It’s going to get you to a clump of things, and then you have to search within that clump to find what you are looking for…Now why wouldn’t the universe be organized that way?” (ibid p. 7)

No idea what this horseshit is—it appears to be a discussion with Cooper about Vallee, involving someone who took the Incunabula/Ong’s Hat stuff seriously.  Nothing wrong with that, I took it seriously for a full week when I was in high school.  It’s fun stuff, and it was a good way to learn quantum physics.

http://users.cihost.com/ata/chat99.htm

Marshall Barnes - I think there is much merit to the concept of the Montauk Project. Here’s a secret: there is a model of the universe that Jacques Vallee called…

Marshall Barnes - This associative model would answer many of the questions that arise from quantum physics. What it says is that the universe is made up as much of information as it is of matter and energy and that consciousness is how we interact with the version of the universe. According to Jacques Vallee in his book, Messengers of Deception, such a model of the universe would allow for time travel and many other things…

dwcooper - Valle’s best book

Marshall Barnes - Yes, DW. It is Vallee’s best book, and written before he went over to the other side.

RAGman - If you’re quoting Vallee...how about his...WAIT! Didn’t you attack Vallee’s credibility?

Marshall Barnes - Yes RAGman. I not only attacked Vallee’s credibility, but his very work, BUT it was the work that he did with Anatomy of a Hoax, which was a blatant fraud. But that DOESN’T MEAN that he was always one of the bad guys, or that he isn’t sorry for what he did. I used to be a big fan of Vallee in his early career and I’ll never take away from that. That doesn’t mean I’m going let him slide on that crap that he wrote for the JSE.

ProfessorD - OK, so the Incunabula was a sort of map, designed to help you figure out how they did things?

THEN IT GETS HEAVY:

Marshall Barnes - the secret to the transdimensional travel thing lies in the intersection of fractal geometry and chaos math, quantum physics, the Eisntein/Rosen bridge, cybernetically enhanced bio-feedback, altered states of consciousness, Bell’s Theorem, crystallography, morphogenetic field theory, and catastrophe topology for the most part.

dwcooper - Don’t forget Schrodinger’s poor cat

Marshall Barnes - Yeah, DW but the cat is part of the whole quantum thing.

Marshall Barnes - The reason why all these subjects count is because they describe the way that the whole idea works…

dwcooper - But the cat’s inter-re-action leads to the Evert-Wheeler thesis.

Marshall Barnes - The E/R bridge has to do with the throat of a wormhole. Now, here’s where we go back to the PX. Allende told Robert Goerman, who has now proven himself to be a liar and a fraud, BTW, that the teleportation took place via something that Allende called the Einstein bridge-tunnel propulsion method…

From “UFOs in the Age of Information”:
http://www.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/UFO-info-age.html

“The theory of space and time is a cultural artifact made possible by the invention of graph paper. If we had invented the digital computer before graph paper, we might have a very different theory of information today… what modern computer scientists have realized is that ordering by space and time is the worst possible way to store data… if there is no time dimension as we usually assume there is, we may be traversing incidents by association; modern computers retrieve information associatively… if we live in the associative universe of the software scientist rather than the Cartesian sequential universe of the spacetime physicist, then miracles are no longer irrational events… at a time when we are beginning to suspect that computer-based network communication may create altered states conducive to psychic functioning [my emphasis], a new type of physical experiment is becoming possible… these experiments would aim at probing the reality of information-handling by the brain through associative constructs. The SRI experiments with Swann and Price suggest that remote viewing is based on an addressing scheme. Is it possible to promote coincidences and peculiar effects by systematically creating physical structures serving as information singularities ? Consciousness could be defined as the process by which informational associations are retrieved and traversed.”

Jacques Vallee, Messengers of Deception

The Internet allows us to look at UFO reports across space and time, possibly even allowing us to discover a third kind of patterning - associational or informational linkages to particular keywords, kinds of places, or other “Name Games” which Fortean researchers often delight in. These “Name Games” have led some UFO researchers to consider ways in which the phenomenon may have links to another global cybernetic system - Lovelock’s “Gaia,” the biospheric meta-system which seems to maintain the Earth’s climate within tight boundaries.

The temporal patterns may link within certain other cyclical phenomena - human sociocultural cycles included. We can no longer overlook the way in which UFO and paranormal outbreaks seem to mirror upheavals in the social world. Reports seem to increase during periods of massive social change (as seems to be happening in Russia right now), which leads to the inevitable theory of “mass hysteria.” But there is another perspective, one which might see these cycles becoming “phase-locked” through various external mechanisms… or driven through external “strange attractors.”

and the meatiest part:

The UFO as a Control System

The UFO, whatever it may be, appears to have the ability to alter consciousness, perception, and to some degree, maybe even space and time itself. Like Dick’s VALIS, it appears to be an “information singularity,” which seems to draw bits and pieces of reality around it into a new order. Physical reality is distorted in various ways (cattle mutilations, crop circles, “implants,” percipient physiological changes, subsidiary poltergeist phenomena, etc.) in its wake. But it doesn’t appear to be any true “accidental tourist”; its transits through our reality seem deliberate, almost contrived, focused on some sort of interaction with us.

Half-baked predictions are told to contactees, abductees, and alien “channellers” about impending cataclysms, “Earth changes,” and transitions in human evolution. The peculiar mix of truth and fiction, insight and bullshit, and wisdom and stupidity found in these messages led UFOlogist John Keel to dub them broadcasts from some “Great Phonograph in the Sky,” stuck in some worn celestial groove. Like Keel, we need to stop focusing so much on the content of these messages, and start looking at the mechanisms of the messengers.

Information is given to UFO experiences - but carefully controlled information, maybe disinformation. The key to disinformation is to mix truth with deception, so that it’s hard to distinguish one from the other; but there’s just enough truth to keep the person coming back for more. People are told about fabulous new devices and technologies which will save the human race, but never seem to work properly. People are promised evidence and “smoking guns” to prove the existence of UFOs, which then never materialize completely. People are given explanations of the motives and origins of the UFOnauts, which seems at once profound and yet also ridiculously absurd.

The paradoxical nature of this information seems to point to some deeper truth than vast extraterrestrial conspiracies. It points to the role of the human consciousness in organizing complex and contradictory information into a coherent whole. It points to a reality which is socially constructed through communication and interaction between human beings with different semantic structures for organizing their perceptions. It points to the dramatic ways in which science and technology seem to be transforming fundamental concepts of epistemology and ontology. The medium is the massage…

Vallee suggests the UFO functions as a kind of “thermostat,” a regulator which helps navigate our society back toward the subtle and the invisible, after it’s become too focused on the gross and the visible. It functions as a kind of autoresponsive control system, utilizing feedback to challenge ossified paradigms, memetic structures, and belief systems. But the use of subtle control mechanisms cannot have been lost on the men of DARPA, who may be interested in the UFO technology for more overt kinds of psychological control.

thats amazing.

Mass Social Change, triggering UFo sightings. How revealing.

Consciousness is waiting to see what it already knows. I am so fascinated at how UFO’s play a part in that.

I’m also ecstatic that I will always have an infinite well of questions to ask… scary and relieving at the same time.

metajake (7:43:12 PM): man so like, UFO sightings are like someone turning down the heat real fast on a stovetop with a pot full of boiling water on it?.

More gems, this time from the Journal of Alternative Realities:
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~amilani/jour3.html

COMMENT BY SIMON HARVEY-WILSON

Synchronicity, a term first used by Carl Jung in 1930, refers to ‘meaningful coincidences’ that are so unlikely to occur by mere chance that one is compelled to seek a deeper explanation for them. Much has been written on the subject by people from fields such as depth psychology, the paranormal and physics. Most seek a æcause and effect’ explanation for synchronicity, but have so far been unsuccessful. A popular approach is to highlight the philosophical differences between Western mechanistic notions of causality, and the Eastern viewpoint, preferred by Jung, which suggest that events can be meaningful related in an acausal manner. While somewhat vague, this idea implies that science’s understanding of reality is too superficial. However, this may be changing.

An interesting suggestion come from respected ufologist Jacques Vallee in his book Dimensions (1988). Vallee has a masters degree in astrophysics, a doctorate in computer science, and once worked as Manager of Information Systems at Stanford University, an ideal cross-disciplinary background from which to ponder anomalous events. Information theory is a helpful analytical tool in several fields of research. Quantum physicists use it, neuroscientists use it, and so do researchers designing faster computers.

Vallee theorises that the æstrangenessÆ of the UFO phenomenon, other paranormal events, and synchronicity, may be easier to understand if we view our universe in terms of information processing.

To set the scene for his explanation Vallee contrasts the difference between two types of information storage and retrieval systems: a library and a computer memory. Library books are stored by topic, in a linear fashion. We have all had the experience of being told by a librarian to go up the second aisle and then turn left to find whatever books we were seeking . However, large computer systems store information in a non-linear fashion. Related information is sprinkled throughout the memory system in a non-sequential fashion based on an idexing system that uses probability as one of its criteria. This enables the system to cross reference information in a multi-dimensional fashion, something that is impossible on a book shelf. Vallee’s example has someone seeking information relevant to the intersection of two topics, ‘microwaves’ and ‘headaches’. (p.288)

Vallee suggests that we use Information theory to expand our understanding of how the universe might work. He suggests that we live in what he terms a ‘multiverse’. ‘perhaps it is proper to shake from our theoretical ankles the chains of spacetime. Space and time co-ordinates derive their convenience from graphic considerations. .... If we had invented the digital computer before inventing graph paper, we might have a very different theory of the universe today.’ (p.287) Further on he writes : ‘If we live in the associative universe of the software scientist rather than the sequential universe of the spacetime physicist, then miracles are no longer irrational events.’ (p.288)

But to what extent can the universe be seen in informational terms? Timothy Leary has written that: ‘All matter and energy in the universe is just frozen information.’ (Drury, 1991:1) Respected US physicist John Wheeler is famous for his ‘it from bit’ doctrine (Chalmers. 1995), in which ‘it’ refers to physical matter, while a ‘bit’ is a basic unit of information. As explained by neuroscientist David Chalmers (1995) ‘… information is fundamental to the physics of the universe.’ Furthermore, the theory of non-locality, which states that ‘all (subatomic) information is everywhere’ is now accepted by quantum physics. (Talbot, 1991)

Likewise, speaking of the Collective Unconscious or Overmind, Terence McKenna (1991) writes that: ‘… we are in a symbiotic relationship with an organism made of information ...’ If there is a deeper level of reality, as Eastern religions and transpersonal psychology suggest, then it ‘… maybe organised like a randomised data base (the multiverse) rather than a sequential library ( the four-dimensional universe of conventional physics). (Vallee, 1988:288)

So, what is the nature of the interface between this deeper informational level and ourselves, because it seems to be there that synchronicity occurs? Once again a computing analogy is instructive.

A computer may present information in different formats, such as on screen, by disc, hard copy, or verbally. This emphasises that the way information is stored can be utterly different from the way it is presented to the user. For example, imagine drawing a diagram on your computer screen, then saving it into memory. If you then crawled into your computer’s hardware looking for your diagram , all you would find would be a jumble of wires, chips, electric currents and magnetic fields. No diagram anywhere. Yet if you request the picture again, there it is just as you left it.

Perhaps space-time is the ‘screen’ in which the information that comprises reality is presented for our consumption, but which bears little linear relationship to how that information is stored or cross-referenced at a deeper level. Vallee (1988:287) writes that: ö The theory of space and time is a cultural artefact.ö It may be our individual consciousness that formats the jumble of information that exists at a deeper level to present us with the cultural artefacts of space, time, and even matter. If this is the case, almost anything is possible.

Synchronistic events may be examples of meaningfully related information, packaged as events, rising to the surface of our awareness. It is interesting to note that Hinduism uses the term ‘causal’ for one of the deepest levels of transpersonal consciousness. (Ross,1993:21O) To seek the ‘cause’ of synchronicity we should perhaps look at the consciousness of the person involved. What ‘wavelength’ were they using at that time? Synchronicity may be a type of psychokinesis, and an invitation to seek the unity beyond appearances.

References

CHALMERS, D., (1995) Towards a Theory of Consciousness.
DRURY, N., (1991) The Visionary Human.
McKENNA, T., (1991) The Archaic Revival.
ROSS, G. (1993) The Search for the Pearl.
TALBOT, M. (1991) The Holographic Universe.
VALLEE, J. (1988) Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact

The “associative universe” is quite compatible with Neoplatonic-ish cosmologies, where the qualities of things exist in perfection and full realization in eternity; time is conceived as something like a progressive, ever-deepening realization of this perfection which always is, only provisionally relatively can it be contained or conceived.

One of the most staggering theolgians of history, Ibn Arabi, describes the Unnameable ONE as being clothed in the Divine Names (Truth, Beauty, Mercy, Power, Severity, ...), which are partial or mutually conditioned/conditioning aspects of the Truth. The world was created as the names sought to know themselves more fully in the ramifications they implied in each other. (compare to sephiroth in QBL)

http://www.ibnarabisociety.org/articlespdf/fourtexts.pdf

Also, the “associative universe” was worked out in Paracelsian times as a practical (to a degree!) application of this cosmology in the “Doctrine of Signatures”:
http://levity.com/alchemy/croll_signatures.html

^^Thank you—I haven’t looked to Ibn Arabi since back when I was reading Nick Herbert and all that Incunabula stuff.  And the Doctrine, I was totally unaware of.  Good brainfood, much appreciated.