Chapter 11 Chapter Eight: The Difference Between Reality and Illusion

At that moment, I felt something suddenly in the dark room, is it a ghost or something?What is moving?I looked at it out of the corner of my eye, but when I turned my head, there was nothing.Is the phone ringing, or is it just my "illusion"?In horror, I seemed to smell the salty air of the Coney Island summer beaches I had visited as a child.As soon as I enter a foreign city I visit for the first time, I see streets that I seem to have known before. In this recurring experience, we often don't know what is going on, are our eyes (ears, nose or memory) "deceiving" us?Did I actually witness something beyond nature?Should I keep silent, or tell the truth?

The answer depends a lot on circumstances, friends, loved ones and culture.In a very rigid, matter-of-fact society, one needs to be cautious about acknowledging such experiences.People would think I was capricious and out of my mind.Unreliable.But in a society that believes in ghosts, or "can imagine objects," someone who tells such an experience might gain recognition, even prestige.In the former society, I would do my best to suppress the desire to speak about the experiences, to keep them all to myself.And in the latter kind of society I may exaggerate and play with fiction to make it sound more mystical than it really is.

Charles Dickens lived in an active rational culture, but spiritualism was also active at the time.He describes this coexistence of two currents of thought (from his short story "A Grain of Salt Bewitches"): I have noticed a universal need for stimulation, even among persons of a high intellectual and cultural level.When they encounter some weird things, they are willing to tell others about their psychological experience.Almost all people are afraid that when they tell these experiences to those with high intelligence, they will not be affirmed or responded by the listeners who have the same experience in their spiritual life, so they will be suspected or ridiculed by them.An honest tourist sees a sea serpent-like monster and is not afraid to mention it.But if he has some kind of strange ominous omen, stimulation, whimsy, hallucination (so-called), dream or other psychological ideas, he will hesitate, hesitate, and refuse to admit it.I think people don't want to admit it because it's so unpredictable.

Today, telling the story of the experience is still met with ridicule and ridicule by most.But it is easier for people to overcome concealment—for example, under the "induction" of therapists and hypnotists.Unfortunately—and, to some, miraculously—imagination and memory are often confused. Some "abductees" say they can recall the experience without hypnosis, but many cannot.Hypnosis is not a reliable method of evoking memories.Hypnosis often induces imagination, hallucinations, and fictions in addition to real situations, making it impossible for both patient and physician to distinguish reality from hallucination.Hypnosis seems to have a strong suggestive effect.Hypnosis is prohibited by law as evidence in court or as a means of investigating crimes.The American Medical Association believes that memories evoked with hypnosis are no more reliable than memories evoked without hypnosis.A standard medical textbook (Harral L. Kaplan's Comprehensive Course in Psychiatry, 1989 edition) warns that "the hypnotist's beliefs will communicate memory, this is likely to have the result that the seeker is convinced that his recollections are real." Thus, the accounts of alien abductions narrated by the hypnotized person have little to no credibility.There is a danger in this that the hypnotized person, at least in some cases, is so eager to please the hypnotist that they sometimes respond compliantly to the hypnotist's inadvertent and subtle suggestions.

Alvin Lawson of the University of California, Long Island, conducted an experiment. After screening out UFO fans, he selected 8 people, and then hypnotized them by a doctor, telling them that they were kidnapped by aliens and brought to a spaceship. and subject to inspection.Without further prompting, they were asked to describe their experience.Proving that they are highly susceptible to inducements, the content of the accounts is almost indistinguishable from those of those who claim to have been kidnapped.Indeed, Lawson made simple and direct hints to his subjects.But in many cases, therapists working on alien abduction cases routinely induce, some elaborately, others more tactfully.

As Lawrence White recounts, the psychiatrist George Garnaway once suggested to a patient who was easily induced under hypnosis that five hours in a given day had disappeared from her memory.When he mentioned a bright light over her head, she immediately told him about seeing UFOs and aliens.He insists that she has been experimented on by aliens, and a detailed abduction story ensues.But when she came out of her trance and watched the footage, she admitted that she experienced what felt like a dream of being totally unconscious.However, during the second year, she still frequently recalled that dream scene.

Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist at the University of Washington, has found that people who are not hypnotized are also more likely to accept the view of others that they see something they don't.In a typical experiment, he showed subjects a movie about a car accident.When asked what they saw, they will be hasty in giving wrong answers.For example, the experimenters casually mentioned red lights even though they were not shown in the film.As a result, many of the subjects in the experiment respectfully recalled seeing a red light.When the lie was debunked, some protested angrily, emphasizing that they vividly remembered seeing a red light.The longer the time spent watching the movie and the misinformation given to them, the more people had altered memories.According to Loftus, "The closer a remembered event is to a story that is often revised, the further it is from the complete original message."

There are plenty of other examples—for example, false memories of getting lost in a mall like a child—that have a greater emotional punch.Once the relevant main content is brought up, the patient often speaks eloquently about the relevant details of the incident.A few prompts and questions, especially in a therapeutic setting, can easily induce clear but entirely false memories.Memory can be influenced by other information.False memories can even be implanted in a person's mind without any doubt or judgment. Stephen Chesch, Loftus and their colleagues at Cornell University were not surprised to find that preschoolers are particularly sensitive to cues from others.When the child was first asked whether his hand had ever been caught in a mousetrap, he correctly denied it, but later recalled vividly his own fabricated details of the incident.When children are told "what happened when you were young" in a more direct way, after a period of time, they will easily accept these input memories.Experts who watched videotapes of the children were no better at discerning which of what they said was false memory and which was correct memory.Is there any reason to think that adults can completely prevent the mistakes children make?

President Ronald Reagan, who spent World War II in Hollywood, vividly described his role in liberating victims of Nazi concentration camps.Living in the movie world, he obviously confuses the movies he sees with the fact that he never does.Many times during his presidential campaign, he inspired us all by telling the heroic story of a heroic victim of World War II.But that story never happened.It was a scene from the movie "A Wing and a Prayer."It also made a very strong impression on me when I saw it when I was nine years old.Many of the same examples frequently appeared in Reagan's public reports.It is not difficult to imagine the serious public crisis that can result when political, military, scientific, or religious leaders fail to distinguish fact from fiction.

Witnesses are guided by their attorneys in preparing their court testimony.They often recount the incident over and over again until the lawyer says "that's it."So, on the witness stand, what they remember is the story told repeatedly in the lawyer's office.Minor differences are suppressed, and even the main content does not correspond to the truth of the events that took place.Witnesses may easily forget that their memories have been artificially processed. These matters relate to the evaluation of the social impact of advertising and state propaganda.But in this regard, the state propaganda is that there is no such thing as alien abduction at all-although such incidents without any evidence are usually followed up for years to follow-up reports-therapists must be very cautious. Don't accidentally accept or choose a story they elicit from someone.

Maybe what we actually remember is just a series of fragments of memory, and then put together according to the structure of our own design.If our combinations are clever, we can weave ourselves an easy-to-recall, easy-to-remember story.If the fragments themselves are not combined, retrieval will be more difficult.This situation is much like the scientific method - many discrete data points can be documented in a theoretical framework.Summary and explanation.This way we are more likely to recall the theory than the data. In science, theories are constantly re-evaluated and subjected to new data.If the facts diverge significantly—more than the margin of error allows—the theory may have to be revised.But in everyday life, we rarely encounter events in which events that happened long ago give rise to new facts.Our memories are hardly ever challenged.However, the memory will freeze in a certain place, no matter what kind of mistakes there are in the memory, or it will become a work after continuous artistic modification. Those who proved to be the best ghosts were those who were far more than gods and devils, especially the Virgin Mary in Western European countries from the late medieval period to the present day.Alien abduction legends, however, have a much more earthly flavor.Imagery of the devil, insight into the myth of UFOs can also emerge from fantasies that are described as divine.Perhaps the most famous are France's Jeanne de Arca, Sweden's St. Bridge and Italy's Girolamo Safonarola.But the ghosts more in keeping with our topic are those seen by shepherds, farmers, and children.In a world plagued by uncertainty and panic, people yearn to connect with God.Details of similar events in Castile and Catalonia are described in William A. Corristian's book The Late Middle Ages and the Spanish Renaissance. The Specter of "(Princeton University Press, 1981) has a detailed record: In a typical incident, a peasant woman and child said they had encountered a girl or a woman of extremely small stature—only about three or four feet tall—who claimed to be the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God.She asked the awed witnesses to go to the respected men of the village or the authorities of the local church, and ask them to pray for the dead, or to obey the commandments of God, or to build an altar on the very spot in the outskirts where they met.If they disagreed, there were dire punishments, such as plague.However, when the plague struck, Maria promised to cure the disease if her demands were met. Witnesses went out of their way to do what she was told.But when she told her father, husband and priest, they told her not to mention it to anyone again.They thought it was just the woman's foolishness or frivolity, or maybe it was an illusion created by the devil.So she kept silent.A few days later, she met Maria again, who was a little annoyed that her order had not been followed. "They won't believe me," she complained. "Give me something symbolic to prove it." She wanted evidence. Maria, although she hadn't thought of the need to give evidence, now offered something symbolic.Villagers and priests were quick to believe it.The altar was built.Diseases in the vicinity were miraculously cured.Pilgrims came from far and wide.The priests got busy.The region's economy boomed rapidly.The original witnesses were named guardians of the altar. For the most part we know that the investigative team, composed of city chiefs and notables, was responsible for confirming the existence of the ghosts, even though they were all initially skeptical.And the standard required for evidence is not high.On one occasion, the gibberish of an eight-year-old boy two days before his death from the plague was calmly accepted.Some missions are still discussing the event decades or even 100 years after it happened. In The Difference Between Real and False Hallucinations, an expert on the subject, Jean de Gelson, in about 1400, summarized the probable standard of credibility.One of these is the willingness of political and religious rulers to take advice.In this way, anyone who sees the illusion of undermining the power of those in power is considered "ipso facto" and they are unreliable witnesses.The Holy Spirit and Our Lady will also be compelled to speak according to the wishes of those in power. Those "symbolic objects" purportedly provided by Maria were considered convincing evidence, including an ordinary candle, a piece of silk and a lodestone, a piece of encrusted tile, footprints, collected by witnesses at unusually rapid speed. Thistles, a simple wooden cross planted in the ground, welts and wounds on witnesses, a 12-year-old girl twisting her hands into surprising shapes and folding her legs back, and many more Shut your mouth to temporarily go dumb.All of this was "cured" the moment what she said was accepted. Sometimes, eyewitness accounts are compared and synthesized before providing evidence.For example, many eyewitnesses in a small town reported that the night before a striking, arguably tall woman, dressed in plain white, was holding a baby, surrounded by a halo of light that cast the entire The street is illuminated.At other times, people standing around witnesses saw nothing, as described in eyewitness accounts in reports of apparitions in Castile in 1617: "Ah, St. Bartholomew, that woman who comes to see me these days, who walks across the grass, falls on her knees, and embraces that cross--look, look at her!" Though the young man tried to look, But he only saw a few birds flying around the cross. Possible motives for the fabrication and acknowledgment of such legends are not hard to find: finding employment for priests, notaries, carpenters, merchants, etc. to boost the local economy in times of economic depression; social status enhancement for witnesses and their families; Prayers for relatives at the cemetery canceled by subsequent plagues, droughts, and wars; agitation of public sentiment against enemies, especially the Moors; promotion of submission and obedience to ecclesiastical edicts; affirmation of religious devotion.The fervor of the pilgrims to the Holy Land is breathtaking.It was not uncommon for pilgrims to drink as medicine scraps scraped off rocks or dust from altars mixed with water.But I don't think most witnesses just made up the whole thing and let it go.They went on to make up other events. The vast majority of urgent requests made by the Virgin Mary have a prosaic character.For example, recorded reports of apparitions in Catalonia in 1483 read: I command your souls to command the souls of the parishes of Earl Taurne, Mirela, Earl Salem, and Sant Mikol of Camp Mario to command the souls of priests to make people at 30 They pay tithes and all church taxes within days, and return to their rightful owners all that is not theirs in land or public possession.These must be done and checked on the Lord's Day. Also, they have to stop blasphemy and they should give charitably as taught by their dead ancestors. Witnesses often see ghosts after waking up from a dream.Francesca La Brava testified in 1523 that she had gotten out of bed "without knowing whether the senses dictated it", but later testified that she was fully conscious ( This is the allowed way to answer the question at different levels: fully awake, napped, lethargic, deep sleep).Sometimes details are completely omitted, such as what the angel who was with her at the time looked like; the Virgin Mary she describes is sometimes tall and sometimes short, sometimes a mother and sometimes a child—features that in themselves clearly indicate the stuff of dreams.In Caesar Leo of Hurstbach's Dialogue Concerning Miracles, written about 1223, the divine apparition of the Virgin Mary is often seen during the morning prayers, which occur at midnight when the people sleep hour. It is quite natural to suspect that many, perhaps all, of these apparitions are dream images.These things appear in the waking or sleeping state, and with them come the fabricated nonsense (making a hoax. Now there is a popular work of making up miracles: creating religious paintings and images based on accidental events or the will of God).The events in question are contained in the Encyclopedia of the Seven Laws, a manuscript of canon and civil law published around 1248 by order of Alfonso X (the Wise Man).From which we can read: There are those who tell lies that they have found altars in fields or towns, or have built them themselves, that there are relics of saints in those places, and that these relics will perform miracles.People were then induced from all over to come and worship these places in order to get something from them.Others, under the influence of dreams or fanciful fantasies, erected altars, and then fabricated falsehoods that these altars were found in the above-mentioned places. In enumerating the causes of false belief, Alfonso draws consistent conclusions from religious sects, human perceptions, fantasies, as well as dreams and hallucinations.He gives this definition of a phantasy called antoiancia: Antoiancia is something that appears to a person and then disappears, one sees it or hears it in a state of trance, and is therefore a thing without physical form. A 1517 papal bull distinguishes ghosts who "appear in dreams or are sent by God."Clearly, both secular and religious institutions, even in an age of credulity, are wary of deceit and delusion. Still, in much of Europe during the medieval era, such apparitions were warmly welcomed by the Roman Catholic clergy—not least because the teachings of the Virgin Mary fit the needs of the clergy as a whole.A very scanty "symbol" of evidence—a stone, a footprint, anything that can be falsified—will suffice.But in the early 15th century, around the time of the Protestant Reformation, the church's attitude changed.Those who claim an independent channel of communication with God break free from the shackles of a church that must do God's will.Other ghosts—like Joan of Arc—have uncomfortable political or moral implications. The Inquisitor who tried Joan of Arc in 1431 described the adventurous spirit she symbolized: Threats that put her in great danger come from people who stubbornly believe that they have seen such apparitions and have revelations from God to them, so they make up what God has said, false things that did not come from the mouth of God Prophecy and foreshadowing.Add to this the seduction of races, sectarianism, and a host of other acts of impiety that have corrupted the Church and Catholics. Joan of Arc and Girolamo Safonarola were burned at the stake for their insight. The Fifth Lateran Council in 1516 reserved the "Apostolic Seat" the right to check the authenticity of the apparition.The punishment of peasants whose illusions had no political meaning approached the cruelest.The young mother who saw the apparition of the Virgin Mary, Francesca La Brava, was described by an Inquisition judge named Lisenciado Mariana as "compromising our holy Catholic faith and compromising its authority." sex".Her seeing the ghost was "of no value and a frivolous act". "It stands to reason that we should be stricter with her."The Inquisitor went on to say: Notwithstanding such severe penalties, there are often those who persist in her footsteps, despite the "tricks" used to compel her to confess that she is lying, dreaming, or nonsense in a deluded state, insisting that she has indeed seen visions , which is really surprising. In a time when almost everyone was illiterate before newspapers, radio, and television, why were the hallucinations of religious icons so similar in detail?William Christian believes that there is a ready answer in the religious drama (especially Christmas drama), the journey of priests and pilgrims, and the teaching of the church.Legends about the nearby shrine spread quickly.Sometimes people came from a hundred miles or more to say that their sick children could be healed by the pebbles trodden by Our Lady.Legends in turn influenced legends of ghosts, and vice versa.In the era of frequent droughts, plagues and wars, ordinary people did not receive social help and medical services, nor heard of scientific methods, so they rarely doubted legends. Why are these warnings so realistic?Why in a small village with only a few hundred people, it is necessary for a famous ghost like the Virgin to appear in order to build an altar and save people from disasters?Some important and prophetic messages whose significance was only recognized in the following years, and it is believed that these messages can only be sent by God or saints?Did it greatly advance the cause of the mortal struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism, the Enlightenment?But so far we have had no ghostly apparitions warning Catholics against accepting the illusion that the Earth is the center of the universe, or warnings against an alliance with Nazi Germany—two events of great moral and historical importance in which On this issue, Pope John Paul II has made a rare acknowledgment that the church has erred. No saint condemned the torture and burning of "witches" and "heretics."Why?Don't they know what happened?Don't they know it's an evil?Why does the Virgin Mary always order the poor peasant to convey her will to the authorities?Why didn't she go and admonish the powers-that-be, the king or the pope herself?In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it is true that certain specters were more concerned—in Fádima, Portugal, in 1917, the Virgin was outraged as a secular government replaced that run by the Church. In Gara Banda, Spain, from 1961 to 1965, legend has it that if conservative policies and religious doctrines are not immediately adopted, the end of the world will come. I think I can see a lot in common between apparitions of the Virgin Mary and alien abductions—even though in the former case, witnesses are not immediately taken to heaven and the aliens don't have genitals for sexual harassment.The creatures of legend are small in stature, most of them only two and a half to four feet high.They all come from the sky.Although they are said to be sacred, the content of their conversation is profane.These events are clearly connected with sleep and dreams.Witnesses, often women, often struggle to speak out, especially when ridiculed by men in power.They insist, however, that they did see such a thing.The means by which these legends were communicated remained, and even witnesses who did not know each other would engage in lively discussions, supplementing and adjusting each other's details.In this way, others will not find anything special about the other accounts of the time and place of the appearance of the ghost.There are no "signs" and evidence of the appearance of ghosts in legends that human beings cannot do or forge.In fact, Maria seems unconcerned with the necessity of proof, occasionally willing to treat illnesses to those who believed her before she gave her "signs."So long as society itself has no therapists, it is full of influential parish priests and superiors who are interested in the reality of these fantasies. In our day, there are still incidents of Virgin Mary and other angelic apparitions, as well as—as psychiatrist and hypnotist G. Scott Sparrow puts it—Jesus apparitions.In "I'm With You Forever: The True Story of Encounters with Jesus" (Bantam, 1995), some touching, some prosaic first-hand accounts of some encounters with Jesus are recounted.Curiously, as the author himself admits, most of his sources come from self-reported dreams, as well as visions, which are said to be different from dreams "only because we are in the waking state. experienced".However, Sparrow believes that judging whether something is "just a dream" has nothing to do with its objective reality.In Sparrow's view, everything and everything you dream about actually exists in an objective world outside of your awareness.He explicitly rejects the idea that dreams are "purely subjective consciousness."This doesn't require any proof.If you dream about something, and you feel that the dream is good, and if the dream causes a miracle, why not think that it actually happened?There was no nerve of doubt in Sparrow's brain.When Jesus told an ambivalenced woman in an "unbearable" marriage to leave the scoundrel, Sparrow acknowledged that this created problems for "advocates in a position to remain in alignment with God."In that case, "it might be said that in fact all speculation is ultimately a product of the mind".If this is true, what should we do if someone says that in his dream Jesus advised him to abort or take revenge?If we finally, somewhere, somehow figure out the truth and prove that certain dreams are made up by the dreamer, why, we ask, aren't all dreams made up? Why do people make up kidnapping stories?Why do people appearing on audience-participating television obsess over the details of "guests" being sexually insulted -- a current fad in the American film and television desert?The discovery that you're an alien abductee provides at least a little novel kick out of the tedious routine; you get the attention of your peers, therapists, and even the media; And a little scared.What will you remember next?You start to think of yourself as a seer, or even a figurehead for the ongoing events of our time; you don't want to disappoint your therapist; you crave validation from all kinds of people.I think that you will be rewarded with the special ability to predict the future for being an abductee. Product manipulations to elicit emotions of surprise about UFOs and alien abductions have done little compared to alien abductions.Some have claimed to have found needles in common drink cans.It's entirely conceivable that this would become a blockbuster event.Newspapers and especially television news covered the event.The same reports quickly flooded across the country and intensified.But it is difficult to understand how a needle got into the beverage can, and no witnesses can provide us with on-site evidence that the untouched beverage can was opened and a syringe was found inside. Gradually accumulating evidence shows that this is actually a crime of "blindly imitating others".People are just pretending to find needles in drink cans.Why do people do this?What are their possible motives for doing so?Some psychologists believe the main motives are greed (which they can claim against the manufacturer), desire for attention and a desire to play the victim.It is noteworthy that no therapist used the incident to trumpet the reality of the needle found in the soda can, encouraging patients—subtly or directly—to break the news to the public.Manufacturers who found foreign objects in their products were severely fined, and even those who falsely claimed that there were foreign objects in their products were also punished.But there are still people and therapists who encourage abductees to tell their fabricated stories to the public, and there are no legal penalties for people who falsely claim to have been abducted by UFOs.Whatever the reasons for doing so by those who fabricate such stories, it is more convincing to have others believe that they were chosen by higher beings for incomprehensible reasons than the chance event of them finding a syringe in a Coke can. feel contented.