Synesthesia

“I could see eddies and whirls in the air and I could predict weather according to what I saw in the air,” stated P.M.H. Atwater, noted author and near-death researcher, describing her childhood psychic memories. “I could pick up a handful of dirt from a person’s property and I could tell you accurately what their health was based on what I felt from the dirt as I let it sift through my fingers. I was doing things like this all of the time because I could see the energy world and I knew what it meant, and I knew how to respond to it.”

In addition, Atwater described to me another interesting facet to her childhood. She said, “By the time I reached the first grade I was the only child in school who could hear numbers, see music and smell color, and that did not go over very well with my first grade teacher.”

What Atwater was experiencing is what psychologists call synesthesia. “Synesthesia is called multiple sensing,” she explained, adding that it is connected with the “limbic system in the brain” and it is where “stimuli comes in multiples.”

“This is one of the things I noted in my research of near-death experiencers....they begin to receive stimuli in multiples, and that finding of mine has since...been validated.” (A complete interview with Atwater will soon be featured in an upcoming edition of our magazine)

A well-known West Coast ufologist back in the mid-1980s shared an interesting story with me. “I had the urge to purchase a typewriter and teach myself to type,” she wrote. “In 1960, I accomplished this, and went on to business school sometime later. When I typed a glow could be seen over my hands. Sometimes it was blue, sometimes green and other times purple. I knew that someone was helping me. When I started to work....I typed 8 hours a day. ...Hardly ever do I see the glow anymore. Maybe once a year.”

Another case of synesthesia?

Don Wright, the New Mexico psychotherapist who makes Peruvian whistling vessels, talks and writes some about synesthesia. He has written that when he’s tuning the vessels he feels that he is “inducing synesthesia” in himself. Don further explained to me that he “seem(s) to experience increases” in his “color and hearing perception” and feels that it is probably due largely to his “almost daily experience of blowing them during their construction.”

While working on a New Frontiers magazine article on the vessels back around 1995, Don arrived at what he describes as some “major insights.” He told me, “I speculated that the people that made these vessels experienced synesthesia naturally and suddenly realized that in order to appropriately tune these vessels they must be in a state in which they experience synesthesia.” Don’s talents with self-hypnosis came in handy. In the way that he now tunes his vessels Don knows when he’s reached the correct point(s) by what he’s described as a “physical sensation and a specific type of emotion.” He informs me that the new vessels induce altered states much quicker than the earlier ones that he made from 1980 to 1995. He says it’s a “profound difference.”

It was recently reported that neuroscientists at Switzerland’s University of Zurich had studied a 27-year-old woman with profound and rather extraordinary symptoms of synesthesia. Previous studies suggest that one in 2,000 people may smell or hear colors, but in this particular case the subject described tasting music and can even identify musical tone intervals. For example, she not only saw musical notes as different colors (Beethoven reportedly saw sounds as colors also), her lips would pucker from the sensation of a sour taste when she heard the tone of a minor second, whereas she’d experience a bitter taste with a major second, a sweet taste with a major third, a water taste with fifth, a taste like cream with a minor sixth, a taste like mown grass with a fourth, and a salty taste with a minor third. Researchers insist that this woman isn’t imagining these different tastes associated with musical tones. They say that she’s really experiencing this, and that she demonstrates perfect tone-interval identification in these synesthesia-induced perceptions. Some researchers of synesthesia speculate that people who describe seeing the colored auras of others are, in fact, experiencing a form of emotion-color synesthesia. (1)

Sacred sound vibrations, shamanism, and the modern contactee experience

Use of vowel sounds can be found in various shamanic traditions, notes Jonathan Goldman in his book Healing Sounds. Often a shaman’s chants or songs sound like a series of meaningless phonemes strung together, which Goldman feels contain harmonic vibrations. He cites as an example Native American songs wherein sounds like “Ah Hey Ya” are repeated over and over. He describes chanting with Joseph Rael of the Ute-Tewa Native American tradition who claims that in a Sun Dance ceremony he received a “vision” about what he calls the “five vibrations” and how these sacred vibratory chants are to be used in special “sound chambers” throughout the world. At these chambers sacred vowel sounds of attunement are to be chanted. They are “Ah” (for purification), “Aye” (for relationship to all things), “Eee” (contact with the Divine), “Oh” (to express innocence and curiosity) and “Ooo” (lifting us to the God presence).

Goldman speculates that many shamans may have a vast amount of knowledge about harmonics for transformation and perhaps even to create interdimensional windows for shamans and spirits to traverse back and forth between their separate worlds. He writes about how a white Australian he met told him how he had lived with the Aboriginal people of that land and how they shared with him how they believed that when the first Aboriginals were created that there was a supernatural race already here called the Wandjina. This “dreamtime” race, the story went, had created the different creatures and life forms of our world, but after the Aboriginals had arrived the Wandjina departed, leaving behind the didjeridu, which when sounded created a kind of interdimensional window for the Aboriginals and the Wandjina to travel back and forth between their respective worlds, which, alas, sounds very similar to some of the speculations and notions that I’ve written about in this column recently regarding the Peruvian whistling vessels.

Back in 1975, Madeline Teagle of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, described to me how she was initiated into the UFO contact experience by a contactee named Al. She told me that he would have people create a kind of mantra sound to, for example, repeat every hour on the hour, and eventually things would happen, like things resembling “dimes” that would be seen “skipping” through the air, or “big beams of black light” coming down in the backyard, where the “ground actually shook.” On one occasion, Madeline wanted to meet Al’s contact named X-el-nors, and again Al had to establish mental contact. Later that night she was outside of her home when an oval shaped “patch of fog” suddenly appeared next to her and out of it things resembling “tentacles” wrapped around her. Naturally, she became very frightened, at which point she heard a pleasant sounding laugh and then an unknown voice explain that since she was afraid then the contact would be terminated, at which time the “tentacles” unwound from her and the mysterious apparition was gone. Al then ran up to Madeline very excited (he had been across the road from her house in a field) and exclaimed, “You met him!” However, when she described what she had seen, Al explained that she had not seen the being’s true form. He refused to describe what that form was. “I blew it,” she thought to herself. Then Madeline said she reflected silently that if she could be granted a sign or something that would reveal to her the true appearance of X-el-nors, without the presence of the “real thing” physically, she’d like to be given that knowledge. Then the clouds in the night sky seemed to come together and formed the perfect image of a man, but a man with the head and wings of an eagle! She then thought that if this was actually how he looked, then could she be given a sign that this was correct, whereupon a ball of light fell from out of the sky and exploded like “fire works” over Al’s head! Al then turned to Madeline and told her that whatever she had asked that the answer was affirmative, and she told him about the man-like figure in the sky, and he confirmed that indeed that was X-el-nors true appearance.

Madeline came to be a contactee herself. Her contact was a being named Amana. “When he appears there is generally a brilliant white tube of light first,” she explained. “Then he just seems to ‘form’ within it. When I have touched him in the process of deforming something like a sharp electrical shock runs through the area of my own body that is touching him. ...Amana told me long ago that every cell within the body had its own keynote and when we were able to harmonize all of our various notes we would discover perfection. Do believe this, for he and those with him emanated music, and the craft itself seemed to be motivated by music. When it went, the most fantastic musical scores came from it...”

Madeline also had what she felt was a contact with something called O-MO-NO. She said that she was told that it was “a system of suns.” “I felt a kinship with it,” she said, “For some reason I felt...it was like home. ...I was told that it was a word of patterning.”

UFO researchers Al Greenfield and Robert Anton Wilson have mentioned in their published writings how the modern “alien” names often seem to be a variation on the ancient “angelic” language of Cabala/Qaballa. “If you learn the system, apply it to ‘strange names’ in UFO lore (like ‘Orthon’ or ‘Kazik,’ for example) one is likely to hit on some remarkable results,” Greenfield told me. “Affa” (which in Cabala means nothing) turns up in early contactee George Hunt Williamson’s story, as well as another early 1950s case that I followed up on in Eliot, Maine, back in 1974. The Maine contactee case had even come under scrutiny of U.S. Naval Intelligence officers and the noted Canadian scientist Wilbert Smith. I even met with the contactee’s neighbor, retired Rear Admiral H. B. Knowles, who had first discovered the contactee. Admiral Knowles had also served on the Board of Governors of the civilian UFO organization NICAP.

References:

1. Mysteries: Exploring Mysteries From Modern Times to Yesteryear magazine. Vol. 3, No. 4, issue No. 11, 2005, pg. 23. Phantom Press Publications, P.O. Box 490, Walpole, NH 03608.