"...asking what it 'really' is, where we are 'really' going, is so very much the wrong question."

Alchemical Braindamage:

"It's like Jacques Vallee has said; when you look at contact-type experiences as a whole, the only thing they really have in common is a confounding of rationality. But at the same time there's always enough loose threads there for the paranoid or the skeptic to weave something out of whole cloth. It's like you have the option at all times to go pronoiac or paranoiac. The experience is meant to shove you definitively one way or another. You could grab your rifle and hit the rooftops, start some idiotic cult or newsletter... Or you could change your whole life, heal your spirit or have the knowledge and conversation of the holy guardian angel.

...It's up to us to decide what we want, where we want to go with our world. Down into the toilet, or to the mountaintop? And I fear that asking what it 'really' is, where we are 'really' going, is so very much the wrong question. I do believe there is free will, and I do believe there is an intention, a purpose to the universe. And all that purpose can do is set the stage. If we chose to sail off the cliff, that's up to us, and if we can choose to step up and take on our true intended station on this planet, or in the universe, that's up to us too. But what's certain is that we are being MADE to decide, and decide soon.

A lot of us will break towards the low road, aligning ourselves to anger and fear and false appearances, what Steiner called the 'old moon'. The poisonous delusions and despair of the dark night dragging them under forever. And a lot of those folks will think of themselves the way my friend would do in that situation: fighting against the darkness, rifle clutched in hand, living like a hunted animal in an endless terrorscape. He wouldn't have betrayed himself, but he wouldn't have lived up to everything he was gifted with.

It is what we make it."