What Mack is saying dovetails well with the work that Edward Kelley and his colleagues are doing at the University of Virginia. We’ve dealt specifically with Kelley et al. in a (2018) CCafé on the Irreducible Mind, and that work has popped up in other places on the site as well (e.g., here, here, and here). It would seem we, as a culture, have moved from rabid rejection to at least begrudging tolerance, but we still have a long way to go.
UFOlogy is one of those areas where a certain measure of sobriety is still well-placed, that is where it is necessary to sift the wheat from the chaff. It’s an area of study where it is certainly possible to get “carried away”, in more than one sense of the word. Personally, I don’t have a lot of difficulty with the theoretical possibility of additional dimensions (which may (or may not) be essential in explaining/understanding the phenomena under investigation), but the practical phenomenology of experience is quite unresolved in my case.
Unsurprisingly, Vallee brings up Ezekial’s vision, which has long been associated with the Merkevah (MRKBH), or “chariot of God” and which constituted the jumping-off point for perhaps the oldest school of Hebrew Mysticism. Oddly, or ironically, enough, “Merkevah” is what the Israelis decided to call their latest line of military tanks. All of which certainly underlines Mack’s thinking on “worldviews”. (I call them (foundational) beliefs; the results are very similar: they’re the last thing any of us changes, and then only with often the most substantial effort.)
Good question. It is becoming clear(er) to me that we are being called upon to revisit our core beliefs (or core worldview or whatever you wish to call it/them) to see how they impact our understanding of “Bildung” (or education or upbringing or enculturation or whatever we choose to call the process) along with whatever notions and metaphors we believe are relevant for our sharing of our thoughts and reflections on the matter. As is so often the case, we may be saying the same things in very different ways … or very different things in the same ways.