Weird Studies: Entities, with Stuart Davis

Weird Studies:  Entities, with Stuart Davis

Several years ago, on New Year’s Eve, a tall, purple-robed praying mantis appeared to multidisciplinary artist Stuart Evan Davis as he meditated while running a fever. “Remember who you work for,” the entity said after beaming a zettabyte of information into Stuart’s febrile mind. Though it lasted less than a minute, the encounter sparked a series of life-changing -- and hair-raising -- events worthy of a Philip K. Dick novel.

JF and Phil talk to Stuart Davis to get his thoughts on nonhuman intelligences, the artistic cosmos, a movie trilogy the Mantis commissioned, and Stuart’s brilliant audio documentary, Man Meets Mantis.

Header image by OLJA, Wikimedia Commons
Stuart Davis Official Website
Stuart Davis, Man Meets Mantis
Stuart Davis, “Something from Nothing” course
Jasmine Karimova, singer-songwriter
Ramsey Dukes, The Good, The Bad, and the Funny
John Mack, psychiatrist and abduction phenomenon researcher
Jacques Vallee, ufologist
John Keel, paranormal researcher
Weird Studies episode 2, “Garmonbozia”
Norman McLaren, Spheres
Remedios Varo, artist
Leonora Carrington, artist
JF Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice

[Ninshub]

This makes me curious, Sci. Thanks for the link also to the audio documentary, I think I'll take a listen to that first.

[Ninshub]

That documentary was well worth the listen.

Shinzen Young saw giant grasshopper type creatures after years of intense meditation.

http://www.c4chaos.com/2009/10/the-scien...ered-cake/

In my own experience, after I’d been meditating for about five or six years, I started to have visionary material, very intensely. One of the interesting things about visionary material is that once it gets going it’s not necessarily limited to when you’re sitting in formal practice. That’s something that people that go through this phenomenon discover to their chagrin. Once it gets going it’s there all your waking hours often. So that means when you’re just walking around or whatever you’re seeing stuff all day. And in my case it was mostly, but not exclusively, giant insects. And they were very realistic. It’s not like seeing a static image. It moves with all of the motion of a living being. The perfect arthropod articulatory motion that you would find in an actual creature. These things, they move and they were extremely vivid. We say visionary material but I should say you can touch and hear and smell it too. That’s what I meant when I said that it’s extremely realistic, whatever its ultimate ontological status may be. In any event, that went on for a good year. And I was in school, I was in graduate school and I walk to school and there’d be giant grasshoppers greeting me along the path and all sorts of stuff, and I still function quite well. There’s no problem. It wasn’t like being schizophrenic or anything like that. It was just a phenomenon of that intermediate realm. It means that I had dropped into that realm and some material was coming up.

[Ninshub]

Davis is humble in the doc and in the podcast Sci referenced about his ability to know what these beings are, but his take on it, as also informed by people he comes across, is that they are a distinct ontological multi-dimensional (non-physical) entity, of a(n apparently) benevolent and creative nature.

Seems like they are encountered by many people. For instance....

The real aliens: a survey of 'praying mantis' entity reports

12 October, 2017
Columnist: Edward Crabtree

Back in 1967 a child called Paul Nelson took a holiday with his parents and another male friend in Catalina Island off the coast of California. His buddy and he had bought some comic books and they seated themselves in Paul's father's boat to enjoy them, when the missing time event happened. The next thing they knew was that they had awoken the next morning without even remembering having fallen asleep.

Later, as an adult and out of touch with his friend, this odd event troubled Nelson, who now worked as a doctor. He had read up on UFO abduction claims and took the plunge in arranging a hypnotic regression to relive this evening of his life.

Sure enough, a textbook abduction scenario was recovered from Nelson's buried memories. There was however one detail that differed from the norm and which Nelson had no foreknowledge of: his abductors, in tight fitting tunics were insect-like, with large bulging eyes (Dennet, p-192).

Dr Nelson's situation is not unique. Abduction stories feature not only the usual Greys and some reptilian denizens but sometimes more repulsive forms such as beings compared to Praying Mantises.

Investigators using both hypnotic regression and straight interviews have, in particular from North America from the late Eighties, logged Close Encounters of the 4th and 5th kinds involving these 'Mantises'. Moreover, some have been seen without any associated UFO craft. They feature in altered states of consciousness and, according to some, crop up in ancient artefacts. One has even been captured on camera.

Davis has interviewed other artists about their entity encounters ->

Just a few comments. 

I think these accounts of extraordinary and weird encounters with insect beings, giant praying mantises and grasshoppers and whatnot, with faceted insect-like eyes, for biological, scientific reasons must almost certainly not be actual physical beings. Instead they must necessarily be either immaterial spirit entities for some unknown motivation taking on this unusual form, or purely subconsciously generated and imaginary. That may already be the conclusion, but I thought I would describe the scientific reasons why it must be the case. These reasons are that in our world this arthropod body plan and creatures using it are drastically limited in size from tiny to an absolute maximum of a few inches, with primitive and compared to humans rudimentary brains. 

This limitation is in turn is caused by the fundamental geometric relation that body volume (and accordingly, tissue weight and corresponding mechanical support and respirational metabolic needs) increase by the cube of external dimensions. This makes large human-sized "insects" impossible in our world.

Arthropods by fundamental design use a stiff chitin exoskeleton for mechanical support and external sealing, and for respiration don't use lungs, but instead usually an arrangement of spiracle tubes leading into the abdomen. This basic body plan is fundamentally limited by basic physical principles to small creatures and has never over 600 million years of evolution developed into human-sized animals, because of the inherent limitations of this body plan in being able to be scaled up to physically, mechanically, respirationally and metabolically support large heavy bodies. 

During the Carboniferous period hundreds of millions of years ago the insects and other arthropods achieved their largest size of a foot of so because the explosion of forests and other plant life had raised the oxygen percentage of the air enough for arthropod respiration by tube-like spiracles to work for significantly larger bodies.

There are also other limitations made inevitable by this body plan using multi-faceted eyes - such as the fact that such an eye design is drastically limited in resolution to the number of "pixels" furnished by the multiple simple eye facets, rather than the millions of individual rod and cone photocells of the vertebrate camera eye.

Just a few comments.

The general consensus among the experiencers I've listened to so far seems to be these entities are something akin to spirits - possibly visiting from another dimension - that have some kind of connection to the usual mundane mantises.

However they also seem connected to the human dead, a curious feature of other UFO/Alien phenomenon that calls back to old Fairy stories about witnessing the dead among those mythical beings.

There was one woman who claimed to have "mantis DNA" which, if she is talking from a POV of strict biology, harms the credibility of her claims IMO. In general I think some of the information is suspect, such as that which was supposedly channeled. 

The synchronicities, "UFO" sightings, and visionary experiences however I think are widespread enough to give some credence toward, especially as it seems to parallel the connection between "alien" experiences and owls ->

Davis has interviewed other artists about their entity encounters ->

Another one of the Alien and Artist interviews ->