John Mack explored alien encounter experiences deeply, revealing a world of meaning and power that can revolutionize our understanding of who we are and our place in the cosmos. Dr. Mack suggests that such experiences reveal to us a universe which is filled with intelligence and life, though this may not always take the densely embodied form with which we are most familiar.

This book brings us to the edge of material reality and beyond, shattering the boundary that has separated matter and spirit and scientific or spiritual ways of knowing.
 
Dr. Mack asks us to move beyond the largely useless debate about whether UFOs or abductions are real in a purely material sense.  He shows us the limited way that we have used ourselves in learning about the cosmos, and challenges the limitations of traditional science as a way to learn about the multi-dimensional world in which we reside.

Insights about the relationship between spiritual and physical energy; trauma’s role in transformation; information about the ecological crisis facing the planet and the urgency that we do something about it; the possibility that human beings are participating in the creation of some sort of interdimensional hybrid race; the expansion of human consciousness and our spiritual reawakening; and the apparent evolution of extraordinary relationships that some human beings may be developing beyond the earth plane — these are the matters this book includes.

Dr. Mack demonstrates that the investigations of a skilled clinician, exploring human consciousness through in-depth conversations, can reveal to us a multidimensional, apparently intelligent, cosmos whose nature is fundamentally consistent with the discoveries of leading scientists who have been gaining knowledge primarily through exploring the physical world.

John Edward Mack, M.D. (October 4, 1929 - Sep 27, 2004) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He received his medical degree from the Harvard Medical School (Cum Laude, 1955) after undergraduate study at Oberlin (Phi Beta Kappa, 1951). He was a graduate of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and was board certified in child and adult psychoanalysis.

Dr Mack’s efforts to bridge psychiatry and spirituality were compared by The New York Times to that of former Harvard professor William James. Dr Mack advocated that Western culture requires a shift away from a purely materialist worldview - which he asserted was largely responsible for the Cold War, the global ecological crisis, ethnonationalism and regional conflict - towards a transpersonal worldview which could embrace some elements of Eastern spiritual and philosophical traditions which hold that we are all connected to one another.

He researched how this sense of “connection” developed with difficulty between different cultures, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1977 for A Prince of Our Disorder, his biography of British officer T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) whose identity bridged Britain and the Middle East. He interviewed political leaders and citizens of the then-Soviet Union and Israel/Palestine in the study of ethno-national conflict and the nuclear arms race. His early clinical work included explorations of dreams, nightmares and adolescent suicide.

The theme of “connection” to other life was explored most boldly in his study of men and women who reported that recurrent “alien encounter” experiences had affected the way they regarded the world, including a heightened sense of spirituality and environmental concern. Mack’s interest in the transformational aspects of these extraordinary experiences, and his suggestion that the experience may be more transcendent than physical in nature - yet nevertheless real - was largely reported in the media as a simple endorsement of the reality of alien encounters.

The Dean of Harvard Medical School infamously appointed a committee of peers to review Mack’s “clinical care and clinical investigation” of the people who had shared their alien encounters with him (some of their cases were written of in Mack’s 1994 book Abduction). After fourteen months of inquiry, amid growing concern from the academic community regarding the validity of an investigation of a tenured professor in the absence of any claim of misconduct, Harvard issued a statement stating that the Dean had “reaffirmed Dr. Mack’s academic freedom to study what he wishes and to state his opinions without impediment,” concluding “Dr. Mack remains a member in good standing of the Harvard Faculty of Medicine.”

Mack’s explorations broadened into the general consideration of the merits of an expanded notion of reality, one which allows for experiences that may not fit a materialist paradigm, yet deeply affect people’s lives. Mack’s final published book, Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters (1999), was as much a philosophical treatise connecting the themes of spirituality and modern worldviews as it was the culmination of his work with “experiencers” of alien encounters.

Dr. Mack passed away at age 74 in London, England.

For more information on John Mack, contact http://www.johnemackinstitute.org/