ok, but aren't you just kinda passing the buck? I mean, it's a bit like the "turtles all the way down" explanation... "so there's this higher bandwidth and above that there's this higher bandwidth and above that there's this higher bandwidth..."
Of course it's just my opinion, but it is based on some evidence. Just as those guys you mention are offering an opinion based on
their interpretation of evidence they have selected. The evidence is open to various interpretations.
I will take the time to organize a solid case (I'm just starting to assemble all of that for a book) and I'll present it to you. In the meanwhile, I can offer this; I can safely state - because I think there'd be ample agreement from people who have had the experience(s) - that people can be trained to shift awareness away from their ego. This can be done with certain drugs (I don't mean just taking a psychedelic and seeing what happens. I mean becoming intimately familiar it), inducing OBEs, lucid dreaming, remote viewing, etc. All things I have personally experienced and that many others have as well.
When one has obtained some degree of mastery of these states one can explore. The first thing one notices is that one is not oneself. Why should be obvious. The habitual self is the ego (much psychological and spiritual research to cite here). You have diminished the ego.
Something else that is readily observed is that the intellect/rationality/science is not operating in any of these states. Those modes of perceiving and interpreting the world are an ego function and thus very limiting (like a wannabe construction worker with only a hammer). Have you ever heard of, say, a full blown NDE where the experiencer is using rationality and science to understand? No. There is feeling, sensing, direct knowing. Words aren't even operating. The NDErs often try to convey how things weren't being told to them with words, but in other ways they can't fully explain now that they are back in ego land.
However, ego shrinking doesn't require practice or deliberate application of techniques. It happens to people all of the time. Sometimes something captures your attention so much that you forget yourself; or you just space out for a bit for whatever reason. You don't develop an understanding of consciousness that way, but it has still happened.
So already, trying to be scientific about all of this is clearly going to fall short, but let's go with it anyhow.
So far, I think that JV would be with me. Hernandez? I don't know.
Here's where JV, IMO becomes self-contradictory and it gets at the meat and potatoes of who is doing what to whom - JV acknowledges that the UFOs are probably archetypes and not nuts and bolts craft. IN fact, that's kind of what he's all about. Ditto "aliens" encountered in other ways, like abductions.
By definition, an archetype is man made to a large extent, right? It might be a primal energy that exists outside of man, but man gives it a name and a face and somewhat anthropomorphizes it.
So at the very least, JV
should agree that these are not alien intelligences coming to manipulate our awareness's. These are very human forces - forces that are perhaps often ignored or repressed - that seek expression
because they are part of our psychic field as humans. So it's us manipulating us to the extent that it might start knocking on the door, but at the same time
it is us coming to visit ourselves.
Getting back to what happens when the ego is diminished - you are able to have contact with these latent psychic energies. That
is what you experience. Period. Full stop. I don't think that anyone into this area of study who has had experiences would say otherwise.
So we have people having ego diminished/spaced out lapses, deliberate or otherwise, that then experience all of these non-rational psychic energies that are part of the human field of perceptional capabilities.
Now you tell me, please. Where is the evidence that these energies are non-human in nature? Where is the evidence that they seek to contact us and manipulate our awareness for whatever purposes, sinister or good? JV's own theories and understandings don't support taking that leap. All of the non-human origin conjecture seems to arise from people that don't understand that humans are bigger than their egos and are all psi-inter-related via a collective unconscious.