“Profound Contact”: A Review of Initiation: The Spiritual Transformation of the Experiencer, by Rev. Michael JS Carter

 

 (Acme, Nadir, Fulcrum, and Pivot, 2021). ISBN: 978-0-578-96331-0

Earlier this year, I reviewed a new book called Convergence: The Interconnection of Extraordinary Experience by Barbara Mango, PhD and Lynn Miller, MS. Mango and Miller were also guests on my weekly livestream and we belong to an informal research group. The subject matter centers on near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, contact/unidentified aerial phenomena experience, and past life regression/recall.

I am experiencer with three of the four. I have never had a near death experience. In all of these phenomena, there is one word that experiencers use in almost every case: transformative.

Having been interested in Reverend Carter’s work for many years, I was excited by the opportunity to read and review his new book, Initiation. You will notice that “Transformation” appears in the title, as it focuses on contactee/abduction cases. A second subtitle reads, “A Guide for Contact Experiencers.”

At 125 pages, which includes three Appendices, Initiation is an easily understandable, helpfully laid out handbook in two parts. The first, “Foundation,” uses Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey as its structural guide, outlining the three “acts” of the journey: Separation, Initiation, and Return (although the latter is not an explicit section title). Intermixed are subsections titled “Indicators,” “Teachers and Mentors,” and “Trials, Disciplines and Vows.” The latter two are also sub-stages of Campbell’s full framework. Part Two has two sections: “Spiritual Transformation” and “In Their Own Words: Experiencer Stories.” Just from the Table of Contents it is clear that the content is a balanced mix of Spirit and Science, Theory and Application.

The book begins with a Hindu story about finding the god and goddess (or you could say “star stuff”) within. It is a slightly different version of the one told in the documentary Finding Joe. As the government plays its faux Disclosure games by trotting out the same insider talking heads that have been the both witting and unwitting instruments of non-disclosure for so long, we need to remember that contact with extraterrestrials has nothing to do with governments, militaries, and their agendas. I left the Catholic Church thirty years ago (after wanting to be a priest when I was teenager) because I realized that gnosis, true knowing of spiritual/mystical experience, does not require a mediator.

So take heart—you do not need the gatekeepers in the scientific community to tell you your experience is true. You do not need a mediator to validate what you know in your heart to be true.

How then, do we understand what it is that has happened to us? Rev. Carter’s book is an excellent start. There are abundant bulleted lists of questions throughout Part One that will help you to contextualize your experiences and better understand them. The post-contact lists are especially helpful, as you may very well be reading this book (as I did) because of your experiences. 

Another question you might ask is, Why should I trust Rev. Carter? You may have seen him on Ancient Aliens or during other of his numerous appearances on television, radio, and at conferences and conventions, but does that make him trustworthy? Perhaps those credentials are sufficient. But he is also an experiencer who shares his very profound contacts with ET intelligences as though we were all sitting together in a support group for contactees.

Such communities are important. The more of us speaking about our experiences, the harder it is for the government gatekeepers to suppress or dismiss them and the less we need science to validate them for us. You should find the lists of traits we all have in common both affirming and a way to make connections with other contactees.

Once you have worked through the list in “Indicators,” “Teachers and Mentors” and “Trials, Disciplines and Vows” will provide preliminary guide you into the new space you will occupy as a transformed contactee, the subject of the first half of Part Two.

From individuals and organizations looking at the contactee transformation phenomena, such as Edgar Mitchell’s Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial Encounters, one thing is clear—people look at life, the Universe, Materialism, and spirituality in far expanded ways after an encounter. Many embark on what amounts to a Quest. They become seekers. Although I was asking difficult questions of the priests in my Catholic school from the time I was eight, it was not until my abduction/contactee experience in 2009, when I was just shy of 40, that I really pursued the Big Questions and began writing books, lecturing, during field research, and identifying as a researcher/investigator. My lifelong sense that there was something bigger and I was destined to know it suddenly made sense. I believe that Initiation is an invaluable resource to help you on your own journey to meaning and sense.

The final section is first-person stories of contact/abduction experiences, each followed by a short commentary by Rev. Carter. These stories are profound. They also give the reader a way to see all of the bullet lists and theory in action.

As I mentioned, there are three appendices. They list organizations that study UAP reports and encounters, counselors who work with experiencers, and recommended reading.

If you or someone you know has had a contact experience, or you seek to better understand a phenomena that is much less rare than the government and media want us to believe, Initiation: The Spiritual Transformation of the Experiencer is essential reading.