Orbs, Intellect and Imagination

By KEN KORCZAK

Is it an “8” or is it the infinity symbol? Maybe it’s both — and maybe it’s neither?

Maybe it’s both and neither at the same time?

Or maybe it’s in a state of not being both and not being neither at the same time?

Are you confused yet? Well … worry not!

That’s because, in this article, I will attempt to provide answers and a scrap (just a scrap) of clarity about what is behind the orb phenomena.

But first, let’s step back and get some background — also, I would encourage readers to review my article Orbs As Bridges to Channeling for some additional perspective, although this article stands well enough on its own.

So— I can tell you that the photo at the top of this page is an “orb” image I took in my backyard two years ago. The “infinity symbol orb” on the right is just the same picture of the “8-orb” flipped on its side.

In fact, this was the first orb image I have ever captured. It set off what has now been a two-year quest to explore the phenomenon of orbs.

It started in the spring of 2020 after I watched an episode of “White House UFO” on YouTube. This is a long-running program presented by veteran UFO investigator Grant Cameron of Winnipeg, Manitoba, a city about 90 miles north of my home here in rural northwest Minnesota.

Although mostly about UFOs, Cameron ranges widely to cover an array of paranormal topics, especially how “consciousness” is the key aspect and the lynchpin for understanding all things from UFOs and NDEs to alien-human communications — and orbs. Cameron uses his platform to host an occasional “orb discussion panel” wherein he invited his guests to show their oRb photographs and videos. Then they discuss.

Well, one lovely spring evening after watching “the orb panel,” I was intrigued enough to step out into the soft air of a starlit Minnesota night and snap a few pictures to see if I could capture an orb.

The bright green “eight ball” at the top of the page was the first and only photo I took that night. That odd “8” apparition in the center of my image gave me pause.

As I stated in my previous article, Orbs As Bridges to Channeling, my “inner hardcore skeptic” immediately leaped forward with a half-dozen explanations for the unmistakable “8” — a camera anomaly, an artifact of the internal structure of the camera, just a chance shadow, etc. — but it was enough to motivate me to go out and take more photos.

It wasn’t long before more “numbered” orbs began to appear in my images. Below you see a “21,” a “6” and a “D.”

 

All the while, I was capturing other strange images that kept my skeptical left-brained mind at bay long enough to keep taking more photos. This led to a lot of truly tantalizing images, including weird plasma-like formations that also seemed to contain “faces”:

 

Other “regular orbs” might carry the images of famous deceased people, such as the following which I have reason to believe is the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche:

 

Another orb brought the image of famous British author and ghost hunter Violet Tweedale:

 

Sometimes a famous Buddhist monk from a previous century shows up:

 

Sometimes orbs just fly around overhead like UFOs:

 

Along the way, I began using a kind of shaman’s staff (which I call a ‘Guild Staff’ — that’s a long story for another time) to assist in my interaction with orbs.

 

And, I have a couple hundred more …

 

Sometimes orbs are hanging around, you know, just being orbs …

 

So, for two years I’ve been sharing many of my orb image captures on Twitter. Surprisingly, the usual harsh abuse meted out by skeptics (trolls) has been minimal to the point of being inconsequential.

Most comments have been kind and constructive.

Many have urged me to express my theories are to what the orbs are, what is the essential nature of this phenomenon, what methods I use to capture images and more.

I must confess, however, that early on in my orb practice — when I opened up my consciousness to it — I perceived an intellectual and epistemological challenge associated with this phenomenon that was enormous beyond scope.

But what I’m going to do here today is carve out a tiny scrap of meaning that I have derived from certain interactions with orbs — and these meanings have been garnered by way of paying attention to certain synchronistic events — and also by leaning heavily into intuitive and imaginative thought rather than linear, materialistic or scientific thought.

Let me just get down to it:

It begins with that first orb with the “8” in the middle. Let’s look at it again:

 

One of the first things this orb made me think of was the 8-ball in the game of pool, although the 8-ball is traditionally black in color. (The six is green). The latter is neither here nor there.

But the association with the game of pool will become significant, as you will see.

When I posted this picture on Twitter, more than a few of my Twitter pals jumped in to say they believed “the intent of the orb” was to show an infinity symbol and not an 8.

 

There was a bit of discussion about this when one of my long-time friends happened to mention that I once gifted him a pool cue when we were both attending the same university nearly 40 years ago.

Then he added: “Instead of signing your name on the gift card, you signed it with the infinity symbol.”

Gaaaahh!

By golly, that was right! I had 100% forgotten all about it! I don’t even remember buying him a pool cue! However, at his mention of my “infinity symbol signature,” a lot of memories came crashing back.

In fact, it was my quirky habit for probably two or three years back then — I signed every informal letter, card and whatever else I could with an infinity symbol rather than my name. The “why” of my practice is lost to time as I write this here ~40 years hence.

Now, as a fan of the great Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, I have long been in the habit of looking for synchronistic events in daily life, be they trivial or significant happenings.

In this case, my “Spidey Sense” tingled and gave me a little chime.

Intuitively, I sensed that, just beneath the surface, a confluence of “little coincidences” was percolating.

As Jung tells us, what we think of as inconsequential coincidences are really elements of synchronicity that point to deeper meanings/connections existent in the universe — they point to what physicist David Bohm called an overarching “implicate/explicate order.”

There seemed to be some confluences here:

–> An orb that looked like an 8-ball in the game of pool.

–> The “8” might also be interpreted as an infinity symbol.

My college pal with whom I used to play pool reminded me that I once gifted him a pool cue and signed the card with an infinity symbol.

Hmmm. But what could it all mean, if anything?

Sometimes when you notice synchronicities, they seem instantly meaningful — and yet, you can’t grasp the information suggested.

They nibble around the edges of your consciousness in a vexing manner and then step back to take a back seat in the recesses of your “psychosphere.”

But as the French chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur said:

“Dans les champs de l’observation, le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés.”

“In the field of observation, chance favors the prepared mind.”

Well, I’m no Louie Pasteur, but I can say that I do have a habit of looking for “unseen patterns” and confluences.

That’s why this next event gave me that tell-tale feeling or jolt that suggested certain intuitive-synchronistic puzzle pieces were falling into place.

Here is what happened:

An incurable insomniac, I have adopted the habit of listening to audiobooks while I lay in bed. Realizing I won’t be asleep for hours, I use this time to absorb a lot of books.

One night, I happened to be listening to “The Magical Approach,” a book by the great writer, poet and psychic Jane Roberts, author of the channeled “Seth Material.” The Magical Approach is a short book entirely dictated through Jane by the “nonphysical energy essence entity” Seth while she is relaxed into a trance state.

In the first part of Chapter 2 of the Magical Approach, Seth states this:

“It is not that you overuse the intellect as a culture, but that you rely upon it to the exclusion of all other faculties in your approach to life. The intellect is brilliant, but it is on its own now. It is, indeed, in its way, isolated both in time and in space in a way that other portions of the personality are not.

When (the intellect) is overly stressed with all of the usual frameworks and rationales that go along with it, it can indeed become frightened and paranoid because it cannot perceive an event until it has already occurred.“

Seth goes on to discuss the solution to the unnatural dominance of the intellect in our culture by suggesting that we nurture all those nonlinear and so-called “right-brain” gifts that we have access to, such as intuition, imagination, dream-derived information, psychic ability and more.

As I listened, I drifted in a half-awake, half-asleep state when the image of the 8-ball-orb/infinity symbol orb flashed into my awareness.

Rather lazily, I mused to myself: “You know, that 8-ball orb is a perfect symbol for what Seth is talking about.”

I thought further:

“The number “8” of the orb might be said to be an artifact of the rational/materialist intellect and the infinity symbol of the orb is its opposite, or more accurately, a complement as in an artifact of the greater nonlinear form of consciousness.”

Note that in math:

–> An 8 is a rational number because it can be expressed in terms of a simple fraction of a whole number in a ratio of one number to another. The term “rational” is derived from “ratio.”

–> Infinity is an irrational “number” because it must remain undefined as an integer.

That means my 8-infinity orb might be an excellent symbol of something that combines the rational and the irrational in a singular object.

Note that this picture I have been using creates an illusion of sorts:

 

This is not a photo of two separate objects, but the same object simply presented from two different angles. All we are doing is consciously changing our perspective slightly to see a singular object in terms of two different meanings.

One conveys the meaning of “the rational” and the other conveys the meaning of “the irrational.”

It’s not the object that changes — only our mind changes.

Now, for some reason, this concept (albeit simple) charged me with a kind of numinal energy. I came fully awake — it was 3 in the morning — but I decided to get out of bed to go outside to see if I could capture some orb images.

Walking around in the utter darkness of a moonless night in the remote rural region where I live in northern Minnesota, I spent perhaps 45 minutes clicking off about 300 to 400 photos with my crummy little digital camera.

All of the images I took were blank — just darkness on the LCD screen — except for two frames that came in side-by-side (out of 300–400 pics). Amazingly, here are those two images:

 

That’s right!

Another “8-infinity-symbol orb!” — and an orb that clearly shows the letter “D!”

I have already discussed what I believe the “8-infinity-orb” means — the integration of two opposing concepts — the epistemological concepts of the rational and the irrational — in a singular “oneness.”

Both concepts are enfolded into the same singularity in space and within the human psychosphere. As it turns out, the orbs were using the “D symbol” to reinforce this idea and to let me know:

“This is integral to what ‘we’ want you to understand about the orb phenomena.”

That’s because I now believe the orbs showed me a “D” to represent the old college buddy I told you about above — I sometimes refer to him as “Dr. D.” That’s because his last name starts with a “D” and it so happens that he holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering — thus, Dr. D.

However, it is even more important to state that my friend Dr. D, in many respects, embodies the same quality of the 8-infinity-orb — the balance of the mathematical rational and irrational — and the balance of the intellect with intuition, imagination and nonlinear thought.

Despite being a hard-nosed mathematician, scientist and engineer, I know Dr. D to be open-minded toward the possibilities of those things generally relegated to “the paranormal” or “the unscientific.” He’s not afraid to “go there” — even as he keeps his feet planted firmly on the ground as a professional engineer who plies the scientific method daily to create amazing technological applications.

I ask you to recall at this point that it was Dr. D who reminded me that I was once in the habit of signing my name with the infinity symbol.

So, let’s review:

–> I capture an orb image that looks like an 8-ball in the game of pool.

–> The “8” can also be interpreted as an infinity symbol.

–> My college buddy with whom I used to play pool reminded me that I once gifted him a pool cue and signed the card with an infinity symbol.

–> This same college pal is referred to as “Dr. D.”

–> Dr. D embodies an example of a person who balances the qualities of intellect and intuition/imagination.

–> The 8-infinity-orb image can also be said to embody the qualities of intellect and intuition/imagination in the same space.

After listening to a lecture by Seth about the need for human culture to combine the rational intellect with irrational imagination and nonlinear intuitive thought, I go outside and capture two orb images: another “8-infinity-orb” and a “D” orb.

Orb photography is an activity that combines the technical/mechanical with the imagination and intuition. The digital camera is a mechanical device that emerges out of materialistic science — but can be used to create “art” — and that art can further be “massaged” to extract an “infinite” number of meanings limited only by one’s capacity for imagination.

By “total chance,” I managed to capture the images of a new “8-infinity-orb” right next to a “D” orb out of 400 frames on a night when I was formulating the idea of orbs as representations of intellect/imagination.

Of course, all of this begs all kinds of thorny questions. For example, some might ask:

“Are you saying, then, that the orbs possess their own consciousness? For example, would they not have to be aware of the existence of Dr. D (who lives 325 miles from my location) so that they can leverage him as an example to convey a message to you?”

Or:

“Isn’t this just an example of AOL — analytic overlay? That is, your “orb images” could be lens flare, dust motes or anomalies produced by the internal structure of the camera — and what you’re doing is applying AOL to create all kinds of meanings to suit your fancy?”

And many more … to mention one of the most frequent comments I get about the pareidolia effect — the tendency for our perceptions to overlay a meaningful interpretation on an indefinite stimulus.

At any rate, the pareidolia and camera anomaly ideas are severely undercut by the simple fact that many orbs are observed as naked-eye objects — you don’t need a camera to see them — and thousands of people do all the time, including me.

But all these questions and issues are for another day and another article.

I invite my readers to look consider this article a starting point for what I believe is a much larger and more important phenomenon than certain “junk science” ideas about pareidolia or oversimplified materialistic-based explanations.

Remember what Albert Einstein said:

“It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.”

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NOTE: For more stories about my orb work, please see: KEN-ON-MEDIUM