But I doubt that any of these qualifications would help these particular colleagues very much. They are still living in the old world. I choose to live toward and for the new one.
Which world do you choose?
* * *
Jeffrey J. Kripal
J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religion
Rice University
Houston, Texas
1
The Mystery Begins
I am the author of many books, both novels and nonfiction, most notably the novels The Hunger, Warday and Superstorm, which was the basis of the movie The Day After Tomorrow. But my best-known work is a nonfiction book called Communion, about a close encounter of the third kind that befell me on December 26, 1985. Since then, my relationship with the strange people I encountered on that night, whom I have come to call “the visitors,” has continued. Starting in the fall of 2015, contact with them has exploded in richness and wonder.
In part this is because I have gradually learned something of how they can communicate with us—which is so different from anything one might expect that it took me many years just to understand that it was happening. My hope is that by describing my experiences with this, I can help others to understand the messages that they may already have received and also learn how to engage in give-and-take. If more of us can gain an idea of how it works, I think that our visitors may abandon their long-held stance of secrecy and become a more open part of our world.
My first encounter with them did not go well. Not at all.
On that snowy December night, I woke up in a little room filled with what appeared to be darting, big-eyed insects and the stocky, dark-blue trolls I later came to call kobolds. They were originally given this name by miners in Bavaria in the middle ages, who would glimpse their iridescent, dark blue forms as they rushed through the shadowy tunnels. To this day, there are narrow tunnels under parts of Bavaria, the origin and use of which are unexplained.
The next day, a vague memory of the big eyes caused me to imagine that an owl had come into our house, but as there was no entry point, this could not have been the answer. I was injured in the side of my head. My rectum was torn so badly that I bear the scar to this day. To say the least, I was severely shaken up. As the weeks passed and I discounted one ordinary explanation after another, I was finally left with only one alternative: as incredible, as impossible as it seemed, the event had in some way been real. The creatures I had seen were actual, living beings of some kind.
I agonized over telling my wife. What in the world would Anne think? Things were rocky between us because, during the six weeks or so after the event that it had taken me to understand that I wasn’t going insane, I’d tried to drive her off. If I ended up in a psychiatric institution, I knew her well enough to know that she would never abandon me, and what would she and our son do for money? They needed and deserved to have a healthy husband and father, not be saddled with a person so deeply psychotic that he was completely misperceiving reality.
I took neurological tests for brain abnormalities and temporal lobe epilepsy, which can produce hallucinations. All were normal. The epilepsy test even showed that not only was I not prone to hallucinations, I had an unusually stable brain. I took an extensive battery of psychological tests, which revealed me to be normal but also suffering a high level of stress.
I still had no idea what to say to Anne. What could I say, that I’d been taken aboard a flying saucer by little men? Because I was now pretty convinced that this was what had happened. Finally, I told an old friend, photographer and documentary filmmaker Timothy Greenfield-Sanders. Incredibly, he responded that his wife’s parents, who lived down the road from us in upstate New York, had seen some strange creatures similar to the ones I had described to him. They had observed them from a window, moving about in their back garden.
This put things in a new light. I could now say that there were other witnesses. Obviously, Anne was going to ask that question. Timothy advised me to go ahead and tell her. He was sure she’d find it all as fascinating as he did.
One evening after dinner, when our little boy was safely asleep, I asked her to sit down for a talk. She said later that she was afraid that I was going to tell her I wanted a divorce. But I was past trying to drive her away from the crazy man. My main concern now was whether or not she would be the one to want a divorce.
I said the words I had been so afraid to utter: “Honey, I think I was taken aboard a flying saucer by little men.”
She stared at me. Her mouth dropped open. Then a twinkle of what I can only describe as her sparkling wit flashed in her eyes. She blurted out, “Oh, thank God! I was afraid you were going crazy!”
There was a silence. Her eyes searched me for some sign that I was joking. I looked gravely back at her. Then we both burst into laughter anyway. We threw ourselves into one another’s arms. She said, “I wanted an interesting life, but I had no idea what I was getting into when I met you.”
In that moment, our marriage entered a new chapter. On that evening in our little apartment in New York, we began what became a journey of discovery that completely revised our understanding of world, life and reality and continues to do so every single day.
From the beginning, she seemed to know things that she perhaps could not put into words, about how this incredible experience belongs first to us—to human beings—not to the mysterious figures in the night who trigger it.
At first, I was appalled. I resolved to sell the little cabin where it had happened and never spend another night outside of the depths of a city. But I just couldn’t get over the idea that they were real. Real.
Anne didn’t want to sell up. She wanted to go back and see what might happen.
I also found that my curiosity was stronger than my fear, and in April of 1986, we resumed our weekends at the cabin. I started going out into the woods at night to serve notice to whatever they were that I wanted to meet them again—hopefully without a repeat of the violence that had taken place previously and the injury that my flailing panic had caused me.
Given what I had been through, this might seem pretty foolhardy, and it certainly was that. But I was simply too curious. We both were. The fact that the event had happened at all had been completely remarkable. Although I had been left with injuries, I had also had my mind opened in the most profound way I could imagine. Whatever they were, they were not human by any definition I knew. And yet they were here.
Anne agreed that I should go out and see what happened, but she was not a believer by nature. She was a questioner, and I followed her lead in this. She would often say, “The human species is too young to have beliefs. What we need are good questions.”
We humans have a nasty habit of deciding to believe that things we don’t actually understand are explained in some way that we make up. And the next thing we know, we’re killing each other over these imaginings.
So this is not going to be a book of advocacy. I am not asserting beliefs. Instead, it is going to be a description of events, as I have witnessed them, and an inquiry into ways of communicating with a richly alive, enigmatic and absolutely remarkable presence that seems to have been with us, at least in part, throughout our recorded history, and probably a lot longer than that. But it is also true that it seems to have entirely changed its approach to us in the years since World War II ended. It is now an enormous part of our world. It seeks to become even more central to human experience. We’re dying here, and it doesn’t want that. It wants to communicate with us, but it is deeply, profoundly different from us, and so far communication has been essentially impossible. Learning to do it effectively is what my life has been about, and what I hope to convey here.
The visitors have been very clear to me: Unless we can communicate with them in a rational, practical and effective way, they cannot help us.
I wish I could provide a simple how-to, a neat list of dos and don’ts.
I can’t do it, and nobody can. The gap between us is simply too
great for a simple list to work.
Our visitors stand ready to help us face the jeopardy we are in, and even aid us in solving the problems that we are facing. The degree of their involvement depends on the degree to which we are able to face them and understand what they have to offer us. For reasons that are going to become clear over the course of my story, this is not going to be easy. Far from it, making sense of the relationship will be the greatest intellectual, emotional and spiritual challenge that mankind has ever faced. If we are able to succeed, though, we are going to experience a vast increase in the range of human understanding—truly, we are going to enter a new world.
Right now, things are predictably chaotic. Different religious groups have long ago integrated the phenomenon into their belief systems. Christians think of the visitors as demons, sometimes as angels. To Muslims, they are djinn. Other religions call them many other things. Outside of the Christian community in the west, the fairy faith of Northern Europe has evolved into the UFO and alien folklore and has spread around the world. But that is only part of what has happened. What used to be a minor folklore is now a vast, living experience, by far the most complex cultural and social influence, and personal challenge for the close encounter witnesses, that humanity has ever faced. Millions of individual lives have been touched by it. Governmental response has mostly been concealed behind a veil of secrecy that hides disquiet, confusion and fear.
In point of fact, the entire human species has been thrown off balance by whatever this really is. Despite over seventy years of effort, it has not just remained a mystery, it has become steadily more mysterious—and at the same time, more and more provocative.
Somebody is here, all right. At this point, denial of that fact is an emotional response not a rational one.
It is not a simple matter of aliens having arrived. This sublime, challenging, sinister and yet oddly welcoming presence is far more complex than that. It is so varied, so contradictory, and yet so pervasive on so many different levels that for us even to achieve a useful description of it is going to be a tremendous intellectual challenge.
Behind the scenes, a small group of scientists, who have access to certain materials and biological remains, has made significant progress in areas as diverse as metallurgy and communications. But most scientists and intellectuals, left out of this exclusive group for reasons that will become clear over the course of this book, remain in a state of enforced ignorance that emerges into the broader culture as a mix of denial and indifference. Meanwhile, people who have been touched—often, as I was, fiercely—by the presence are left to fend for themselves when it comes to understanding what has happened to them.
The result of this is that the rich potential of contact is being buried beneath a great mound of confused theories that amount to little more than an elaborate extension of the folklore of unknown presences that has been with us from the beginning of our history.
Make no mistake, though: it is not up to the people concealing their knowledge behind the wall of classification to disclose the secrets. From the beginning, the visitors themselves have been in control of the secrecy, and it is they who will be responsible for revealing themselves—or, to be more accurate, integrating themselves into our lives more openly than they already have.
They are extremely subtle, very thoughtful and very careful. The ones I have come to know want contact to work, but if they were to step out into the open right now, that is very definitely not what would happen. Instead, we would try to integrate them into our worldview through the medium of assumptions about aliens that simply are not adequate to the task and do not hold up under scrutiny.
They are also determined, hard and can be, frankly, terrifying. They are powerful beyond conception and are not going to be defeated by military opposition. That whole approach is meaningless. This isn’t a war at all, it is a process of contact that is intended to lead to the deep inner sharing that is communion. There are things that they want from us and things that they can give us in return. But it is a trade of a kind we have never engaged in before and it is going to take a leap of understanding for us to make a success of it.
It is not, however, something that we don’t do. We have been doing it, I would think, through all the time we have been. We have been passive to it, however. The result of this is that both sides gain less from it than they could. They do not share as fully as they might. We do not realize what we actually are, and so devalue ourselves. Only when we become aware of the sharing can there be communion between us. As we are now, we’re passive to it. We need to engage with it and so with them, thus becoming participants in an enormous part of our lives that we have not so far known existed.
This is what it is to increase in consciousness. It means knowing and seeing more of where and what you truly are. As I have said before, the coming of the visitors is what it looks like when evolution comes to a conscious mind.
There are some previous moments of contact in human history that are instructive here. The first two involve how pre-Columbian civilizations responded to the unexpected appearance of the Spaniards, who arrived in the Americas in possession of things like horses, metal armor and gunpowder, none of which were known to the indigenous population. However, they also brought with them a culture debased by superstition, fanaticism and jingoistic brutality. This devastating combination was used to destroy not just the Indian societies in Mexico and South America, but later to subjugate and enslave populations all across the western half of North America. Further waves of Europeans later overwhelmed these ancient Earth-centric cultures over the entire continent. Only recently have any of them begun to show even a few sparks of recovery, and most probably never will.
Later in this book, I will discuss an eloquent message left by the visitors, warning that we could face similar cultural dislocation, although hopefully without the exploitative brutality. This warning has been placed at a site where advanced artifacts were left behind and from which scientists have been recovering valuable materials for years. The reason that this particular site was chosen by the visitors has not been understood so far, but it can be, and its warning should be, heeded carefully at every level of our society as the visitors emerge.
The Aztecs attempted to fit the bizarre apparition of the Spaniards into their existing mythology and decided that Hernando Cortez must be their god Quetzalcóatl, come back to retake the throne of the Aztec empire. Although they were momentarily nonplussed by the fact that he couldn’t speak their language of Nahuatl, they decided to ignore this anomaly and more or less allowed a few hundred Spaniards to conquer their extensive empire. The result was that, within 50 years, 90% of the indigenous Mexican population was dead and the surviving 10% were enslaved.
Another instructive case is that of the Inca civilization, which was overtaken by Francisco Pizarro. Essentially, a highly organized nation with an army of 50,000 men was defeated and subjugated by about 500 Spaniards. The critical battle of Cajamarca in 1532 was won by 200 Spaniards, who defeated an Incan field army 6,000 strong. When Pizarro subsequently entered the Inca capital of Cuzco, he was met by what amounted to a confused silence. He and his Spaniards made no sense to the Inca. The result was that this ancient civilization, with probably the most mysterious origins of any on Earth, also disappeared into history, taking with it all that it had learned and achieved, leaving behind only the ghostly remnant that persists to this day among indigenous Peruvians.
In attempting to integrate the Spaniards into their belief system, the Aztecs did what religious and UFO believers are doing now. They looked to their own preexisting beliefs to explain the inexplicable and were rendered helpless as a result. Our scientific and intellectual communities are reacting much as the Inca did, with confusion, denial and, finally, silence.
What happened when technologically advanced European civilizations expanded across the world should also be carefully considered. Even when they were not brutal and exploitative, the technological superiority of the Europe
ans again and again made indigenous peoples feel inferior, caused them to abandon their own cultures and beliefs and, all too often, descend into the debased remnants of their once vital societies that we see to this day in too many places in the world.
The visitors are not just technologically more advanced than us. They have a completely different way of seeing reality, and when we first confront it, we are going to see them as being in possession of godlike powers, breathtaking insight and seemingly unlimited scientific knowledge. They will appear this way not because they are more intelligent but rather because of the different way their minds work. They are not more intelligent than we are, not at all. They are more experienced, and their experience is fundamentally different from ours. We must not elevate them above what they are but seek to meet their strengths with our own in the most meaningful and mutually enriching ways that we can find.
Their abilities are going to disempower our scientists and intellectuals, which will be made worse by their inability to address them directly. In this regard, I am hoping that this book will accomplish three things: first, that it will enable people to see that there are ways to communicate with them; second, that we have things that they value greatly and need badly and that a great trade is on offer; third, that they do not want to invade us, enslave us or otherwise destroy our freedom or take from us our own sense of self-worth.
A New World Page 2