There is no ‘Tao of ufology’ or an all-encompassing ‘theory of everything’.
To place these theoretical and historical difficulties aside, we may want to turn to the sky itself, and reflect on the fact that it is both symbolically and truly a vision into an unidentifiable mystery. Our moon, for example, is instantly identifiable—few have even travelled to and from it—but still, anything that exceeds beyond it remains difficult for our instruments to explore. And then, beyond a certain limit, it is again unknown. We cannot, for better or worse, ‘correlate all its contents’, as the horror writer HP Lovecraft celebrated of the mind itself. Furthermore, our manifest universe is the backdrop of our cosmologies and our imaginative projections––our ‘What ifs?’. Indeed, from religion to genres of speculative fiction, we populate the regions of the unknown with divine personages or other beings like or unlike us. What haunts this mysterious space is psyche, of mind and its illuminations, and this is a part of an ancient tradition, sometimes symbolised as Isis’ star-clad veil—and sometimes ‘unveiled’ by acclaimed or condemned occult adepts.
Leonardo da Vinci wrote a defence of this attentive gaze into the manifest cosmos, for he saw it as the basis of creativity, and moreover an ability to perceive new forms usually obscured from our ordinary perception. This imaginative engagement with the world may explain his extraordinary creativity and visionary powers, so it is therefore instructive for anyone pursuing the fruits of imagination to understand this method of active imagination, for this may prove indispensable in our integration and understanding of some of the stranger phenomenon that we shall encounter. Here da Vinci describes his curious method:
If you look at any walls spotted with various stains or with a mixture of different kinds of stones, if you are about to invent some scene you will be able to see in it a resemblance to various different landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys, and various groups of hills. You will also be able to see divers, combats and figures in quick movement, and strange expressions of faces, and outlandish costumes, and an infinite number of things which you can then reduce into separate and well conceived forms [my italics].2
This type of thinking, a sort of psychological and creative form of gestalt, has gained popularity in more recent times and has particularly been adapted into a contemporary form of magical theory and practice called ‘chaos magic’. A brief comment on the subject will prefigure some of the ideas that I will pursue in this essay, and so it is to one of the founders of chaos magic, Peter J. Carroll, that we shall pay particular attention. Apophenia, or indeed, pareidolia, is a creative perceptual act that transposes—or brings forth—meanings and patterns out of apparently chaotic or highly complex situations, images or thoughts. In other words, anything that has implicitness (a poem for example) is open to an interpretation—or hermeneutic ‘reading’—in which the observer is inextricably a part. The poem without interpretation, of course, would only exist in a flux not unlike the cat in Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment—suspended in a hypothetical betwixt state of either/or until it is ‘collapsed’ into isness by the act of observation. Both apophenia and pareidolia are essential to the psychotherapeutic discipline of gestalt therapy, which begins from the principle that man has a ‘meaning faculty’ that grasps totalities—that his consciousness is naturally connective rather than deductive. In other words, perception aggregates ‘parts’ into ‘wholes’ in the same way a baby recognizes his mother’s whole face almost instantaneously. Not by an act building up an image bit-by-bit but by an unconscious mechanism that collates the sum of the parts, thus resulting in the near miraculous recognition of pattern, form and, importantly, meaning.
Carroll goes on to say in The Apophenion (2008) that these traits can be found particularly amongst ‘magicians, mystics and occultists’; however, it also affects many individuals who often provide advances, more generally, in other less ‘magical’ endeavours by their sheer creative drive. Invention is basically where the imagination converges with an objective reality, in which the imagined thing is amenable to the laws of objective reality. When this happens the imagined form takes shape in the world of space and time, and is palpable and functional as either an object, or as a symbol of higher truths, providing a sort of ‘bridge’ between the two worlds. It is as da Vinci said, a ‘well conceived form’. Creativity of this kind is crucially important for a culture’s health, and also presages scientific advances that are enormously beneficial.3 Pareidolia, similarly, works by associations and ‘map making’ projections through which man can begin to see elephants in clouds, astrological parallels, and even hysterical conspiracy theories entirely divorced from reality. Carroll certainly acknowledges these psychological dangers of unbridled ‘meaning perception’,4 but he argues quite convincingly that these very perceptual abilities play a significant part in ‘the development of art and religion’ (2008: 8).
Chaos magic is perhaps the most contemporary and explicit example of a theory of the imagination and its power, for it is particularly orientated towards its application both creatively and magically. Later on in this essay I will draw upon some of its other aspects and limitations in a larger context. Chaos magic is basically a scaffolding of a system that recognises the value of phenomenology. Again, its logic points towards an active use of imagination in the study of mind and reality. Metaphors, which become magical ‘sigils’ within chaos magic, are used as bridges into new associations, and ways of seeing novel potentialities.
Wilson, both anticipating chaos magic and honing his own phenomenological approach, states in Beyond the Outsider: ‘The world seems to be wearing a mask, and my mind seems to confront it helplessly; then I discover that my consciousness is a cheat, a double agent. It carefully fixed the mask on reality, then pretended to know nothing about it’ (1965: 93). With the mercurial world of imagination and the UFO phenomenon, this is wise counsel when dealing with the ‘double agent’ of the mind and its powers; especially considering both our own and the phenomenon’s ambiguous relationship to reality—objective or subjective.
The trajectory of this essay from here on is similar to that expressed in Wilson’s fifth book of the Outsider Cycle, Origins of the Sexual Impulse (1963), in which he outlines two ways of going about analytical writing:
One is to define all of your terms with scientific precision… and then stick closely to those definitions throughout. The other is to rely on your reader’s instinct and common sense. All originators in philosophy are forced to rely on the second method (because so much of their work depends on intuition)… Any professional writer—that is, any writer who is concerned about direct communication with his reader—will certainly be inclined to prefer the ‘intuition’ method… (1970: 15)
I intend to proceed in the spirit of Wilson’s ‘intuition method’, using what Lachman calls an ‘intuitive glue’ to piece together the many fragments of ufology. It is worth emphasising again that ufology is a relatively young field that is in the process of substantiating its presence as a serious area of study.
Here it is my contention that the UFO, by being as ambiguous as it is, is a deliberately mystifying ‘presence’ that affects the structures of that mercurial world of Carl Jung’s collective unconscious. Myths, if they have any substantial foundations in true events at all, may be that which aggregate around an initially information-rich bafflement of the senses (of the individual or the target society). Religions are perhaps the structures that emerge to ‘explain away’ the initial phenomena of the miraculous—that is, they are stories which absorb the ‘shock’ into a comprehensible and pedagogic narrative. Referring as they do to something beyond the scope of ordinary language, the stories are necessarily metaphorical, that is, inferring something beyond the limitations of ordinary language. Visionary art, emerging from the powerful and tumultuous depths of subjectivity, nevertheless present to us something hauntingly objective. It is this art that stands the test of time for its undeniable truth value,
with its enormous poignancy stimulating our recognition of profound depths of meaning. Meaning on the threshold of what is ordinarily expressible or even comprehensible.
We may ask, with some speculation, what the UFO teaches us—if anything—about the creative matrices underlying the evolution of human consciousness. Is this phenomenon outside of us, or is it, perhaps, a type of ‘bootstrapping paradox’ involved with mankind’s own self-evolution? As we shall see, these questions develop exponentially, and before we know it we are back into the domain of common existential questions, albeit with an evolutionary beckoning.
Life, according to Wilson, works in ‘terms of symbols and language’ and when the ‘flame of consciousness is low, a symbol has no power to evoke reality, and intellect is helpless’ (1966: 112). In this essay I have taken the symbol of the evolution of human consciousness as a possible solution to the enigmas that the UFO represents. Its presence, I believe, fits into a general philosophical bracket of the ‘evolutionary metaphor’: that playful extrapolation of something beyond the ken of ordinary perception. William James once said that there can ‘never be a state of facts, to which new meaning may not truthfully be added,’ that is ‘provided the mind ascend to a more enveloping point of view.’ But it is also worth keeping in mind Carl Jung’s dictum that the ‘highest truth is one and the same with the absurd’, for in ufology, as in life, the two often converge when the flame of consciousness is burning bright.
This essay represents my own attempt to continue in the spirit of where Alien Dawn left off, and it is also my own endeavour to throw some auroral illumination into this phenomenological twilight zone.
The Power of the Question
Contradictions abound in many of the ‘explanations’ for the UFO phenomena. The field is simply too complex and ever-changing; even transitional with its leaping developments and evolution as a phenomenon. To pull back, so to speak, and gain a ‘bird’seye view’ requires both a familiarity with the literature and a mind tempered by philosophical rigor as well as sympathy—even patience—towards the uncanny and unusual. As I have mentioned above, any young discipline that hastily settles on an all-encompassing theory, the sooner it finds itself contradicted, inconsistent. The sheer flow of information, of emerging evidence and mounting witness accounts, is almost consistently churning up even the firmest of theoretical foundations. These elements are not necessarily the fault of ufology and its individual researchers; indeed it is an issue that the phenomena itself appears to exploit.5
There is a persistent ambiguity latent in the UFO ‘presence’, and any theory that can preserve its credibility requires itself to be constantly updated, vigilant and flexible enough to allow the field to swiftly evolve in tandem with the phenomenon itself. Again, it is important to note that the phenomenon evolves and develops, and it is not a static mystery but a dynamic enigma. It is towards a general widening and complexity which will allow ufology the freedom and innate flexibility to fully establish its foundations in a field that shifts beneath it—but first, one has to survey the terrain before he begins construction.
The Super Natural (2016)––a collaboration between Whitley Strieber, an abductee and horror novelist, and Professor Jeffrey Kripal, a specialist in philosophy and religious thought––reads at times like a hybrid of Wilson’s Introduction to the New Existentialism (1966) mixed with a mystical commentary on the shadowy realms of esotericism and depth psychology. Kripal describes the discipline of hermeneutics—the central theoretical approach which runs throughout the book (although mainly in Kripal’s own responses to Strieber’s autobiographical material)—as ‘the art of interpretation that deciphers the hidden meanings of some enigmatic symbol, text, dream, vision, or striking coincidence’ which, he states, recognises ‘a single process that co-creates both the subject and the object at the same time’ (2016: 112–113). Again, we are back to Wilson’s notion that consciousness is a ‘double-agent’.
The trickster god Hermes, whose name constitutes the very word ‘hermeneutics’, has been called by Jorjani an archetypal ‘dialectical antagonist’,6 a sort of ‘living’ kōan of the collective unconscious. The ‘hidden meanings’ of these symbols reveal a radically new understanding of our ontology, that is, they present evolutionary metaphors concerning our state of being, and how we attend—through our intentionality—in an active participation between the world of phenomenon and our selfhood. The UFO, for Strieber, Kripal and Wilson, is such a symbolic reality—a simultaneous co-creation of the trickster double-agent and our own inner dialectical antagonist.
Now, one of the common myths within ufology is that these sightings began as a sort of Cold War hysteria, a mass psychic product born from geopolitical tension. Carl Jung even speculated along these lines in his book Flying Saucers (1958). And although Jung’s book goes a lot further than this ‘Cold War hypothesis’, it is strange that some sceptics regard Jung’s explanation as an all-encompassing answer to the problem, a sort of ‘explaining away’ a phenomenon by reducing it to a psychic compensation mechanism of collective trauma. Indeed, Jung’s work is perhaps one of the more intelligent and academic contributions to ufology; sadly, however, it has come to be as misunderstood as the phenomenon it attempts to analyse. What is often overlooked is the fact that Jung is interested in the very concept of a UFO—that is, as a possible incursion of extraterrestrial or inter-dimensional entities within our skies and psyches—and considers how our minds might react to such strangeness. Jung goes on to say that our:
[…] conscious mind does not know about them and is therefore confronted with a situation from which there seems to be no way out, these strange contents cannot be integrated directly but seek to express themselves indirectly, thus giving rise to unexpected and apparently inexplicable opinions, beliefs, illusions, visions and so forth [my italics]. (2002: 7)
This ‘indirect expression’ of the phenomena is central to this essay, for the UFO ‘presence’ appears as a sort of drama, a symbol, within a self-mythologizing sequence of events calculated by some playwright of the absurd and uncanny. An indirect form of expression is also a common hallmark of the evolutionary metaphor. It is important to remember the apparently deliberate strangeness of such experiences—or, moreover, the enigmatic resonance of the event that distorts our perceptions of the phenomenon. This, importantly, is acknowledged in both Kripal’s and Jorjani’s hermeneutic and phenomenological method of analysis.
An example of deliberate strangeness: one female witness once reported that she saw a ‘fifteen-foot kangaroo in a park, which turned out to be a small spacecraft’ (Mack; 1994: 396). In short, one could say this is truly mercurial; it abides by the principles of the trickster, even that of a satirist of public opinion. In their transitional existence ‘betwixt-and-between’ they act—as Victor Turner says in his study of the notion of liminality, The Ritual Process (1966)—in a way to provide a ‘generative’ as well as ‘speculative’ tendency in the individual or society which attempts an understanding of the mysterious, that intermediate ‘other’. Importantly Turner concludes by saying that the ‘mind that enters willingly will proliferate new structures, new symbols, new metaphors’ (quoted in Hyde; 2008: 130). Nevertheless, its resonant absurdity remains, and its interpretation turns our usual sense of reality inside out.
It is this place betwixt-and-between that is represented in the Kabbalah as the fertile egg of chaos; the origin of new forms and the place where the implicit and explicit are inverted, seamlessly swapping places. It is also the domain in which apophenia and pareidolia come as compensatory tools, reordering our senses, generating new patterns and meanings which take root, or even drift away and back into the tumultuous churn of potentia. This is the essential ‘stuff’ of the visionary artist’s revelation, the product of which is captured and concealed within his creation. It is the ever-present dynamism which underlies nature’s evolutionary impetus and advantageous forms. Whether or not this explains the kangaroo turning into a spacecraft, it is difficult at thi
s point to tell, but either way the presence of deliberate absurdity is present in the report.
Now, in contrast to the ‘Cold War Hypothesis’ is Jacques Vallée’s classic ufological study, The Passport to Magonia (1969), which goes much further than what is classically taken to be the standard history of ufology. The most common origin, of course, is that the word ‘flying saucer’ was coined by Kenneth Arnold, an aviator and businessman who saw a mysterious disc over Mount Rainier, Washington in June of 1947—this, of course, further cements the Cold War hypothesis. Again, as Vallée argues, this circumscribes it into a too comfortable time period in which it can again be written off as ‘experimental military technology’ of the post-War years; even as a type of emergent neurosis after years of public uncertainty—a ‘collective hysteria’. Kenneth Arnold’s case is anecdotal, and this very anecdotal nature plagues UFO research due to its being ‘merely anecdotal’, in other words, a testament to its unscientific and improvable nature. In this view the phenomenon cannot, therefore, become scientifically grounded unless it can be (as it often has been) detected on radar, or, as is more difficult to prove, remnants of a crashed craft have been examined. The latter hypothesis becomes problematic, for it presupposes that the UFO phenomena is a physical, materialistic and a ‘nuts-and-bolts’ quantifiable ‘thing’. However, from our point of view we may quite confidently attend to the ‘merely anecdotal’, for this, in a sense, is the best place to start when unravelling the phenomenological dimension of ‘high strangeness’.
Evolutionary Metaphors Page 2