The UFO, then, may be a thermometer for our culture’s development—and its appearance in the past may have been guiding or initiating certain other elements of our culture’s unconscious drives.
It may very well be that the UFO, in its inside-out ambiguity, represents something outside of the very bounds of that which stunts man’s evolutionary growth—that is, it haunts us from the periphery of the known, frustrating materialism’s out-of-date boundaries by clownishly transgressing and subverting logic and the rationalist’s own spiritual equivalent of the Iron Curtain.
Now, to return to Watson’s Miracle Visitors, we may see that in his protagonist’s revelation these ideas are perfectly at home in the expansive genre of science fiction:
For all these inaccessibilities caused a fierce suction towards ever higher patterns of organization, towards higher comprehension. So molecules become long-chain molecules, and these became replicating cells that transmitted information… till mind evolved, and higher mind. The universe, he realized, was an immense simulation: of itself, by itself. It was a registering of itself, a progressive observation of itself from ever higher points of view. (2003: 187)
Indeed, Méheust’s ‘super-dream’ that tends towards ‘absurdization’; and Jung’s flying mandalas that are harbingers of a new psychic unity; and indeed Watson’s ‘suction’ of ‘inaccessibilities’ towards ‘ever higher patterns’ do seem to be the raison d’être behind the UFO phenomena. This brings us to the very essence of Wilson’s ‘new existentialism’, for its evolutionary premise enables us to unfold a phenomenological groundwork to do the integrative work on our own behalf.
In Watson, Wilson saw a genuine attempt to understand the phenomenology behind the UFO experience, and this is what lends to Alien Dawn a quality that is often lacking in books on ufology.
Now, before we move on to discussing esotericism and synchronicity, it is worth mentioning a story that happened between Watson and Wilson that allows us an interesting insight into the absurdity of the phenomenon. It can be taken as one pleases, as a meaningful synchronicity, or a freak accident of circumstance. But many of its elements prefigure some of the topics that we shall pursue. Watson relates:
[Wilson had] been prompted to phone me by reading my own fictional take on the UFO ‘experience’, Miracle Visitors. Colin’s phone was struck by lightning through the landline either during or just after one of our conversations, causing a book fire in his room; unremarkable contacts with such as Colin Wilson seemed impossible—or maybe the lightning had something to do with the UFO phenomenon. You’d think I’d be able to remember clearly whether the lightning strike came during or after; but oh don’t we mythologise ourselves?8
Absurdity and mythologization, as we have seen, takes a significant role in the ‘drama’ of the UFO phenomena. And the lightning bolt striking between the line of a researcher and a novelist, it seems, is a brilliant place to start unpacking the hermetic spirit which lies at the heart of such evolutionary metaphors…
Plasma, Signatures and the Life Force
Other than discussing Whitley Strieber’s interpretations of the meaning behind his abduction experiences, I am aware that we have not directly discussed the UFO experience using any other case studies or direct, reported examples. This has been intentional, for it sets us up to explore the odd levels and layers of interpreting anomalous phenomena in general. My intention so far has been to present a general way of thinking which has close ties with esotericism. Indeed, James W. Deardorff has speculated along these same lines, for the phenomena may communicate by bypassing scientists and instead providing recipients with ‘vague descriptions of extraterrestrial technological achievements that would read like magic or science fiction’. Deardorff continues:
They might even contain a few absurdities purposely added; these… would help ensure that any scientists who happened to learn about the communications would regard them as hoaxes or fiction… Meanwhile, the message would get published, translated into various languages, and distributed throughout the world amongst other occult literature.9
Now, if we turn to Andrija Puharich’s bizarre book, Uri (1974), for example, we have the same strange sense of absurdity repeated. The world-famous psychic, Uri Geller, in a moment of despair and frustration with the entities—namely one that referred to itself as ‘Spectra’—condemns their ‘performance’ as ‘stupid and idiotic’, nevertheless, they perform for us, he says, ‘on our level’ (1974: 173–174). Performance, of course, has an important role to play in the mysteries, particularly mythological and those pertaining to esoteric schools. And although Uri knows of their existence, in some objective sense, he nevertheless does not know what they mean; that is, precisely what existential value that this holds for him, or indeed, for anyone else. In fact, Uri Geller, despite his flamboyant reputation, is like the rest of us when facing this mystery. And although he has had, according to his own account and Puharich’s, direct experience, he is nevertheless rational and sober-minded as one can be about such a challenging experience. Condemning it as such a stupid performance, in fact, is a fairly rational approach, and is not suggestive of someone who wants to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes concerning something so apparently miraculous.
Uri asks the crucial question of, ‘What is it doing to us?’ His answer, as we have seen, is an exasperated shrug. They perform for us ‘on our level’ is his basic insight, and our level, fundamentally, cannot go beyond itself.
Despite this, Puharich is provided with a series of unusual explanations of the functions of the soul:
I was given a new concept which was to imagine that all souls are like a vase (i.e., a physical pot). Each vase-soul exists in a rotational, gravitational field. When one perturbs the vase-soul, wavelets go out into the universe field. It is very much like dropping a pebble in water—wavelets will radiate outward. The perturbation of the vase-soul in the rotational gravitational field is experience. (1974 :195)
Again, this strikes anyone familiar with esoteric literature as strikingly consistent with many occult doctrines, particularly theosophy or something uttered by Alice Bailey. The language even reminds us more of David Bohm’s ‘implicate order’ and quantum theory which has, over recent years, become increasingly embedded in New Age literature for its variety of versatile models and metaphors. What is more striking is that Puharich does not pursue the notion that the ‘vase-soul’ is, in some sense, a description of the UFO itself. The UFO, of course, often has a vase-like appearance and its effects, which are experienced or witnessed, are duly influential in their ‘perturbation’ of everyday existence.
There is the sense that the soul—or the UFO—is a ‘spill over’ into matter which, as the soul is embodied, is subject to the limitations of time and space. This is also evocative of Lurianic Kabbalah developed by Isaac Luria (1534–1572), for which his concept of tzimtzum is a sort of ‘concealment’ or ‘contraction’ of God. Gary Lachman, in The Caretakers of the Cosmos (2013), describes the process of tzimtzum:
Once the tzimtzum created the void, Adam Kadmon, the Primordial Man, appeared… Out of the eyes, nose, mouth and ears of Adam Kadmon come flashing lights, emanations of the divine creative energies. These form the sephiroth, or vessels, designed to contain these energies… (2003: 32)
The human being, in Kabbalah, is an expression of these energies that are contained and simultaneously shed forth into the material existence. We, as expressions of this cosmic schism, are responsible for a type of repair work which Luria called tikkun, which Lachman describes as a restoration ‘of the shattered sephiroth’ and that our job is to ‘heal the rift between the opposites, and unify the polarized masculine and feminine aspects of God’ (2003: 34). Again, the similarity to Puharich’s alleged extraterrestrial contact with Spectra leaves us with the distinct sense of esoteric knowledge being encoded within the anomalous experience. What left Uri feeling frustrated and bewildered left Puharich contending with the mysteries of human existence—there is the sense, in th
e UFO experience, of a deliberate friction being used to erode consensual reality, and within these fractures of reality they smuggle in new concepts for the understanding of our existential position. They present, in a peculiar way, a new cosmological and ontological model.
The engineer Bryant Reeve wrote a book with the significant title of The Advent of the Cosmic Viewpoint (1965), in which he proposes a similar hypothesis to the one presented in this essay. Indeed, Reeve began from a wish to understand the physical nature of the UFO (being an engineer with a distinctly scientific orientation) but instead found that only philosophy and metaphysics could do justice to any comprehensive understanding. Reeve, after considering the evidence substantially, concluded that it demanded a radical cosmological reorientation, and that it was essentially a psycho-spiritual or esoteric ‘event’ of enormous significance.
There is, in all this, something that hints towards what William James described as a vast ‘continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir’. Again, this relates to both consciousness and the ‘vase’/‘vessel’ imagery used in Puharich’s ‘contact’ and Kabbalistic cosmology. It is significant, then, that in each approach the human being is considered deeply involved in the universe, and whose position is in direct contrast to the sense of contingency and meaninglessness implicit in a strictly materialistic cosmos. Also, as we have seen in the case of Strieber, there was a sense that the phenomenon was attempting to subvert our ordinary understanding of life and death.
Here it is worth returning to the ‘new existentialism’ to elucidate what might be called the ‘cosmic viewpoint’, for Wilson states in Religion and The Rebel (1957) this way of seeing may:
… easily be called religion. It is a way of thought which, like the religious way, regards man as involved in the universe, not just a spectator and observer, a sort of naturalist looking at the universe through a magnifying-glass and murmuring: ‘Mmm. Most interesting.’ Existentialism states that the most important fact about man is his ability to change himself. (1990: 148)
In short, it is by changing our perception of ourselves, and recognising that we are an active component in a meaningful cosmos, that we begin to actualise our far-reaching potentialities. This is a much more invigorating way of living in the world, and in doing so activates the deeper reserves of the ‘life force’ to meet the challenges that we face in the real world. Furthermore, implicit in the recognition of a ‘cosmic viewpoint’ is an evolutionary context, or directive, which further converges with our revitalised momentum, our active engagement with the direction that the life force directs itself—that is, towards Ian Watson’s ‘higher-organization’, the ‘very dynamic of the universe’.
By recognising this meaningful nature of the cosmos, there is also another element that allows us to ‘read into’ the meanings contained there within: that is, the universe becomes interpretable through a hermeneutic phenomenology. The ‘flame of consciousness’ is able to bring forward the symbols and language of what Jacob Boehme called the ‘signatures’, which Wilson—again in Religion and The Rebel—describes: ‘just as an expert can find a criminal’s fingerprint on every object from a glass vase to a human throat’ (1990: 158). It is, Wilson continues, the ultimate mysticism of the West, providing a scientific insight into the mechanisms of the universe, as well as providing a simultaneous glimpse into William Blake’s visions of the infinite in a grain of sand. Wilson sees that the ‘“Life Force” has its own deep inscrutable aims and methods in this world of physical reality’, and this is precisely what the mystic can detect in those states of intense visionary consciousness.
This active approach to consciousness is indeed to what Jacques Vallée dedicated his classic book in ufology, Passport to Magonia (1969). He summarises it precisely:
… for the few who have gone through all this and have graduated to a higher, clearer level of perception of the total meaning of that tenuous dream that underlies… human history, for those who have recognised, within themselves and in others, the delicate levers of imagination and will not be afraid to experiment with them. (1975: 154)
In evoking the transformational power of art, Vallée continues to say, that like ‘Picasso and his art, the great UFO Master shapes our culture, but most of us remain unaware of it’ (1975: 160). Layers, like the varieties of applied paint on a canvas, bring forth something once implicit, something hovering in the mind’s eye of the artist. Wherever these visions or ideas come from is, in a sense, as mysterious as the arrival of any anomalous event. The imagination in art, of course, becomes a transit for the life force, providing as it does a vast enough medium for its expression. Rather like Boehme’s signatures, Vallée’s expression of a ‘clearer level of perception’ that enables a vision into the ‘dream that underlies history’ is an imaginative leap into the evolutionary drives underlying existence itself. And as far as we know, human beings are the life force’s most advanced expression.
This artistic vision was also experienced by another science-fiction writer, Philip K. Dick, whose many books have deeply impacted modern Hollywood with films like Total Recall, Blade Runner and Minority Report, among many others—directly or indirectly—attributed to his name. His novels often invoke what he called the ‘pluriform’ nature of our universe; its many layers and levels of alternate timelines (often dystopic in nature); varieties and shades of realities that exist alongside our ‘ordinary’ world of lived experience. In 1974 Dick claims to have undergone an unusual experience rather evocative, particularly in its use of language, of Puharich’s and Luria’s ‘energies’, or Boehme’s ‘signatures’. I quote from his visionary 1977 essay, ‘If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others’:
[the vision] resembled plasmic energy. It had colors. It moved fast, collecting and dispersing. But what it was, what he was—I am not sure even now, except I can tell you that he had simulated normal objects and their processes so as to copy them and in such an artful way as to make himself invisible within them… By this I mean that during that short period—a matter of hours or perhaps a day—I was aware of nothing that was not the Programmer. All the things in our pluriform world were segments or subsections of him. Some were at rest but many moved, and did so like portions of a breathing organism that inhaled, exhaled, grew, changed, evolved toward some final state that by its absolute wisdom it had chosen for itself. I mean to say, I experienced it as self-creating, dependent on nothing outside it because very simply there was nothing outside it [my italics]. (Quoted in Dick; 1996: 251–252.)
In this phenomenologically rich description of what is evidently a very striking event—Dick went on to write a gargantuan Exegesis that endlessly meditated on what he had undergone—we can see a series of correspondences with what we have pursued in this essay so far. Firstly, there is the artistry and embedded nature of its presence, that is, it is—to use Dick’s phraseology—‘pluriform’, but also somehow disguised, not in, but as the environment itself. He refers to it in the language of phenomenology as ‘the Programmer’, which is immediately reminiscent of Husserl’s ‘transcendental ego’—that Will which underlies our perceptions; the origin of the intention behind the intentionality, so to speak. Dick refers to it as ‘self-creating’ and ‘dependent on nothing outside’, for it simply is—a self-contained, evolving conglomerate of energy. There is also something inside out about the whole experience, for at first Dick describes it as a plasmic energy, contracting into a point and then dispersing, presumably, into the environment itself.
In a novel that attempted to dramatically portray and grapple with this anomaly, Dick labelled it by the acronym VALIS, which is short for: Vast Active Living Intelligence System. And in keeping with our esoteric trajectory, Dick indeed called one of his essays in his famed Exegesis with the tongue-in-cheek and Madame Blavatsky-esque title of ‘The Ultra Hidden (Cryptic) Doctrine: The Secret Meaning of the Great System of
Theosophy of the World, Openly Revealed for the First Time’. (Humour, it could be argued, was the one thing that prevented Dick from becoming something like a megalomaniac guru, or, indeed a cult-like figure like L. Ron Hubbard who established the Church of Scientology.)
In his remarkable segments of Exegesis, Dick propounded his extraordinary grip of a transcendental form of phenomenology, seeing as it were ‘signatures’ in our very cosmic and psychological constitution. Furthermore, like the Kabbalah he believed that what was demanded was a sort of ‘self-repair’. Indeed, he continues by saying that this includes rebuilding our world (which he calls ‘sub-circuit’ in this complex reflection):
via linear and orthogonal time changes (sequences of events), as well as continual signaling to us both en masse and individually (to us received subliminally by the right brain hemisphere, which gestalts the constituents of the messages into meaningful entities), to stimulate blocked neural (memory) banks within us to fire and hence retrieve what is there [my italics]. (1996: 327)
As imaginative and inventive as Dick was, it is curious that such an anomalous experience—which, in its odd form of ‘plasmic’ energy resembles the UFO phenomena—led to an expounding on metaphysical, even religious terms. There is a sense that it ‘reprogrammed’ him; indeed, he even says he saw by its light—he saw everything as permeated by ‘the Programmer’ (or the transcendental ego). Yet, he goes further by postulating a physical as well as cosmological theory that includes us in the remembrance—Plato’s Anamnesis—of things not only past, but of our role in the cosmos itself. It is worth comparing Dick’s conclusion to Wilson’s in Access to Inner Worlds (1983), in which Wilson emphasises that it is ‘we who transform… the raw material of perception into what we see. Perception is a sculpture, a moulder of reality… I fire it like an arrow’ (quoted in Stanley; 2016: 54). Wilson concludes by saying that the ‘world is a delightful place, full of hidden meanings’. We can see that Dick used similar language, positing us to ‘fire and hence retrieve what is there’, but, significantly, this reconstitution of a more meaningful reality is received—or added to our perceptions—by our right brain, which, as Dick points out ‘gestalts the constituents of the messages into meaningful entities’. In other words, it brings the ‘bits’ of reality into a unified and fundamentally meaningful whole.
Evolutionary Metaphors Page 5