That is a false view of time. The visitors offer a much better idea of time. They say the future is to the right, and it’s like water. The present is here and now, and it’s like a compressor. And the past is like ice. The water has now been turned into ice because the present has decided the shape the water will take, the shape the past will take. And this leaves room for entry into many different possible futures. We can change that water into any number of different shapes simply by the way we address it… What we have to learn to do—and this is as much an inner movement as an artefact of some potential technology—is to learn to move out of the time stream so that we can examine it more carefully and come to understand its real meaning.14
Implicit in this realisation of the reality of ‘other times and places’ man can act in a far more constructive way, and see himself as fundamentally important in the actualisation of realities in the stream of time. Again, the evolutionary metaphor is what the Kabbalists call tikkun, a repairing symbol that bridges the visible world with the invisible, and vice versa. Emphasising the nature of time along the same lines of Strieber, Lachman describes this process in Caretakers:
When we ‘complete’ the world, when we ‘represent’ the ‘unrepresented’, when we infuse dead matter with meaning, when we fill the empty forms of reality with the living force of the imagination, we are moving against the tide that is carrying the fallen, physical world into nothingness. (2013: 221)
Ultimately, the later view is entropic: it tends towards decay and disorder. Whereas the former, ‘infusing dead matter with meaning’, is negentropic: tending towards order and meaningfulness. Here Lachman emphasises the ‘filling up’ of the material universe with implicit meanings which work against entropy and time’s one-directional arrow.
Now there are two poignant symbols of both our understanding of a cosmos—a whole unified meaning—and a chaos, or that which results out of imbalance, allowing in destructive and destabilizing qualities. Jung’s discovery of the mandala in effect symbolises man’s inner-cosmos, his psyche, into the artistic creation of a whole with a centre—a centre which symbolises man’s point of individuation. The mandala is an artistic image, usually colourful and which is orientated around a central point, usually pulling inwards, as it were, all of the outside images; it is an attempt to spontaneously express the unconscious and conscious forces into a representative image of one’s inner-being. Usually, but not necessarily always symmetrical, it emphasises the psychic working of an individual, and particularly lays emphasis on integration of the Self. This is significantly in contrast to the chaos magic symbol, which is orientated outwards towards a magic form assertion (below):
Referred to as post-modern magic, or indeed ‘pop magic’, it is symbolised almost entirely by externalized influences, with little emphasis on interiority. As a modern phenomenon, on the fringes, it nevertheless represents a current of occult thinking in modern times. One commentator, the comic book artist Grant Morrison, mentions briefly the notion of a ‘hyper sigil’, a symbolic image which represents for the magician some will of which he wants to exert on to the world around him. The ‘hyper sigil’ is a larger version of an ordinary ‘sigil’, and for Morrison, ‘incorporates elements such as characterization, drama and plot. The hyper sigil is a sigil extended through the fourth dimension.’15 In other words, it is a dramatic cultural shift willed and enacted—or represented—through a cultural medium such as art, music or, in this case, Morrison’s imaginative comic books.
This type of experimental cultural manipulation is due to the fact that, as Peter Carroll says, ‘for the first time in history we live in a world where a substantial fraction of humanity has freedom of belief, and hardly knows what to do with it’, and this means that postmodernist, post-monotheist ‘culture has yet to formally explicate its ideal spirituality’ (2008: 55). This is where chaos magick steps in. Further on in The Apophenion he discusses a type of neo-pantheism which attempts to provide both an animistic and meaningful interaction with the environment. Uniquely, he places emphasis on the practicality of ‘magical thinking’, disposing it if it fails to work, and integrating it into its system of practices if it fails. Underlying his thesis, there appears to be no overarching metaphysic, or, in a sense, an evolutionary purpose—it is simply an experimental framework towards the rebuilding of a magical, metaphorical and analogical—even imaginal—worldview. He continues, ‘… if a superstition gives good results it gets reused, and coincidence rarely gets dismissed as mere coincidence… So if a synchronicity appears spontaneously we should consider interpreting it as an affirmation of deep intent, or a warning from the subconscious’ (2008: 60). And, as we have seen in the idea of ‘deep intentionality’, here Carroll acknowledges a similar ‘metaphysic’ in the sense of what he calls ‘deep intent’—this, essentially, is the closest chaos magic gets to an overall evolutionary ‘metaphysic’. In essence, Peter Carroll’s ‘chaos magic paradigm’ has its roots in phenomenology, for it incorporates direct experience based on its effectiveness and an active and creative relationship with reality.
Although there is a psychological dimension to chaos magic, what it is lacking is a vision of integration, of an emphasis on inner development. For example, when it posits the value of analogical thinking, it also understates the dangers of being misled. Ritual magicians warned precisely against these and projected—like Lyall Watson’s Amazonian healer—the psychological dangers into disembodied entities or ritual and symbolic situations. What this did was to contextualize the issue into something concrete; that is, they were explicitly reminding themselves that it had to be dealt with practically and as if it were an objective reality. This emphasis on objective consciousness—by stepping back from oneself—enabled the individual to discipline his own mind by refusing to be ‘taken in’ by a distorting web of entanglements produced by negative emotions—produced either in the individual or a collective malaise present in the ritual atmosphere, or even culture, at large.
However, the philosophical and existential insights of chaos magic cannot be underestimated. Indeed, its relativisms—as can be seen in the idea of neo-pantheism—may seem to undermine any particular philosophical or religious foundation, instead celebrating ambiguity and the ‘meaning perception’s’ ability to make models, new juxtapositions and heady brews of associative thinking. Nevertheless, there is also the element of Alfred North Whitehead’s statement that: ‘Speculative philosophy… is the endeavour to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted.’ Certainly, Whitehead’s definition of experience expands over a wide range of states:
Nothing can be omitted, experience drunk and experience sober, experience sleeping and experience waking, experience drowsy and experience wide-awake, experience self-conscious and experience self-forgetful, experience intellectual and experience physical, experience religious and experience sceptical, experience anxious and experience carefree, experience anticipatory and experience retrospective, experience happy and experience grieving, experience dominated by emotion and experience under self-restraint, experience in the light and experience in the dark, experience normal and experience abnormal.16
It is from this gestalt of experience that one can begin to make a new model of the cosmos that man finds himself an important part. It provides a working hypothesis in which one can act out freedom; it provides, as it were, a fundamental set of axioms from which to actively participate in a reality that tends towards greater complexification and, finally, actualisations of the realities implicit in that complexity. Prototypal models—if they are successful of course—go on to become commonplace tools, whether they are cars, light bulbs, helicopters etc. Again, this was the central insight that drove Arthur M. Young to write about cosmology after he invented the helicopter, for he knew, practically and philosophically, that cosmological models are important for the development of novel ideas and, furthermore, life-enhancing psychological changes. He a
lso intuitively realised that consciousness itself is a fundamental part of the cosmos we inhabit, for each evolutionary leap in consciousness is proportional to increased freedom. Young perceived the universe as the declension of light—with its boundless freedom from time and space—into matter, and then, at ‘the turn’ (or ‘shock’, as Gurdjieff would have called it), an increasing complexity of organisms—from mineral to man—until man’s higher destiny is reflected back at him in the cosmos itself. This is referred to in the ancient hermetic dictum: As above, so below.
It is now worth turning once again to the evolutionary metaphor along with the UFO and its associated phenomena. We will return to the discussion of chaos magic in this new context.
In his book Passport to the Cosmos (1999) the psychologist and parapsychologist, John E. Mack, describes the effects of the abduction phenomenon as an ‘intrusion into our reality from other realms’ that aid and contribute to ‘the gradual… spiritual rebirth taking place in Western culture.’ Mack continues:
Each of the principal elements of the phenomenon—the traumatic intrusions; the reality-shattering encounters; the energetic intensity; the apocalyptic ecological confrontations; the reconnection with Source; and the forging of new relationships across a dimensional divide—contributes to the daishigyo, the great ego death, that is marking the end of the materialist… paradigm that has lost its compatibility with life in the world as we know it. (1999: 299)
In Mack’s terms, the UFO experience provides a transformational paradigm in which an individual is rather forcibly reminded of their existential position in a cosmological context. Of course, this is in its broadest possible interpretation. Merely as a phenomenological event—perceived as if it were real—it is presented in science-fiction terms, that is, providing a framework in which to examine mankind’s purpose and, moreover, the responsibility of the individual in relation to the universe in which he lives. The experience is always future orientated in the extreme. Again, like Whitehead’s brand of existentialism, one may include the UFO as a symbol for the expansion of understanding ourselves. This, of course, is the sort of thing Jung understood to a great extent, being one of the most formidable intellects to apply himself to the phenomenon.
Whether we accept the UFO as an evolutionary metaphor or not, it can at least be incorporated and integrated more efficiently if it is treated as such. The phenomenon’s demand of multifaceted interpretations offers us the equivalent of a puzzle, an imaginative game, in which one can perceive new patterns, and radically stretch our intellectual, theoretical and imaginative capabilities. Even after a life of directly experiencing and writing about the UFO and abduction phenomenon, Whitley Strieber concludes his lifetime of experience suggests that we are much more than ‘sparks in flesh doomed to die with the inevitable implosion of the body’ and that, indeed, ‘we have hardly even begun to touch on the complexity and enormity of what it is to be human’ (2016: 336). He argues that the whole experience energizes a question—that raison d’être behind the evolutionary metaphor—which, he argues, is ‘our most valuable asset and our best hope’ (2016: 336). There is a suggestion in Strieber’s response to the ‘power of the question’, in which mystery in itself ensures the health of a species, for it encourages a growth towards a further understanding of itself and the cosmos.
Now, there is the post-modernism of chaos magic and the relativistic—or endlessly relativising—nature that underlies much of modern culture. The esoteric, of course, is also a part of this culture, but found on the fringes—or, as is sometimes the case, subtly embedded in popular culture such as comic books, films and so on. Its presence is notable in some way, either consciously or unconsciously. Again, chaos magic posits itself as a ‘new paradigm’ in which to update magic for the 21st century; or, at least, as a psychological tool that incorporates belief in paranormal abilities, inter-dimensional entities or extrasensory powers. Generally speaking, it does not entertain a radical metaphysics that is entirely departed from materialism; its substrate, interestingly, is still basically materialistic in the sense that it relativises Gods, demons, succubae etc. For many chaos magicians these are merely ‘animated’ psychological projections, garbed in symbols and dramas that make them appear as real—or, for practical and ritual purposes, quasi-independent interactive psychological realities.
Chaos magic, it could be argued, is a result of the chaos of a world with all its symbols uprooted; drifting and displaced; divorced from a central meaning of deeper purpose. To contrast this with Wilson’s description of the outsider presents an unusual insight into the modern civilized psyche and the plight of an essentially religious individual.
He is the creative individual whose instinct is to bring order out of chaos, to question the foundations of society… But since the Outsider’s impulse is fundamentally religious—the desire to be more ‘serious’ than other people is the essence of religion—he tends to be less of a misfit in ages of faith than in ages of materialism and skepticism. (1979: 265)
Further on in Mysteries, Wilson goes on to discuss UFOs, in which he makes the interesting comment: ‘Our minds are essentially provincial when, ideally, they ought to be cosmopolitan. We are not merely earth-bound; we have our heads buried in the earth.’ Wilson proceeds to cite Vallée’s belief that the ‘UFO phenomenon… [is] forcing us to look up, to get used to the idea that we are citizens of the universe, not just of this earth’ (1979: 563). This, of course, is the basic religious impulse that plagues the outsider; he feels that ordinary existence is too provincial—that rut of materialism and scepticism—and that this desire for ‘seriousness’ is essentially a requirement for a larger context which assents man’s position as significant—and, moreover, requires of us our active participation in a vast evolutionary project.
Again, Peter J. Carroll in The Octavo (2011) recognises that our civilization has reached a degree of immense complexity, some of which he describes as an ‘interdependent system of Integrated Information’ created from fossil fuels and other materials. This, he argues, has come to the point where it has run into a diminishing of its returns. However, mirroring this, he recognises that the individual too works on similar ‘inputs’. ‘We must look for new horizons and boundaries to change our energy/information input. We can use the input to increase our Integrated Information either in quantity or quality, or we can just squander it away on entropy’ (2011: 135–136). The outsider’s yearning for ‘seriousness’ is the yearning, essentially, for qualitative meaning and purpose that merits and benefits from—while complementing and elevating—the material manifold of existence. This, essentially, is what Lachman meant when he said the outsider is demanded to impose his values upon the world, for if he declines to do this the values of negentropy and chaos will win the day.
It is this sort of thinking that underlies much of mythic, analogical and metaphorical thinking, for, as Peterson says, this world of qualitative symbols infers an ‘emergent property of first-order self-reference’ and that it might be ‘regarded as the interaction between the universe as subject and the universe as object’ (1999: 290). This, of course, is exactly what the UFO exploits, for if one reads Jung or a large swathe of UFO literature, there is this constant paradoxical quality in which object becomes subject and vice versa. The ‘cosmic viewpoint’ is the realisation of universe as subject; in other words, it is implicit in our own being. After all, we constitute the universe by being inside it as much as, simultaneously, ‘outside’ it in the sense that we can become self-referential. To cease to be an outsider is to cease to be trapped in self-negation, and instead, finding a way out of the boundaries of personality and materialism towards a more elevated state of consciousness—and as a director of evolution.
On an individual level this can be seen with the individual versus mass-mindedness—or the Outsider and Western civilization—for it essentially equates to the same thing. Again, Jung notes in The Undiscovered Self that just as the ‘chaotic movements of the crowd, all ending in mutu
al frustration, are impelled in a definite direction by a dictatorial will, so the individual in his dissociated state needs a directing and ordering principle’ (1990: 4). The individual, at odds with the immense unconscious forces of the world, must, in himself, experience—or know directly—something which is integrative of both inner and outer ‘warring factions’. ‘[Ego-consciousness]… must experience them, or else it must possess a numinous symbol that expresses them and leads to their synthesis’ (1990: 35). This, of course, was what Whitehead meant with his huge list of all existential experiences, and it is towards their integration that Jung, Wilson and the many other individuals we have discussed in this essay have pointed towards.
Each, in their own unique way, provides a model for the psyche’s ‘coming-to-terms’—through intuition and symbolism—with an evolutionary intentionality. The UFO will remain on the perimeter of this further discussion, but—suitable to its nature—it will return cloaked in a new order of logic which I will further explore in these proceeding sections.
Vast Active Imagination
It is impossible to study a system of the universe without studying man. At the same time it is impossible to study man without studying the universe. Man is an image of the world. He was created by the same laws which created the whole of the world. By knowing and understanding himself he will know and understand the whole world, all the laws that create and govern the world. And at the same time by studying the world and the laws that govern the world he will learn and understand the laws that govern him. In this connection some laws are understood and assimilated more easily by studying the objective world, while man can only understand other laws by studying himself. The study of the world and the study of man must therefore run in parallel, one helping the other. –In Search of the Miraculous (2001: 75)
Evolutionary Metaphors Page 10