The new existentialism acknowledges that there are levels of consciousness and that meaning, being the substratum as well as the evolutionary life force of existence itself, is relatively apprehended at each level. At higher levels we become aware of increasing meaningfulness; at lower levels we dis-integrate, and as a result, our sense of values decreases in proportion; eventually we cease to make any intentional effort required for the access of meaning. The latter becomes a vicious circle, whereas the former can achieve a level of ‘positive feedback’ by reinforcing itself after a certain level has been reached.
By examining the UFO mystery through the esoteric and phenomenological lenses provided by Wilson and others, what emerges is a symbol and metaphor for the development of a new paradigm in which human––and non-human––consciousness’ role in evolution and reality is of crucial importance––and far exceeds its lowly position in our current materialistic climate. Wilson reached the same conclusion in Alien Dawn, for he sees both the UFO and occult phenomenon as forcing to us to accept a multidimensional understanding of reality. Indeed, he agrees with both Vallée and Mack, by considering the phenomenon to be heuristic in nature. ‘[S]omething,’ Wilson writes, ‘is trying to alter and widen our concept of reality’ (1999: 372).
Later on in Alien Dawn Wilson discusses the meaning of synchronicity, that is, as we may recall, of meaningful synchronous events––initially felt as an absurd coincidence––in which time and space are radically called into question. It is curious, at this point, to note the often symbolic and metaphoric nature of just how paranormal phenomenon provides for what Mack called an ‘ontological shock’. The anomalous redefines our existential orientation, tilting it, as we shall see, towards a new paradigm––precisely a widened conception of reality.
The recognition of a level of deep intentionality as the underlying manifold of existence provides in itself a re-evaluation of what we call ‘causal’; for if we accept the scientific materialist frame of reference there is only the cause and its inevitable effect. If we understand, like Michael Talbot, that consciousness is a ‘reality-structurer’ then what occurs regarding our present paradigm is a ‘slow and continual change of axis from causality to synchronicity’ [my italics] (1991: 123). This recognition, which is of paradigmatic importance, suggests a new understanding on both existential as well as cosmological levels. The two, of course, reflect upon each other and are, moreover, interlinked. Now, if one accepts consciousness to be intentional, then, what is relational is what constellates the meaning in a web-like fashion; a bringing together of facts, of real meanings. The recognition, then, becomes that the world and consciousness are synchronous and fundamentally participatory in their revealing of meaning. In other words, consciousness is the essential part in bringing forth the implicit dimensions of reality; it is, above all, a reciprocal process. One could even call it nature’s way of self-learning.
Wilson argues that these UFO entities whose ‘powers far surpass our own nevertheless seem to be aiding us in our recognition of dimensions within ourselves which are equal to these entities.’ He continues, ‘… from the point of view of the UFO entities, the human race is a species that is about to make the transition to a state that our visitors have already reached.’ Their purpose, he argues, ‘is to help us make that transition.’
Now, if these entities are inter-dimensional and perhaps even cross over in some odd way with the dead––as Strieber has come to believe––how, then, do they get their messages across? How do they aid in this transition between two worlds, two perspectives? As I have tried to show throughout this essay, there is the important metaphorical element to much anomalous phenomena. Vallée even argues that the phenomenon is ‘one of the ways through which an alien form of intelligence of incredible complexity is communicating with us symbolically’.
The science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick has also mentioned that when he saw the world with both hemispheres in synchrony he experienced an entirely different world. A world, we could say, experienced synchronistically rather than causally. To understand this phenomenon to its greatest extent, we need to begin to tilt our ontological axis so that the two worlds––perceptual and conceptual––converge. However, with the view of the abduction phenomenon this worldly transition doesn’t come without its traumatic birth pangs. The work of John Mack and Budd Hopkins, along with the regression hypnotherapy records of many abductees, presents a daunting mountain of often terrifyingly icy impersonality and emotionless procedures of the medical variety.
And yet, despite this, many abductees discuss––after their integration of the trauma at the hands of competent psychiatrists, or through personal developments––a profoundly positive inner-change and deep recognition of another dimension of reality. Prior to this realisation, however, is a difficult adjustment period that challenges the individual––and sometimes whole families––on every level imaginable. Nevertheless, once a form of integration has taken place, and the abductee begins to understand his or her abduction in an entirely different light, then the experience itself becomes uniquely transformational.
What becomes of immense importance to the abductee is the relationship between him- or herself and the trauma: there is, naturally, the initial sense of being a victim; one who is experimented upon and brutally examined without any permission or, indeed, any clearly defined reason. The abductee, as a result, is precisely traumatized by the sense of his/her utter powerlessness.
To understand this in a transformational framework it is worth applying what Jeffrey Kripal calls the traumatic secret, comprising a dialectic of the three components: trauma, trance and transcendence. Kripal begins from the same premise as Wilson, in that he too understands consciousness to be ‘blinkered’ when it comes to accessing larger dimensions of reality; it is, as Kripal rightly points out, precisely the ‘human body-brain’, the nervous system, which reduces consciousness in the same way that our laptop filters out many other signals and tunes into a specific bandwidth for its purposes. Otherwise, of course, the laptop, much like human consciousness, would be bombarded by a storm of chaotic, conflicting information which would send us spiralling into sensory overload. Kripal continues:
Sometimes, however, the reducer is compromised or temporarily suppressed. The filtering or reduction of consciousness does not quite work, and other forms of mind or dimensions of consciousness, perhaps even other species or forms of life, that are normally shut out now ‘pop in’ [my italics].
If, as the phenomenon seems to hint, these entities exist in a state of matter––or form––which is dimensionally different from our own, then our consciousness too is in a state many dimensions parallel to ourselves; we access just a number of bandwidths out of a spectrum of consciousness, or conscious nesses. In other words, we too exist in one slither of a wide-ranging, inter-dimensional bandwidth, and what we experience as ourselves is only the reduced version of all that we are, in potential. Conversely this posits that the entities too can exist in realities entirely invisible to our own level of consciousness. Of course, this notion is altogether rejected by our current materialist paradigm, and this, in turn, generates a disorientating shift of perspective for the abductee whose fundamental existential axioms are severely compromised––resulting, indeed, in an ‘ontological shock’.
The frustrating bridge for the abductee is the fact that they are experientially true events, and yet, both their logic forbids as well as, in some cases, the material, physical evidence. Often the abduction even seems to take place in their bedrooms, woods, or while driving their car; a UFO or bright light or orb appears in what is, essentially, the context of everyday existence, yet all the laws of time and space are broken. And, worst of all, they are usually left with only the traumatic experience to show for it, which is rejected as perhaps pathological and/or ‘merely anecdotal’.
Let us briefly outline some common themes found in the abduction experience.
Once ‘taken aboard’ the craft, or vessel, o
r into another dimension entirely, the abductee often finds him- or herself in an utterly unfamiliar environment in which they are commonly, but not always, paralysed. Undergoing a battery of medical or surgical tests and procedures––another common feature––they are witness to an unusual entity, or group of entities, which are frequently described as insectoid-like, hairless, large-almond-eyed beings that often communicate in vague terms, usually via thought transference or telepathy. Again this is a general outline, for experiences vary largely in other cases, with descriptions in direct contrast to the ‘common’ traits and observances above.
Usually the event is followed by ‘missing time’ in which the abductee suddenly finds themselves an hour or more amiss (sometimes even days or weeks have been reported). In some cases they are clueless to the sequence of events leading up to the missing time period and simply have a ‘blank’––or they have a general sense of unease, and ‘flashbacks’ of the events. These memories are often found buried, as it were, or repressed or removed altogether by a type of hypnotic suggestion. Retrieval of memory, in such circumstances, is often brought about either over time and happenstance, or the abductee undergoes hypnotherapy or psychiatric help to gain access to memories pertaining to the anomalous gaps of time. Or, indeed, they may emerge as symptoms such as irrational phobias, which, in themselves, suggest that they have undergone a deeply unusual experience of which they are not consciously aware.
These, for the sake of this essay, provide a general context from which to discuss the abduction experience, and it leads us on to discuss the transformational realities that result from these anomalous traumas.
One abductee, as detailed in Mack’s Abduction, for the sake of anonymity called ‘Eva’, reports what she believes the role of abductions to be: ‘To clean the body, physical body, in order for more information to come through’ (1994: 260). Certainly this ‘cleaning process’ seems to be an incredibly traumatic experience. And yet, if our consciousness does indeed work as a reducing valve for other, larger and more potent realities, could the traumatic process be directly attributable to the process of this perceptual widening?
In Miracle Visitors Ian Watson observes a ‘plus and minus factor at work’ and this relates to the problem of injecting ‘higher-order knowledge’ for, in this process, ‘something must change within the lower-order reality or be lost to it, to compensate.’ He continues: ‘The trick was to make the loss the least negative one possible––to create merely mystery, not damage’ [my italics]. Mystery, of course, is best served symbolically, thus preserving the implicit content of the message in such a way that after careful consideration and integration the meaning reveals itself equal to the interpreter’s level of consciousness. Other than that, one could simply open all of the doors of perception at once, as it were. A sudden revealing of this whole new reality would, perhaps, overwhelm the reducing mechanism, causing irreparable psychic damage. Metaphoric expression, therefore, becomes a sort of ‘stepping-down’ process, and the most painless means to widen our perceptual range.
Now ‘Eva’, like Kripal, goes on to mention that it is the physical body––the nervous system––that is being cleansed. Trauma, of course, often has a deeply physical component, and many of the procedures undergone in the abduction experience do appear to relate directly to the body, and yet it is difficult to discern which body they are operating upon. It seems, at times, to be both/and the physical body and what we might call a ‘spirit’ or non-physical body. The ‘body’, in fact, may be a metaphorical representation of our consciousness as it is disembodied from the physical––that is, it composes a sort of ‘mental body’, symbolically or actual.
Curiously another abductee, ‘Carlos’, in Mack’s chapter ‘A Being of Light’, describes leaving his body and floating through walls and windows––all solid materiality seemed to be no obstacle. ‘Carlos’ also describes the ‘transubstantial bodily-material changes’ in which he ‘dissolves’ at a cellular level through a painful process of ‘breaking from material form into light energy’ (1994: 343). Again here two or more realities are blurred and a third state is suggested: an existence in which, apparently conscious, we are subsumed or transubstantiated into a vast manifold of light. The religious connotations, of course, are clear if we think of Catholicism and the transubstantiation of the body of Christ. This state of being is often referred to as simultaneously a state of after (physical) life and, indeed, as a stage before we inhabit corporeal existence as a physical body. ‘Carlos’ describes the location of this light-realm as simply, ‘out of space. It was not space/time’ (1994: 343). This will become increasingly important as we discuss the work of the psychologist Stanislav Grof.
Before we move on it is worth turning to another description of a reality in which the laws of consensual reality, and our understanding of human consciousness, are dramatically turned inside out. This case, however, concerns an individual who has had no such experience with UFO entities, but instead experimented with his own consciousness. It concerns the Russian philosopher, already mentioned in this essay, Ouspensky, who describes his extraordinary experiences in an essay entitled, ‘Experimental Mysticism’, in his book A New Model of the Universe. It is likely that these experiments were conducted with the aid of nitrous oxide (dental gas).
Ouspensky warns us that such experiences of these intense states are influenced, more generally, by the philosophical or religious context, or interpretative language, through which the experiencee is enmeshed. Each framework or point-of-view presupposes its own epistemology which, in turn, attempts to approach the phenomenal and numinous experiences within its own structure. And each experience, rather like that of ‘Carlos’, will be tainted with words, concepts and terminologies which remind one of another belief system. These are, effectively, the paradigms in which one operates, but, nevertheless, they do share a common experience of something numinous, unexplainable, and baffling to ordinary language. They are, says Ouspensky, at best approximations of another reality.
Ouspensky describes his own experience in which the ‘objective and subjective could change places’, and ‘the habitual mistrust of the subjective disappeared; every thought, every feeling, every image, was immediately objectified in real substantial forms which differed in no way from the forms of objective phenomenon’ (1989: 314). In this state, we may venture, the subjective nature of an evolutionary metaphor, then, might become a reality in itself; and which, on the other side of the dimensional partition, so to speak, it once again becomes a symbol, or, as Ouspensky calls it, a ‘motif’. A ‘motif’, for him, became a relational pattern which was represented as a ‘very complicated design’ developing out of a set of simple laws. And yet, it had a recursive, highly information-rich nature which could suddenly switch between various modes of expression and manifestation: music, a visible form, a sort of mosaic design, which in turn could be turned again, back into sounds, music and any other apparently unique modality of expression. All this took place, he says, in a dimension of ‘mathematical laws’ (1989: 315).
Language too took on this complex self-referential quality. So much so in fact he could proceed no further than uttering the simple phrase ‘I said yesterday…’ before yielding to its sheer implications, its interrelated complexity and meaning-content that was associated with each of the three words. Identity: communication: time. A sense of an infinity of relations opened up before him with each utterance. ‘I’, for example, unravelled philosophical as well as psychological realities regarding the nature of identity. The word ‘said’ produced further ideas related to ‘speech, the possibility of expressing thoughts in words, the past tense of the verb’, and each of these ‘ideas produced an explosion of thoughts, conjectures, comparisons and associations’ (1989: 316).
‘Experimental Mysticism’ provides a brief glimpse into an extraordinary richness relating to even the most apparently ordinary realities we take for granted. Everything, it seemed for Ouspensky, took on an almost infinitely relati
onal quality, to the point that even a trivial object such as an ashtray could send him into a vision of endless documentary of origin––design and conception, from the trivial, everyday practical manufacturing of the object to its cosmic significance and origin.
An important point, however, is that Ouspensky was no passive or neutral observer of these visions, rather they involved an enormous emotional component in which feelings of ‘joy, wonder, rapture, horror’ continually changed ‘into one another’ and would often correspond with the vast unfolding spectacle before him. Although trauma may be too strong a word to use for Ouspensky’s visionary experience, this does not prevent us from drawing a parallel with the transformational knowledge attested to by so many abductees, who similarly undergo an experiential spectrum of emotion and emerge with an ability, to adopt Ouspensky’s phrase, to ‘think in other categories’ (paradigms).
In fact, Ouspensky recorded his insight and found, when he became sober, that he had written down the phrase ‘think in other categories’; a curious message that has much in common with alien abduction literature. Indeed, it provides an explanation for some of the more symbolic claims of the entities in which visions, usually presented on a screen or inside the abductees’ minds as an inner-panorama, forewarn the human race about their future. Many of these sometimes dire visions seem to be intended to be interpreted somewhere between a metaphor and a reality, and the urgency for change more often than not refers directly to human consciousness. Mack importantly highlights the allegorical nature of much of the content, suggesting that, reminiscent of Ouspensky’s experience described above, ‘the realms of consciousness and of existence to which abductees travel during their experiences the distinction between the literal and the metaphoric or the objective and the subjective, seems to lose its power’ [my italics] (1994: 109). Amusingly one bewildered abductee, ‘Ed’, even protested, asking the entities: ‘Why do you talk to me in allegory? I’m no poet!’
Evolutionary Metaphors Page 12