by Colin Wilson
Now it so happens that this was the starting point of my own work. The Outsider (1956) was about the number of men of genius in the nineteenth century who committed suicide or died of illnesses induced by ‘discouragement’. The reason was obvious. They would experience moods in which the whole universe seemed glorious, and in which they felt that life could be a continuous ecstasy. Then they would wake up the next morning, and wonder what on Earth it had all been about. And, since reality was very obviously cold, hard and problematic, they would conclude that the vision had been an illusion, and sink into depression.
What was happening was that in these ‘moments of vision’ they were experiencing the universe as pure energy, the energy that excites us in Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ or in the poetry of Goethe:
Es schäumt das Meer in breiten Fliissen
Am tie fen Grund der Felsen auf,
Und Fels and Meer wird fortgerrisen
In ewig schnellem Sphärenlauf.
And all the towering cliffs among
In spreading streams upfoams the ocean,
And cliffs and sea are whirled along,
With circling orbs in ceaseless motion.[6]
It is the energy that excites us in the music of Wagner or in Van Gogh’s painting The Starry Night. Van Gogh enables us to see the essence of the tragedy. In the later painting, we can see that he is experiencing this overwhelming sense of universal energy—the grass and trees and even buildings seem to surge upward like flames. Yet after these visions he came back to a world of endless financial anxiety, and the feeling that he was a burden on his brother and sister-in-law. This is why he killed himself, and left a note saying, ‘Misery will never end’. The vision seemed a lie.
What is more, science told him it was a lie. Huxley and Haeckel and Tyndall and the rest assured the romantics that the world could be explained in completely material terms, and that mind is a product of matter, in the same way as fire is a product of combustion.
Contemporary scientists like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking tell us the same thing. The absurd thing is that science itself tells us the opposite. It tells us that the universe is not made of matter but of vibrations of energy, and that mind seems to have some incomprehensible role in determining how this energy reveals itself.
It seems incredible that no one so far has noticed it. But modern science is telling us that the vision of the nineteenth-century romantics was true, and that their notion that matter is cold, hard and unyielding is untrue. Goethe, Wagner, Van Gogh and the rest were sensing the underlying reality of the universe.
Unfortunately, they did not know this. It seemed to them quite simply that their visions of affirmation were illusions, and this thought plunged them into depression. The result was a mood of self-pity, which became the main theme of much of the most typical poetry and art of the 1890s. In the twentieth century, self-pity developed into a stoical ‘realism’ that was based upon acceptance of human weakness and vulnerability, and which culminated in the work of writers like Graham Greene, William Golding and Samuel Beckett—the last of these epitomising the notion that human life is totally pointless and meaningless.
All this is understandable. To Goethe and Shelley and Wagner and Van Gogh and Nietzsche, it seemed that their vision of surging energy was contradicted by the brute force of matter. Now we know this is untrue. That vision of universal energy, and of the mind’s power to enter into creative interaction with it, is an accurate perception of the underlying reality.
It also enables us to understand why dowsing and psychometry seem to work. The energies of the universe have been ‘stamped’ with meanings by previous events, and some part of our mind has the power to decode these meanings. The sense of meaninglessness that seems such a typical part of everyday experience—particularly when we are tired or depressed—is an illusion, due to the superficial nature of everyday consciousness. To look for ‘meaning’ with everyday consciousness is like going to an art gallery and trying to appreciate the pictures through a pair of binoculars.
The philosophers who take this meaninglessness as their starting point—Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida—are quite simply wrong. The most urgent necessity at the moment is to create a new philosophy based upon the recognition of underlying meaning.
Now let us look again at the problem of UFOs from the standpoint of this new understanding of the nature of reality.
It explains, to begin with, some of their paradoxical behaviour: their ability to appear out of nowhere, to defy the laws of inertia by changing direction at tremendous speeds, to disappear in one part of the sky and reappear simultaneously in another. Our chief mistake lies in thinking of UFOs as craft like our own space probes when all the evidence suggests that they are unknown energy forms.
And what about the entities who control them? We have seen again and again how those who have experienced ‘close encounters’ have felt that their powers far surpass our own. Human beings seem to be as helpless in their hands as babies. They can apparently make us do what they like, then wipe the memory clean. Yet although encounters with them can be downright unpleasant, there seems to be a general agreement that they are not malevolent or hostile. They simply seem to regard us as we would regard Neanderthals.
But one thing ought by now to be clear. It is not they who see us as Neanderthals: it is we who regard ourselves as Neanderthals compared with them. If this book has tried to make one thing clear, it is that human beings possess powers of which they are unaware.
So, 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. I would argue that the evidence suggests that their purpose is to help us to make that transition.
We may note Brian O’Leary’s comment that ‘through their experiences, an ever increasing number of people are telling us we are on a collision course with a destiny far beyond our conscious minds’, and Vallee’s conclusion that UFO phenomena ‘have had an impact on a part of the human mind we have not discovered’. He goes on to suggest that the phenomena are ‘one of the ways through which an alien form of intelligence of incredible complexity is communicating with us symbolically’.
Again, we have also seen, in an earlier chapter, how Hawkins has predicted that man is on the point of a new ‘mindstep to the cosmos’. Mindstep 1 towards understanding his universe was mythology. Mind-step 2 was early astronomy. Mindstep 3 was the Copernican revolution, aided by the printing press. Mindstep 4 was the modern space age, with its attempt at a ‘theory of everything’. And the next mindstep, Hawkins speculates, could be a new technology for exploring the universe, or a contact with extraterrestrial civilisations.
But if these aliens are really extraterrestrials, or even interdimensionals from parallel worlds, why do they not tilt the balance by making their presence known so positively that no one could doubt it?
None of the ufologists I have quoted in this book has addressed this question—except for the occasional hint that downright interference in human affairs is somehow ‘not allowed’. But why not? And not allowed by whom?
One of the few plausible attempts to answer these questions was made by the novelist Ian Watson, best known for his tour de force, The Embedding (1973), which has claims to be one of the best science-fiction novels ever written. But his Miracle Visitors displays a grasp of the UFO phenomenon that reveals someone who not merely studied it, but has tried to find an answer to the mystery.
The central character is a professor of psychology named Deacon, who has edited a book on the subject of consciousness. One of his students, Michael Peacocke, has seen a UFO on a Yorkshire moor, and experienced ‘missing time’. Under hypnosis, Michael recalls being taken on board and induced to have sex with a blonde alien, who introduces herself as Loova. One of the aliens tells him that they are from a planet called Ulro. Deacon happens to know that Loova and Ulro can be found in William Blake’s prophetic books, and assumes th
at Michael’s abduction is simply an expression of his unconscious sexual urges.
Weird events ensue, most of them based on actual reports. The professor’s dog is beheaded. Michael’s girlfriend has a terrifying encounter with an alien, followed by a visit from men in black, and has a nervous breakdown. An Egyptian mystic has an encounter with Khidr, Master of the Saints, also known as the Green Man. Later, Michael has further UFO encounters which culminate in a visit to an alien base on the far side of the moon, accompanied by Deacon and an American investigator.
The climax of the novel occurs after the three have returned to Earth, and are separated in the Mojave Desert of California. There Deacon also encounters the Green Man, and has a mystical revelation about evolution:
For all these inaccessibilities caused a fierce suction towards even higher patterns of organisation, towards higher comprehension. So molecules became long-chain molecules, and these became replicating cells that transmitted information . . . till mind evolved, a higher mind.
The universe, he realised, 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. Each higher order was inaccessible to the lower order, yet each lower order was drawn towards the higher—teased by the suction of the higher.
(Watson, The Miracle Visitors, 1973)
Absorbed into this higher order, Deacon suddenly becomes aware that it was he who cut off his dog’s head, failing to recognise that his touch could be fatal. He was the blonde woman who seduced Michael. He was the alien who caused Michael’s girlfriend to have a nervous breakdown.
As to why UFOs do not interfere more directly:
There was a plus and minus factor at work too, he saw. When you inject a higher-order knowledge, something must change within the lower-order reality or be lost to it, to compensate. The trick was to make the loss the least negative one possible—to create merely mystery, not damage. UFO intrusions all too often scared the wits out of people, maimed them, slew animals, stole flesh and blood. ‘You had to pay the Devil . . .’. But really, the UFO wisdom was an awareness of the universe thinking itself, causing itself, evolving itself.
‘To create merely mystery, not damage’. In other words, the mystery is essential, to open up the way to the perception of higher-order knowledge. More positive intervention would be self-defeating, since the aim is to persuade human beings to take the crucial step themselves. Every schoolteacher knows that education can achieve its real purpose only by making the pupil want to learn. The aim is to lure free will into expressing itself and recognising its own existence.
An equally striking view of ‘UFO reality’ has been expressed by Ralph Noyes, a vice president of the Society for Psychical Research and the editor of one of the first books on crop circles, in a novel called A Secret Property (1985). Noyes was a high-ranking civil servant, and the novel reflects his knowledge of the workings of government. Set in the Cold War era, it concerns attempts by the Russian and Western governments to make use of psychics for military purposes. It is based on the notion that Earth is surrounded not only by what Teilhard de Chardin called the biosphere—the living envelope of life—but by a ‘psychosphere’, an envelope of supersensible realities.
Whipped up into local vortices, [the psychosphere] whirled saucer djinns into the innocent lives of a farmer in the Brazilian uplands, a housewife on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, a couple of vacationing Americans in Venezuela. It had not quite reached the force at which it would turn them into the blue-electric torches of spontaneous combustion. It merely singed their hair, arrested their vehicles, sucked them into saucer visions, gouged up the Earth into traces which would remain, for ever, not quite evidential enough for a court of law.
Noyes is suggesting that UFO phenomena may not always be deliberately engineered: they may be meteorological eruptions from the psychosphere. He is also suggesting that spontaneous human combustion may also be one of its manifestations. The psychosphere, Noyes feels, is a realm whose laws we do not even begin to understand.
Another English writer, Patrick Harpur, believes that behind our material reality there is a ‘daimonic reality’, and, in a book of that title (1994), he argues that UFO phenomena can be understood only in the same terms as apparitions, fairies, religious visions and the ‘other world’ of the shamans. His thesis has much in common with Vallee’s Passport to Magonia, but draws its evidence from a wider range of examples, and argues that the underlying reality of the universe is what Plato called anima mundi, the soul of the world.
In 1992, in an article for a Japanese magazine, I had made my own attempt to formulate an answer to the problem:
More than twenty years of psychical research have led me to the conclusion that there is a ‘psychic reality’ which runs parallel to our physical reality. Ghosts, demons, poltergeists, fairies, even ‘vampires’, are incursions from this ‘other reality’ into our own. Like the human race, the denizens of this other realm probably change and evolve, so their methods of drawing attention to themselves also change and evolve.
In ancient times, there were simply ghosts, believed to be spirits of the dead. In the Middle Ages came poltergeists. In the 17th century there were vampires. In the 19th century, there were all kinds of ‘spirit communicators’. In the second half of the 20th century there are UFOs. In the 21st century, there will probably be some new wave of ‘strange phenomena’ which at present we cannot even imagine.
Do these phenomena have a ‘purpose?’ That is impossible to say; but one thing is very clear: that their effect is to remind human beings that their material world is not the only reality. We are surrounded by mystery that cannot be understood in terms of scientific materialism. If psychic phenomena have a purpose, it is to wake us up from our ‘dogmatic slumber’, and galvanise us to evolve a higher form of consciousness.
The only sentence with which I would now take issue is the one about the twenty-first century, which implies that UFOs are simply another type of psychic phenomenon from this ‘parallel reality’. Now I would say that their purpose is not simply to remind us that the material world is not the only reality, but to draw us by a kind of suction into consciousness of another kind of reality.
Imagine that you are a Martian, or a being from another star system, and that you are paying a visit to Earth to check on the green planet’s evolution. Your predecessors had noted the progress of this upright, humanoid creature, so much more intelligent than his nearest relative, the ape. But the real distinction is that these humans are religious. All living creatures have a vague perception of a supernatural realm, but man’s perception means that he sees the world around him peopled with spirits. Mountains fill him with a sense of awe; so do lakes and forests. There is no evidence that gorillas or horses feel that way.
When the cosmic expedition reaches Earth (about a hundred thousand years ago), its scientists are pleased to discover that the most intelligent creature on the planet is a type of man that we call Neanderthal (after the valley in Germany where his skull was later discovered). Neanderthal is small, and prefers to live in caves. He is known to eat his own kind—not for food, but because he thinks he takes on the vitality of his enemy. He has strong family feelings, and takes care of old and infirm members of the tribe. Above all, he worships the dead, whom he buries with elaborate ritual involving woven carpets of flowers. And, because the red clay called ochre is the colour of blood (due to iron oxide), he holds it in the same high regard as we feel for gold. In fact, he mines it from the ground—with appropriate rituals to propitiate the mountain gods—and later reseals it with more apologies to the gods. But, although one variety of Neanderthal hunts with the bow and arrow, he is not deeply intelligent. His lack of organisation is revealed in his cave dwellings, which are piled high with bones and other refuse. His brain is large—far larger than modern man’s—probably because his social life is so rich and complex; but he cannot be said to use it much.
Sixty thousand y
ears later, the Martians pay us another routine visit. This time, things look much more promising. The gentle, bumbling Neanderthal has been driven out by a newcomer who is more aggressive, and, in one vital respect, more intelligent. This is our ancestor, Cro-Magnon man, whose emergence has been so swift that the space visitors wonder if some previous expedition has been experimenting with a little genetic engineering.
What is so fascinating about this new man is that he has taken the one vital step that makes him truly human, and discovered science. Of course, we would not call it science, but ‘magic’, for his shamans play a vital role in his hunting activities: they make drawings of bison, deer and other animals on the walls of his caves, then perform a ritual which involves dressing up in a deer skin with antlers, and leading a ritual dance. Oddly enough, this actually works, removing a great deal of the element of chance from hunting. (Lethbridge would say that the shaman was simply locating the prey through some form of divination; but Cro-Magnon man undoubtedly believed he was drawing the prey into an ambush, and he may have been right.) This is why the Cro-Magnon population has increased in size, and why our ancestor has displaced the Neanderthals.
We can see that what was so important was that Cro-Magnon man had developed a new attitude to life. Animals feel helpless and vulnerable, accepting their lot and making no effort to escape it. They are not even capable of the thought of controlling the world around them. But this new type of man believed that his shamans had miraculous powers, and could intercede directly with the gods. The shamans—as we would expect—had become their tribal chieftains. So Cro-Magnon man no longer had the sheeplike acceptance of his destiny that characterised Neanderthal. He was beginning to develop the feeling that H. G. Wells caught in the phrase, ‘If you don’t like your life you can change it’.