by Colin Wilson
This looks so promising that the visitors begin making more frequent checks, and even offer a little occasional instruction. (The humans, of course, regard them as gods.) But when they return about seventeen thousand years ago, and discover that civilisation is beginning to flourish, they become aware of a new problem. These simple people are not yet ready for civilisation. And this is due to a law that might be called the Law of Complication, which states that success brings expansion, and expansion brings complication. When that happens, life loses its spontaneity, and becomes an endless, exhausting struggle against complication. The same problem would later cause the downfall of the Persian and the Roman Empires.
What has almost certainly happened is that their shamans have achieved such power that small tribes have been absorbed by large ones, and ‘civilisation’ (which means literally ‘citification’) has become inevitable. But since it is still based on religion and magic, and its leaders are not ready for such full-scale expansion, the experiment is doomed to failure. There is evidence to suggest that, in fact, it ended with a geological catastrophe which scattered the survivors all over the world—particularly to Egypt and South America.[7]
The next attempt at civilisation, beginning about twelve thousand years ago, is altogether more successful. Man rediscovered agriculture, built cities, and developed writing. Ancient Egypt was the most successful civilisation so far, and this was largely due to its obsession with religion, as well as to its fortunate geographical position, with mountains on three sides to defend it from enemies. It was rather like an enormous village, whose ends are connected by the Nile, and its hierarchical structure, with the pharaoh regarded as a god, and the priests as its aristocracy, created the highest level of peace and prosperity humankind has ever known.
This could not last. Even in 2000 BC, the modern world was moving too fast for a theocracy.
At some point in history, man became a ‘left brainer’—that is, the rational part of the brain became the dominant hemisphere, relegating the intuitive part to a supporting role. Julian Jaynes, in his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), has suggested a fairly precise date—around 1250 BC. Jaynes believes that, during the tremendous wars that convulsed the Middle East after 2000 BC, human beings were forced to acquire a new ruthlessness and efficiency in order to survive. He believes that this ‘change of mind’ came about in Mesopotamia. Kings up to this point were regarded as gods, and carvings show them sitting on a throne beside the god. But a carving of 1250 BC shows the Assyrian king Tukulti-Ninurti kneeling in front of the empty throne of the god. Man is suddenly trapped in the left brain, and has lost touch with the divine. A cuneiform text of the period contains the lines:
One who has no god, as he walks along the street
Headache envelops him like a garment.
Jaynes may or may not be correct about when it happened. I am inclined to suspect that left-brain awareness developed slowly and inevitably with the coming of the cities. What matters is that it always produces the same effect. When the logical brain operates without the backup of its intuitive companion, life loses its richness, and we become subject to irritability and tension.
But that brings a certain compensation. Since the left brain’s purpose is to ‘cope’ with everyday life and ‘scan’ it for problems, the narrower left-brain awareness permits long periods of concentration on small things. And concentration on small things is the foundation of science and technology. In due course, these became the foundation of modern civilisation.
But left-brain awareness has one enormous drawback. Being limited and obsessive, it narrows the range of consciousness. When we are happy and relaxed (that is, in a ‘right-brain’ state), we have a sense of ‘meanings beyond’ the present moment. When we are trapped in left-brain awareness, we lose all sense of ‘meanings beyond’. We feel that this—the present moment—is all there is.
So our cosmic visitors would have noted that the human race has entered a kind of spiritual cul-de-sac, an evolutionary dead end. Left-brain dominance would lead to technological achievement and the ‘conquest of nature’. But it would also lead to a vague sense of frustration and dissatisfaction, since we know instinctively that technological achievement is not the real purpose of life.
Unfortunately, our blinkered left-brain awareness can see no other purpose. Driven on by its own momentum, it has achieved immense technological development, and the problems that go with it—overpopulation, the endless proliferation of cities, and pollution of the environment.
But these are only the symptoms. Our visitors would be able to understand the deep, underlying problem: that, when the left brain feels there is nothing to ‘scan’, it tends to sink into a kind of hypnosis. We call it ‘boredom’, but it is more than that. It is a kind of judgment on the universe, a feeling that no effort is worth making.
The odd thing is that, when we are galvanised by a sense of emergency, it suddenly becomes obvious that it is perfectly easy to concentrate our energies. Hans Keller, the former head of BBC music, once described how, in prewar Germany, when he was in danger of being arrested and sent to a concentration camp, he prayed: ‘Oh God, let me get out of Germany, and I swear I’ll never be unhappy again’. It seemed obvious that, once this crisis was behind him, he could be happy all the time. And Graham Greene’s ‘whiskey priest’, in The Power and the Glory, suddenly recognises, as he stands before a firing squad, ‘how easy it would have been to be a saint’. Dr. Johnson went to the heart of the matter when he said, ‘When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully’.
Why is it so hard to keep the mind concentrated, and to live up to our good resolutions? The problem is the basically mechanical nature of left-brain consciousness. We have a kind of robot servant who does things for us: we learn to type or drive a car, painfully and consciously, then our robot takes over, and does it far more quickly and efficiently. Because man is the most complex creature on Earth, he is forced to rely on his robot far more than other animals. The result is that, whenever he gets tired, the robot takes over. For the modern city dweller, most of his everyday living is done by the robot. This is why it takes an emergency to concentrate the mind ‘wonderfully’, and why we forget so quickly.
The problem of living with permanent low-pressure consciousness is that we forget what real consciousness is like. We all experience it in flashes, perhaps in what Abraham Maslow calls ‘peak experiences’, when we are flooded with sudden delight, or on spring mornings, when everything seems marvellously real and alive. But we then accept it as a kind of freak. Low-pressure consciousness seems, on the whole, more ‘normal’. The trouble is that low pressure tends to prolong itself, because it can see no reason to do otherwise. When you are staring blankly in front of you, thoroughly bored and discouraged, you find it very difficult to see any reason to make an effort. It seems easier just to sit and stare. This is why the human race is marking time at its present stage of evolution.
Religion, on the other hand, has a tradition of high-pressure consciousness. That is why yogis sit cross-legged, focusing and concentrating the attention. That is why monks spend hours on their knees in prayer. That is why ascetics devote their lives to meditation. It gives them a glimpse of higher levels of power which make ordinary living seem futile by comparison.
Now it seems clear that our ‘alien’ visitors have long since risen beyond the stage of evolution in which humankind finds itself trapped. Many contactees have received the impression that they are in the presence of a more highly developed form of life. It also seems logical to assume that, at some stage, they went through the phase in which the human race now finds itself. If we could begin to formulate some notion of how they managed to find their way beyond it, we might begin to see our own way out of the cul-de-sac.
The answer is, I believe, more straightforward than we might assume. In fact, it is inherent in what has been said already. The problem with left-brain conscio
usness is, quite simply, that it is inclined to leak. When we are driven by a deep sense of purpose, our energies become focused and concentrated. When we try to spread our attention over a dozen complications, it loses pressure, and half the energy dribbles away. Left-brain consciousness is like a leaky pump that seldom works at more than 50 percent efficiency.
We have all noticed how, when things begin to go wrong, we experience a sinking of the heart, which is actually a sinking of inner pressure. When this happens, things begin to get worse because a kind of feedback loop sets in. On the other hand, we have all experienced those times when everything seems to be going right, and we have a curious certainty that they will continue to go right. It is as if we knew that the mind somehow controls what happens to us.
Goethe’s friend Eckermann once pointed out to him that he had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and asked how he would have felt if he had been less lucky. Goethe replied contemptuously, ‘Do you suppose I would have been such a fool as to be born unlucky?’ He obviously felt that there is a sense in which our mental attitudes govern what happens to us.
Jung was implying the same thing when he coined the word ‘synchronicity’. And Vallee’s Melchizedek story (p. 133) underlines the point. It is almost impossible to dismiss the encounter with the only Melchizedek in the Los Angeles phone directory as mere coincidence. Vallee suggests that the universe may be constructed more like a computer with its random database (i.e., where information is conjured up by the correct word) than a library with its alphabetical order. But that still does not explain how he found a taxi driver whose surname was that of the cult he was researching. Here we are dealing with the same kind of puzzle as in the case of Lethbridge and dowsing. And the answer to that puzzle seemed to be that we are living in an ‘information universe’, where information is somehow encoded into energy, and is accessible to the mind. In which case, Vallee may have ‘retrieved’ his taxi driver as I can retrieve a computer file by typing in the right word, or as Lethbridge could retrieve information about underground artefacts with his pendulum, or as a psychometrist can ‘retrieve’ the history of an object by holding it. Or, for that matter, as a ‘remote viewer’ can find his way to some distant site by using an arbitrarily assigned code. But a solid female taxi driver is obviously quite a different thing from a computer file or a piece of information, and we need to formulate some very strange theories to explain how it could happen.
Whatever the explanation, the implications remain the same: that the mind—without knowing it consciously—has some sort of control over the material universe.
But how could human beings begin to achieve a conscious grasp of this control?
We must try to grasp what is wrong with us at present: that human consciousness habitually operates on half-pressure, and consequently loses half its energy in ‘leakage’. When we operate on full pressure—as, for example, when some emergency galvanises us to determined effort—we begin to glimpse the real possibilities of consciousness.
William James approached the problem in a little book called The Energies of Men (1899), in which he remarks:
Everyone is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling more or less alive on different days. Everyone knows that on any given day there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but which he might display if these were greater. Most of us feel as if a sort of cloud weighed upon us . . . Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our mental and physical resources . . . There seems no doubt that we are each and all of us to some extent victims of habit-neurosis . . . We live subject to degrees of fatigue that we have come only from habit to obey. Most of us may learn to push the barrier farther off, and to live in perfect comfort on much higher levels of power.
And he goes on to note that, when people have achieved this higher degree of will-drive, ‘the transformation . . . is a chronic one: the new level of energy becomes permanent’.
This is clearly getting altogether closer to the transformation we are talking about.
Another oddity about the human mind was noted by the philosopher Fichte: ‘To be free is nothing; to become free is heaven’. Everyone must have noticed what it is to lie in bed on a freezing winter morning, when you have to get up in ten minutes, and the bed has never seemed so warm and comfortable. Yet when you can lie in bed as long as you like on a Saturday morning, you cannot recapture that delicious warmth and comfort. You have too much freedom.
What happens should be clear. When you have to get up in ten minutes, you pay attention, and close all your leaks. So you feel more alive and aware. When you can stay in bed as long as you like, you do not pay attention, and your ‘robot’ takes over.
This is connected with another main problem of human beings: our ‘defeat proneness’. Difficulties not only cause the heart to sink: they often make us feel totally vulnerable. And, once life has got us on the run, difficulties seem to proliferate. This is a consequence of our tendency to ‘leakage’.
On the other hand, once some powerful interest has made us close the leaks, we experience an increasing sense of inner pressure, and begin to feel curiously invulnerable. And suddenly it is as if we are standing at the beginning of the yellow brick road, with all kinds of fascinating prospects in front of us. This is quite clearly a glimpse of a different way of living, a way that no longer involves taking two steps forward and sliding two steps backward. For the past two centuries, from Goethe’s Werther to Beckett’s Endgame, the basic message of our culture has seemed to be ‘You can’t win’. But these states of non-leakage bring a breathtaking glimpse of the possibility that we can win.
I would suggest not only that many of the aliens we have encountered in this book are beings who have moved far beyond the stage in which humanity finds itself marking time, but that they originally moved beyond it by discovering the secret of closing the leaks and living on a level of higher inner pressure. But then, the same seems to apply to some of the unusual human beings—for example, the Tibetan lama Nyang-Pas, encountered by John Keel, who was able to hold a conversation while sitting in midair, and was able to read Keel’s mind. He also explained to Keel how to practise ‘travelling clairvoyance’, which elsewhere in this book has been called remote viewing.
In fact, ‘miraculous’ powers are so commonplace among Hindu holy men that Ramakrishna warned his disciples against attaching any importance to them, since they are too easy to achieve, and can impede further progress.
I am, then, arguing that the UFO entities—or some of them—have passed beyond the ‘leakage’ stage of evolution, and have begun to learn what can be accomplished when consciousness is operated at full pressure—what should be ‘normal’ pressure. And certainly, there are enough examples of people who have encountered UFOs and experienced some kind of transformation. We may recall Vallee’s engineer who spent three hours aboard a UFO, and found he has been away for eighteen days; he told Vallee that his powers of memory and concentration had been enormously enhanced, and that he was convinced that some immense change was about to take place on Earth. We may also recall ‘Doctor X’, whose leg injury vanished after he had seen a UFO, and who told Vallee that he and his wife had become telepathic, that strange coincidences kept occurring, and that he had experienced levitation. There was also the Aveyron case, where the farmer’s son began to have out-of-the-body experiences after seeing a UFO. Many other cases in this book—like John Spencer’s Kathryn Howard, or the woman who saw a goat-footed man in an Oxford garden—leave no doubt that a UFO encounter can cause a basic change in awareness.
Moreover, it also seems likely that some of the incomprehensible operations performed on abductees are another method of inducing change. When Beth Collings asked a ‘grey’ why he was driving a needle into her navel, she was told, ‘It is part of the change’. The same seems to apply to the instrument applied to the forehead of Anders, in the case
described by John Spencer, and which left Anders with a deep sense of unity with Earth.
There is also considerable evidence for Budd Hopkins’s suggestion that the entities are involved in some kind of breeding experiment. Hopkins has been accused of imposing this reading on his material. But there are too many other cases to take this objection seriously—for example, Hans Holzer’s case of Shane Kurz, the virgin who in 1967 found herself pregnant after an abduction encounter, then ceased to be pregnant. This was a feature also described by Beth Collings and Anna Jamerson (see chapter 7). Altering the human race by changing its breeding stock would seem to be another obvious method of bringing about evolutionary change.
Other cases—like that of Linda Cortile—point to a possibility even more startling: the notion that many human beings may be dual personalities, whose everyday selves are simply unaware that they have an alien alter ego. It would certainly be an interesting way to bring about change in the human species: to abduct thousands of individuals and ‘engineer’ their minds to turn them into part-aliens.
One of the most interesting of H. G. Wells’s later novels, Star Begotten (1937), presented just such a notion. Its central character is a writer of popular history books who notices that more and more exceptional children are being born, and wonders if this might be caused by mutations due to cosmic rays. These children he calls ‘Martians’. They seem to see the universe in a slightly different way from other people. They question accepted ideas.
The hero asks, ‘Suppose there are beings, real material beings like ourselves, in another planet, but far wiser, more intelligent, much more highly developed . . . Suppose for the last few thousand years they have been experimenting in human genetics. Suppose they have been trying to alter mankind in some way, through the human genes’.