Voices From The Cosmos

by C B Scott Jones

  The annual five-day meeting takes place at the end of January in the delightful ski resort village of Davos, Switzerland. It is by membership and invitation only. While the WEF now has a number of other venues, principally regional meetings, the Davos affair is its flagship event where the CEOs from its 1,000 member countries hold court, mixing with selected politicians, members of academia, NGOs, religious leaders and the media. Around 2,200 participants gather and attend some of the 220 sessions in the official program. It is reported that private meetings have led to as many ideas and solutions as the scheduled ones.

  The economic power represented at the annual WEF meeting is underwritten by successful managers of global corporations. It is highly unlikely that the international financiers who have fought their way to the top of their industry have ever missed a meeting at Davos. They appear as bankers and as CEO of businesses completely controlled by the bankers. Davos is a place where the seeds of needed global transformation could take place, provided that the harvesters of the current crop recognize that the new crop will be just as profitable as the one they currently tend. This is eco-politics, the game that really counts.

  It was therefore very important that one of the products that came out of the 2013 WEF meeting was a discussion of Global Risks. Under a suggestive heading of X-Factors, the details are worth reading. The premise for looking at X-factors was this:

  “In this section, developed in collaboration withNature, a leading science journal, the Risk Response Network asks readers to look beyond our high-risk concerns of the moment to consider a set of five X factors and reflect on what countries or companies should be doing to anticipate them.

  In a world of many uncertainties we are constantly on the search to identify ‘X factors’ – emerging concerns of possible future importance and with unknown consequences. Looking forward and identifying emerging issues will help us to anticipate future challenges and adopt a more proactive approach, rather than being caught by surprise and forced into a fully reactive mode.

  X factors are serious issues, grounded in the latest scientific findings, but somewhat remote from what are generally seen as more immediate concerns such as failed states, extreme weather events, famine, macroeconomic instability or armed conflict. They capture broad and vaguely understood issues that could be hatching grounds for potential future risks (or opportunities).”

  The five identified X factors were: Runaway Climate Change; Significant Cognitive Enhancement; Rogue Deployment of Geo-engineering; Costs of Living; and Discovery of Alien Life. Only the report on Discovery of Alien Life is presented in total below. (Source is the Global Economic Forum website www.weforum.org and is used with permission from the WEF.)

  By: Risk Response Network Team

  Jan 14th 2013

  Discovery of Alien Life

  “Given the pace of space exploration, it is increasingly conceivable that we may discover the existence of alien life or other planets that could support human life. What would be the effects on science funding flows and humanity’s self-image?

  It was only in 1995 that we first found evidence that other stars also have planets orbiting them. Now thousands of “exoplanets” revolving around distant stars have been detected. NASA’s Kepler mission to identify Earth-sized planets located in the “Goldilocks Zone” (not too hot, not too cold) of sun-like stars has been operating for only three years and has already turned up thousands of candidates, including one the size of Earth. The fact that Kepler has found so many planet candidates in such a tiny fraction of the sky suggests that there are countless Earth-like planets orbiting sun-like stars in our galaxy. In 10 years’ time we may have evidence not only that Earth is not unique but also that life exists elsewhere in the universe.

  Suppose the astronomers who study exoplanets one day find chemical signs of life – for example, a spectrum showing the presence of oxygen, a highly reactive element that would quickly disappear from Earth’s atmosphere if it weren’t being replenished by plants. Money might well start flowing for new telescopes to study these living worlds in detail, both from the ground and from space. New funding and new brain power might be attracted to the challenges of human space flight and the technologies necessary for humanity, or its artificial-intelligence emissaries, to survive an inter-stellar crossing.

  The discovery would certainly be one of the biggest news stories of the year and interest would be intense. But it would not change the world immediately. Alien life has been supposedly discovered before, after all. Around the turn of the 20th century, the US astronomer Percival Lowell convinced many people (including himself) that Mars was crisscrossed by a vast system of canals built by a dying civilization. But the belief that humankind was not alone did not do much to usher in an era of goodwill and Earthly harmony, nor did it stop the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

  The discovery’s largest near-term impact would likely be on science itself. Suppose observations point to a potential future home for humankind around another star, or the existence of life in our solar system – in the Martian poles, in the subsurface oceans of Jupiter’s frozen moon Europa, or even in the hydrocarbon lakes of Saturn’s moon Titan. Scientists will immediately start pushing for robotic and even human missions to study the life forms in situ – and funding agencies, caught up in the excitement, might be willing to listen.

  Commercially built and operated spacecraft had a successful rendezvous with the International Space Station, and a host of celebrity billionaires declared intentions to make asteroid mining a reality. Discovery of an Earth 2.0 or life beyond our planet might inspire new generations of space entrepreneurs to meet the challenge of taking human exploration of the galaxy from the realm of fiction to fact.

  If life forms (even fossilized life forms) are found in our solar system, for example, the origin of life is “easy” – that any place in the universe life can emerge, it will emerge. It will suggest that life is as natural and as ubiquitous a part of the universe as the stars and galaxies. The discovery of even simple life would fuel speculation about the existence of other intelligent beings and challenge many assumptions that underpin human philosophy and religion.

  Through basic education and awareness campaigns, the general public can achieve a higher science and space literacy and cognitive resilience that would prepare them and prevent undesired social consequences of such a profound discovery and paradigm shift concerning humankind’s position in the universe.”

  The above X factor assessment is surprisingly bold for a first mention of the subject. The last paragraph is particularly noteworthy – a recommended dialogue. A year earlier, Neil Freer and I offered to present on this subject in one of the 220 scheduled sessions. No response was received.

  Reader Alert

  The real heart of this book is ahead of you when you encounter what the ET races have shared with us. The importance of the other chapters is that they provide background and context information that is important to help you through some challenging times ahead. We have added a post script at the end of the book that will remind you of the material you have just read from the business community.

  Every sector that currently defines Earth civilization will either transform or destruct. Those that move first and fast have the best chance of survival. Every political-ism will become dysfunctional. There will be a great opportunity for a heroic transformation of the global economic system. Go ahead and peek at the PS if you want to.

  Chapter 4

  The Conundrum of

  Consensus Trance.

  C. B. Scott Jones

  First Voice: “Have you ever visited __________ (fill in the blank), and noticed how different the people are?”

  Second Voice: “Different? They are weird!! I couldn’t wait to get home.”

  Consensus trance is the root of cultural shock and is a well-recognized phenomenon. The U.S. State Department, other government agencies that send personnel overseas in representational assignments, and savvy corporations with inter
national business, pay attention to it. Perhaps the largest cohort of individuals exposed to culture shock is the thousands of college and university students that crisscross the globe in educational exchange programs. While it is important for a government to have its representatives in a foreign country represent the best of its culture, and particularly to avoid what became known as the “Ugly American” stereotype, it is far more important for student exchange programs to demonstrate that the stresses of cultural shock are a normal and more than a survivable situation. It will be an important model for what is ahead.

  But there is a dark side to this subject, and important as to how we get to the post-disclosure world and maximize the potential of that future.

  A pioneer researcher on the subject of consensus trance is Dr. Charles T. Tart. A psychologist and parapsychologist, he is known for his work on the nature of consciousness, and is one of the founders of the field of transpersonal psychology. He introduced the concept of consensus trance in his1986 book,Waking Up, Overcoming the Obstacles of Human Potential.

  Tart identifies consensus trance as the everyday “normal” state of consciousness. That state defines all the cultural attributes of a Japanese, a Russian, a Pakistani, etc. This is the stuff of pride and honor and survival for each culture. If you want a stereotype definition of the population of the three countries noted in the previous sentence, ask a Korean, a Polish, an India citizen. The process to achieve this normal state is enculturation, and the teachers are family, religion, history, geography, education, and others. A summary of Tart’s description of enculturation shows why the results are so profoundly successful: This tutorial is used with permission from Tart.

  “Each of us is born unto a culture, a group of people with a shared belief system, a consensus about how things are and how they ought to be...

  Becoming “normal,” becoming a full-fledged member of your culture, involves a selective shaping, a development of approved...potentials, an inhibition of disapproved...ones.

  This interlocking set of beliefs includes a belief that we don’t have a “belief system.” Foreigners have strange “beliefs,” but we know what’s right!

  Cultures almost never encourage their members to question them. Physical survival has been too precarious for too many people from most of our history, so there is a deep, if implicit, feeling that our culture has kept us alive in a rough world; don’t ask questions, don’t rock the boat. Cultures try to be closed systems.”

  We believe that the diversity of responses to the same questions asked of the ET cultures that we have interviewed is evidence that consensus trance is a universal condition. Why would we expect something else? Spatial issues, geographic separation of Earth’s cultures are obvious factors in consensus trance. We now must consider distances in terms of light years, and additionally the issue of dimensionality.

  Don’t get discouraged, but seriously consider the need and importance to make room in the body of your consensus trance for what will be a “once in a world” event. Those who do will be on the path of discovery that is essential for the survival of Earth. From experience and wise ET counsel we know this is a long path, measured in terms of generation travel. Your boldness will be a profound gift to your consensus group.

  If the reader is a member of a professional group within his/her culture, the challenges and opportunities are obvious. One example, if you are a scientist in the classical sense, you will embrace the leadership window opening for you to write the transition chapter in the new text book that says “goodbye” to the old hypotheses of your field, and launch into an academic adventure of ecstatic proportions.

  There are examples when a window of potential change opens, and the results are anything but change.

  The multi-million-copy bestseller that didn’t dent the nation’s consensus trance,The Ugly American,was written by William J. Lederer, a retired senior U.S. naval officer, and Eugene Burdick, a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Published in 1958, their original plan was to write it as a non-fiction book during our build up to the Vietnam War. The intention was to challenge the policy decisions being made about South East Asiain our concerns about Communist moves in that area. Their publisher suggested that a novel based upon facts would be more effective. That advice was well taken, and the book spent 76 weeks on the best-seller list and sold approximately five million copies. After fifty-six years it is still in print, and in 2009,The New York Times Sunday Book Reviewpublished a1400 word essay by Michael Meyer,Still ‘Ugly” After All These Years.Meyer pointed out that the Ugly Americans were not U.S. citizens wearing tube tops to the Vatican, or who speak English in a loud voice to assist understanding by a non-English speaking native in Uganda. The Ugly Americans are the occupying civilian and military elite and government contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan with buckets of bucks and a determination to nation building on a U.S. model. The problem, of course, is for that to work there would have to be a miracle conversion to the American consensus trance. Unfortunately, there is a direct relationship between power and hubris

  The Ugly American became a runaway national bestseller boosted by numerous favorable reviews that combined the following points: It is a slashing exposé of American arrogance, incompetence, and corruption in Southeast Asia. Based on fact, the book’s eye-opening stories and sketches drew a devastating picture of how the United States was about losing the struggle with Communism in Asia. Combining gripping storytelling with an urgent call to action, the book prompted President Eisenhower to launch a study of our military aid program that led the way to much-needed reform.

  The Eisenhower action did not cause a ripple in the consensus trance. A young senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, was inspired by the book and mailed a copy ofThe Ugly American to each of his Senate colleagues. The message of the book was reflected in the Peace Corps. that Kennedy proposed in 1960.

  When Kennedy became president in 1961, as Commander-in-Chief he directed that no U.S. military officer would be ordered to an overseas representational assignment unless he was linguistically qualified in the language of the country. At that time I was in the pipeline to become Assistant Naval Attaché to India and Nepal. My orders were modified and I spent eleven months learning Hindi. When I arrived in New Delhi I was met at the airport by my colleagues currently on duty in the Naval Attaché’s Office, and two India Naval Officers from the India Naval Intelligence Directorate, our official host organization.

  These two greeted me in Hindi and we had a short conversation in Hindi. I was the first military attaché in India to speak Hindi, and India Naval Officers were ordered to speak only in Hindi to me. That resulted in a significant improvement of my Hindi skills. Finally, after one month, at a social event the Chief of India Naval Staff, Admiral A. K. Chatterji, greeted me in English, “So Jones, what do you think of India?” I decided that the proper protocol would be to respond in the language of the question, and replied, “Admiral, I will never understand India.” After a month in India I was finally emerging from cultural shock, and simply spoke the truth. Chatterji replied, “Good answer. We now know that you speak Hindi, but your technical vocabulary is weak, and our South India officers are complaining. You know that they also had to learn Hindi, and their English is much better than your Hindi. I think we should conduct our business in English, do you agree?” I replied that I could handle that. He smiled and ended the conversation with: “We knew that the U.S. was rich, but we had no idea that it was so rich to be able to waste a year of a professional office’s career to learn a skill he did not need.”

  William Lederer retired from the navy as a Captain in the early 1950s and became the Far East correspondent for the Reader’s Digest. His credentials as a Far East expert began in the early 1940s when as a junior naval office he served on a river gunboat in China. Now, as a foreign correspondent with still strong navy contacts he began reporting on the war in Korea. That brought him aboard the aircraft carrier USS Princeton (CVA
-37), and into the home of my jet fighter squadron VF-191, in Ready Room 1. For two days he interviewed pilots after their return from combat missions, and as a gifted story teller told of his experiences in Chinawhere he served during the Japanese-Sino war. One story he told involved someone reaching out of his consensus trance in a bold attempt of radical change. Lederer subsequently wrote about this incident inOur Own Worst Enemy, published in 1968, ten years after writingThe Ugly American. The details are simple. In 1940 in China he met a Jesuit priest who had a Vietnamese assistant. The priest asked Lederer if he had a copy of the U.S. Declaration of Independence on his gunboat. Lederer did and gave the copy to the priest who in turn gave it to his Vietnamese assistant who was eager to provide the document to Tong Van So. Whether that particular copy was delivered to Tong Van So is uncertain, but we do know that Tong Van So, better known as Ho Chi Minh, quoted from that U.S. document in his 1945 Proclamation of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

  Here the tentacles of different consensus trances become impossible to trace, and that is not unusual. There are common components of virtually all consensus trances, security, control and independence being some of these. Was the term “Democratic Republic” simply words borrowed from the U.S. document but actually meant something much different from the vision of the American founding fathers? There is reason to believe that Ho Chi Minh’s vision was close to what our founding fathers shared. But the history of the Vietnam War ignores that possible window of peaceful transition from French Colonialism to a free and independent Vietnam. The U.S. already had articulated its Domino theory of what to fear in Southeast Asia, one country after another falling under Communist control. As Lederer predicted, our bet on a corrupt South Vietnam government in what was a civil war was a losing wager.

  As a matter of strategy, Uncle Sam was playing Dominos while Ho Chi Minh was playing Xiangqi (Chinese chess is very popular in Vietnam).