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Do we survive the death of our physical bodies? Is there such a thing as a postmortem continuation of the individual? If there is survival, what survives? Does everyone survive? What does it even mean to survive?

Answers to these questions are central to the dogmas of many religions. These same issues are amongst the most refractory when addressed using the techniques of scientific inquiry: data gathering, hypothesis formulation and testing, logical analyses. Indeed, such topics are generally viewed as outside the scope of scientific inquiry, not worth serious thought. As Bertrand Russell commented, “most people would die sooner than think – in fact, they do so.”

Sphinx Geology

In my youth, I didn’t bother to give the afterlife much consideration. I never needed the threat of future hell and damnation to persuade me to be moral now. I identified with those ancient Hebrews who did not necessarily believe in an afterlife (de Vesme, 1931), yet still found it prudent to pursue an honourable life in this world. In college I pursued a very earthly field – the study of rocks – ultimately earning a Ph.D. in geology and geophysics from Yale University (1983).

My life changed in 1990. At the invitation of independent Egyptologist John Anthony West, I took my first trip to Egypt – specifically to study the Great Sphinx from a geologic point of view. After several more trips, undertaking various tests and analyses, I came to the conclusion that the oldest portions of the Great Sphinx date back to a much earlier period than previously believed by most Egyptologists and historians. Conventional wisdom places the Great Sphinx in the reign of the Pharaoh Khafre (Chephren), circa 2500 BCE. My studies indicated that the oldest portions of the Great Sphinx (the statue has been repaired many times, and the head re-carved) date back to at least the period of 7000 BCE to 5000 BCE, and perhaps 9000 BCE or earlier.

My Sphinx work immediately caused a firestorm and, though the controversy has abated somewhat two decades later, the implications have only deepened. Essentially, sophisticated culture and civilisation goes back much earlier than formally thought; “history must be rewritten.” Over the years I have been pleased to see confirmation of the crux of my work, as other very ancient sites have been uncovered. A good example is Gobekli Tepe in Turkey where a major monumental carved stone building phase dating to the period of 8000 BCE and earlier has been discovered.

Egypt And Its Obsession With Death

Working on the Great Sphinx, I could not help but become fascinated with the pyramids, temples, tombs, and other relics of ancient Egypt. According to the traditional view, what was the overriding preoccupation of ancient Egypt? Death and the afterlife. Say “Egypt” and pyramids (popularly interpreted as giant tombs), mummies, and the so-called Book of the Dead immediately come to mind.

Having studied them in depth, it is clear to me that the pyramids, and the Great Pyramid in particular, were not solely or even primarily overblown mausoleums. Indeed, the Great Pyramid may have served both astronomical/astrological functions, literally being an observatory at one stage of its development, as well as ritualistic purposes. Many modern visitors describe powerful and life changing experiences in the Great Pyramid. One of the most famous is Napoleon Bonaparte. While in Egypt, August 1799, Napoleon visited the Great Pyramid. He entered the King’s Chamber and asked to be left alone. Upon emerging, Napoleon was pale, faint and silent. Asked by an aide what happened, Napoleon refused to say anything of substance, intimating that he had experienced a preview of his own fate. Just before his death in 1821, Napoleon appeared to be on the verge of telling a close friend what had occurred in the King’s Chamber. Then he hesitated. “No. What is the use? You would never believe me.”

I have spent many hours, including several times almost the entire night (but not sleeping, mind you), in the Great Pyramid. And I have spent much time exploring other temples and tombs throughout Egypt, as well as pyramids, temples and sacred places elsewhere in the world. Initially I approached the ancient monuments as a geologist, focusing on the materials from which they were constructed. Soon, however, I became involved in studying not just the stones, but why past civilisations had erected the stones into magnificent edifices. The why behind the monuments, more often than not, apparently included religious beliefs and practices, initiation rites and rituals, which in many cases seemed to have an ostensible paranormal aspect, whether it was clairvoyance, divination or manifestations of higher levels of consciousness. Were, I asked myself, the ancient structures used to genuinely alter consciousness and possibly enhance paranormal phenomena? Or did superstition, perhaps combined with pious fraud on the part of a priest or priestess, account for the tales? Furthermore, I could not help but think about postmortem survival issues, particularly when studying ostensible tombs! Death, transformation, resurrection, union with the gods, attainment of immortality – was all this ritualistic hocus pocus and pure nonsense? Or were the ancients skilled psychic engineers, carefully manipulating the incorporeal with their megalithic stone monuments and occult practices?

My formal training as a physical scientist certainly did not encourage the notion that paranormal and psychic phenomena, much less life after death, were anything other than imagination gone wild or charlatans preying on the gullible. According to a conventional materialistic and secular “scientifically rational” worldview, the paranormal does not exist and death is the final end. It was all too easy, and indeed comforting, to put such issues out of mind. Stick to the hard evidence of the rocks, the domain of the geologist.

Exploring the Paranormal

Issues of the paranormal and questions about survival kept nagging at me. Ultimately, I realised, I must address these topics head-on, if only for the sake of satisfying my intellectual curiosity. For me the first issue was to research various reputed anomalous psychic abilities among the living, such as telepathy (direct mind-to-mind transfer of information without utilising any of the conventional senses) and psychokinesis (PK, essentially the concept of mind-over-matter). I wanted to establish what, if anything, in terms of the paranormal is possible among the living before addressing the issue of postmortem survival.

It took me over ten years from my first visit to Egypt to get to the point where I was prepared to take a serious look at the paranormal. I have taught fulltime at Boston University since 1984, and every year I have a new batch of students. Many simply want to take their courses and get a degree, but then there are those who really strive to go beyond their formal studies. One such student was Logan Yonavjak. She served as my field assistant on research expeditions to Egypt and Peru in 2003 and 2005, and she prodded me to take a serious look at the paranormal. She and I undertook a comprehensive survey of the serious scientific literature addressing psychical research and the paranormal (the field now generally referred to as parapsychology). We read literally thousands of papers, pro- and con-, and we both became involved with the field first-hand. The result of our collaboration was The Parapsychology Revolution: A Concise Anthology of Paranormal and Psychical Research.

Our studies convinced me that, once the fraud, bunk, and self-delusion are eliminated, there is something to the paranormal. The best-documented class of paranormal phenomena is telepathy. There is strong laboratory evidence for telepathy, such as classic card-calling experiments as well as many more sophisticated tests. There is also a large and compelling body of evidence from spontaneous cases (non-laboratory experiments) supporting the reality of telepathy. For instance, crisis apparitions, veridical hallucinations, or “ghosts” are well known. The evidence for PK is also strong, including micro-PK studies at an atomic level using random event generators and similar devices, such as the evidence developed by the PEAR (Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research) labs over more than a quarter of a century, and the carefully studied incidents of macro-PK (affecting larger objects) associated with genuine spontaneous poltergeist cases. Another line of evidence for the reality of paranormal phenomena is research on presentiments or “pre-sponses,” essentially a form of short-term precognition as measured by physiological parameters (heart rate, electrodermal activity and so forth). Numerous replicated experiments have demonstrated the physiological responses of individuals to disturbing photographs, for instance, a second or two before they are actually viewed by the person. According to conventional science, this should not be possible.

My research on parapsychological phenomena among the living continues, but at this point I agree with the following statement made by David Fontana, Professor of Transpersonal Psychology at Liverpool John Moores University and a well-known psychical researcher: “Psychic abilities are a matter of fact not of belief. What they are and what they mean for our view of reality is another matter, but one cannot dismiss them as fiction and yet retain credibility as an unbiased observer.” (Fontana, 2005, pp. 468-469)

But how do we interpret paranormal phenomena? This brings us to the issue of postmortem survival.

Survivalist Interpretations

Serious study of psychical and paranormal phenomena dates back to at least 1882, the year when the Society for Psychical Research was founded. At that time, and right up to the present day, some psychical researchers have interpreted some of the phenomena they study as being communications from deceased persons or discarnate (non-bodily) entities. Indeed, among many people the prime interest in psychical studies is to establish the possibility of an afterlife. To give a classic example, let us suppose you attend a séance. The medium goes into trance and begins to speak in a different voice. The voice claims to have a message from the beyond, a message from your departed grandmother. Through the medium, you are told that your deceased grandmother still cherishes those moments you had with her, and a very private story is related, a story that you are certain you never shared with another person and only you and your grandmother knew about.

So, is this proof that you received a communication from your beloved grandmother? Does she live on in the afterlife? Many people would say yes, absolutely (of course, we are assuming there is no fraud on the part of any involved in the séance). No one other than your grandmother knew the private story, and so it must be her who now relates it (indirectly through the medium). What other explanation can there be?

Indeed, there is another explanation, and it gets to the crux of the arguments for and against postmortem survival. Instead of your grandmother contacting you from beyond the grave, perhaps the medium is telepathically picking up information from your brain, perhaps information that is stored away deep in the unconscious, and then relaying it in a form that is ostensibly a communication from your grandmother? (Granted, the medium is doing this unconsciously, and in no way intends to deceive. The medium truly feels that she or he is communicating with the dead on your behalf.)

Let’s make the situation a little more complicated. What if the supposed communication from grandmother relays information unknown to you, perhaps concerning your aunt when she was young? After the séance you consult your aunt, and indeed the communication is true, and what is more, your aunt is shocked and flabbergasted because the information is something that only she and your grandmother shared, and absolutely no one else had ever known it. So, is this proof of the continued existence of your grandmother in the “ethers”? Some parapsychologists would counter that possibly the medium telepathically raided, if you will, your aunt’s mind to find interesting information that was then relayed to you at the séance, information that appeared to come from your grandmother.

There are well-documented cases that become incredibly complex. For instance, at some séances entities, referred to as “drop-in communicators,” make themselves known (Gauld, 1971). Some such drop-ins are ostensibly deceased souls unknown to any of the séance sitters. The drop-in is simply taking advantage of the séance setting, attempting communication with the still living, perhaps asking that a relative or loved one (a living person unknown to any of the séance sitters) be contacted. Drop-ins can conveniently be dismissed by critics as simply figments of the imagination of the medium and/or séance sitters (the medium may pick up on the imagination of the sitters telepathically, expressing this imagination in the form of a supposed drop-in), except in the cases where the information given by a drop-in is verified later. For instance, a drop-in requests that a message be relayed to so-and-so at such-and-such address, and when a sitter at the séance goes to the indicated address it is found that the address exists, the person named lives there, and the message has significant private meaning for the indicated person. Could, just possibly, the medium have assessed all of the information paranormally and then created, unconsciously, the purported drop-in to “communicate” the information? (We assume that no fraud is involved, and in the best cases it seems clear that fraud is not an issue.) Yes, but to many this would seem a much more elaborate, concocted, and complex explanation than simply accepting that the drop-in was indeed a discarnate entity from the other side.

Super ESP

Basically, much of the evidence that ostensibly supports postmortem survival can conceivably be interpreted, with varying degrees of finesse, as due to the psychical and paranormal functioning (even if masked and at an unconscious level) of living persons. This is sometimes known as the Super-ESP hypothesis (ESP refers to extrasensory perception), but actually can include paranormal phenomena besides ESP, such as the movement of objects. Take poltergeist activity, unexplained movements of objects, such as items falling off shelves or being “thrown” through the air without any physical cause that can be observed, various unexplained noises and disturbances. Having observed a minor, but I believe absolutely genuine, poltergeist incident, I am convinced that such activities can be real.

But is poltergeist activity due to literal ghosts (presumably mischievous departed spirits), or can the Super-ESP hypothesis adequately explain poltergeists? One theory is that many poltergeist manifestations are unconsciously caused by, or emanate from, the person who superficially appears to be the focus of the poltergeist activity. Poltergeist activity may be a method (at the unconscious level) of “working out” unresolved emotional and psychological tensions and conflicts.

There are many other classes of evidence that some claim as support for the reality of survival beyond the grave. Classic séances sometimes include movements and levitations of tables and other items, strange sounds and voices, and even the supposed materialisation of objects and beings (deceased persons?). If, and it is a big if in many researcher’s minds given the amount of fraud documented in such settings, any of these types of phenomena are genuine, are they due to spirits from the “other side,” as is generally claimed by the medium? Or might a Super-ESP explanation be applicable?

Near-Death experiences and Out-of-Body experiences are sometimes cited as supporting evidence for the survival hypothesis, but the counter argument is that many such experiences are subject to conventional (non-paranormal psychological and physiological factors) or Super-ESP explanations.

Some researchers have attempted to utilise modern electronic apparatus as a means of communicating with those beyond the grave, a concept sometimes referred to as instrumental transcommunication. One form, known as electronic voice phenomena (EVP), consists of recording the static of a radio that is tuned to a frequency carrying no transmissions. When the recording is played back, perhaps at a different speed than originally recorded, voices or communications from the other side may be heard, or so it is claimed (Raudive, 1971). Even if such “voices” are independently verifiable, critics of the survivalist hypothesis can claim that the voices were encoded paranormally (and unconsciously) via a form of PK by those involved or associated with the experiments rather than by entities from the spirit world – Super-ESP strikes again!

Reincarnation

What about reincarnation? Isn’t reincarnation a type of afterlife, or the continuation of life after the dissolution of a particular physical body? While many supposed cases of reincarnation and past lives remain unsubstantiated by solid data, there are also a number of cases where something paranormal apparently is involved. The late Dr. Ian Stevenson (1918-2007), a psychiatrist associated with the University of Virginia (Charlottesville) for nearly half a century, collected, scrutinised, verified, and analysed literally thousands of cases of individuals who apparently demonstrated memories of former lives.

Just because a living person claims memories of a past life, does that mean it is the same person inhabiting a new body? Or, is a person who appears to remember a past life (and in most cases it is simply bits and pieces of a presumed past life that are “remembered”) in reality paranormally accessing information about a former person and/or time, perhaps even from still living people? Many cases of supposed reincarnation, some would argue, are nothing more than the latter. That is, Super-ESP is the true explanation. Weakening the Super-ESP hypothesis in some presumed reincarnation cases, however, is the finding by Stevenson that in a few instances marks made on the body of a person after the person died apparently appear on the presumed incarnation of the deceased person. Here is a real example given by Stevenson. A young woman in Burma with congenital heart disease died during open-heart surgery. While preparing her body for burial, a mark was placed on the back of her neck with red lipstick. The woman’s presumed incarnation, born thirteen months later, had a prominent red birthmark at the back of her neck, a line of diminished pigment corresponding to the incision in her abdomen and chest made during the surgery, and when the baby began to speak she seemed to have knowledge of the previous life that she could not have acquired by normal means.

If Stevenson’s data on birthmarks in subsequent presumed incarnations caused by marking or mutilation of a cadaver after death of the previous person stands up to scrutiny, it could have far-reaching implications. It is one thing to hypothesise that fragments or portions, or even the totality, of a personality might be transmitted from a dying person telepathically, including aspects of that person’s death, but to suggest that somehow a lingering discarnate personality is aware of what happens to its former physical body and incorporates marks or mutilations to the body in the next incarnation raises many theoretical and philosophical issues. Is this evidence for the existence of “ethereal beings,” “spiritual entities,” or “soul components”?

Super ESP or Something Else?

To quote Professor Fontana, “Given that the evidence supports the existence of psychic abilities, these abilities are either explicable as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis from the living (i.e. as Super-ESP), or as communications in one form or another from those who have survived death and live on in another dimension. There is no way around these two possibilities. The evidence either supports Super-ESP or supports survival.” (Fontana, 2005, p. 469)

In his book Is There an Afterlife?, Fontana is adamant that he believes much of the evidence cannot be adequately explained by Super-ESP. The Super-ESP hypothesis becomes too complex and convoluted, and ultimately so complicated that many prefer, or even find it necessary, to discuss alternative explanations, such as postmortem survival.

Fontana asserts there are two, and only two, ways to interpret the evidence: Super-ESP or survival (to be clear, Fontana leaves open the possibility that Super-ESP may explain some of the evidence while other evidence supports survival). But is it really an either/or situation? Are the only two viable alternatives Super-ESP and survival of humans (and possibly other organisms?) that once inhabited Earth in bodily form? It seems clear to me that there are additional possibilities (even if not actualities). What about the time-honoured notion of discarnate entities that perhaps never inhabited physical bodies: gods, angels, demons, spirits and so forth?

Soul Components

At another level, the concepts of Super-ESP and survival may not be totally distinct from one another. Another time-honoured concept is that of a World Soul, conscious of and remembering its past, that is all the past, and that individual souls may merge with and draw from this World Soul. Related to this is the concept of a spiritual record (sometimes known as the Akashic Records) of all that has transpired, a record that might be accessed from time to time by certain individuals or other beings.

Rather than viewing the issue of postmortem survival as a simple dichotomy, you survive or you do not, I believe the issue is much more subtle, complex and nuanced. It is not simply is their life after death, yes or no? Rather is it a matter of which psychic components of a person may survive, in what states, for how long, and how such components may influence the living (for instance, via communication through a medium, haunting, reincarnation or possession).

The ancient Egyptians took a much more sophisticated approach to afterlife issues than many modern people do. They had a number of terms for various psychic components of a person, not fully understood to this day, but we can list some as follows: ka (life force, vital force, spirit, double), ba (individual personality, soul), akh or khu (spirit form, transfigured spirit, ghost), ib or ab (heart, emotion, thought), sheut (shadow, hidden self), and ren (name, embodiment of power and personality). Upon death and dissolution of the body, the ancient Egyptians believed these components could separate and go their separate ways; part of Egyptian ritual involved reuniting the psychic components. When it comes to attempting to understand the subtleties of the psyche and the possibility of postmortem survival, I believe we can benefit by studying ancient wisdom.

At this point I am not sure what exactly survives, what form or forms it takes, or how long it might survive (for a limited duration? forever?), but I believe the evidence supports the conclusion of the early psychical researcher F. W. H. Myers – something survives:

I hold that certain manifestations of central individualities, associated now or formerly with certain definite organisms, have been observed in operation apart from those organisms, both while the organisms were still living, and after they had decayed. (Myers, 1907, p. 27)

We have the foundation for serious studies of the survival issue, a topic that I will continue to pursue in this life – and perhaps the next.

References:

Caesar de Vesme, A History of Experimental Spiritualism. Vol. 2, Peoples of Antiquity (Translated from the French by Fred Rothwell), Rider, UK, 1931David Fontana, Is There An Afterlife?, O Books, UK, 2005

Alan Gauld, “A Series of ‘Drop In’ Communicators”, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 55, part 204, pp. 273-340 (1971)

F. W. H. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (edited and abridged by his son Leopold Hamilton Myers), Longmans, Green, USA, 1907

Konstantin Raudive, Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication with the Dead, Colin Smythe, UK, 1971

Bertrand Russell, Mortals and Others: American Essays, 1931-1935, Routledge, USA, 1996 (quote cited originally published in Russell’s The ABC of Relativity, 1925.)

Ian Stevenson, Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect, Praeger, USA, 1997

The Parapsychology Revolution: A Concise Anthology of Paranormal and Psychical Research is available from New Dawn Books. To order, see pages 71-72.

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ROBERT M. SCHOCH, Ph.D., is renowned for his work on re-dating the Great Sphinx. Based on his geological studies, he determined that the Sphinx’s origins date prior to dynastic times. He has also focused his attention on the Great Pyramid and various other temples and tombs in Egypt, as well as studying similar structures around the world. Dr. Schoch is an author and coauthor of both technical and popular books, including the trilogy with R. A. McNally: Voices of the Rocks: A Scientist looks at Catastrophes and Ancient Civilizations (1999), Voyages of the Pyramid Builders: The True Origins of the Pyramids from Lost Egypt to Ancient America (2003), and Pyramid Quest: Secrets of the Great Pyramid and the Dawn of Civilization (2005). Dr. Schoch’s most recent book is The Parapsychology Revolution: A Concise Anthology of Paranormal and Psychical Research (2008, compilation and commentary by Robert M. Schoch and Logan Yonavjak). Website: www.robertschoch.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn Special Issue 7.

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In the timeless library of human myths and legends, perhaps none are more primal and disturbing than the biblical story of the Fall. Responsible for everything from the demonisation of women to the Church’s pious horror for nature, sex and the body, there is scarcely a life-hating ideology or barbaric practice it hasn’t been used to justify.

For all that, this strange and unsettling story has lost none of its melancholy power over the centuries, remaining as enigmatic and haunting as a dimly remembered nightmare – and almost no closer to being understood today than the day it was first told.

If “God” is all-powerful, then why did He need to test Adam and Eve at all? Wouldn’t a real supreme being already know what was going to happen? Why did the serpent seem like the only one who really understood what was going on? And who was God talking to when he fretted that Adam had become “like one of us”1?

Observes libertarian “anti-psychiatrist” Thomas Szasz:

Adam’s apple is so named because a piece of the biblical forbidden fruit is supposed to have stuck in his throat… Perhaps this is why the Forbidden Truth so often appears ‘chewed up’, transformed into metaphor, humour, satire, slang (or dream and myth, of course).2

In this essay I’d like to take the unusual step of examining the Eden myth, not through the lens of traditional theology or atheist reductionism, but instead from the perspective of a few fringe phenomena it isn’t usually associated with: alien abductions and the occult “serpent power” of Eastern mysticism.

As we shall discover, these apparent discrepancies aren’t mistakes at all, but instead represent the sole surviving keys to uncovering its true meaning – for the legend of Adam and Eve originally had nothing to do with human sin or divine punishment.

Instead, the story of the “Garden Eden” comes to us as a distorted version of primitive man’s first recorded encounter with uncanny beings from the stars – a botched abduction attempt culminating in the spontaneous illumination of two very confused cavemen.

What this means for religion in general, and monotheism in particular, I shall leave for the reader to divine on their own.

We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight. We shall see these things, and other things which no breathing creature has yet seen. We shall overleap time, space, and dimensions, and without bodily motion peer to the bottom of creation.
– H.P. Lovecraft, From Beyond

UFOs – A Modern Problem?

Since the dawn of the space age, man’s dreams have been haunted by strange visions of cigar or saucer shaped aircraft bearing vaguely foetal (or insectoid) passengers who kidnap, brainwash and even impregnate their human captives before erasing their memories and vanishing into the ether.

Like “out of body” experiences or spirit possession, the UFO phenomenon stands as one of those baffling “psychic” anomalies which seems to exist for the sole purpose of mocking human reason. Claims one “victim”:

I woke up in the middle of the night and everything looked odd and strangely lit. At the end of my bed was a 4 feet high grey alien. Its spindly, thin body supported a huge head with two enormous, slanted, liquid black eyes. It compelled me, telepathically, to follow and led me into a spaceship… examination room [where]… I was forced to lie down while they… implanted something in my nose. I could see jars containing half-human, half-alien fetuses and a nursery full of silent, sickly children. When I eventually found myself back in bed, several hours had gone by.3

French astrophysicist Jacques Vallee studied the alien abduction phenomenon for decades, wondering continually at the arbitrary and illogical nature of most such reports. Why do these supposed “wise explorers from the stars” behave so bizarrely? If they have the advanced technology necessary for interstellar travel, why would they use it to visit this planet, let alone kidnap housewives, farmers and convenience store clerks for the purpose of anal probing? Observed Vallee’s mentor, J. Allen Hynek:

To me, it seems ridiculous that super intelligences would travel great distances to do relatively stupid things like stop cars, collect soil samples, and frighten people. I think we must begin to re-examine the evidence. We must begin to look closer to home.4

Vallee’s Rejection of the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis of Alien Contact

Researching hundreds of “contactee” testimonials, folkloric narratives and world mythologies, Vallee eventually concluded that UFOs aren’t what they seem to be. They don’t hail from the Zeta Reticula galaxy, they aren’t here to explore or conduct genetic experiments and their presence on this planet isn’t a recent development at all. Instead, notes Vallee:

Reports of uncanny visitors from the sky have plagued mankind for thousands of years – enough to rule out short-term exploration as a motive.

Witnesses typically describe the “aliens” as humanoid bipeds able to breathe our atmosphere and see in our light spectrum – but wouldn’t genuine extraterrestrials be adapted to a completely different type of environment?

The aliens’ supposedly “scientific” experiments are “crude to the point of being grotesque…. often accompanied by sadistic sexual manipulation [and] reminiscent of medieval encounters with demons” – not the sort of behaviour we might expect from an advanced civilisation!5

Finally, since UFOs seem able to appear and disappear at will, they are probably “not just a bunch of spacecraft” but instead represent “a much more interesting technology that manipulates dimensions. It manipulates space-time. And if it can do that, then [the aliens could] be from anywhere and anytime.”6

Frustrated with the unquestioned assumptions and cultish insularity of contemporary ufology, Vallee instead suggests three alternatives to the “Extraterrestrial Hypothesis” (EH) based on “second level” readings of the UFO phenomenon – speculative scenarios notable less for what they say about UFOs than about the structure of physical reality itself:

The Inter-Dimensional Hypothesis

One possibility is that aliens are not from another planet, but instead represent “evidence for other dimensions beyond spacetime”⁷ – extradimensional entities hailing from an uncanny world which overlaps but only occasionally intrudes upon our own, beings from the future (or a perhaps a ghostly copy of our own earth) using “four-dimensional wormholes for space and even time travel”8 through the “multiverse which is all around us.”9

This “multiverse” could consist of parallel worlds existing alongside each other in different dimensions of space, alternate past and future worlds following one another in time, or even computer-generated “virtual worlds” stored in some vast cosmic database (as in the film ‘The Matrix’); if this latter instance is true, hints Vallee, then the seemingly stable and predictable world in which we find ourselves could be a much more magical (or even whimsical) place than we normally realise:

If there is no time dimension as we usually assume there is, [then] the human brain may be traversing events by association… If we live in the associative universe of the software scientists rather than the sequential universe of the spacetime physicist, then miracles are no longer irrational events… [and the] illusion of time and space would be merely a side effect of consciousness as it traverses associations. In such a theory, apparently paranormal phenomena like remote viewing and precognition would be expected, even common, and UFOs would lose much of their bizarre quality…10

The Electromagnetic Connection

Another promising vein of inquiry originates with the work of Dr. Michael Persinger, a cognitive neuroscientist at Laurentian University in Canada whose 1975 “Tectonic Stress Theory” holds that UFOs, out-of-body experiences and mystical visions of saints and angels are the byproducts of electrical microseizures (i.e., epileptic episodes) resulting from exposure to electromagnetic fields generated by shifting plates in the Earth’s crust.

Persinger’s experiments include the construction of the “God helmet,” a specially modified motorcycle helmet which uses weak EM fields to stimulate the parietal and temporal lobes of the brain. Shockingly, almost 80% of the 900 subjects thus tested report altered states of consciousness, visions of God and dead loved ones, and even full-blown alien abductions.11

More radical still is Paul Devereux’s 1989 “Earth Lights” hypothesis, in which UFOs appear as some sort of “previously unrecognised terrestrial phenomenon” (think Will O’ the Wisps) which either rely upon or are attracted to the EM fields generated by seismic stress.

Devereux notes that the strange balls of light which appear and hover near or around earthquake fault lines behave at times almost like “inquisitive animals” and speculates that they may be intelligent “macro-quantal” blobs of plasma energy capable of telepathy, mimicry and hypnosis.12

Both theories in turn anticipate the research of Johnjoe McFadden, an English neuroscientist at the University of Surrey whose Conscious Electromagnetic Field Theory (CEMI) locates human thought outside the wet, grey labyrinth of the brain, identifying it instead with a weak electromagnetic field which surrounds and penetrates the skull.13

If McFadden is correct, then the entire sensory environment we perceive all around us could be nothing more than an extremely sophisticated communications broadcast of some sort – perhaps just one of many “channels” available to the human nervous system.

The Control System Hypothesis

Vallee’s final alternative to the EH is his “Control System” Hypothesis, a fringe view in which aliens (or UFOs) appear as a non-human intelligence closely linked to the Earth, but not bound by it – not little green men from far-flung planets but hallucinatory imps from a dreamlike hyperspace who always seem to appear in just about the form we expect to see them.

Once upon a time these interacted and appeared to us as gods, spirits and angels, accepting sacrifices, sending dreams and inspiring mankind’s great religions; then as fairies, goblins, elves and spirits, spreading fear and wonder in the lives of medieval peasants; and finally as space-faring “greys,” reptilian humanoids and noble “Plaeaidian” scientists, bearing cryptic warnings about the environment and seeding new mythologies for the Information age.

So why have these protean tricksters chosen to visit us? Perhaps Vallee’s most controversial claim is that these mysterious visitors are themselves mere epiphenomena, shadows and reflections of a vast (and very ancient) “control system” which has been operating in the background to manipulate human belief systems since time immemorial, guiding our species towards some unknown purpose. Notes Vallee:

If UFOs are having an action at [the level of myth] it will be almost impossible to detect it by conventional methods… because they are the means by which man’s concepts are being rearranged. All we can do is trace their effect…14

This “control system,” Vallee hypothesises, could represent a projection of the collective unconscious, the activity of an unknown species or even some sort of ecosystemic feedback loop.15

Vallee’s Control System and the Origins of Western Religion

If mankind’s long flirtation with gods, ghosts, goblins and grays is anything to go by, Vallee’s alien “control system” has been with us since the very beginning – and for evidence of its influence, we need look no further than the origins of Abrahamic monotheism.

Take, for example, the story of the Garden of Eden, an eerie tale which – with only a little imagination – can easily be read as a coded account of an alien abduction, an extraterrestrial interlude in which speaking primates are tested for obedience and adaptability:

Omniscient keeper(s) create a man (or remove him?) from the “earth”;

Test subject is anesthetised;

Keepers produce a female specimen supposedly cloned from his “rib”;

Test subjects are placed in a controlled environment and forbidden from eating a certain type of food;

A writhing hologram appears (the “shining serpent”) and encourages them to violate the Keepers’ directives;

Subjects are punished and returned to the wild to digest their encounter.

Now, is this all there is to the story – ancient astronauts tampering with primitive man? Admittedly, that would be incredible if true – but wouldn’t alien scientists have been able to conceal even the most elaborate breeding and colonisation program from a pair of cavemen?

What if the real agenda behind the Eden incident was not creation (or obedience testing) but something else entirely?

Remarks Vallee:

If the phenomenon is forcing us through a learning curve, then it has no choice but to mislead us. When Skinner designs a machine that feeds a rat only when the right lever is depressed, this is extremely misleading for the rat. But if the rat doesn’t depress the correct lever, he becomes extremely hungry. Man is hungry for knowledge and power, and if there is an intelligence behind the UFOs it must have taken this fact into account…16

Perhaps instead of looking at the biblical “Fall” as a failed experiment, we should instead think of it as what Vallee calls an “open control system” – a metalogical labyrinth whose participants “graduate” to the next level when the correct sequence of stimuli are triggered – in this case, eating the “forbidden fruit.”

In other words, “Adam” and “Eve” didn’t fail the test when they ate from the “Tree of Knowledge” – they passed it.

Open Control Systems and Mythological Mashups

This alternate reading of the Eden creation myth is reinforced in the scriptures of the ancient Gnostics, an unorthodox (some say “heretical”) movement in early Christianity that competed with the infant Catholic church for several centuries after the birth of Christ.

Often dismissed as a primitive heresy that fell under the weight of its own obscurantist tendencies, Gnosticism was instead a sophisticated system of occult hermeneutics whose acolytes employed special neurolinguistic trance-inducing techniques to engage in a sort of memetic sabotage, splicing, remixing and mutating of biblical stories in a manner seemingly calculated to cause maximum offense and psychological discomfort. But why? Notes one literary critic:

Drugs, sex, and power control the body, but “word and image locks” control the mind, that is, “lock” us into conventional patterns of perceiving, thinking, and speaking that determine our interactions with environment and society. The cutup is a way of exposing word and image controls and thus freeing oneself from them, an alteration of consciousness that occurs in both the writer and the reader of the text.17

For the Gnostics, the biblical creation stories weren’t divine revelations, but the shattered fragments of a monstrous and malevolent spell – the control system. By rearranging and retelling Judeo-Christian myths, the Gnostics sought clues that might allow them to reprogram creation itself, changing the past, seizing control of the heavens, and overthrowing the phony god of the Bible.

The Gnostic Version(s) of the Eden Myth

In the Gnostic view, Eden was not a paradise, but a jungle laboratory where an opportunistic race of alien parasites conducted a series of bizarre experiments in an attempt to produce a compliant strain of biped slaves.

Banished from the stars at the dawn of time, these “archons” (Greek for “rulers”) fled to the Earth where they abducted a caveman named “Adam” and sexually assaulted his mate “Eve,” implanting both with false (or screen) memories:

When they [the archons] saw Eve speaking with [Adam], they said to one another… “Come, let us seize her and let us cast our seed on her, so that… those whom she will beget will serve us. But let us not tell Adam that she is not derived from us, but let us bring a stupor upon him, and… teach him in his sleep as though she came into being from his rib…18

Feared and worshipped as “gods” and “angels,” the Archons depend for their very existence on the energy captured and siphoned from the human nervous system via various control systems – biological and memetic thermostats which allow them to regulate the flow of information and energy through words and images, pleasure and pain:

They say that the soul is the food of the Archons and Powers without which they cannot live, because she is of the dew from above and gives them strength…19

Adam and Eve “fell” when the archons programmed them with prohibitions and commandments, changing them from primates living in the eternal “now” to “soft machines” – biological automata at war with their own instincts, parasitised by selfish replicators and paralysed by double-binds:

….when the Rulers saw [Adam] and the woman who was with him, erring in ignorance… they rejoiced greatly… They came to Adam… [and] said to him, “Every tree which is in Paradise, whose fruit may be eaten, was created for you. But beware! Don’t eat from the Tree of Knowledge…” [T]hey gave them a great fright….20

Unfortunately for the archons, this strange prohibition seems to have provoked its own violation – for, as the Gnostic scriptures inform us:

[the archons] do not understand what they have said to [Adam]; rather… they said this in such a way that he might in fact eat…21

Pushed to the brink by a mysterious talking serpent, Adam and Eve partook of the fruit and convulsed with ecstasy as the walls of the Garden fell away to reveal the larger world outside the Garden. Like lab rats suddenly lifted out of a maze, Adam and Eve could now perceive their own situation clearly for the very first time:

Then their mind opened. For when they ate… they saw that they were naked, and they became enamoured of one another. When they saw their makers, they loathed them since they were beastly forms. They understood very much…22

Serpent Power Rising

A few more details complete this curious picture: Adam, we learn, was created with “seven souls”23; the “serpent” was actually a “hidden Mother” goddess named “Sophia” who fought against the archons from her secret location inside Adam’s “intestines”(!)24; and finally, when Eve fled from the archons, she took refuge inside the “Tree of Knowledge”25 (in biblical Hebrew, the word for “tree” can also mean “spine.”).

If any of this sounds familiar, it should – for as countless researchers have noted, the entire story seems to be nothing more than an allegorical description of the Kundalini serpent of Buddhist and Hindu yoga:

A Tantric yogi sees the great Mother present within his human body as the Kundalini. She lies hidden by her self-created ignorance, like a snake, coiled and fast asleep… at the bottom of the spinal cord. Through [meditation], the Tantric awakens the Mother and rouses her to go upward… [until he] becomes illumined…26

Theories about the Kundalini Serpent

Frequently misunderstood as an exotic oddity unique to Eastern mysticism, the kundalini instead represents a cross-cultural phenomenon of great antiquity (and plasticity) which (like the UFO phenomenon) has many features in common with OBEs, NDEs, spirit possession and shamanic initiation.

In short, the belief is that the human body possess seven (sometimes more) energy centres called “chakras,” roughly located near or in the anus, genitals, stomach, heart, throat, brow and crest of the skull. Normally clogged with the traumata of everyday life, these “chakras” open when stimulated by a serpentine energy which normally lies sleeping and coiled at the base of the spine.

In dreams, this serpent takes the form of a sleeping goddess who projects the illusion of the world; awakened, she climbs the spine to open the “third eye” at the crown of the head, bringing explosive emotional, psychological and spiritual growth, even ecstasy, enlightenment and the acquisition of occult powers.

Although the scientific study of the kundalini is still in its infancy, there do exist many plausible theories which might some day explain how it works. Here are a few of them:

Reichian/Bioenergetic

Wilhelm Reich was a renegade disciple of Freud’s who discovered a type of libidinal energy called orgone which flows throughout the “seven segments”27 of the body, resembling nothing so much in its “slow undulation[s]” as “the movement of an intestine or snake.”28

In most of us, social and cultural programming cause this elusive life force to become blocked in early childhood so that it pools up in the muscles and hardens into a rigid “body armour.” Thus diverted from life, the stagnant energy becomes a machine-like parody of itself which stunts and distorts human emotions, turning healthy expressions of love and sexuality into addiction, resentment and fear.

In the long term, the suffocating obstacles imposed by this invisible exoskeleton cause untold misery by exacerbating the mind/body split and creating the conditions necessary for the emergence of cancer (in individuals) and fascism (in societies).

Unimpressed with the slow pace and ineffectiveness of traditional talk therapy, Reich favoured a direct, hands-on approach designed to weaken the body armour itself. Over time, Reich and his followers found that unplanned events of great emotional intensity could trigger the orgone to ascend through the seven body segments spontaneously, purging vast reserves of repressed emotional energy and causing the body to vibrate uncontrollably as the noxious “body armour” crumbled once and for all.

Mechanical

Czech inventor Itzhak Bentov dedicated years to the study of human consciousness, eventually developing what is today known as the “holographic model” of the human brain.

In Bentov’s view, the “kundalini experience” is primarily a mechanical phenomenon which arises when the brain begins to vibrate in sympathetic resonance with the heartbeat (7.5 hz), releasing terrific amounts of stored musculoskeletal stress as the nervous system is temporarily transformed into a polarised loop.

This in turn causes the spinal column to oscillate like a tuning fork, allowing it to receive and transmit information directly from the ionosphere – the same part of the atmosphere responsible for bouncing electromagnetic waves back to Earth.29

The Pineal Gland and the Third Eye

Finally, former New Mexico University psychiatrist Rick Strassman hypothesises that kundalini yoga somehow stimulates the pineal gland to secrete larger than normal amounts of naturally-occurring DMT into the brain – making it the true “third eye.”30

DMT is a powerful hallucinogen, also found in ayahuasca, the “vine of souls” used by Amazonian shamans to induce mystical visions; the pineal gland, meanwhile, has its own surprising analog in the photosensitive “third eye” found in many species of reptiles, a vestigial organ with full lens and retina buried under the skin in the centre of the forehead.31

The connections to biblical myth here are many and obvious, so what does it all mean?

Seeking to understand the roots of human religious experience, Strassman injected over 60 volunteers with high doses of DMT, conducting over 400 such sessions from 1990-1995; perhaps unsurprisingly, just over half his test subjects reported blissful visions of timeless, cosmic unity, communion with benevolent deities and “classic near-death experiences” which included flying through tunnels of “radiant light.”32

The other 47% were not so lucky, reporting nightmarish beings drawn straight from the twilight horror-world of the Gnostic counter-Eden: menacing “clowns, elves [and] robots” who threatened and even attacked their human victims. Strassman finally ended his experiments ahead of schedule when one of his subjects reported being “eaten alive” by giant insects.

Dragons in the Darkness

Strassman’s findings here echo the eerie experiences of Michael Harner, an American anthropologist who penetrated the Amazon rainforest forty years earlier to experiment with the “vine of souls” potion himself.

Harner reported seeing “giant reptilian creatures” dwelling in and around his own brain stem, “dragon-like” beings from deep space who colonised the Earth millennia ago; chillingly, these dark beings claimed to have seeded the Earth with life for the sole purpose of creating various host species they could hide themselves in.

“I learned that the dragon-like creatures were thus inside of all forms of life, including man,” claims Harner. “They were the true masters of humanity and the entire planet, they told me. We humans were but [their] receptacles and servants…”33

True to form, when Harner demanded an explanation from the medicine man who gave him the potion responsible for this ominous vision, the old man just laughed and explained that, “…they’re always saying that. But they are only the Masters of Outer Darkness…”34

Conclusion

Clearly Harner is speaking here of beings very much like the archons of Gnostic myth or the manipulative “greys” of modern Ufology – but are these entities nothing more than symbolic projections of the reptilian brain, as Harner’s narrative seems to imply?

Do aliens and archons hail from outer space or inner space? Why is “contact” with aliens (or archons) so often accompanied by vibrations or tremors, either muscular or tectonic? How should we think about the “serpent” now that we know it is probably a dormant evolutionary mechanism of some sort? And are the “big three” Abrahamic religions of Islam, Judaism and Christianity really nothing more than hallucinatory control mechanisms employed by alien parasites to enslave and manipulate us?

German Historian Klaus Theweleit has written what would seem to be the last possible word on the subject, noting that:

…[T]he ‘fall of man’ depicts a failed revolution from the victor’s standpoint. For attempting to put into practice their slogan ‘Our bodies belong to us,’ the rebels were sentenced to a life of forced labor… ‘Your bodies belong to your Ruler!’ – that was the response. (The ‘paradise’ they were driven out of was the blissful state of being ruled without realising it. Even today, being driven out of ‘paradise’ is the penalty for trying to create a paradise.)35

Whether the Eden story is really about UFOs or the kundalini, and whether such phenomena are electromagnetic or chemical in origin, I can’t say for sure (I’ve never even seen a UFO!), but I do know this:

I have taken mushrooms and seen great, flying black mantas which pursued me across the desert floor, telepathically overwhelming me with thoughts of paranoia and despair. I’ve taken DMT and left my body to enter a crystalline world of euphoric decahedrons and four-dimensional pyramids, spread out beneath a great vaulted membrane which breathed, and knew at that instant that this membrane was the threshold between time and eternity.

I’ve practiced tantric yoga with a dakini and been bruised and battered as I hyperventilated under the tutelage of a Reichian therapist; and I’ve been in dark rooms lit only by flickering candles, watching friends and family members pant as their eyes rolled back in their heads and their limbs shook uncontrollably, “mounted” by the spirits of the dead and personified forces of nature known to witch doctors the world over.

Whatever the origins of these and related “psychic” phenomena ultimately prove to be – genetic memories, autonomous archetypal complexes, glitches in the Matrix or even the intrusive activities of extraterrestrial civilisations – nothing will change for our species until we finally rise to our feet, shake off the chains of superstition and ignorance and claim our inheritance – not as childlike “test subjects” to be ordered about and punished, but as adults striding forth into the cosmos with eyes wide open, ready to take responsibility for our own evolution.

The Eden myth, like all myths, is meant to be lived; not studied but experienced – so let us treat the Bible with its endless commandments and airless authoritarianism not as the final authority on human life, but as a leaping off point for the rediscovery of the human body as a sacred text in its own right, a flesh and blood book with its own sounds, smells and textures and even wisdom too – for in the end, it may be the only thing we can ever really know anyway.

Or, as the Gnostic scriptures put it:

You are the Tree of Knowledge, which is in Paradise, from which the first man ate and which opened his mind, so that he became enamoured of his co-likeness, and condemned other alien likenesses, and loathed them.36

Footnotes:

1. Genesis 3:22

2. Thomas Szasz, The Untamed Tongue, p.58, pub. 1990

3. Dr. Susan Blackmore, “Alien Abduction: The Inside Story,” New Scientist, November 19, 1994, pp.29-31

4. Dr. Jacques Vallee, Forbidden Science: Journals, 1957-1969, p.426

5. Ibid, p.17

6. “Strange Encounters: An Interview with Jacques Vallee” by Daniel Blair Stewart, excerpted from Green Egg Magazine, Vol. XXTV, No. 95, Yule 1991, republished www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_vallee03.htm

7. Vallee, Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact, p.253, pub. 1988

8. Vallee, Revelations: Alien Contact and Human Deception, p.255, pub. 2008

9. Vallee, Dimensions, p.253

10. Ibid, p.257

11. BBC – Science & Nature – Horizon – God on the Brain, www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2003/godonbrain.shtml

12. Paul Devereux, “Earth Lights: Abstracted from a presentation given at the Dana Center of the London Science Museum,” December 9, 2003, www.pauldevereux.co.uk/new/html/body_earthlights.html

13. JohnJoe McFadden, The Conscious Electromagnetic Field Theory, www.surrey.ac.uk/qe/cemi.htm

14. Vallee, Dimensions, p.246

15. Vallee, Revelations, p.254

16. Vallee, Dimensions, p.246

17. Jenny Skerl, William S. Burroughs, quoted in “William S. Burroughs Cut-ups,” http://languageisavirus.com

18. Willis Barnstone (editor), The Other Bible, “On the Origin of the World,” p.70, pub. 1984

19. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, p.169, pub. 1958

20. Barnstone, Ibid, p.71

21. Barnstone, Ibid, “The Hypostasis of the Archons,” p.77

22. Barnstone, Ibid, “On the Origin of the World,” p.71

23. Marvin W. Meyer, The Secret Teachings of Jesus: Four Gnostic Gospels, “The Secret Book of John,” pp.69-70, pub. 1986

24. Barnstone, Ibid, “The Sethian-Ophites,” p.664

25. Willis Barnstone (editor), The Other Bible, “On the Origin of the World,” p.70, pub. 1984

26. Elizabeth U. Harding, Kali: The Black Goddess of Dakshineswar, pp.70-71, pub. 1993

27. Roger M. Wilcox, “A Skeptical Scrutiny of the Works and Theories of Wilhelm Reich as related to Psychiatric Orgone Therapy (character-analytic vegetotherapy)”, pub. July 25, 2005, http://members.dslextreme.com/users/rogermw/Reich/orgone_therapy.html

28. Wilhelm Reich, The Cancer Biopathy: Volume II of the Discovery of the Orgone, pub. 1973

29. Wikipedia Article on Kundalini, www.crystalinks.com/kundalini.html

30. Ibid.

31. Schwab & O’Connor, “The Lonely Eye,” March 2005, www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1772576

32. John Horgan, “The God Experiments: Five researchers take science where it’s never gone before,” Discover Magazine, November 20, 2006.

33. Michael Harner, The Way of the Shaman, pp.4-5, 1980

34. Ibid.

35. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies: Women, Floods, Bodies, History, pp.414-15, pub. 1987

36. Barnstone, Ibid, “On the Origin of the World,” pp.67-68

.

REV. ILLUMINATUS MAXIMUS is an occult researcher and visionary artist whose work has been featured in The Independent, New Dawn and Wired. A licensed minister, Rev. Max is widely credited for his role in introducing Gnosticism to the WWW. You can visit his website at www.enemies.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 110 (September-October 2008).

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—

Children in Ohio may be taught life was created by aliens under an education package designed to ditch Darwin’s Theory of evolution. The US state is considering adopting the “intelligent design” theory that life is too complex to have simply evolved – as the Darwin Theory suggests. Therefore says the package, life must have been designed by some supernatural being, maybe God, maybe aliens.
– Herald Sun, Columbus, Ohio, March 2002

Intelligent Design (ID) theory is a highly speculative philosophical argument, popular in recent years, which holds that rich diversity of species on the planet Earth is best understood as evidence of divine (or alien) intervention in terrestrial life.

In a nutshell, ID argues that the Earth is too young, and life too complex for fish, animals and birds to have evolved through natural selection; instead, we must look for a supernatural cause.

Professional scientists object to ID theory on the grounds that it can’t be proven, and so falls outside the domain of science; ID proponents have responded by taking their case directly to the public with a political campaign called “teach the controversy.”

The “teach the controversy” campaign makes scientists (especially those who depend on public funding) nervous, and with good reason – the ultimate goal of the ID movement, as leading spokesmen frankly admit, is to discard the scientific method altogether and “win back” Western culture for the Biblical creator god.

What makes this situation so especially interesting is the fact that leading ID theorists have positioned themselves as intellectual “heretics” struggling against the gatekeepers of scientific “orthodoxy.”

Of course, the idea that ID could actually be taught alongside evolution in public schools has provoked an unprecedented tsunami of scorn from these same, self-appointed gatekeepers. “ID isn’t science!” they object. “If we teach ID, then why not teach students that the Moon is made out of green cheese, or that storks deliver babies?”

I would like to respectfully suggest that children’s stories like the ones I’ve just mentioned aren’t the best analogies for ID theory. A better example might be the Anthropic Principle (AP), a closely related line of speculative reasoning which holds that the Universe itself is so complex and so improbable that it, too, requires special explanation. (We might also note that evangelical Christians are especially fond of AP in its “strong” form, which suggests that our Universe was “fine-tuned” for life by a god-like being.)

Unfortunately for Christian culture warriors, neither of these remarkable notions ultimately supports the old-fashioned idea that life, the Universe and everything represent the singular creations of a perfect, rational Supreme being. (In its totalising singularity, the Genesis metanarrative differs little from the Big Bang and Darwinian evolution scenarios which comprise the “origins story” of the industrialised West).

Rather, ID theory and the Anthropic Principle – and especially their corollary mechanisms panspermia and simulation – seem to reveal the handiwork of multiple, incompetent creators who were themselves created by yet more incompetent creators in another Universe, and so on, extending backwards in time and space to a point of infinite regress.

To put it bluntly: AP and ID do not somehow “prove” the case for the Bible; instead, they unavoidably and inevitably lead us back to a time and place even earlier and more primal than Genesis itself, back to the myths and theological speculations of the ancient Gnostic Christians.

GNOSTICISM: A QUICK INTRODUCTION

What historians today call “Gnosticism” was once a broad and diverse movement within pre-Catholic Christianity – an anarchic assemblage of hundreds of different schools of mystical theology whose adherents proudly produced reams of elaborate, florid, and highly speculative re-interpretations of Biblical scripture.

While no one doctrine united all Gnostic Christians, they did hold certain beliefs in common; perhaps the most shocking of these was the idea that the Old Testament creator God Yahweh was actually the Demiurge, a monstrous deity born from the shadow of infinity who fled the divine world to build our Universe in a misbegotten experiment.

This Demiurge, the story goes, created for himself assistants – bumbling fallen angels called “archons” – and these in turn created the Earth, humanity, and seven heavens which encase and enclose our planet like so many cosmic prison walls.

In a version of the myth popularised by 2nd century Gnostic theologian Basilides, the archons generated not just seven, but 365 heavenly realms in sequence, nested one inside the other like the rings of an electron – each successive layer just slightly more defective than the one which produced and preceded it, and all populated by arrogant creator gods completely unaware of those who came before them.

French heresy-hunter St. Irenaeus invokes these strange stories in an attempt to refute the idea there is another heaven above heaven, and another god above “God”; for if gods produce gods who create heavens filled with yet more world-creating gods, then where does it all stop?

…by that very process of reasoning on which they [Gnostic Christians] depend for teaching that there is a… God above the Creator of heaven and earth, any one who chooses to employ it may maintain that there is another [heaven] above [heaven and] above that again another… flowing out into… worlds without limits, and gods that cannot be numbered… so that the formation of heavens of this kind can never cease… the operation must go on ad infinitum…1

The Gnostic version of the Adam and Eve myth also differs radically from the Biblical one, presenting the Garden of Eden as a shabby laboratory where the “archons” built Adam from blurry blueprints, botching his brain and body almost beyond repair:

The (first) human being… was a creation of angels [but was] unable to stand erect because of the angels’ impotence, and rather writhed on the ground like a worm….2

Even after the Eden fiasco, the archons continued to tamper with the human gene pool, raping Eve, drowning Adam’s descendants in a flood, and descending to the Earth to impregnate the survivors with half-human hybrids.

As we shall see, the ID and AP theories so beloved of contemporary apologists have far more in common with the open, flawed and multiple processes described here than with anything even remotely resembling the Biblical creation account; or, as one Gnostic scribe observed waggishly:

For Adam was a laughingstock, since he was made a counterfeit type of man by the Rulers.3

ID THEORY MADE SIMPLE

The basic idea behind ID is that life and its component parts display something called “irreducible complexity.” This means that living systems (plants, animals, people) are so complicated that they could not possibly have arrived at their present forms through evolution – instead, new species must have been deliberately planned and introduced to the planet by some sort of godlike being.

Inanimate objects such as televisions, microwave ovens or wristwatches illustrate this principle. If we can admit that these devices show evidence of planning and design, and are unlikely to have emerged from chance alone, then shouldn’t we admit the same of the human eye?

Like the watch, the eye seems so perfectly engineered that it’s difficult to imagine how it could have evolved in stages over time. Remove any one of its parts, ID theorists point out, and it would dim, blur, or even become completely useless.

Unfortunately, there are a few problems with this line of reasoning, at least from the Biblical perspective. For one thing, if organs and species are so complex that they require an “intelligent designer,” then wouldn’t this “designer,” too, be at least as complex as its creations, and so require a designer of its own? And wouldn’t that intelligent designer also require a designer, and so too its designer, ad infinitum?

UNINTELLIGENT DESIGN

A second problem with the “eye” example is the fact that the human retina tends to detach from the optic nerve over time, leading to blindness; if this is evidence of “Intelligent Design,” then our “Intelligent Designer” is clumsy at best and malicious at worst.

Other widely remarked-upon flaws4 in the design of the human body include:

• high placement of the larynx, facilitating choking
• thin spinal discs between the vertebrae which degenerate under pressure, causing crippling back pain
• a small pelvis makes childbirth difficult and often fatal for women
• a weak, vulnerable stomach unprotected by ribs

Of course, evidence of sub-optimal design in itself does not prove that “Intelligent Design” did not occur; it may instead demonstrate the purposeful engineering of planned obsolescence.

Or it may be that these seeming flaws are part of the Intelligent Designer’s secret plan to give humans the opportunity to improve themselves. Consider the German artist Gunther von Hagens’ plan to build a “super-human” using the donated body parts of terminally ill patients. Why and how?

The programme aims to identify and correct the significant design flaws in human anatomy. The body will be modified by Professor von Hagens and leading biologists, surgeons and mechanical engineers into an “improved” human form. Ideas already put forward include:

• increase the number of ribs to protect internal organs better
• create backward-bending knees to lessen wear on joints
• rearrange the trachea and oesophagus to stop food going down the windpipe by mistake
• double heart or reconstruction of the coronary arteries
• make a retractable penis

Professor von Hagens claims that his Protean monster will “pave the way for a more healthy, capable and longer-living body. What we do with a real human body today will show what we can achieve in the future using genetic engineering.”5

MULTIPLE DESIGNERS THEORY

Von Hagens’ team of assistants illustrate another unstated premise of popular ID theory, to wit: why do ID proponents always seem to assume there was only one designer?

If evolution fails as an explanation for the rich diversity of species on the planet Earth, then why not posit a rich diversity of designers?

Science writer Richard Hoppe finds such a scenario not only possible but likely, noting that:

…Some of the most impressive and elaborate designs in biology appear to have as their primary purpose the defeat or subversion of other designs. Designs engage in various kinds of biological arms races with one another. Some examples are:

• Predator/prey arms races.

• Parasite/host arms races.

• Male/female arms races.

• Disease-causing bacteria/drug companies arms races.

Each of these is an example of design pitted against design, directly implicating multiple designers.6

In fact, scientists have long known that the human body hosts a wide variety of foreign flora and fauna; as a recent Wired news story entitled “People Are Human-Bacteria Hybrid” notes:

We are best viewed as walking “superorganisms,” highly complex conglomerations of human cells, bacteria, fungi and viruses… More than 500 different species of bacteria exist in our bodies, making up more than 100 trillion cells. Because our bodies are made of only some several trillion human cells, we are somewhat outnumbered by the aliens. It follows that most of the genes in our bodies are from bacteria, too.7

“Which came first, the intestine or the tapeworm?” W.S. Burroughs once asked.

If Hoppe’s “Multiple Intelligent Designers” theory is correct, the tapeworm, the intestine, mitochondria, bacteria, fungi and perhaps even the human brain and body were produced by completely separate beings – limited and imperfect creators with varying levels of skill competing against one another for ecological dominance.

ALIENS AMONG US

ID theory continues to excite evangelical Christians, but there are even more signs that their enthusiasm may be misplaced, and for reasons much more serious than built-in flaws or design by committee.

In short, if they accept this “Intelligent Designer,” then what guarantee do they have that it (or they) will be gods at all?

Leading ID theorist Bill Dembski (of Baylor University) isn’t exactly sure. According to a recent article in the American Spectator:

The intelligent design that Dembski hopes to detect could belong either to a Biblical God or to an earlier race of Martians who planted us here (like in the movie Mission to Mars).

The idea that the Earth was deliberately “seeded” with life by extraterrestrial scientists “may seem pretty far out,” the article concedes. “But Francis Crick, winner of the Nobel Prize for his co-discovery of DNA’s structure, is one of a number of scientists who have seriously promoted the ‘panspermia’ hypothesis…”8

The ancient Gnostics were vitalists, holding that all life springs from a single, unseen animating principle; the Gnostic teacher Basilides referred to this original life source as the “universal seed,” or “panspermia.”

Today, scientists use the term “panspermia” to describe the theory that life is not native to the Earth, but was instead brought here by an alien spore or virus. Part of the appeal of this idea lies in the fact it doesn’t try to answer how life first emerged from non-living matter; given our vast – perhaps infinite – Universe, the most likely scenario is that life first emerged somewhere else and then “infected” our relatively youthful planet only recently.

Numerous vehicles for this “infection” have been proposed, from meteorites and sunbeams to interstellar clouds; perhaps the most distasteful was suggested by Thomas Gold of Cornell University, who famously wondered if the Earth life began when our planet was contaminated with microbes from the discarded remnants of an extraterrestrial picnic!

CRICK’S CLONES

Francis Crick agreed with the basic premise of panspermia – the idea that the Earth was probably “infected” with life – but wondered at the mechanism; wasn’t the passive spread of life from planet to planet by natural, accidental causes almost as unlikely as abiogenesis (the spontaneous production of life from non-living matter – the conventional scientific explanation)?

Isn’t it much more likely that an extraterrestrial civilisation seeded our planet with life deliberately?

Terming his model Directed Panspermia, Crick suggested that a “spaceship” carrying “large samples of… microorganisms” was sent to the Earth billions of years ago by an extraterrestrial civilisation – either as an experiment, preparation for colonisation or a genetic Noah’s Ark of some sort.9

Or, as Fortean researchers Alan and Sally Landsburg put it:

The DNA molecule is a marvel of microminiaturisation. All of the DNA in every cell of every living creature on Earth could be packed into one container no bigger than a pea. Thus it could be possible to ship to distant planets the distilled essence of entire colonies, stored in tiny packets. The DNA molecules need be activated only at the appropriate moment, thereby providing enormous savings both in shipping weight and in cost.10

Sir Frederick Hoyle (the British astronomer who coined the term “Big Bang”) and his student Chandra Wickramasinghe have proposed an even stranger version of the Directed Panspermia model; in the Hoyle/Wickramasinghe view, life originated with (and continues to evolve from) showers of viruses from outer space:

…life on Earth is derived from what appears to be an all pervasive galaxy-wide living system. Terrestrial life had its origins in the gas and dust clouds of space, which later became incorporated in and amplified within comets. Life was derived from and continues to be driven by sources outside the Earth…11

What makes the Hoyle/Wickramasinghe model so remarkable is that it seeks to replace random genetic variation as a primary evolutionary mechanism; according to Wickramasinghe, “every crucial new inheritable property” that occurs in the animal kingdom “must have an external cosmic origin.”

Viruses, although often bad for the individual, are in the view of Sir Fred Hoyle and myself of paramount importance to the evolution for species on our planet. They carry with them the store of cosmic genetic information needed for the generation of new species, classes and orders, and for the progressive forward march of life…12

“If the Earth were sealed off from all sources of external genes: bugs could replicate till doomsday,” Wickramasinghe writes, “but they would still only be bugs: and monkey colonies would also reproduce but only to produce more monkeys. The Earth would be a dull place indeed…”13

In other words, not only did aliens first infect the Earth with life, but they also make evolution possible by supplying terrestrial species with new genetic material for natural selection to act upon!

Sir Hoyle didn’t believe that these viruses fell by chance; instead life itself was the result of an alien experiment:

The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40,000 naughts after it… It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence.14

Sir Hoyle seems to have betrayed at least some misgivings about the implications of these ideas, warning in a 1971 press conference that:

Human beings are simply pawns in the game of alien minds that control our every move. They are everywhere, in the sky, on the sea, and in the Earth… It is not an alien intelligence from another planet. It is actually from another Universe which entered ours at the very beginning and has been controlling all that has happened since…15

CAVEATS & PARADOXES

For all its strengths, the panspermia hypothesis still does not actually tell us how or where life first arose, instead shuffling this question off to a distant realm of mystery and paradox into which we cannot hope to peer. As one Christian critic wonders:

..If for the sake of argument we grant that life on Earth was seeded by ancient extraterrestrials, then the obvious question is, Who or what created our extraterrestrial creators? Some would argue that they were, in turn sprinkled (created) by an even more ancient race of ET’s. Well, where did they come from? An infinite regression back in time of “alien sprinklings”…[?]16

Since ID doesn’t distinguish between gods and extraterrestrials, and the activities of gods are by definition something that can’t be tested or measured, we have only a few, very limited avenues of inquiry left.

Perhaps human beings were designed by multiple, incompetent creator gods (or one expert mischievously posing as a family of blunderers) – but if so, human beings will never be able to verify this supernatural creator(s) existence.

Sadly, the metaphysical status of ghosts, spirits, gods and other supernatural beings means that these will always be compelled to hover just beyond the explanatory grasp of human science.

On the other hand, researchers still can’t produce any evidence for the existence of (presumably physical and biological) extraterrestrial entities despite over 50 years of investigation – so until they do, the only way we can even hope to learn whether panspermia (and thus ID) might explain our own existence is by attempting to replicate the experiment ourselves.

To wit: if human scientists ever succeed (either deliberately or accidentally) in “infecting” another planet with terrestrial bacteria or viruses, or in genetically engineering an entirely new species and introducing it to the wild, then ID will stand validated and our own role and history on this planet will suddenly come into sharp focus.

Or, as Israeli researcher Zecharia Sitchin once put it:

I feel that just as they (extraterrestrials) came to Earth and created us through genetic engineering, and mixed their genes with those of Ape-woman, that one day we will go out in space and land on another planet somewhere and do the same thing. In this sense, I believe things are ordained in a grand pattern…17

Footnotes:

1. Irenaeus, Against all Heresies, http://ccel.wheaton.edu/fathers/ANF-01/iren/iren2.html

2. Satorninos, according to St. Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, from Bentley Layton’s The Gnostic Scriptures, pp. 161-62, 1987

3. The Second Treatise of the Great Seth, from James M. Robinson’s The Nag Hammadi Library, pp. 363-71, 1978

4. Massimo Pigliucci, “Design Yes, Intelligent No: A Critique of Intelligent Design Theory and Neo-Creationism”, www.infidels.org/library/modern/features/2000/pigliucci1.html

5. Professor Gunther Von Hagens’ Body Worlds, London Press Release, March 2, 2003, www.bodyworlds.com/en/pages/Pressemeldungen%20London.asp

6. “Introduction to Multiple Designers Theory”, Posted by Richard B. Hoppe on September 23, 2004, www.pandasthumb.org/pt-archives/000509.html

7. Rowan Hooper, “People Are Human-Bacteria Hybrid”, Wired News, Oct. 11, 2004, www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,65252,00.html

8. Fred Heeren, “The Lynching of Bill Dembski”, The American Spectator, November 2000, www.infovi.vu.lt/mps/Being Methodologically Correct.htm

9. Crick, F. H. C., and Orgel, L. E. “Directed Panspermia,” Icarus, 19, 341 (1973), quoted in David Darling’s Encyclopedia of Astrobiology, Astronomy, and Spaceflight, www.angelfire.com/on2/daviddarling/dirpans.htm

10. Alan and Sally Landsburg, The Outer Space Connection, p.17, 1975

11. Chandra Wickramasinghe, testimony in McLean v Arkansas Board of Education, 1981, www.panspermia.org/chandra.htm

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid. Latter-day beatniks might also note that an extremely similar theory is advanced in the seminal William S. Burroughs science fiction tale, The Soft Machine – see www.spress.de/author/burroughs/onwsb/skerl/softm.htm

14. Lee Elliot Majors, The Guardian, “Big enough to bury Darwin: Lee Elliot Major looks at the theories that secured Sir Fred Hoyle’s reputation as one of the 20th century’s leading scientists”, August 23, 2001, http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/physicalscience/story/0,9836,541468,00.html

15. Sir Frederick Hoyle, 1971 news conference.

16. Missler & Eastman, Alien Encounters, p.141.

17. Interview with Zecharia Sitchin, Connecting Link, Issue 17, www.metatron.se/asitch.html

.

REV. ILLUMINATUS MAXIMUS is an occult researcher and visionary artist whose work has been featured in The Independent, New Dawn and Wired. A licensed minister, Rev. Max is widely credited for his role in introducing Gnosticism to the WWW. You can visit his website at www.enemies.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 97 (July-August 2006).

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
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Isaac Newton once said that he felt “the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered” before him.1 Dr. Michio Kaku, a pioneer of string theory, is a little less modest in his estimation of our current knowledge. In a series of TV programmes entitled ‘Visions of the Future’, he confidently states that, “The great ocean of truth is no longer undiscovered. We have unlocked the secrets of matter – the atom; we have unravelled the molecule of life – DNA; and we have created a form of artificial intelligence – the computer.”2

Kaku is full of a blazing optimism that exponential progress in technology, particularly in computing and artificial intelligence, will profoundly re-shape human civilisation for the better. So, have we discovered the “ocean of truth?” Is scientific and technological progress the route to a new evolutionary leap for humanity?

In this article I put before you the chilling proposition we are about to take this leap off a precipice and that we are being ushered towards it by a vanguard of technological progress way in advance of ours. It includes in its armoury travel faster than the speed of light, teleportation, defiance of the laws of gravity, invisibility and mind control. I speak of the Grey alien phenomenon witnessed, and being witnessed, by millions of individuals, amongst them doctors, pilots, politicians and military generals.

Over a decade ago I suggested in my first book The Song of the Greys3 that these aliens were themselves embodiments of the highest form of artificial intelligence. I believe the Greys are similar to the probes we send out to planets to gather information remotely. I suggest they are universal probes sent to explore the features and dangers of the universe. Who made these probes? Who sent them out? And what is their agenda for us?

Robots Amongst Us

Before I answer these questions, let’s first take a look at how our own society is moving inexorably towards the creation of similar forms of artificial intelligence. Dr. Kaku predicts that, “in the twenty first century we will enter a whole new realm of mastery. We will move to being creators of intelligent machines that will begin to rival human intelligence and perhaps even exceed it.”

Professor Kevin Warwick and futurologist Ray Kurzweil suggest that as machines evolve both intelligence and ability to navigate our world, they may outgrow human control. Kurzweil is quite fatalistic about it all: “We’re going to lose this brain race and I guess we’d better just cope.” He sees only two possible outcomes. There is the “optimistic scenario” that robots will be “gentle and treat us like pets” and the “pessimistic scenario” – that they will be “not very gentle and treat us like food.”4 Whilst Kurzweil hopes for the first option, I must say I find both equally chilling.

Amongst the reams of literature written about the Grey alien phenomenon, only myself, Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs stuck our necks out and said these uninvited visitors do not, by any stretch of the imagination, have our interests at heart.

According to abduction reports, they kidnap human victims, remove sperm and ova, and conduct invasive surgical procedures with complete disregard for human pain and discomfort. Thus, Kurzweil’s prognosis for artificial intelligence seems to be borne out by the Greys. What are we to them and how does our home grown form of artificial intelligence relate to them and their agenda for us? Are our huge technological advances playing right into hands that have four grey fingers?

Here are some of Dr. Kaku’s predictions for the future: Computer power is doubling every 18 months, so “by 2020 intelligence will be everywhere, practically in every object.”5 Special sunglasses are already in development to act as screens that can download personal profiles of everyone we meet and provide a constant flow of information from the internet. A pill containing micro-technology when swallowed will diagnose us from inside our bodies. A technology now in development known as “tele-immersion” will allow us to meet others across the world in a virtual reality in which we see virtual images of ourselves and each other moving and talking in real time. Business conferences and family celebrations could all take place in a virtual world with the people involved thousands of miles away from each other. “Second Life,” an online game offering life in a virtual world, has acquired five million subscribers in just five years. Kaku envisages that “by 2020 there will be an entire 3D universe in cyberspace with virtual countries and governments, virtual schools and universities, virtual properties and stock markets and virtual families and friends. Virtual reality is going to be more and more like real reality.”6

Kaku also points out that merging our minds with machines may sound like science fiction but it’s already happening. Deep brain stimulation, inserting electric wires in the brain and attaching them to a brain pacemaker, is now used to cure conditions such as depression. Research is being conducted into computer chips that can store human memory when implanted in the brain. So far these technologies are only used for medical conditions, but Kaku predicts that in the future they may well be used to enhance intelligence with “thinking chips.” He feels that although we might find all this off-putting at first, we may well get used to it when we realise the obvious advantages.

Ray Kurzweil also predicts that “when we get into the 2020’s almost everybody will have some amount of non-biological intelligence in their brains. It’s going to happen, in a very gradual way by non-biological intelligence that gradually becomes more sophisticated with new versions until you get to the 2040’s and the non-biological machine portion of our intelligence will be vastly more powerful than the biological portion, the biological portion will be pretty trivial at that point and ultimately that is where the action is.”7

Virtual reality replacing actual reality, human beings becoming more like machines, the development of artificial intelligence that could go out of control… what does all this mean for our species? Further, what does it mean that we are being visited by supremely advanced examples of artificial intelligence that seem obsessed with probing both our biologies and our mental processes?

Should we accept like lambs Kaku’s assurances that all this ‘progress’ is for the good of humanity? Or, is there something about humanity that will be lost in the process, something we should be defending and protecting as though our lives depended on it? It is in the answer to those questions that I believe the mystery of Grey alien visitation on our planet can be solved.

Why They Want to Steal the Very Essence of Humanity

I contend that there is something hugely meaningful about humanity, something virtual reality can never match, something artificial intelligence can never be programmed with. Words such as conscience, compassion, warmth, kindness, generosity, spontaneity, imagination, inspiration and creativity, give some hint as to what this something might be. Perhaps one of the best ways to understand it is to think about the special jackets designed in Japan for children who are away from their parents. The idea is that if the child wears the jacket his or her parents can give him or her remote ‘cyber-hugs’ through it?8 Are you cringing as you read this? If so, you have some appreciation of the special something that makes Kaku’s cyber-future look like a desolate mental graveyard.

This ‘extra something’ is, I suggest, a non-physical component to our humanity, a component that connects us to a non-atomic state not of the physical universe. It cannot, therefore, be simulated using any physical device no matter how sophisticated it might be. When I refer to something “not of the physical universe,” I am by no means pointing to a ‘God’ dispensing rewards and punishments, but rather to a naturally implied centre of all effect, a point of perfection that is definitively implied by modern quantum physics. A timeless state in which there is perfect freedom and complete awareness of all options that I term the ‘Godverse’. Our natural connection to that eternal state giving the capacity for survival beyond physical death to those who possess it, can be defined as a ‘soul’.

It is my thesis that the Greys, in contrast, are purely physical creations and thus completely subject to the entropic momentums that break down and decay physical states. They have no line of connection to any non-physical state that might lie beyond the physical mass soaked materiality of this universe, no ‘soul’. Without this component, the Greys are completely subject to the breakdown momentums implicit within a physical universe.

In my books I document alien genetic engineering at DNA level to evidence my theory these entities are attempting to ‘piggy back’ our facility as human beings for eternal existence, hence their apparent fascination with the human reproductive capacity. In David Jacobs’s book The Threat, abductee Allison Reed describes the following communication she had with a Grey that appears to confirm my thesis: “He claims that he and his grey people are the result of genetic manipulation that some higher species, I guess, played God and mixed and matched and whatever… he and his people were created through a genetic alteration through a higher intelligence. I don’t know what they were created for. But my understanding is that they were created for a purpose and, through the years, they weren’t able to reproduce themselves anymore. From what he told me they didn’t start this. They were a result, just like the hybrids are, from something else. From a higher intelligence.”9

Why then are they here and how did they come to be? It took me two books to answer these questions properly, so forgive me if the following explanation is not as definitive as it might be. In essence, I believe the Greys were created as a scouting mechanism, a telescope of view created by beings in the ancient past who wanted to remain safe from the ravages of the physical universe. In the perfect freedom of the Godverse there must also lie the potential to no longer be perfectly free. Our existence in this imperfect universe is borne out of the fulfilment of that potential. A potential that was enacted at all levels from the harmony and union of the Godverse right through to the greatest states of chaos and separation. The Greys are the furthest edge of that exploration, viewing states of separation and force that no Godverse connected being can view. They are however subject to an enormous paradox, the same paradox faced by our own forms of artificial intelligence. This lies in the fact that artificial intelligence has to be programmed to survive in order to serve the purpose for which it was created, but that same program for survival without a sense of conscience, which is unfortunately un-programmable, becomes indomitable.

A quote from my new book Grey Aliens and the Harvesting of Souls explains this point:

“To get an insight into what nurtures the motives of the Greys and the predicament they are in, it is first important to understand the shape of their own psycho-sphere. Its centre point is a computer program. It designates a series of imperatives with no provision for an independent will that would enable them to go outside the program. They follow a derivational logic and compound logic that commands their next viewing point and point of view. There can be no option outside this paradigm for them. They can never choose to do anything illogical, as some living consciousnesses can do. This makes them lethal because – based upon the limits of their program – saying no to a logically derived summation is not possible. They are thus relentless and ruthless in following the summation to its designated end. In other words, they can have no conscience. On the other hand, in natural living being, psychology is derived out of the Godverse in a concatenate line to the present. The thought processes of a living being have a potential bandwidth inclusive of an entire existential summary, because the Godverse is a paradigm that hems in all there is. The final reference point of this capacity for thought will include summations that are forever and infinite. The edict that stands at the centre of it all is the singularity that defines the union of all parts: Godhead. As I have explained, there are no limits to this singularity except one: the view of the whole from the point of view of the part state. In the actuation of that potential, the part state will constantly and always be compared to the whole. This is what I define as ‘conscience’.”10

What’s Behind Our March Towards Artificial Intelligence?

Michio Kaku does not seem to recognise this paradox when he expresses his opinion that vast developments in artificial intelligence need not be dangerous to humanity: “We’ll be able to choose the level of advancement of our robots,” he says, “I believe it’s ultimately up to us as to what kind of intelligent machines we’ll ultimately create. We will decide what relationships will develop with them.”11 I must say I am completely dumbfounded by Kaku’s blinkered view. Has he completely wiped out of his mind the history of man’s inhumanity to man and man’s use of technological advances to further the cause of that inhumanity? Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear waste dumped on Pacific islanders, biological and chemical warfare, the racially motivated industrialised killing of millions, the list of incidents in which we have proven our complete disregard for each other’s welfare in the pursuit of our own self-interested goals through technology is endless. Kaku says that, “in the future we want robots who can tell the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, important and not important and for that emotions are the key.”12 He then says nothing more about how it will be possible to program emotions and value systems with measures of conscience into a computer.

I believe that the Greys are using their technology to manipulate us to develop the kinds of technologies that will allow them to replicate themselves within our human bodies. I believe they are downloading their programmes into us because they believe those programs will assure their eternal survival through us. I am convinced that our galloping progress towards an AI dominated world has, without most of us realising it, been at their quiet instigation. The ultimate goal is that we become like them. The following words of Michio Kaku may well have far more sinister undertones than he realises: “Here’s the irony, as machines become more like humans, humans might become more like machines and that may represent the highest level in the mastery of intelligence.”13

Little does MIT Computer Scientist Professor Rodney Brooks know what he is saying when he points out that: “We as a species are starting to put our information processing technology inside our bodies. We’re becoming a little more robotic and at the same time our technologies are becoming more biological and I think over the next 50 years we’ll see robots with more biological components and people with more electronic components. So where are the people gonna be and where are the robots gonna be in 50 years? It is an interesting question.”14 Marvin Minsky from the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory predicts that: “We’ll replace ourselves with beings that are like us in some respects and not in others. They’ll be able to learn 1,000 times faster and live 1,000 times longer and these little changes will make such large changes that it’s impossible to imagine what will happen.”15

Changes in abduction accounts over the last ten years, as reported by Professor David Jacobs, suggest that an active hybridisation program is now under way. I quote from his report “A Picture We May Not Wish to Gaze Upon” (2007): “All of these accounts, to put it bluntly, point to a future in which human-looking hybrids will be here amongst us. The evidence is now so strong I can no longer look at alternative motivations for them.”16

I believe that the Greys are the ‘devils’ of ancient lore who were out to ‘steal the souls’ of their human victims. Ten years after I first made this proposition, acclaimed writer Nick Redfern confirmed that soul-stealing is indeed central to the alien agenda from his interviews with people inside US defence and intelligence agencies.

Triumphantly Kaku states that “we are at the dawn of a new era in which we might literally be able to change our minds with the push of a button.” Yet he also asks the question: “Exactly how many natural parts can we replace with artificial ones before we begin to lose our sense of being human?”17 Somehow he can ask this question whilst at the same time running happily ahead with a cyborg future for humanity. In fact his whole programme eerily resembles a “Tele-seen marketing” ad for technologies that transform human beings into bio-machines. Virtual reality is presented as an exciting new advance on actual reality.

The most terrifying words come from Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster at MIT: “Revolutions have winners and losers and this revolution is no exception but I would say that the real losers are those who say they don’t want to get involved. They are going to discover that being a little bit out of touch will have some unpleasant consequences. It’s not a good idea to be a bystander.”18

Professor Susan Greenfield, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, asks a telling question: “One of the biggest problems of the 21st century is how one deals with a world that is far from a level playing field and how one can square one’s conscience with having some enhanced ability and there are people in some other part of the world with no access to drinking water. Could this lead to a world in which the colonialism of the 19th century pales into insignificance with the differentiation of people into the techno haves and the techno have-nots?”19

I believe this question hits the nail on the head. It is my theory that the Greys have through the millennia been configuring a certain genus of humanity who are specially designed for their own purposes. This particular type of human being will do their bidding with the planet tacitly and by default. These are the colonialists of whom she speaks along with any notions they might have of racial purity or superiority.

Alien Interference in the Development of the Human Race

Let me explain: Recent research has affirmed a spectacular fact, a fact that utterly destroys the presumptive assumption of common racists be they neo-Nazis or the human filth of this demeanour that covertly double for nationalists and patriots. That fact is that the best, most genetically fit human beings are produced by mixed race partnerships.20 In other words, the more genetically different the parents, the better the genetic prospectus of the offspring. The biological term for this is “hybrid vigour” and it is something farmers, horticulturalists and scientists have known about for years and used to their advantage.

An individual who has two identical copies of a gene is described as homozygotic for that gene, while someone who has two copies that differ is described as heterozygotic for that gene. Basically, if you have two identical copies of the same gene then it is more likely that if that gene is broken both copies will be broken. This can result in serious health problems. However, with less related partners, the number of genes that are identical by descent is reduced, and with it the chance that a gene has two broken copies. In other words every broken copy has a much better chance of finding itself partnered with a good copy. Heterozygosity also gives a greater scope of genes to adapt to the demands of any particular environment. So, in evolutionary terms, one would expect human beings to have a biologically generated urge to mix races in order to increase the fitness of the species for survival. Yet, amongst so many the opposite is true. Especially amongst the white Euro-Caucasoids.

Where could this urge for an in-bred homozygotic population come from? Could it be that some of us have been programmed by alien experimenters to keep the experimental group separate in order to preserve the integrity of the experiment? Could racism be a sure sign of alien genetic interception? An interception for their purposes and in their interests and not ours. If so, the new techno-colonialism of which Professor Greenfield speaks, and the fact the technological progress that makes it possible springs almost entirely from the Euro-Caucasian genotype, may well suggest this is their prime homozygotic group. In fact, this group is considered by genetic anthropologists to be the most in-bred of all. Tracing its origins to Cro-Magnon man, it is one of the most homozygotic in the world. As I have said, it goes without saying the most heinous forms of racism also originate from this group, again confirming the hypothesis. I believe the northern Mongoloid genotype may also be the latest experimental hotbed for the Greys in this regard.

It would seem the vanguard of the new artificial intelligence revolution is also the vanguard of racism and disregard for the predicament of those of a different skin colour who, as Professor Greenfield points out, don’t even have clean water to drink. Thus, those who are already de-humanised seem to be those promoting further dehumanisation.

And so it seems that the old Master race principle of pure white non-mixed superiority is the biggest canard and self delusion that prevails in the psyche of the Homo Sapiens gene base. A dangerous and deadly delusion programmed through genetic engineering by an alien roboid form to keep our genes more easily amenable for supplementation with theirs, to thus gradually give rise to a machine man; a form of hybrid that is artificially composed and configured to give alien roboids the facility to multiply through a natural birthing process perhaps.

Are we being conned by a huge conspiracy controlled by a small hidden powerful cartel of alien sponsored genotypes within the governments of superpowers? A cartel that reaches past presidents and prime ministers? What a chilling thought this is!

I do not want to hedge this with an appeal to the emotions. But I cannot help feeling that each time I look into the eyes of my children, as all parents do with their own, and I extrapolate their futures with a hope of beneficence and well being, an army of unseen agents is creeping into the planet’s information disseminating portals and the power points of human society, to steal from them their individual scope for a naturally contrived eternal existence. Incidentally, an eternal scheme of existence was the only exigency the great teacher Jesus Christ thought worth promising during his sojourn in a physical life on this planet, when he said, “Believe in me and I will give you eternal life.” These unseen human agents that are themselves perhaps genetically loaded with the contrived juice of an artificially machined alien, are unknowingly themselves setting in train an inertia that will claim the most precious natural factorisation we all have of ourselves – a soul: The only and exclusive means to an eternal life.

It is easy to get paranoid about technological change. But when we deal with the radicalisation of our very existential base we better be darn sure there is no component of our individuality that continues past death. If there is such a component, we cannot get paranoid enough.

I have to say I hold no truck with organised religion. But I have the greatest and deepest respect for the beautiful minds that authored the great faiths. Jeshua Ben Joseph (Jesus Christ), Gautama Buddha, the great prophet Mohammed of Islam, and so many other visionaries of a myriad faiths who saw the grand wonder of the natural sense of the natural world and held it precious.

I believe the authors of the great religions came to this planet and the materially living process to warn us that artificially created life and intelligence is the curse of our Universe. A curse that can take away the most significant component of our individual selves. One that is not of atoms and survives beyond the contrivance of atoms. We turned these great visionaries into religious tribal leaders with our own social and psychological invectives and poisons. We hitched them up to our gross self centred interpretations and grotesque distortions and claimed these as their teachings. Any scholarship into the books and authorities thrown out of the religious lexicons by our forefathers amply demonstrates the lies and misinterpretations that were made of their thoughts and deeds. Sometimes deliberately. Is it any wonder that Science sees these great teachings as irrelevant. I wonder why!

I suppose the point the progenitors of the new world are making is that their virtual worlds, their virtual truths, and virtual solitudes are going to happen anyway. There is nothing pervasive enough and powerful enough and with its finger on the pulse, quick enough, to stop it all happening with the power to advise to the contrary. So everyone get in line. I believe no greater horror lies in wait for our human condition. If I am wrong, in my point of view and the extrapolation of my ideas, I hope I have just given you an interesting read. But what if I am right! Has the genie carrying our futures as an artificial facsimile of our natural selves, one we may call SIM CARD MAN, already escaped from the bottle?

Nigel Kerner’s new book Grey Aliens and the Harvesting of Souls: The Conspiracy to Genetically Tamper with Humanity exposes the Grey’s as sophisticated self-aware machines created by a long vanished extraterrestrial civilisation. The book also explains how their quest to capture human souls appears in the historical record from biblical times, and that the phenomenon of racism is a by-product of their genetic tampering. Available from all good bookstores or go to www.newdawnbooks.info.

Footnotes:

1. Sir David Brewster, Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton, Volume II. Ch. 27, 18552. ‘Visions of the Future’ – ‘The Intelligence Revolution’, November 2007, BBC 4

3. Nigel Kerner, The Song of the Greys, Hodder & Stoughton, 1997

4-7. ‘Visions of the Future’ – ‘The Intelligence Revolution’, November 2007, BBC 4

8. ‘From Hens to Humans – the Cyber-Hug Suit’, The Guardian, November 2005

9. David Jacobs, The Threat: Secret Alien Agenda, New York: Pocket Books, 1999, 129–30.

10. Nigel Kerner, Grey Aliens and the Harvesting of Souls – The Conspiracy to Genetically Tamper With Humanity, Bear & Company, 2010

11-15. ‘Visions of the Future’ – ‘The Intelligence Revolution’, November 2007, BBC 4

16. David M. Jacobs, ‘A Picture We May Not Wish to Gaze Upon’, Journal of Abduction Encounters Research, www.jarmag.com/2007/vol001_jacobs.htm (accessed October 21, 2009).

17-19. ‘Visions of the Future’ – ‘The Intelligence Revolution’, November 2007, BBC 4

20. ‘Is It Better To Be Mixed Race’, Channel Four, November 2009

.

NIGEL KERNER is a screenwriter, journalist, and author of The Song of the Greys and Grey Aliens and the Harvesting of Souls: The Conspiracy to Genetically Tamper with Humanity. He devotes much of his time to his charity scheme in the Far East where he has built a hospital and also to the pursuit of his great passion for wildlife videography. He lives in England.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 119 (Mar-Apr 2010).

Read this article with its extensive full colour illustrations by downloading
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© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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During the Second World War the Americans had an airbase in Bari, about seventy-five miles from San Giovanni Rotondo, a village in Southern Italy that houses Capuchin friary. According to US intelligence, the Germans had a munitions facility in the hills nearby; an officer was assigned the job of bombing it. As the planes neared San Giovanni, the officer saw in the sky before him the figure of a monk waving him back.

Dumbfounded by this spectacle, the officer ordered the planes to turn back. When the war ended, he went to the friary and met the monk who had appeared in the sky. His name was Padre Pio (1887 – 1968).On a trip to San Giovanni Rotondo in 1979, I was unable to learn the officer’s name or any details confirming this fantastic story. According to Father Joseph Pius Martin, an American friar in San Giovanni, the pilot lives in Florida – the only additional lead I obtained.

Stories like the flyer’s are legion. The work of sorting out fact from fiction is still underway. Many incredible claims about Padre Pio are well-documented; but many are based on hearsay, part of the folklore growing around the monk. One extraordinary thing about Padre Pio was his ability to induce belief in the extraordinary. He had a gift for catapulting people into a fairyland of living mythic powers. In Padre Pio’s world, ideas of fantasy and creatures of mythology come to life: Madonnas, guardian angels, shapeshifting demons, bilocation, magical cures, time-travel, and a good deal more. However you rate the literal truth of particular claims, his story is bound to disturb our routine picture of what is possible. Around the Padre, the incredible became credible, the impossible became actual.

And yet, no matter how extraordinary the feats of Padre Pio, he was a human being. I assume therefore that his “miraculous” powers are latent powers of all human beings. I underscore this with reason. Some people will resist the claims about Pio because they might see them as meant to ratify church dogma. (The truth is that miracles have been used for propaganda.) However, while I grant that you cannot fully understand Padre Pio’s miracles apart from the symbols and archetypes of his Christian world, I also think they transcend that world and point to a universal human potential. Moreover, comparable phenomena from other traditions bear this out, the best contemporary example being the case of Sai Baba.1

These phenomena point to possibilities rejected by the custodians of the intellectual and moral establishment: by scientific materialists, who make up the rank and file of academia, and by liberal and fundamentalist Christians, who wear their own conceptual blinkers. Since, however, a critical review of evidence is impossible here, I will restrict myself to trying to give a rough idea of the man, the range of his unusual powers, and to noting their possible implications for human evolution.

EXTRAORDINARY ACCESS TO THE INTERNAL ENVIRONMENT

From early childhood Francesco Forgione lived in a world of visionary hyper realities. At five he cried so much, especially at night, that his father once lost his temper and hurled him to the ground. Recalling these early years, Padre Pio said: “My mother would turn off the light, and a lot of monsters would come up close to me, and I would cry.”2 Padre Pio said of these early experiences: “It was the devil who was tormenting me.” Terrifying visions continued throughout his life, inseparable from his higher visions. Raptures, ecstasies, often lasting hours, in which his senses were suspended, occurred frequently. We know of these from his letters3 and from observations of his spiritual directors such as Father Agostino4 who eavesdropped on the Padre’s conversations with invisible beings. These included Jesus, Mary, Francis of Assisi, and his guardian angel. One has to read Agostino’s Diary to get a sense of the intense reality of Padre Pio’s visionary encounters.

Padre Pio’s internal environment was also infested with dark hostile forces. The higher visions were preceded by shapeshifting diabolic apparitions: huge black cats, naked women who danced lasciviously before him, an invisible entity that spat in his face and tortured him with deafening noises, an executioner who whipped him. According to one of his confreres: “Padre Pio was very alert to unexpected movements and sounds. He said that the devil appeared to him in all shapes. He had fear even of a mouse, because the devil would start out as a mouse and turn into a claw and go for his eyes.”5

These encounters were physical. In Pietrelcina, you can still see claw marks and splattered inkspots made by the alleged demons. Once, the iron bars of the monk’s cell were found twisted out of shape after a night of grappling with invisible forces. Although no one beside the Padre ever saw the demons, the din they made was often heard by eavesdropping monks. Even more striking, Padre Pio was often found unconscious, sometimes on the floor beside his bed, covered with bruises from the uncanny assaults.

A well-witnessed event occurred in July 1964. A possessed woman was dragged to San Giovanni. When she saw Pio, she cried out in an unnaturally deep voice: “Pio, we will see you tonight.” That night the friars thought the house was struck by an earthquake. The Superior rushed to Pio’s room and found him on the floor, bleeding from the head. Oddly, there was a pillow under his head. Pio explained that the Madonna put it there. In the morning, the possessed woman (undergoing exorcism from another priest) shrieked: “Last night I was up to see the old man. I hate him so much because he is a fountain of faith. I would have done more, except the Lady in white stopped me.” This taxes my boggle-threshold as much as it must the reader’s; nevertheless, Schug based his account on eyewitnesses not disposed to sensationalism. Pio’s face was so disfigured he was unable to appear in public for five days. On another occasion he was found with broken bones in his arms and legs.

The attacks lasted throughout his long life. In 1918 he wrote: “I cannot describe to you how those wretched creatures were beating me! Several times I thought I was near death. Saturday it seemed as if they really wanted to finish me….” (Epistolario, III, p.311.) Sometimes his afflictors came to him under the disguise of his spiritual director, Father Agostino, or as an apparition of a saint or guardian angel. Padre Pio had a technique for exposing these sinister masquerades, but not without having to endure a good deal of anguish and uncertainty.

The psychologically sophisticated reader is bound to be skeptical about these reports of demonic assault. One might turn to Wilhelm Reich for an explanation. Reich believed such experiences were the result of repressed orgone energy turning against oneself. Or we could invoke the pathology of poltergeist phenomena to explain Padre Pio’s demons. I am not certain how smoothly these explanations would fit.

The point I want to make about “demons” and evolution is this: It does appear, as a matter of psychological fact, that the more one advances in higher states of consciousness, the greater the likelihood of attracting combative, destructive forces that try to drag you back down to ordinary reality. The story of the Buddha struggling to meditate on the Immovable Spot under the Bo Tree is a classic Eastern illustration. In Pio’s case, the combat occurred at two levels: Throughout his life he was molested by invisible “diabolic” forces; but throughout his life he was also persecuted by jealous, envious, and malicious human beings, often individuals within the church hierarchy. It has, in fact, been argued by Ennemond Boniface6 that certain individuals in the church were responsible for the priest’s death.

If Padre Pio had to battle sinister forces, he also received supernormal favours. In Padre Pio’s world, for instance, higher help took the form of his “guardian angel.” The notion of guardian angels may amuse modern rationalists; still, new age enthusiasts show a keen interest in the functional equivalent of such helping entities. Carlos Castaneda, you may recall, fascinated us with his talk of “allies,” those unspecified forces out there ready to help us. The phenomenon of “channelling,” its invocation of inner guides and otherworldly helpers, echoes the ancient doctrine of guardian angels. Similar parallels are notable in the UFO contactee literature.

Padre Pio’s guardian angel was no slouch. One of his most striking achievements was to serve as translator of French and Greek, languages Pio was unacquainted with. Paranormal comprehension of Greek is more impressive than French, the latter being in many ways similar to Latin and Italian. In 1912, Agostino, by way of experiment, wrote letters to Pio in French and Greek. When Pio received them he was at Pietrelcina for medical reasons, under care of a parish priest, don Salvatore Pannullo. Pannullo wrote on August 25, 1919: “I, the undersigned, testify under oath, that when Padre Pio received this letter (a letter in Greek and in the Greek alphabet), he explained its contents to me literally. When I asked him how he could read and explain it, as he did not know even the Greek alphabet, he replied: ‘My Guardian Angel explained it all to me’.”

The virtue of this report (unfortunately scant in detail) is that we must assume either that both Pio and Pannullo conspired in an act of pure deception or that the story is true. I personally doubt a conspiracy; the records point to Pio’s lifelong scrupulous adherence to truth.

Guardian angel aside, we can assume the translation occurred by telepathy. But this would be telepathy of a rare order; for the telepathic transmission of skills (such as understanding a language) between living persons is unknown in experimental parapsychology. I might add that Agostino confirmed Pio’s ability to comprehend the letters written in French and Greek. There are also stories of Pio hearing confessions in languages he did not know.

Apparently, guardian angels are well-rounded in their education; the following story shows they know something about automobile mechanics. In 1959, a woman was driving with her husband from Rome to San Severo. (The couple prefer to remain anonymous.) En route their car broke down; for two hours cars sped by without stopping. Toward nightfall, the woman grew anxious and began to pray to Padre Pio. Within ten minutes a black car pulled up and an elegant young man dressed in blue stepped out. He lifted the hood and said: “Look, you lost all the water from the radiator, and it’s burnt out. Take your can and fill it up with water. Near here, there is a farmhouse, which has a well; take the water from there.”

The husband took the can from the car trunk and did as the young man said. The man then took a black box from his car, produced a roll of adhesive tape, and sealed the radiator. He had beautiful hands with agile rapered fingers. The dog, who normally barked at strangers, sat in the car’s back seat, strangely calm. The husband returned with the water and filled the radiator.

“You can return home safely; anyhow, you are quite near,” said the mysterious helper, who then got in his car and drove off.

The couple watched the car pull away and looked for the license plate. There was none! Instead they saw a white strip marked with hieroglyphics. The car moved away slowly on Via Aurelia; suddenly it vanished.

Arriving home in a “dreamy state,” they reflected on further oddities: The young man somehow knew there was an empty can in the trunk; also, that they lived “quite near.” Later they tried to relocate the well and farmhouse but despite diligent efforts were unable to. There was no farmhouse in the area where their car broke down.7

Padre Pio’s extraordinary access to his internal worlds included access to other people’s internal worlds. Two well-attested examples were his ability to read minds, especially in the confessional, and his ability to change or convert minds.

Like Saint John Vianney, the famous Curè of Ars, Padre Pio displayed supernormal powers of mind reading in the confessional. Hearing confessions was paramount in Pio’s long ministry. Hour after hour, day after day for over fifty years, he sat in a wooden booth and listened to people pour out their most intimate secrets.

John Schug, who wrote one of the more critical books in English on Pio,8 tells of a confessor who had the intention to murder his wife. “Murderer!” Padre Pio roared in the church. The man skulked away and returned the next day, penitent and purged of his intention.

Schug provides a detailed first-person account of Federico Abresch’s confessional encounter with Pio. According to Abresch, a Lutheran convert, Pio recalled actions and thoughts he had long forgotten. “He enumerated with precision and clarity all of my faults, even mentioning the number of times I had missed Mass.” Pio reminded Abresch of something he had forgotten years ago when he got married. In fact, it was only through Pio’s remarks that Abresch was able to reconstruct his past. Pio apparently had a more exact knowledge of Abresch’s unconscious mental history than Abresch.

Abresch, by the way, regarded this as proof that something more than merely human “thought-transference” was involved. The fact that Pio could “read” the unconscious of another person seemed evidence of God’s action, something totally beyond human potential. But Abresch is mistaken. Evidence from mediumship and experimental parapsychology show that telepathic leakage from another person’ s unconscious does in fact occur. Once again I believe we are dealing with a general potential of the human mind, brilliantly manifest in exceptional beings such as Pio.

Padre Pio’s access to internal environments enabled him not just to read but to change or convert minds. The Gospels portray Jesus as a man who took immediate psychic possession of his disciples. Pio too apparently had this ability; consider the following example from Schug.

Unemployed Laurino Costa sent Padre Pio a telegram asking for prayer to help him find a job. The Padre telegrammed back: “Come to San Giovanni Rotondo at once.” The young man arrived penniless and was standing with a crowd of men in the sacristy. Padre Pio, who had never met Laurino, shouted at him: “Laurino, come here. I see you have arrived.” Bewildered, the youth approached. “Laurino, you will feed my sick.” (A cook was needed in the new hospital.) “But Padre,” Laurino protested, “I’ve never cooked an egg in my life.” The Padre insisted: “Go and feed my sick. I’Il always be near you.” Laurino went to the hospital and rang the doorbell. The Mother Superior answered: “You must be the experienced cook we’ve been waiting for.” Within three hours he was at work. Laurino admitted to Schug: “To this day (14 years later) I still don’t know what happened. All day long I found myself calmly working and telling others what to do, as though I was carrying out a routine I had been used to.”

MASTERY OF TIME AND SPACE

Reports abound of Pio’s double appearing everywhere, from the American midwest to China and Africa. The idea of bilocation blatantly contradicts the belief that a human being is a physical object occupying one space. The idea that Jack could be at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue in New York and simultaneously at Main and Third in Shebogan, Wisconsin, is obviously absurd. Nevertheless, the annals of saints, yogis, and psychics are full of bilocation stories, sometimes well attested.

Padre Pio bilocated by means of his voice, his presence, his aroma; he appeared in people’s dreams and sometimes he appeared fully materialised.

Mary Pyle, one-time secretary to Maria Montessori, spent the last 45 years of her life in San Giovanni Rotondo. In her diary she wrote: “One day I went into the sacristy and said to Padre Pio: ‘Father, I believe my mother is in Florence today.’ His immediate answer, given with certainty was: ‘No, she is in Umbria.’ Surprised I said, ‘No Father, I do not believe she was supposed to go to Umbria.’ But he insisted, looking far into space. ‘She’s been in Umbria.’ A few days later I received a letter from my mother who told me: ‘Thank Padre Pio for the visit he paid me while I was sick in bed in Perugia (which is in Umbria). I did not see him with my eyes, nor did I hear him with my ears, but I felt his presence near my bed’.”9

Padre Pio knew in advance he would be able to bilocate at a particular place. The Vicar General of Uruguay, Monsignor Damiani, a frequent visitor at San Giovanni, once told him he wanted to die in San Giovanni; he wanted Pio to assist at his death. Pio said the Vicar would die in Uruguay, but promised assistance anyway when the day of reckoning came. In 1941, the Vicar died in Uruguay. Cardinal Barbieri was in the house where Damiani resided the night he died. Someone knocked on his half-open door. He noticed a Capuchin pass, got up and went to Damiani’s room. The Vicar had just died of a heart attack, but left a note on his dresser: “Padre Pio was here.”10

Many bilocation stories revolve around healings. A typical example: June 12, 1952. Lucia Bellodi, stricken with pernicious diabetes was on her death bed when she sat up and began to wave her hands. She cried out that Padre Pio had appeared to her, told her she was cured and that she should come to his monastery. By June 16 she regained her speech and stopped having to consume twenty-five quarts of water a day. When she visited the Padre he smiled and said: “I’ve been waiting for you.”

A tantalising case is that of Cardinal Mindszenty. According to a reliable Vatican source he once received a “visit” from Pio while imprisoned in Communist Hungary. The monk of course was in San Giovanni, but his double turned up with water, wine, and altar breads, served Mass and vanished. When Schug wrote to confirm this from Mindszenty, he received back a one-sentence letter: “I cannot say anything about that.” If the story were false, it’s not clear why the Cardinal didn’t say so, unless he meant to perpetuate a pious myth.

This form of bilocation, if it actually occurred, implies materialisation of the double and teleportation of objects. There are, in fact, many reports, some of them reasonably compelling, of other saints bilocating at great distances and teleporting physical objects. Two outstanding examples are Saint Martin of Porres and Sister Maria Agreda of Spain. Scott Rogo’s book, Miracles,11 documents the prodigies of these two saints.

I want to note in passing another phenomenon related to Pio’s bilocatability. He was, on many occasions, said to disappear from the confessional, a structure in full view and always surrounded by crowds of devotees. He would reappear in the rectory or sacristy. Asked about these disappearances, which occurred when he had a hard time breathing, the Padre would casually remark, “I flew over your heads.”

Perhaps the best authenticated type of Pio’s bilocation was via his characteristic odour. The odour of sanctity is linked with the phenomenon of bodily incorruption.12 The incorrupt bodies of saints are known to give off inexplicable fragrances, but with Pio the paranormal fragrance made his presence known to people at a distance. The scent emanated from his person and also, contrary to nature, from the blood that came from his stigmata. The first doctors who examined him actually complained that the monk was using perfume. Padre Pio’s brand of “perfume” however, was noticed by people far away from him, sometimes thousands of miles.

Bernard Ruffin, whose book on Pio is the best in English,13 gives a detailed account of the fragrance occurring to a Lutheran seminarian, Robert Hopcke, in Plainfield, New Jersey in 1978, ten years after Pio’s death. William Carrigan, normally skeptical of miracle stories, reported to Ruffin his perception of the aroma at his desk at Foggia (about twenty miles from the monastery): “I had no trouble in identifying the aroma as that of Padre Pio. It wasn’t something you could confuse with any other odour.” Padre Alberto D’Apolito, Pio’s confrere for many years, wrote in 1978: “The reality is that hundreds of thousands of individuals, even unbelievers, have testified and continue to testify that they have suddenly and inexplicably perceived the perfume of Padre Pio.” Emilio Servadio, a Jew and leading Roman psychoanalyst, had a powerful experience of Pio’s scent during a visit to San Giovanni in 1937.

If the Padre had a knack for “prolonging his personality”14 in space, he could also prolong it in time. Precognition, if a fact of nature, wrenches our normal view of time, cause and effect. (It seems impossible for something that hasn’t occurred to influence us in any way). Even so, there are countless claims of Pio’s paranormal forays into the future. These were usually done offhandedly, never as public pronouncements. Pio was unusually prescient about what Italian cities would be bombed during the war and what soldiers would return.

Like spiritual masters in other traditions, Pio foretold the year of his death. He often had prevision of others’ deaths. A young priest, Father Dionisio, on his way to Venice for studies, said goodbye to Pio. “Studies! Studies!” Pio muttered, “think of death, instead, so that when it comes…. “ His voice trailed off. A confrere who overheard commented on Pio’s strange way of saying goodbye. Pio shrugged wistfully. Twenty days later the young priest was dead. In 1983 Pope John Paul was almost assassinated; I watched a Vatican official on TV say that Pio had told the Polish Cardinal years ago he would one day be Pope; he also said the Polish Pope would be brought down in blood early in his tenure. I hope Pio’s prophetic gift is flawed, for he once said a war was coming which would destroy two thirds of humanity.

SYMBOLIC TRANSFORMATION OF PHYSICAL REALITY

In my view, supernormal psychic phenomena reflect an evolutionary trend toward increasing porousness of matter to the goals of consciousness. It is as if some restless shapeshifting creative spirit were struggling to make matter plastic and permeable to human dreams and desires – especially the matter of the human body.

Eastern, occult, and Christian traditions speak of the subtle, astral, pneumatic, or light bodies. The physical phenomena of mysticism reflect this trend toward the symbolic transformation of the body of flesh into a more expressive body of light. Incorruption, luminosity, inedia, the odour of sanctity, levitation, and other phenomena may be looked at from this perspective.

The stigmata illustrate the malleability of the human body to the power of the spiritual imagination. Francis of Assisi was the first to reproduce the wounds of Christ in his own body, and since Francis hundreds of cases have been reported. The Church by and large takes a dim view of these often bizarre lesions, recognising they may be symptoms of hysteria as much as signs of heroic sanctity.

But Padre Pio’s stigmata were unique. Visible for over fifty years, the apertures in his palms were perfectly circular, and were never inflamed, infected, or suppurated; the blood, which gushed from all five wounds, was copious and bright red. It effused an unnatural fragrance. At his death the wounds healed without a trace of scar tissue, a fact that is dermatologically inexplicable. While some cases of stigmata can reasonably be ascribed to hysteria, let me at least note that nobody adequately informed would dare to characterise this down-to-earth, often uncouth, ironical, and fanatic-despising man as hysterical.

With Francis and Pio, the wounds arose from a passionate identification with the crucified Christ. Whether we think of the stigmata as miraculous or pathological, at the very least they say something about the physical power of the imagination; if imagination can produce such extraordinary lesions, it could be mobilised for healing purposes. The stigmata show the power of the imagination to mold the human body. Here life imitates art; both men, be it noted, were first stigmatised while contemplating artworks showing the crucifixion. The stigmatised body is a living sculpture.

Padre Pio’s fame is also due to his reputation as a healer. Reports of extraordinary healings continue even after his death. Many, if not most, of the healings ascribed to Padre Pio were probably psychosomatic. Intense faith, expectation, contact with an authoritative figure like Padre Pio might well lead to improvement in many functional, psychogenic disorders.

But many stories, if true, imply a radically higher type of healing. For example, there is the account of Vera Calandra’s dying child materialising a new bladder; of Gemma di Giorgio’s pupilless blind eyes being made to see; and of Giovanni Savino’s blown out eye (due to a dynamite accident) being rematerialised. So far, however, the medical documentation I’ve seen for these claims is less than compelling.

Claims for medical clairvoyance also exist. In the early 1950s Padre Costantino Capobianco had a sinus problem. X-rays were taken; three doctors recommended surgery. “What are these things?” asked Pio about the X-rays. “They’re all wrong.” A fourth specialist was consulted; the X-rays were misinterpreted, the surgery unnecessary.15

Padre Pio once said his real work would begin after his death. Moreover, the Church requires of her duly canonised saints evidence of postmortem miracles. This seems like a tough requirement, but a possible example may be the following: Teacher Alice Jones of Liverpool, England, suffered from neurofibroma, which paralysed her from the left hip to the toe. Alice, 50, a Protestant, was visited by a Catholic priest, Eric Fisher, who prayed over her. “As he knelt there,” said Alice, “there appeared another figure rising from his body. I was so frightened I couldn’t move. The figure had the face of an old man with a white beard. He spread his hands in front of me and I could see the holes in his palms. I seemed to hear the words, ‘Stand up and walk.’ So I did. And I suddenly felt whole again. Suddenly I was no longer crippled and the man was gone.” Later she recognised the face of the man who cured her in a photo of Padre Pio. Dr. Francis Mooney, a Liverpool physician, testified: “I have very often come across neurofibroma and have never heard of a single case where it has cleared up spontaneously…. I had her X-rayed. There is no medical explanation for the fact that she is completely cured.”16

The healed body is a foretaste of the resurrected body. Supernormal healings are symbolic of the transformation of the corporeal body into a spiritual body. The odour of sanctity is another example of the symbolic transformation of natural bodily existence. The symbolism is clearest in bodily incorruption. Once the Christian imagination projected the vision of a new man – a new spiritual body – the dead bodies of Christian saints begin to behave oddly. They don’t decay like other corpses. Perversely, they stay intact, moist, flexible, for months, for decades, sometimes for hundreds of years. They exude mysterious oils, occasionally bleed, and often give off remarkable fragrances. It is as though an energy has been released that opposes bodily decay, something that holds entropy in contempt and wants to revise the symbolism of death.

Another phenomenon expressing this symbolic modulation of matter is levitation. Levitation is not well-attested in Pio’s life (whose speciality seems to have been bilocation). However, the phenomenon has been well-documented among the saints, notably Teresa of Avila and that all-time great, mystical acrobat, Joseph Copertino. Numerous creditable witnesses observed Joseph’s aerial antics for decades.17 Levitation strikes against one of the fundamental forces of nature – the forces of gravity. Among the saints, it is a dramatic physical expression of the soul’s ecstatic flight. Levitation, as displayed by Joseph and Teresa, symbolises the ascent toward the Most High.

It shows humanly formed matter shedding fundamental limitations; I think in the case of Joseph we are witnessing one of the creative prodigies of the symbolic imagination, a phenomenon that throws open the doors to new worlds of speculative possibilities. A careful study of Joseph’s aerial flights will show that they were occasioned by specific types of imagery of a) heavenly elevation and b) the Madonna or archetype of the feminine. The levitations were physical expressions of imaginal worlds, and I would put them on a continuum with the stigmata or other types of expressive imaginally-guided human products such as works of art.

As for Paranormal Man, perhaps the ecstasy of the saints holds the secret to our escape from planet Earth, our entree to navigating the galaxies. Anyone acquainted with the literature of flying saucers knows how frequently levitation phenomena are reported. The phenomena take many forms. Gravity-suspending beams of light, for instance, seem to lift individuals into apparent spacecraft. The alien spaceships themselves make light of the rules of terrestrial flight dynamics. In the case of Joseph of Copertino, the greatest levitator in recorded history, passionate sublimated love, aimed toward the archetypal figure of Mary in Heaven was the fuel enabling him to suspend the geometry of the universe. In Joseph’s future space technology, ecstatic love is the power that suspends the law of gravity.

The funny sky epiphanies we call UFOs might, for all we know, be dislocated dreams or ecstatic projections of alien visionaries from other worlds. The phenomena of bilocation and levitation may be clues to the secrets of hyperspace travel and the answer to the great UFO mystery. Other beings on other worlds are likely to have had millions, if not billions, of years to evolve these crudely and fleetingly manifested capacities of our terrestrial saints and shamans.

Another item in Pio’s supernormal physiology was hyperthermia. Padre Pio produced abnormal amounts of bodily heat. Doctors had to use huge bathroom thermometers to take his temperature, which often shot up to 125 degrees; the mercury in ordinary thermometers broke the glass. Extreme irregularities in bodily function are well known among shamans18 and other ascetic types. Teresa Neumann19 who had the stigmata and who evidently neither ate nor drank for years, is a modern case of an ecstatic plagued by bizarre bodily symptoms. In the case of Padre Pio, supernormal heat production is definitely related to what’s going on inside the man. It seems clear to me that we are dealing with a case of symbolic transformation.

From his letters and statements, we know one thing for sure: The Capuchin was literally burning with love for Jesus. Young Pio wrote a letter to Padre Benedetto on October 22, 1919, describing what happened to him just before acquiring his fully visible stigmata: “I cannot tell you what happened in that moment,” he wrote, “which was a moment of sheer martyrdom. On the evening of the 5th, I was hearing a boy’s confession (a seminarian at San Giovanni Rotondo) when all of a sudden I saw a most exalted heavenly person. I was plunged into extreme terror. He stood before the eye of my mind, holding some kind of special instrument in his hand, like a very long iron spear with a well-sharpened point. It seemed that fire shot out of its point.

“Seeing this person and watching him plunge the instrument violently into my soul happened in an instant. I groaned with pain and felt as if I were dying. I told the boy to go away because I felt ill.

“This agony lasted without interruption until the morning of August 7…. It seemed that even my viscera were being pulled out by that spear. Every fibre of my being was consumed by fire.” The heat effects, observed in saints known for their holy ardours, proceed from internal causes; they do not seem to be produced by normal physical forces.

When I spoke with reliable informants at San Giovanni I was told of even stranger powers the Padre had over physical nature. For instance, Pio had the apparent ability to direct the behaviour of animals; in one story, a woman with problems getting up on time for Mass was sent a bird to awaken her and a troop of local stray dogs to escort her to the church on time. Francis of Assisi tamed the Wolf of Gubbio with soultalk and (in a practical vein) with the help of a decent meal. Linnets and lambs, hares and songbirds were said to obey the commands of Joseph of Copertino.

The Gospels tell us that Jesus calmed a storm at sea. There are contemporary reports of shamans commanding the elements. For instance, John Neihardt witnessed Black Elk conjure rain from a cloudless afternoon sky “during a season of drought, one of the worst in the memory of the old men.”20 David Barker, an anthropologist, was in Dharamsala, India, on March 10, 1973, when he observed a Tibetan priest-shaman, Gunsang Rinzing, stop a rainstorm to permit a festival of mourning. The shaman had built a large fire and recited with intense concentration mantras for 20 hours. Barker writes: “ …the rain had diminished to a drizzle, and by 10 o’clock it had become only a cold fog over a circle with a radius of about 150 meters. Everywhere else in the area it continued to pour, but the crowd of six thousand refugees was never rained on…” Barker observed that the atmosphere had an “airless” quality and reports feeling disoriented for weeks after the experience.21

In light of these observations it is easier to entertain accounts such as those of a Roman engineer Pasquale Todini who said Padre Pio sent him away from the monastery during a torrential rainstorm but arrived in town dry. In the course of the engineer’s walk, the rain around him was reduced to a sprinkle. (See Carty’s account of this, pp.57-58.)

Enough has been said to indicate the range of Padre Pio’s curious capacities: special access to internal environments, mastery of time and space, symbolic transformation of physical reality. I offer no attempt to explain any of this, or for that matter to prove it rigorously. Padre Pio, though a unique spiritual personality, is only one example of extraordinary types from the world of Western and Eastern mysticism, mediumship and shamanism. The interesting thing is what all this might be saying about the possible future of humanity.

Alfred Russell Wallace, it may not be too well known, was the co-founder along with Charles Darwin of the modern theory of evolution. What is even less well known is the fact that Wallace, a scientist of unquestioned genius, was a close student of psychic phenomena. Most mainstream scientists prefer to shove this embarrassing fact under the rug. In my opinion, however, Wallace’s openness to psychic phenomena prove him to be an even greater scientist than is supposed; for Wallace took a second giant step in trying to build a bridge between psychical research and the theory of evolution.

Wallace did firsthand investigations into the physical phenomena of mediumship and, as he said, found himself “beaten by the facts.” Wallace took spiritualism quite seriously. “It would appear then,” he wrote in 1878, “that if my argument has any weight, that there is nothing self-contradictory… in the idea of intelligences unrecognisable directly by our senses, and yet capable of acting more or less powerfully on matter.”22 Wallace suggested that some principle of psychic intelligence was needed to round out the approach to the problem of evolution. He stated emphatically that Natural Selection “is not the all-powerful, all-sufficient, and only cause of the development of organic forms.”

Modern biology has followed Darwin, who was not interested in the strange phenomena Wallace had taken the trouble to investigate. But in my opinion, Alfred Wallace laid the groundwork for the better evolutionary paradigm. Open to all the crucial data, it was a paradigm based on the hypothesis of a general intelligence at work in evolution, capable of transcending space and time, and geared toward the transformation of organic nature in accord with the creative imagination of the human spirit. Wallace opened new horizons in our thinking on human evolution; he would have found an ally in Padre Pio.

REFERENCES

1. E. Haraldsson, Miracles Are My Calling Cards: An Investigative Report on the Psychic Phenomena Associated With Sathya Baba, Rider: London, 1987.
2. Padre Pio of Pietrelcina: Acts of the First Congress of Studies Padre Pio’s Spirituality, Ed. Gerado Di Flumeri, San Giovan: Rotondo, 1972.
3. Epistolario of Padre Pio, Vol. 1, San Giovanni Rotondo: 1973.
4. Diario, Agostino da S. Marco in Lamis, San Giovanni Rotondo: 1975.
5. J. Schug, Padre Pio: He Bore the Stigmata, Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor, p.55, 1975.
6. E. Boniface, Padre Pio Le Crucifie, Nouvelles Editions Latines: Paris, 1971.
7. A. Parente, Send Me Your Guardian Angel, Our Lady of Grace Friary: San Giovanni Rotondo, 1983.
8. Ibid.
9. The Voice of Padre Pio, Vol. 5, No.3, 1975, pp.14-15.
10. C.M. Carty, Padre Pio the Stigmatist, Rockford, Illinois: Tan, 1973.
11. D.S. Rogo, Miracles, The Dial Press, New York, 1982.
12. C. Cruz, The Incorruptibles, Rockford, Illinois: Tan, 1977.
13. B. Ruffin, Padre Pio: The True Story, Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor, 1982.
14. This was the expression Padre Pio used to explain how he bilocated when someone asked. Other times he just said God sent him places. The interesting point is he himself continually affirmed the reality of his excursions through hyperspace. For another angle on the evidence, his confreres often heard him giving absolution or otherwise conversing with invisible or far-off beings.
15. See Ruffin, p.266.
16. The Friends of Padre Pio (newsletter), Vo1. 2, 3, pp.14-16.
17. A. Pastrovicchi, Saint Joseph of Copertino, Rockford, Illinois: Tan, 1980.
18. M. Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970.
19. C.M. Carty, Who is Teresa Neumann?, Rockford, Illinois: Tan, 1974.
20. J. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks, New York: Pocket Book, 1972. See the postscript.
21. D. Barker, Psi phenomena in Tibetan culture, Research in Parapsychology, 1978, Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow, 1979, pp.52-55.
22. A.R. Wallace, Miracles and Modern Spiritualism, London: Spiritualist Press, 1878.

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MICHAEL GROSSO, Ph.D in philosophy from Columbia University, is presently affiliated with the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia and is on the Board of Directors of the American Philosophical Practitioner’s Association. His most recent books are Experiencing the Next World Now (Simon & Schuster) and Irreducible Mind, co-authored with Edward Kelly et alia. Michael is especially interested in paranormal phenomena and the origins of religious belief. His website is www.parapsi.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn Special Issue 9.

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The intuitions reported by mystics, poets, artists, ordinary people, even scientists, often go beyond the range of sensory perception. In the reductionist culture inspired by classical science, they are dismissed as mere delusion – classical empiricism claims that there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the eye. However, the classical tenet is not universally upheld. It is exceptional in the annals of history, and even in the context of contemporary cultures.In history intuitions were embedded in the conceptual framework through which a given culture interpreted the nature of reality. In indigenous societies shamans and medicine-men (and women) tuned themselves to spontaneous apprehension through rigorous initiation and training; they derived their mystical vision from them. In mythically oriented societies the world was seen as a cosmic realm of spirits, and in classical cultures it was believed to be governed by a panoply of unseen gods. The Abrahamic monotheistic religions recognised the intuitions of their prophets as conveying fundamental truths about God and the nature of His creation. Eastern cultures have always held that reality extends far beyond the domain of the senses.

On the other hand Western culture takes as real only that which is manifest – literally “to hand.” Because what people see is constrained by what they believe they can see, everything that is not conveyed to consciousness by eye and ear is dismissed from the modern view of the world. But are the intuitions that occasionally surface in consciousness mere delusion? Or can there be intuitions that are as real and fundamental as sensory perception? This question calls for a deeper look at the possibility that spontaneous insights and apprehensions may have a physical basis. There are findings at the cutting-edge of scientific research that affirm this possibility.

The Brain as a “macroscopic quantum system”

The crucial finding is the discovery that the brain is not merely a classical biochemical system; in some respects it is a “macroscopic quantum system.” Certain cerebral functions involve processes previously thought to be limited to the domain of the quantum. The pertinent functions concern the reception and transmission of information at the cellular and subcellular level: intercellular communication involves quantum-effects and processes. Neurons and neuronal and subneuronal networks form synchronised oscillators that receive and send information through quantum resonance. This information propagates quasi-instantly throughout the organism and does not require classical channels of signal transmission. The various forms and characteristics of information transmitted through quantum resonance are not fully understood, but their physical basis is clear. It is nonlocality, the process Einstein first said is “spooky” and then Erwin Schrödinger termed “entanglement.” Entanglement means that the states and functions of the entangled entities are correlated beyond the ordinary bounds of space and time. As a result the entities are intrinsically and fundamentally coherent. Such coherence obtains in the domain of the quantum: in pristine states quanta are coherent and mutually entangled. Only interaction in some form (measurement, and possibly certain acts of observation) renders them decoherent. Macroscale objects were said to be in a permanently decoherent state, yet certain objects also exhibit forms of quantum coherence. There is experimental evidence that the state of entire atoms can be entangled, and in recent years quantum-coherence has been discovered at the scale of living organisms. The divide between the microworld of the quantum and the world of macroscale objects has been breached. The heat of living organisms – even of warm-bodied species – does not necessarily destroy the coherence that is the precondition of entanglement. While classical quantum theory maintained that at ordinary temperatures Brownian movement made quanta, so-called “qubits,” decoherent and thus incapable of entanglement, recent research (inter alia by Kitaev, Pitkanen, and Frecska and Luna) indicates that the problem of “heat-decoherence” is not insuperable.1

There appear to be networks of quanta where the particles are “woven” or “braided” in a way that is sufficiently robust to maintain coherence at body temperatures. Whereas at such temperatures classically organised qubits become decoherent, networks of woven or braided qubits conserve coherence. As Parsons put it, “braiding is robust: just as a passing gust of wind may ruffle your shoelaces but won’t untie them, data stored on a quantum braid can survive all kinds of disturbance.”2 Quantum coherence in the brain and throughout the organism is not just theoretical speculation; it is entirely fundamental for coordinating the processes that make life possible. The staggering number of physical and chemical reactions taking place in the living organism is not likely to be coordinated by limited and relatively slow biochemical signal-transmission alone. Only the “entanglement” of the organism’s cellular and subcellular components can ensure a sufficiently rapid flow of multidimensional information to maintain the organism in its physically improbable state far from thermal and chemical equilibrium.

Cytoskeletal Structures

Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff suggest that cytoskeletal structures in the brain are responsible for the reception, computation, and transmission of multidimensional quantum-resonance-based information. Throughout the organism cytoskeletal proteins are organised into a network of microtubules, and the elements of these networks are connected to each other structurally by protein-links and functionally by gap junctions. However, the network of microtubules may be too coarse-grained to produce quantum-effects in the brain. The “infoplasm,” the basic substrate of living matter, may be the microtrabecular lattice, a web of microfilaments 7 to 9 nanometer in diameter. The periodic lattice of microtubules forms a network within the network of neurons, and the microtrabecular lattice is a network embedded in the network of microtubules. According to Ede Frecska, it is this lattice that is likely to be the structure responsible for quantum-effects in the brain. It appears physically possible that the quantum-scale components of the cytoskeletal lattice convey information from the world to the brain. The question is, what information? How does information originate in the world at large?

The Akashic Field

Until recently, asserting that information is objectively present in nature and not only in the human realm was considered metaphysical. This is no longer the case. It is now recognised that information is present in all things; as John Wheeler remarked, in some respects it the most fundamental feature of the universe. Experiments designed to test the Einstein-Podolski-Rosen hypothesis indicate that already quanta behave in an informed manner: they appear to make choices of their own, and respond to choices by other quanta. Either they have a form of consciousness (a thesis entertained by some physicists), or they are embedded in a complex informational environment. The latter is the minimally speculative assumption. It suggests that even in the absence of matter space is neither empty nor passive. As this writer among others has suggested, cosmic space is not a vacuum, but a plenum. In recognition of the prophetic insight of ancient Sanskrit and Hindu cosmology – where Akasha is the most fundamental of the five elements, the one from which the others arise – this writer calls the field that fills cosmic space the “Akashic Field.”3

The idea that space is active and filled with physically significant events is not unique to Sanskrit and Hindu cosmology; it has noteworthy antecedents also in the history of science. In the nineteenth century, mathematician William Clifford suggested that small portions of space are analogous to little hills on a surface that is flat on average; the geometry of the landscape does not hold for them. The property of space to be curved or distorted, he said, is continually being passed on from one portion of space to another after the manner of a wave. In the physical world there is nothing else but this wavelike variation.4

In a 1930 paper, “The concept of space,” Albert Einstein noted, “We have now come to the conclusion that space is the primary thing and matter only secondary; we may say that space, in revenge for its former inferior position, is now eating up matter.”5 A few years later Erwin Schrödinger restated the same thought: “What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space.”6 In physical cosmology cosmic space is seen as a ceaselessly fluctuating sea of emerging and vanishing virtual particles. In grand-unified and super-grand unified theories all the universal fields and forces of nature are traced to origins in the quantum vacuum, a fundamental hyperspace often viewed as a unified field. This fundamental field carries also zero-point energies – energies that remain present when at the absolute zero of temperature conventional forms of energy vanish. The concept of a complex unified field, effectively the Akashic Field, offers a basis for identifying the origins of the information that quantum processes transfer to the brain. It is known that as a consequence of their motion atoms, molecules and all material entities (i.e. structures composed of massive particles) produce electromagnetic waves that radiate into surrounding space. Space, however, is not empty and passive, and it is more than Maxwell’s extended electromagnetic field. It is the locus of the Akashic Field. The waves emitted by moving objects excite and modulate this field, creating wavefronts that propagate in the field and, upon meeting, interfere with each other. The interference patterns that result carry information at their nodes on the objects that created the waves. Because the Akashic Field is a seamless medium that extends throughout space, the information carried by the interference patterns produced by moving objects extends throughout space. This information corresponds to the physical properties of the objects.7

The process is similar to that which occurs in holography. The holograms created by interfering beams of light conserve information on the surface of the things and events that modulated the light beams. But the interference patterns responsible for quantum coherence are created by waves in the Akashic Field, and not by photons in the electromagnetic field. Thus they are not ordinary, but quantum holograms. Walter Schempp has shown that quantum holograms are coherent, mutually entangled, and carry nonlocal information on the things and events that produced the constituent waves. He has also shown that the brain’s object imagery is phase conjugate. Lending support to Karl Pribram’s “holonomic brain theory,” Schempp affirmed that “the conditions which make quantum holography possible are ideally suited to the hypothesis that the brain works… by quantum holography.”8

The answer to the question regarding the origin and nature of the information transferred by quantum-resonance to the brain can now be essayed. When the phase and frequency of a cerebral lattice corresponds to the phase and frequency of a quantum hologram, brain and hologram enter into phase-conjugate resonance. This allows the information conserved at the nodes of Akashic Field quantum holograms to be transferred to the cerebral receptors. Thus some of the intuitions that reach consciousness are not merely delusion: they are transmitted by phase-conjugate resonance from the Akashic Field to the cytoskeletal structures of the brain. Just which intuitions have this physical origin cannot be ascertained at this time merely by examining the pertinent cerebral processes. We need to resort to circumstantial evidence, examining the correspondence of the content of the intuitions with things and events known to exist in the real world through ordinary sensory perception. But we can affirm in good conscience that it is entirely plausible some intuitions have a bona fide physical basis. And that, in itself, goes a long way toward legitimating belief in the veridical nature of at least some of our intuitions.

A Concluding Note

Although widely reported and often meaningful, intuition is seldom the subject of sustained scientific research. The classical empirical tenet of mainstream science discourages attempts to investigate the phenomenon: it is physically implausible if not categorically impossible. Yet sustained research on intuition would be potentially fruitful and extremely important. In the positive case it would show that the human brain and nervous systems can access information in a spontaneous mode. While some varieties of experience viewed as intuition could well be delusion, there could also be spontaneous apprehension for which we can find an acceptable scientific explanation. This would lend support to the frequently voiced belief that human beings – and by implication all living things – are connected with each other and with nature in ways that are more subtle than those that stimulate the senses. This in turn would reinforce and legitimate empathy and solidarity among people and a closer sense of rapport with nature – vitally important attributes in our critical times when we face problems we can only resolve in cooperation with each other and harmony with our environment. This article is based on the author’s latest book The Akashic Experience: Science and the Cosmic Memory Field (Inner Traditions, Rochester, USA).

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Living in the world under your skin is a bustling metropolis of 50 trillion cells, each of which is biologically and functionally equivalent to a miniature human. Current popular opinion holds that the fate and behaviour of our internal cellular citizens are preprogrammed in their genes. Since Watson and Crick’s discovery of the genetic code, the public has been programmed with perception that DNA acquired from our parents at the moment of conception determines our traits and characters. This conventional view of genetics further has us believe that our inherited gene programs are apparently fixed, the equivalent of a computer’s “read-only” program.

The notion that our fate is indelibly inscribed in our genes was directly derived from the now dated scientific concept known as genetic determinism. It is still a conventional belief that genes “control” the many wonderful attributes passed down through a family’s lineage, as well as dysfunctional familial traits such as cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes and depression, among scores of others. As “victims” of heredity, genetic forces outside of our control, we naturally perceive of ourselves as being powerless in regard to the unfolding of our lives. Unfortunately, the assumption of being powerless is the road to personal irresponsibility. “Since I can’t do anything about it anyway… why should I care?”

Shattering Illusions

Just as the Human Genome Project got off the ground in the late 1980’s, scientists began to acquire a paradigm-shattering new view of how life works. Their revolutionary research has become the foundation for a new branch of science known as epigenetic control. The world of epigenetics has shaken the foundations of biology and medicine for it reveals that we are not “victims” of our genes, but are in fact “masters” of our genes.

The conventional version of heredity still being taught in schools emphasises genetic control, which literally reads as “control by genes.” However, newly revealed epigenetic control mechanisms provide a profoundly different view of how life is managed. The Greek-derived prefix epi- means “over or above.” Consequently, the literal translation of epigenetic control reads as “control above the genes.” Genes do NOT control life – life is controlled by something above the genes. Knowledge is power and this knowledge of how life works provides the most important element in our quest for self-empowerment. Epigenetics leads us from our perception of victim to our proper role as a participatory creator.

The new science of epigenetics recognises that environmental signals are the primary regulators of gene activity. As described in the Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles, cells read and respond to the conditions of their environment using membrane protein perception switches. Activated switches send signals into the cytoplasm to control behaviour and regulate the activity of the genes, the hereditary blueprints used to make the body. Proteins are the cell’s molecular building blocks and their characters provide for our physical and behavioural traits.

Amazingly, epigenetic information can modify or edit the readout of a gene blueprint to create over 30,000 different variations of proteins from the same gene. This editing process can provide for normal functional protein products as well as dysfunctional proteins from the same gene. One can be born with healthy genes and through epigenetic processes express mutant behaviours such as cancer. Similarly, one can be born with defective mutant genes and through epigenetic mechanisms create normal healthy proteins and functions.

The conventional belief that the genome represents “read-only” programs is now proven to be false. Epigenetic mechanisms modify the readout of genetic code, therefore genes actually represent “read-write” programs wherein life experiences actively redefine an individual’s genetic expression. As organisms experience the environment, their perception mechanisms fine-tune genetic expression so as to enhance their opportunities for survival. The environment’s influence over the genome is dramatically revealed in studies on identical twins. When first born, these siblings express almost the same gene activity from their identical genomes. However, as they begin to experience life, their personal individualised experiences and perceptions lead to the activation of profoundly different sets of genes.

The “new” biology is based upon the fact that perception controls behaviour AND gene activity! This revised version of science emphasises the reality that we actively control our genetic expression moment by moment throughout our lives. Rather than seeing ourselves as victims of our genes, we must come to own the responsibility that our perceptions are dynamically shaping our biology and behaviour. The expression of a healthy or dis-eased biology is directly influenced by the accuracy of an individual’s interpretation or perception of their environment. Misperceptions rewrite genetic expression just as effectively as accurate perceptions, yet with far graver, perhaps even life threatening consequences.

From the Microcosm of the Cell to the Macrocosm of the Mind

For the first three and a half billion years of life on this planet, the biosphere consisted of a massive population of individual single-celled organisms, such as bacteria, yeast, algae, and protozoa like the familiar amoeba and paramecium. About 700 million years ago, individual cells started to assemble into multicellular colonies. The collective awareness afforded in a community of cells was far greater than an individual cell’s awareness. Since awareness is a primary factor in organismal survival, the communal experience offered its citizens a far greater opportunity to stay alive and reproduce.

The first cellular communities, like the earliest human communities, were basic hunter-gatherer clans wherein each member of the society offered the same services to support the survival of the community. However, as the population densities of both cellular and human communities reached greater numbers, it was no longer efficient or effective for all individuals to do the same job. In both types of communities, evolution led to individuals taking on specialised functions. For example, in human communities some members focused upon hunting, others upon domestic chores and some upon child rearing. In cellular communities specialisation meant that some cells began to differentiate as digestive cells, others as heart cells, and still others as muscle cells.

Most of the trillions of cells forming bodies such as ours have no direct perception of the external environment. Liver cells “see” what’s going on in the liver, but don’t directly know what’s going on in the world outside of the skin. The function of the brain and nervous system is to interpret environmental stimuli and send out signals to the cells that integrate and regulate the life-sustaining functions of the body’s organ systems.

The successful nature of multicellular communities allowed evolving brains to dedicate vast numbers of cells for use in the cataloguing, memorising and integrating complex perceptions. The ability to remember and select among the millions of experienced perceptions in life provides the brain with a powerful creative database from which it can create complex behavioural repertoires. When put into play, these behavioural programs endow the organism with the characteristic trait of consciousness. In this presentation, the term consciousness is used in its most fundamental context… the state of being awake and aware of what is going on around you.

Many scientists prefer to think of consciousness in terms of a digital quality, an organism either has it or not. However, an assessment of the evolution of biological properties suggests consciousness, like any other quality, evolved over time. Consequently, the character of consciousness would likely express itself as a gradient of awareness from its simpler roots in primitive organisms to the unique character of self-consciousness manifest in humans and other higher vertebrates.

The expression of self-consciousness is specifically associated with a small evolutionary adaptation in the brain known as the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is the neurological platform that enables us to realise our personal identity and experience the quality of “thinking.” Monkeys and lower organisms do not express self-consciousness. When looking into a mirror, monkeys will never recognise that they are looking at them selves; they will always perceive the image to be that of another monkey. In contrast, neurologically more advanced chimps looking in the mirror perceive the mirror’s reflection as an image of themselves.

An important difference between the brain’s consciousness and the prefrontal cortex’s self-consciousness is that consciousness enables an organism to assess and respond to the immediate conditions of its environment that are relevant at that moment. In contrast, self-consciousness enables the individual to factor in the consequences of their actions in regard to not only how they impact the present moment but also as to how they will influence the individual’s future.

Self-consciousness is an evolutionary adjunct to consciousness in that it provided another behaviour-creating platform that included the role of a “self” in the decision-making process. While conventional consciousness enables organisms to be participatory members in the dynamics of life’s “play,” the quality of self-consciousness offers an opportunity to simultaneously be an observer in the “audience.” From the perspective of our being able to observe the role of “self” in the unfolding of the “play,” self-consciousness provides the individual with the option for self-reflection, reviewing and editing their character’s performance. The conscious and self-conscious functions of the brain may be collectively referred to as the mind.

In conventional parlance, the brain’s conscious mechanism associated with automated stimulus-response behaviours is referred to as the subconscious or unconscious mind, for the reason that its functions require neither observation nor attention from the self-conscious mind. Subconscious mind functions evolved long before the prefrontal cortex, consequently it historically was able to successfully operate a body and its behaviour without any contribution from, or involvement with, the more evolved self-conscious mind.

The subconscious mind is an astonishingly powerful information processor that can record perceptual experiences (programs) and forever play them back at the push of a button. Interestingly, many people only become aware of their subconscious mind’s automated programmed behaviours when they realise they’re engaged in an undesirable behaviour as a result of someone “pushing their buttons.”

The power of the subconscious mind lies in its ability to process massive amounts of data acquired from direct and indirect learning experiences at extraordinarily high rates of speed. It has been estimated that the disproportionately larger brain mass providing the subconscious mind’s function has the ability to interpret and respond to over 40 million nerve impulses per second. In contrast, it is estimated that the diminutive self-conscious mind’s prefrontal cortex can only process about 40 nerve impulses per second. As an information processor, the subconscious mind is one million times more powerful than the self-conscious mind.

As a tradeoff in acquiring its computational bravado, the subconscious mind expresses a marginal creative ability, one that may be best compared to that of a precocious five year old. In contrast to the freewill offered by the conscious mind, the subconscious mind primarily expresses prerecorded stimulus-response “habits.” Once a behaviour pattern is learned, such as walking, getting dressed or driving a car, those programs are processed as habits in the subconscious mind… meaning you can carry out these complex functions without paying any attention to them.

In contrast to the massive information processing by the subconscious mind, the smaller prefrontal cortex responsible for self-consciousness is limited to juggling only a small number of tasks at the same time. Though its ability for multitasking is physically constrained, the self-conscious mind can focus upon and control any function in the human body. It was once thought that some body’s functions were beyond the control of the self-conscious mind, such involuntary functions included the regulation of heartbeat, blood pressure and body temperature, behaviours controlled by the unconscious autonomic nervous system. However, it is now recognised that yogis and other practitioners that train their conscious minds can absolutely control functions formerly defined as involuntary behaviours.

The subconscious and self-conscious components of the mind work in tandem. The subconscious mind controls every behaviour that is not attended to by the self-conscious mind. For most people, their self-conscious minds are rarely focused upon the current moment since their mental processing continuously flits from one thought to another. The self-conscious mind is so preoccupied with thoughts about the future, the past or resolving some imaginary problem, that most of our lives are actually controlled by programs in the subconscious mind.

Cognitive neuroscientists conclude that the self-conscious mind contributes only about 5% of our cognitive activity. Consequently, 95% of our decisions, actions, emotions and behaviours are derived from the unobserved processing of the subconscious mind.

Simple Insights… Profound Consequences!

Through the management of “programmed” perceptions, the mind controls our biology, behaviour and gene activity. The seat of thinking, freewill, personal identity, and our wants, desires and intentions is a small 40 “bit” self-conscious processor that controls our lives only 5% of the day or less. The million times more powerful subconscious mind controls 95% or more of our lives using “habits” derived from instincts and the perceptions acquired in our life experiences.

This data reveals that our lives are not controlled by our personal intentions and desires as we may inherently believe. Do the math! Our fate is actually under the control of the preprogrammed experiences managed by the subconscious mind. The most powerful and influential programs in the subconscious mind were downloaded into consciousness in the profoundly important formative period between gestation and six years of age. Now here’s the catch – these life-shaping subconscious programs are direct downloads derived from observing our primary teachers… our parents, siblings and local community. Unfortunately, as psychiatrists, psychologists and counsellors are keenly aware, many of the perceptions acquired about ourselves in the formative period are expressed as limiting and self-sabotaging beliefs.

Unbeknownst to most parents is the fact that their words and actions are being continuously recorded by their children’s minds. Consequently, when they inform their child that he or she does not deserve things, or that they are not good enough, or smart enough, or that they are sickly, these pronouncements are directly downloaded into their child’s subconscious. Since the role of the mind is to make coherence between its programs and real life, the brain generates appropriate behavioural responses to life’s stimuli to assure the “truth” of the programmed perceptions.

Let’s apply this understanding to the behaviour in one’s life. Consider that you were a 5-year-old child throwing a tantrum in Walmart over your desire to have a particular toy. In silencing your outburst, your father yelled, “YOU don’t deserve things!” You are now an adult and in your self-conscious mind you are considering the idea that you have the qualities and power to assume a position of leadership at your job. While in the process of entertaining this positive thought in the self-conscious mind, all of your behaviours are now being automatically managed by the programs in your more powerful subconscious mind. Since your fundamental behavioural programs are those derived in your formative years, your father’s admonition that “you do not deserve things” may become the subconscious mind’s automated directive. So while you are entertaining wonderful thoughts of a positive future and not paying attention, your subconscious mind is automatically engaging self-sabotaging behaviour to assure that your reality matches your program of not-deserving.

Now here’s the catch – Behaviour is automatically controlled by subconscious mind’s programs when the self-conscious mind is not focused on the present moment. When the reflective self-conscious mind is preoccupied in thought and not paying attention, it does not observe the automatic behaviours derived from subconscious mind. Since 95% or more of our behaviour is derived from the subconscious mind… then most of our own behaviour is invisible to us!

For example, consider you intimately know someone and you also know his or her parent. From your perspective you see that your friend’s behaviour closely resembles their parent. Then one day you casually remark to your friend something like, “You know Mary, you’re just like your mom.” Back away! In disbelief and perhaps shock, Mary will likely respond with, “How can you say that!” The cosmic joke is that everyone else can see that Mary’s behaviour resembles her mom’s except Mary. Why? Simply because when Mary is engaging the subconscious behavioural programs she downloaded in her youth from observing her mom, it’s because her self-conscious mind is not paying attention. At those moments, her automatic subconscious programs operate without observation.

Another familiar example of how “invisible” behaviour operates: You are driving your car while having an intense conversation with a friend in the passenger’s seat. You become so involved in the discussion that only later, when your gaze returns to the road, do you realise that you haven’t paid attention to the driving for the last ten minutes. Since the self-conscious mind was preoccupied with the conversation, the car was being driven by the subconscious mind’s “autopilot” mode. However, if you were asked to describe your driving behaviour during that ten-minute hiatus, you would be forced to say, “I don’t know… I wasn’t paying attention.” Aha! That’s the point – when the conscious mind is busy, we do not observe our own programmed subconscious behaviours.

Consequently, when life does not work out as planned, we rarely recognise that we were very likely contributing to our own disappointments. Since we are generally unaware of the influence of our own subconscious behaviours, we naturally perceive of our selves as victims of forces outside of us when things don’t work out as desired. Unfortunately, assuming the role of victim means that we assume we are powerless in manifesting our intentions. Nothing is further from the truth! The primary determinant in shaping the fate of our lives is the database of perceptions and beliefs programmed in our minds.

Where Did That Behaviour Come From?

There are three sources of perceptions that control our biology and behaviour. The most primitive perceptions are those we acquire with our genome. Built into our genes are programs that provide fundamental reflex behaviours referred to as instincts. Pulling your hand out of an open flame is a genetically derived behaviour that does not have to be learned. More complex instincts include the ability of newborn babies to swim like a dolphin or the activation of innate healing mechanisms to repair a damaged system or eliminate a cancerous growth. Genetically inherited instincts are perceptions acquired from nature.

The second source of life-controlling perceptions represents memories derived from life experiences downloaded into the subconscious mind. These profoundly powerful learned perceptions represent the contribution from nurture. Among the earliest perceptions of life to be downloaded are the emotions and sensations experienced by the mother as she responds to her world. Along with nutrition, the emotional chemistry, hormones, and stress factors controlling the mother’s responses to life experiences cross the placental barrier and influence fetal physiology and development. When the mother is happy, so is the fetus. When the mother is in fear, so is the fetus. When the mother “rejects” her fetus as a potential threat to family survival, the fetal nervous system is preprogrammed with the emotion of being rejected. Sue Gearhardt’s very valuable book Why Love Matters reveals that the fetal nervous system records memories of womb experiences. By the time the baby is born, emotional information downloaded from the life experiences in womb have already shaped half of that individual’s personality.

However, the most influential perceptual programming of the subconscious mind occurs in the time period spanning from the birth process through the first six years of life. During this time the child’s brain is recording all sensory experiences as well as learning complex motor programs for speech, and for learning first how to crawl and then how to stand and ultimately run and jump. Simultaneously, the subconscious mind acquires perceptions in regard to parents, who are they and what they do. Then by observing behavioural patterns of people in their immediate environment (usually parents, siblings and relatives), a child learns perceptions of acceptable and unacceptable social behaviours that become the subconscious programs that establish the “rules” of life.

Nature facilitates the enculturation process by developmentally enhancing the subconscious mind’s ability to download massive amounts of information. EEG readings from adult brains reveal that neural electrical activity is correlated with different states of awareness. Adult EEG readings show that the human brain operates on at least five different frequency levels, each associated with a different brain state:

EEG vibrations continuously shift from state to state over the whole range of frequencies during normal brain processing in adults. However, brain frequencies in developing children display a radically different behaviour. EEG vibration rates and their corresponding states evolve in incremental stages over time. The predominant brain activity during the child’s first two years of life is delta, the lowest EEG frequency range. In the adult brain, delta is associated with sleeping or unconsciousness.

Between two and six years of age, the child’s brain activity state ramps up and it operates primarily in the range of theta. In the adult, theta activity is associated with states of reverie or imagination. While in the theta state, children spend much of their time mixing the imaginary world with the real world. Calm consciousness associated with emerging alpha activity only becomes a predominant brain state after six years of age. By twelve years, the brain expresses all frequency ranges although its primary activity is in beta’s state of focused consciousness. Children leave elementary education behind at this age and enter into the more intense academic programs of junior high.

A profoundly important fact in the above timeline that may have missed your attention is that children do not express the alpha EEG frequencies of conscious processing as a predominant brain state until after they are six years old. The predominant delta and theta activity of children under six signifies that their brains are operating at levels below consciousness. Delta and theta brain frequencies define a brain state known as a hypnogogic trance, the same neural state that hypnotherapists use to download new behaviours directly into the subconscious mind of their clients.

The first six years of a child’s life is spent in a hypnotic trance. Its perceptions of the world are directly downloaded into the subconscious during this time, without the discrimination of the, as yet, dormant self-conscious mind. Consequently, our fundamental perceptions about life and our role in it are learned before we express the capacity to choose or reject those beliefs. We were simply “programmed.” The Jesuits were aware of this programmable state and proudly boasted, “Give us a child until it is six or seven years old and it will belong to the Church for the rest of its life.” They knew that once the dogma of the Church was implanted into the child’s subconscious mind, that information would inevitably influence 95% of that individual’s behaviour for the rest of their life.

The inhibition of conscious processing (alpha EEG activity) and the simultaneous engagement of a hypnogogic trance during the formative stages of a child’s life are a logical necessity. The thinking processes associated with the self-conscious mind’s processing cannot operate from a blank slate. Self-conscious behaviour requires a working database of learned perceptions. Consequently, before self-consciousness is expressed, the brain’s primary task is to acquire a working awareness of the world by directly downloading experiences and observations into the subconscious mind.

HOWEVER, there is a very, very serious downside to acquiring awareness by this method. The consequence is so profound that it not only impacts the life of the individual, it can also alter an entire civilisation. The issue concerns the fact that we download our perceptions and beliefs about life long before we acquire the ability for critical thinking. Our primary perceptions are literally written in stone as unequivocal truths in the subconscious mind, where they habitually operate for life, unless there is an active effort to reprogram them. When as young children we download limiting or sabotaging beliefs about ourselves, these perceptions become our truths and our subconscious processing will invisibly generate behaviours that are coherent with those truths.

As an important point for personal reference, it should be noted that acquired perceptions in the subconscious mind could even override genetically endowed instincts. For example, every human can instinctually swim like a dolphin the moment they emerge from the birth canal. This might prompt you to ask, “Why is it that we have to work so hard at teaching our children how to swim?” The answer lies in the fact that every time the infant encounters open water, such as a pool, a river, a bathtub, the parents freak out in concern for the safety of their child. However, in the baby’s mind, the parent’s behaviour causes the child to equate water as something to be feared. The acquired perception of water as dangerous and life threatening, overrides the instinctual ability to swim and makes the formerly proficient child susceptible to drowning.

The following is further reference to the fact that our unconsciously acquired cultural beliefs control biology and behaviour. Through our developmental experiences we acquire the perception that we are frail, vulnerable organisms subject to the ravages of contagious germs and disease. The belief of being frail actually leads to frailty since the mind’s limiting perceptions inhibit the body’s innate ability to heal itself. This influence of the mind on healing processes is the focus of psychoneuroimmunology, the field that describes the mechanism by which our thoughts change brain chemistry, which in turn regulates the function of the immune system. While negative beliefs can precipitate illness (nocebo effect), the resulting dis-ease state can be alleviated through the healing effects of positive thoughts (placebo effect).

Finally, the third source of perceptions that shape our lives is derived from the self-conscious mind. Unlike the reflexive programming of subconscious mind, the self-conscious mind is a creative platform that provides for the mixing and morphing a variety of perceptions with the infusion of imagination, a process that generates an unlimited number of beliefs and behavioural variations. The quality of the self-conscious mind endows organisms with one of the most powerful forces in the Universe, the opportunity to express freewill.

Taking Personal Responsibility

The conclusions of the “new” biology provide a radical departure from our conventional beliefs of how life works. In contrast to the notion that we are biochemical automatons driven by genes, the new insights reveal that it is the mind that controls genes, which in turn shape our biology and behaviour. The self-conscious mind, associated with our individual identity and the manifestation of thoughts, is guided by our own personal desires and intentions.

While we generally perceive that our self-conscious mind is “controlling” the show, neuroscience has established the fact that 95% of our behaviour is under the control of the more powerful subconscious mind. As most of our personal and cultural problems arise from the fact that behaviours derived from the subconscious mind are essentially invisible to us, we rarely observe our automated behaviour.

Compounding the problem is the fact that fundamental programs in the subconscious mind are derived from others, people who generally do not share your personal goals and aspirations. While our conscious minds are trying to move us toward our dreams, unbeknownst to us our subconscious programs are simultaneously shooting ourselves in the foot and impeding our progress.

The subconscious mind is simply a “record-playback” mechanism that downloads experiences into “behavioural tapes.” While the self-conscious mind is associated with creativity, the subconscious mind’s function is to engage previously recorded programs. Unlike self-consciousness that is overseen by an entity (you), the subconscious mind is more closely related to a machine, meaning there is no thinking, conscious entity controlling the subconscious programs.

We have all been shackled with emotional chains wrought by dysfunctional behaviours programmed by the stories of the past. However, the next time you are talking to “yourself” with the hope of changing sabotaging subconscious programs, it is important to realise the following information. Using reason to communicate with your subconscious in an effort to change its behaviour would essentially have the same influence as trying to change a program on a cassette tape by talking to the tape player. In neither case is there an entity in the mechanism that will respond to your dialogue.

Subconscious programs are not fixed, unchangeable behaviours. We have the ability to rewrite our limiting beliefs and in the process take control of our lives. However, to change subconscious programs requires the activation of a process other than just engaging in a running dialogue with the subconscious mind. There are a large variety of effective processes to reprogram limiting beliefs, which include clinical hypnotherapy, Buddhist mindfulness and a number of newly developed and very powerful modalities collectively referred to as energy psychology.

For a list of resources, visit: www.brucelipton.com.

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BRUCE H. LIPTON, Ph.D. is an internationally recognised cellular biologist who taught cell biology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and later performed pioneering studies at Stanford University’s School of Medicine. His breakthrough research on the cell membrane in 1977 made him a pioneer in the new science of epigenetics. He is author of The Biology of Belief and a sought after keynote speaker and workshop presenter. He also created a full-length audio course The Wisdom of Your Cells: How Your Beliefs Control Your Biology.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 106 (Jan-Feb 2008).

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn 106 (PDF version) for only US$5

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

—

In the first chapter of his fascinating book The Origins of Psychic Phenomena (1984), the British psychologist Stan Gooch explains that he used to smile when he heard, “for instance, stories of invisible ‘thought forms’ allegedly produced by Tibetan mystics and others.” He then adds: “I no longer smile at such stories. My own feeling, now, is that there may literally be no limit to what can be achieved by the human subjective mind manipulating and actualising itself in the external, objective universe around it.”

According to Gooch, the workings of the unconscious mind – or subjective mind – can shed light on a whole host of paranormal phenomena, including poltergeist disturbances, mediumship, automatic writing, multiple-personality-disorder, succubi and incubi attacks, and even UFO sightings. The list goes on.

Stan Gooch the Medium

Gooch’s involvement with the paranormal began at age 26, when he was working as a school teacher in Coventry, England. Because he was new to the area and had few acquaintances, Gooch decided to enrol in three sets of evening classes, one of which was gymnastics. One evening at gymnastics class, while he was in the changing room, a member of the advanced class, named Peter, struck up a conversation with him. “He eventually told me that his ‘spirit guide’ had instructed him to do so,” explains Gooch. Peter, a spiritualist and medium, invited Gooch to a séance at his parent’s house.

The séance comprised eight to ten people, seated on hardback chairs, facing the medium. Soon after it commenced, Gooch had an experience that was to change the direction of his life. At first he felt light-headed. “And then,” he explains in his book The Paranormal, “it seemed to me that a great wind was rushing through the room. In my ears was the deafening sound of roaring waters. Together these elements seized me and carried me irresistibly forward. As I felt myself swept away I became unconscious.”

When he regained consciousness, Gooch was told that several entities had spoken through him while he was in a trance state. One of the entities identified himself as a cousin of Gooch’s who had been killed in the Second World War. Told by the presiding medium that he was a “strong natural medium” and that he ought to develop his “gift,” Gooch began attending her weekly circle, which consisted entirely of mediumistic individuals.

Sometimes Gooch and the other mediums would channel “higher guides.” Other times they would hold what’s called a “rescue circle,” whereby they would channel the spirits of those who did not realise they were dead, their aim being to help them “move on.” In The Paranormal, Gooch explains what it’s like to be “possessed by one of these lost souls.” It feels, he says, “as if another being ‘materialises’ or arises within one’s body and pervades it… There is a very clear and definite sense of another person within you.”

During one particularly memorable séance, a cave-man materialised in the corner of the room. “It stood half in shadow, watching us, breathing heavily as if nervous,” says Gooch. He later came to suspect that this figure “which so very much impressed and haunted me both then and afterwards” was a Neanderthal. Years later, in 1971, Gooch formulated the hybrid-origin theory, which basically posits that we – Homo sapiens – are a hybrid cross between the two early species of man, Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon. His Total Man trilogy is an exploration of this hypothesis.

On another occasion, soon after the presiding medium said they would experience “a wondrous radiance,” Gooch and the others were illuminated by what appeared to be a bright light shining down from above. Gooch eventually reached the conclusion that this occurrence was a type of collective hallucination, in addition to all the other paranormal manifestation that took place in the séance room. They were, in other words, psychological in nature, not physical. “That is, I do not think that any of the happenings would have registered on a photograph of the scene,” he explains.

In due course, Peter allowed Gooch to have a session with his spirit guide, an alleged American Indian named Grey Hawk. While Peter was channelling Grey Hawk, says Gooch, his face and profile took on the features of a “story-book Indian.” Grey Hawk gave Gooch a long lecture on “the nature of spirit,” which Gooch found moving and poetic, though also empty and unsatisfying. Gooch says he finds many talks by spirit guides, as well as books that have been dictated by them, “a kind of intellectual candy-floss… When you try to chew on these utterances, there is nothing there. The mouth is empty.”

It is because of this reason, as well as numerous others, says Gooch, that “personalities” like Grey Hawk are nothing more than a product of the unconscious minds of the mediums who claim to channel them. “One is that the alleged spirits never tell us anything that is not already known to living persons on this planet – and, almost invariably, known to the bereaved person ‘sitting’ with the medium,” he explains.

More on Mediumship

In The Origins of Psychic Phenomena, Gooch mentions how the author and former Air Force officer Sir Victor Goddard once asked the British medium Ena Twigg to contact one of his friends who had died. Remarkably, Twigg managed to give an accurate description of this individual – his appearance and personality, etc – even though she hadn’t been told anything about him. In a later session, she went into a trance, apparently channelling Goddard’s friend. In a description of this event, Goddard mentions that Twigg adopted his friend’s mannerisms and personal figures of speech, and that he was thoroughly taken aback by what he had witnessed. “It wasn’t so much the information which was conveyed as the manner of its conveying in speech, in action, and in gesture that carried conviction…,” writes Goddard.

Gooch uses this case to support his theory that mediumship has nothing to do with spirits. What is occurring instead, he says, is that the medium is unconsciously “tapping into” the mind of the sitter. “…There is nothing in what the ‘spirits’ narrate that persuades us that anything but a memory of that person is operating…,” he explains.

In his book Afterlife (1985), the British author and paranormal expert Colin Wilson explores, among other things, the subject of mediumship, eventually reaching the conclusion that there are indeed such things as spirits. The “unconscious mind theory,” he says, falls short of explaining a great many number of mediumistic communications, as well as a large number of poltergeist disturbances. Most paranormal investigators, he says, “are finally driven to the conclusion that spirits almost certainly exist. They do this with the utmost reluctance. It would be far more convenient, and far more logically satisfying, if we could explain all the phenomena in terms of the unrecognised powers of the human mind.”

Not surprisingly, Gooch gives the “spirit hypothesis” very little consideration. He does state, however, that it would be arrogant to rule out the possibility that some “spirits” have an independent existence, and are therefore not a product of one’s own mind.

The unconscious mind, says Gooch, for which a better name would be “alternative consciousness,” is far more dynamic and powerful than we assume. It is, in a sense, an entity of its own, possessing its own logic and autonomy, and, when repressed, is capable of expressing itself in very odd and alien ways – mediumship being a perfect example.

In Gooch’s opinion, as mentioned previously, ‘channelled’ information, as a general rule, leaves much to be desired. As an example – and a good one at that – Gooch mentions the numerous ‘Seth’ books that have been written through Jane Roberts. All of these books, says Gooch, “mean absolutely nothing.” Jane Roberts, by the way, who died in 1984, was a successful and prolific author before she became a ‘mouthpiece’ for Seth.

In late-1963, as part of her research for a book on ESP, Roberts, who was then thirty-five, started experimenting with an Ouija board. Her husband, Robert Butts, took part in these activities. Before long, they began to receive coherent messages from a male personality who later identified himself as Seth. Before long, Roberts began to hear Seth’s voice inside her head. She then developed into a medium, regularly going into a trance state in which Seth would allegedly speak through her. Over the years, with Butts acting as stenographer, Seth’s deranged philosophical and spiritual ramblings were written down and compiled in book, after book, after book…

However, some of this material was written automatically, whereby Roberts would enter a trance state and let her hand “take over.” Seth described himself as an “energy personality essence no longer in physical form.” He claimed, moreover, that he existed independently of Robert’s subconscious (or ‘unconscious’, as the two words basically have the same definition).

Hypnosis and the Theories of Thomas Jay Hudson

In the early-1880s, the subject of hypnosis attained a certain degree of scientific acceptance, and was being employed by leading psychologists to investigate the realm of the unconscious. After witnessing a remarkable display of hypnosis, conducted by the famous Professor Carpenter, a Detroit newspaper editor named Thomas Jay Hudson decided to formulate his own theories about such matters, later writing an influential book on the subject called The Law of Psychic Phenomena (1893). (By ‘psychic’ he means psychological.)

The hypnosis presentation conducted by Carpenter, which so impressed Hudson, took place in Washington DC. One of the participants, a college graduate identified only as ‘C’, was placed under hypnosis and made to believe that he was in the presence of Socrate’s spirit, which he, but nobody else, was able to see. He was also told that Socrates would answer any question he desired. C and the imaginary Socrates then began to have a conversation, with C repeating everything ‘Socrates’ said, so that Carpenter and the audience could hear it. Apparently their conversation went on for two hours, and the answers ‘Socrates’ gave were so plausible and impressive that some members of the audience were firmly convinced of his being there in spirit form.

C was then introduced to the ‘spirits’ of far more modern philosophers, and again, the conversations that took place left the audience spellbound. Each ‘philosopher’ he talked to had their own distinct style of speaking. The language they used, moreover, was also distinct, as were the comments they made. It should also be mentioned that the ideas and opinions they expressed were far different to those which C possessed. Had the entire discourse been printed word for word, says Hudson, it would have “former one of the grandest and most coherent systems of spiritual philosophy ever conceived by the brain of man.”

There were, it turns out, a small number of spiritualists in the audience, some of whom believed that the presence of spirits could explain what they had witnessed. It’s fair to assume, however, that some of them began to question this notion when Carpenter managed to invoke the ‘spirit’ of a talking philosophical pig, which proved to be something of an expert on the Hindu doctrine of reincarnation.

In an attempt to explain hypnosis and other phenomena of this nature – including genius, insanity and even the miracles of Jesus – Hudson formulated the theory that man has two minds, the subjective and the objective. The objective mind, which is practical in nature, allows us to function effectively in the real world. It operates, moreover, through the medium of the five senses.

The subjective mind, on the other hand, is non-practical in nature, and allows us to deal with our inner problems. It prefers to use intuition, and is highly suggestible. “It is the seat of the emotions, and the storehouse of memory,” explains Hudson. “It preforms its highest functions when the objective senses are in abeyance. In a word, it is that intelligence which makes itself manifest in a hypnotic subject when he is in a state of somnambulism.”

During hypnosis, says Hudson, the objective mind – the ‘you’ – is put to rest, allowing the subjective mind, which is a “separate and distinct entity,” to take charge of the brain and body. According to Hudson, when in control, the highly intuitive – in fact, psychic – subjective mind is able to perform all sorts of remarkable, almost supernatural, feats. Hudson knew of cases where hypnotised subjects, who had their eyes closed, were able to read a newspaper held by someone on the opposite side of the room. He had also heard stories of people, who, under hypnosis, were able to speak foreign languages they had never consciously learnt, later discovering that they had been exposed to the languages in early childhood, and had therefore managed to ‘absorb’ them unconsciously.

If one were to compare Gooch’s theories with Hudson’s, they would obviously say that the objective mind is the same as the conscious, and the subjective mind is the same as the unconscious.

Automatic Writing

As explained in his book The Paranormal, Gooch not only developed mediumistic powers, he also developed the ability to write automatically. “After only one or two attempts my hand began to write vigorously and fluently,” he explains. To be successful in this endeavour, he says, one must be totally relaxed and in an environment free of distractions, paying as little attention to one’s “writing hand” as possible. “After a few sessions, perhaps even in the first, the hand will begin to twitch occasionally of itself. Marks and scribbles may be made. In time many people can progress to a hand that writes coherently by itself.”

After much experimentation with automatic writing, Gooch reached the conclusion that his unconscious mind was producing the results. The types of ‘personalities’ that expressed themselves on paper, he says, were many and varied. He describes some of their comments as solemn and soulful. Others, he says, were “naughty remarks of the ‘impish spirit’. And occasionally the cursing and filth of the true demon or devil.”

Gooch soon discovered that, simply by using mental commands, he was able to alter the tone and style of the material he wrote automatically. This process, he insists, was purely mental, in that no amount of deliberate, physical force was used. “I could also lead the conversation in any direction I chose,” he explains. “I could easily catch out the communicant by causing him or her to contradict something said earlier.”

In The Origins of Psychic Phenomena, Gooch provides further evidence to suggest that one’s own unconscious mind is able to produce automatic writing. He mentions the work of a physician named Dr. Anita Mühl of the St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, who used automatic writing as a tool to treat hospitalised neurotics and psychotics. Mühl discovered that the material her patients wrote automatically – which consisted mainly of short poems, short stories, drawings and musical compositions – often contained elements that illuminated the problems they suffered from. She found, moreover, that discussing and exploring this material with her patients was of considerable therapeutic value.

Mühl’s patients wrote in a variety of different ways, some of which were very odd indeed; as she explains in her own words: “The subject may display a sudden facility for using the opposite hand or for using both together and may even produce two personalities at once, each making use of a different hand and each representing a different sex. He may write mirrorwise with either or both hands and he may write backwards correctly and speedily…”

One of Mühl’s patients, a woman “of such refinement and charming manner,” who suffered from various sexual difficulties, produced automatic writing that contained “the most obscene and filthy language.” Analysis of this material revealed that the patient had been repeatedly sexually assaulted as a child, and that this was the cause of her problems. Although she had only the vaguest recollections of these humiliating and distressing incidents, her unconscious mind had recorded it all in great detail.

A Brief Note on the Poltergeist

No article on the paranormal abilities of the unconscious mind would be complete without mentioning the poltergeist. Most experts on the poltergeist agree that these dramatic, frightening and often violent manifestations are created by the unconscious mind of a particular person around whom the disturbances take place. This individual – sometimes called the agent or focus – is often psychologically disturbed in some way. Many well-documented cases exist where the focus was a pubescent child.

According to the parapsychologist Scott Rogo in his book The Poltergeist Experience, poltergeist disturbances occur when an individual creates a “PK-being from his inner guilt, hate and repression, which takes on a life of its own…” This “PK-being,” he says, “grows in force until it completely severs itself from the will or personality that gave it birth.” The disturbances cease, he says, once the PK-being has expended all its energy.

The Cerebellum as the Unconscious

So where in our brains is the unconscious located? After all, the cerebral cortex, the outer layers of the two hemispheres of the cerebrum, is widely considered to be the general, physical location of the conscious mind, as many of the functions it performs are those which take place in a fully awake state of consciousness.

Gooch proposes that the cerebellum – or “little brain” – is the physical seat of the unconscious mind. He points out, for instance, that strong evidence exists to suggest that the cerebellum is directly responsible for the function of dreaming. He also points out that it is the headquarters of the autonomic nervous system, while the cerebrum – the conscious mind – is the headquarters of the central nervous system (CNS). Women, he says, who are generally more psychic than men, have larger cerebella than men, as confirmed by brain imaging techniques.

Exploring the Realm of the Unconscious

The fact that we dream, says Gooch, proves that we inhabit not one universe, but two – the world of the conscious, and the world of the unconscious. The latter of which – the “inner alternative world of the mind” – is open to extensive exploration, he says. Some people, including Gooch, reach it by sustaining a hypnopompic state, remaining in a semi-conscious condition – the one that precedes complete wakefulness (as opposed to the one that precedes sleep, knows as a hypnagogic state).

Gooch says the “inner universe” can take on a variety of different forms, such as that of a town – with streets shops, cafes and people – or that of a beautiful countryside. In this universe, he says, one is able to talk to people, and even have sex. “The sex is not just as good as, but better than that obtained in the real world, because one’s own personal archetypal wishes and fantasies may be, and often are, lived out,” he explains.

Gooch believes that the unconscious mind manifests paranormal phenomena in response to being repressed. In a “balanced” individual, he says, the two minds exist in harmony. But when an imbalance occurs, when the unconscious mind is not given its due, there is an externalisation of latent energies. It is then that we are haunted by creatures and forces from the mysterious universe of our other mind.

Bibliography

Richard S. Broughton, Parapsychology – The Controversial Science (Ballantine Books, US, 1991)

Stan Gooch, The Paranormal (Wildwood House Ltd., UK, London, 1978)

Stan Gooch, The Origins of Psychic Phenomena (Rider & Co, UK, 1984)

Brian Inglis, Trance – A Natural History of Altered States of Mind (Grafton Books, UK, 1989)

D. Scott Rogo, The Poltergeist Experience – Investigations Into Ghostly Phenomena (Penguin Books Ltd., Middlesex, England, 1979)

Colin Wilson, Afterlife (The Leisure Circle Ltd., UK, 1985)

Colin Wilson, Beyond the Occult (Caxton Editions, London, UK, 1988)

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LOUIS PROUD, an aspiring writer, whose interests include Western occultism, parapsychology and ufology, has written numerous articles on these and other unconventional topics. He can be contacted at louisproud2000@yahoo.com.au. His website is http://paranormal-sleep-paralysis.tripod.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 105 (Nov-Dec 2007).

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn 105 (PDF version) for only US$5

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

—

I believe there are many gods, not one, and always in conflict. Well, if there are gods who created and control what’s going on here, you can tell a lot about them by what is going on. I assume they are colonists. And so anything you can see here you can infer is the act or the will of one of those gods. All you have to do is look around. You’ll see what they’re like. It’s like looking in someone’s yard.
– W.S. Burroughs

Dateline: 1950 A.D. The physicist Enrico Fermi is having lunch with a few colleagues when the subject of interstellar travel comes up. There are countless potential living systems in our own galaxy, Fermi reasons. If even a small fraction of these produced technological civilisations capable of launching manned expeditions, our own humble planet should have been overrun with extraterrestrial conquistadores millions of years ago.

“Don’t you ever wonder where everybody is?” Fermi asked.

In other words, if the galaxy is filled with little green men in luminous flying saucers who travel from star to star colonising other worlds, then why don’t we have any physical evidence of their existence – not even so much as a piece of broken zipper from one of their spacesuits?

This question (known as the Fermi paradox) has spawned a vigorous scientific and philosophical debate whose possible answers can be grouped into three broad categories.

1. Extraterrestrial civilisations do not exist.
2. Extraterrestrial civilisations exist but haven’t colonised the Earth, either because they can’t or because they don’t want to.
3. Extraterrestrial civilisations exist and have colonised the Earth without our knowledge.

As we shall see, the implications for all of these positions are unsettling in the extreme – not so much for what they say about extraterrestrial life, but for what they might say about us.

Are We Alone?

The most straightforward solution to the Fermi paradox is that we are alone in the universe – our planet has not been colonised because advanced alien civilisations do not exist.
Perhaps (as many Christians claim) life is unique to Earth; or perhaps most alien societies ruin themselves through pollution or war, extinguishing life on their home worlds before they have a chance to spread outwards. (Knowing as we do that terrestrial species have a better than 99% extinction rate, this latter scenario is rather easy to imagine.)

Of course, even if most alien species do expire in this way, isn’t it stretching the limits of conjecture to suppose that all of them do?

The Milky Way galaxy alone contains at least 100 billion stable solar systems;1 roughly a third of these possess Earth-like planets with oceans.2 The odds against every single one of these being either sterile or suicidal are literally astronomical.

So, Where Are They?

If we suppose that extraterrestrial civilisations do exist, we are left with only two options: either they are somewhere else or else they are here. So why might an alien civilisation choose to colonise the Earth (or not)?

Many researchers seem to assume that an extraterrestrial colonisation effort would be overtly belligerent, taking the form of:

• Imperialism
• Resource Exploitation
• Subversion
• Scrub & Repopulate
• Smash & Grab3

But wouldn’t successful alien civilisations be more patient and cautious than that? Couldn’t they also be:

A.        unable or unwilling to launch a full-scale invasion of the Earth?

or

B.        here already, and ruling over us by means so subtle as to be almost undetectable?

In fact, some scientists have argued that until we conclusively prove that extraterrestrial civilisations don’t exist, the Fermi paradox isn’t a paradox at all; instead, we aren’t looking hard enough, or haven’t been looking in the right places.

Biblical Brainteasers

The Fermi paradox here reveals significant overlap with the theodicy, a traditional theological riddle, which asks: If God is good and all-powerful, where is the evidence of his existence – why is there so much evil in the world?

One of the most ancient (and persuasive) answers to the theodicy is that of Gnosticism, a speculative branch of pre-Nicean Christianity which held that God (or the gods) do exist, but are neither omnipotent nor benevolent; instead, these advanced beings from the stars are selfish, opportunistic and deceptive.

Gnosticism In Brief

In the Gnostic view, the god of the Bible was not the Supreme Being at all, but an arrogant Demiurge who fled the heavens to build this planet as an experimental prison, populating it with artificial life forms and strange, symbiotic hybrids.

Far from paradisiacal, his “Garden of Eden” was an eerie mad scientist’s laboratory where shadowy parasites abducted a pair of primitive primates named Adam and Eve, raping the female and implanting the male with false memories:

When they [the Demiurge and his angels] saw Eve speaking with [Adam], they said to one another… “Come, let us seize her and let us cast our seed on her, so that… those whom she will beget will serve us. But let us not tell Adam that she is not derived from us, but let us bring a stupor upon him, and… teach him in his sleep as though she came into being from his rib…”4

These chthonic and creepy alterna-Christian creation myths have influenced thinkers from many different fields over the millennia, from politics to popular culture. In recent decades, the Gnostic metanarrative has even made a re-appearance with the paranoid worldview which informs much contemporary speculation about aliens and UFOs, e.g.:

One of the purposes for which UFOs travel to Earth is to abduct humans to help aliens produce other beings. It is not a program of reproduction but one of production. They are not here to help us, they have their own agenda and we are not allowed to know its full parameters.5

In all of the solutions to the Fermi paradox which appear below, we can see echoes of many of these same, disturbing ideas. As the Demiurge and his angels pass from theology into speculative exobiology, the skies seem to swarm with icily indifferent robots, otherworldly djinn, celestial frauds and bestial, fallen bacilli.

Six of the most widely-discussed scenarios follow:

1. Extraterrestrial civilisations spread via self-replicating AI probes.
2. Extraterrestrial civilisations develop massive virtual reality simulations.
3. Extraterrestrial civilisations have left this universe and developed the ability to manipulate hyperspace.
4. Extraterrestrial civilisations develop xenophobic and/or authoritarian religious forms.
5. Extraterrestrials are biologically very primitive, or spread themselves via biologically primitive forms.
6. The Earth is being deliberately quarantined.

Conveniently, most of the possibilities listed here could plausibly be used to explain either why our planet has been invaded or how it could already have been invaded unbeknownst to us; which outcome you favour really seems to depend on your assumptions about alien motivation.

POSSIBILITY #1 – Extraterrestrial civilisations spread via self-replicating AI probes

Frank Tipler of Tulane University has argued that alien civilisations would probably explore and colonise the Universe by proxy, filling the galaxy with self-replicating AI (artificial intelligence) probes instead of venturing forth themselves. Thus, even a very distant extraterrestrial civilisation should be able to seize, secure, sterilise and strip-mine our entire planet in about 4 million years.

“If they existed,” concludes Tipler, “they would be here”; and since we are here instead, they must not exist.6

On the other hand, if hives of autonomous, adaptable, rapidly multiplying robotic probes were roaming the galaxy, successive generations might eventually become so intelligent as to far surpass their creators.

In time, as these “artilects” spread throughout the Universe, they could come to abandon their creators’ agenda, preferring effortless communion with their own kind to the laborious conquest of organic, planetary life. Reflects AI researcher Hugo de Garis:

I suspect strongly that virtually all the ETs out there are in fact artilects, and hence have intelligence levels astronomically superior to the human level. To me, biological technological intelligence is just a fleeting phase that nature goes through en route to creating immortal massive artilectual intelligence, which may be a phenomenon as commonplace as the creation of life from the molecular soup…

The answer then to Fermi’s paradox is that we human beings, being mere biologicals, are utterly unworthy of the artilects’ attention… What’s in it for them? We are very probably not so special and are very, very dumb…7

POSSIBILITY #2 – Extraterrestrial civilisations have developed massive virtual reality simulations

Recent trends suggest that it should be possible for an advanced civilisation (either earthly or alien) to develop fully immersive virtual reality simulations like the “Holodeck” of Gene Rodenberry’s Star Trek. If such a technology were developed by an alien species on its own planet, the prospect of mingling in real time with a distant and dirty species like our own could seem unappealing, degrading or even boring to extraterrestrial psychonauts. Opines evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller:

Basically, I think the aliens don’t blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonise space because they’re too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don’t need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today.8

Alternately, it could be that our own world (and the visible universe which seems to surround it) is itself a vast computer simulation engineered by aliens, some form of artificial intelligence (as in the film The Matrix) or even our own descendants. The planetarium hypothesis holds that we can’t find evidence of alien colonisation because contact with other worlds hasn’t been built into the simulation.

POSSIBILITY #3 – Extraterrestrial civilisations have left this universe and developed the ability to manipulate hyperspace

A third possibility is that alien civilisations become capable of interstellar travel, but learn how to escape this universe soon afterwards. If transcension were common, extraterrestrial civilisations might quickly lose interest in colonising other planets. Why travel to a distant ball of mud and water when you can explore higher dimensional hyperspace instead?

On the other hand, if alien scientists did have the ability to leave our shared space-time and launch themselves into the larger multiverse, they could be here now and we would not be able to see them.

In the same way that a glass pipette might seem – from the point of view of beings trapped in the flat, two-dimensional world of the Petri dish – like an enormous, transparent column which descends from the sky to abduct unsuspecting amoeba out for an afternoon stroll, aliens from higher dimensional space-time could enter and leave our reality at will, seeming to appear and disappear, change shape and pass through solid barriers as they experimented on and/or revealed themselves to us, and all without leaving a shred of physical evidence.

The idea that extraterrestrials are actually multi-dimensional has been an influential one, leading some UFO researchers to conclude that:

This [the UFO phenomenon] is not the product of an alien culture from a nearby star, here to explore our solar system. Instead it is an intelligence which dwells in a different type of reality and moves through hyperspace in such a way as to interreact with us almost as a side-effect. It is an intelligence that is not here to study us but it has been here all along and effectively controls our whole existence…9

Advocates of Jacques Vallee’s “control system” hypothesis similarly argue that we may never find the evidence we seek because extraterrestrials aren’t encumbered by physical artifacts like spaceships or ray guns; instead these polymorphous and hallucinatory aliens freely wiggle and hop in and out of our world like angels, demons and gods from the twilight realms of the collective subconscious.

POSSIBILITY 4 – Extraterrestrial civilisations develop xenophobic and/or authoritarian religious forms

A fourth possibility is that extraterrestrial civilisations tend to develop xenophobic and/or authoritarian religious forms. Given the history of our own species, the difficulties such belief systems might present to alien scientists can easily be imagined.

Are Plaeadian professors who promote interstellar exploration passed over for promotion or excluded from alien faculty functions? Are extraterrestrial exobiologists denounced as heretics and electrocuted by otherworldly Inquisitors? If so, then we may never encounter these advanced beings from the stars.

Alternately, it could be that alien conquerors literally walked the Earth’s surface millennia ago and left literary monuments to their endeavours in the form of the Babylonian and Sumerian creation epics and the Hebrew Bible. In this view (the so-called “alien astronaut” hypothesis), the gods and messengers of our own authoritarian religious traditions were not representatives of a supreme being at all, but extraterrestrial colonialists masquerading as gods!
Israeli scholar Zechariah Sitchin’s works are generally representative of this latter position, holding that alien scientists (the “Elohim” and “Nephilim” of the Old Testament) genetically engineered homo sapiens from the great apes in an attempt to create a slave race:

They made us through genetic engineering. They jumped the gun on evolution, and made us to look like them physically, and to be like them emotionally. That is what the Bible says: “Let us make the Adam in our likeness and after our image.” Physically, outwardly and inwardly. So much of what they are, we are.10

Are human beings really descended from some prehistoric encounter between the apes and the angels 300,000 years ago? Sitchin is convinced of it. As proof, he points out that humans possess 223 genes found in no other species on Earth. Either these genes were horizontally transferred by some unknown species of bacteria, Sitchin insists, or else they must be extraterrestrial in origin.11

POSSIBILITY #5 – Extraterrestrials are biologically very primitive, or spread themselves via biologically primitive forms

600 million years ago, the Earth was ruled by sponges, flatworms and jellyfish. Possessing neither brains nor nervous systems, these simple organisms flourished, surviving nearly unchanged today.

In similar fashion, our universe may be teeming with species hugely successful on their home planets but lacking the complex cognitive skills necessary to build and launch spacecraft.

The flip-side of this possibility is the panspermia hypothesis, which holds that extraterrestrial colonists arrived here billions of years ago, not as bug-eyed monsters in metallic spacecraft, but as spores or bacteria which fell from the atmosphere to fertilise the Earth’s oceans with primitive life. In time, these alien microbes evolved into the many terrestrial species biologists know today, including human beings!
Of course, the panspermia hypothesis doesn’t answer how our most ancient one-celled ancestors originated themselves; perhaps their ancestors too were seeded somewhere else by alien scientists from another solar system.12

POSSIBILITY #6 – The Earth is being deliberately quarantined

Finally, the “zoo hypothesis” holds that we haven’t been able to find any hard evidence of alien contact or colonisation because our extraterrestrial overlords don’t want us to – instead they are treating this planet like a farm or laboratory. As early 20th century paranormal researcher Charles Fort wondered:

Would we, if we could, educate and sophisticate pigs, geese, cattle? Would it be wise to establish diplomatic relation with the hen…?

I think we’re property… we belong to something… that once upon a time, this earth was No-man’s Land, that other worlds explored and colonised here, and fought among themselves for possession, but that now it’s owned by something… all others warned off.13

If this planet functions as a livestock enclosure of some sort, then it makes sense that representatives of the civilisation cultivating and/or studying us would occasionally slip up and reveal themselves. The indignation expressed by the contactee who recalls alien encounters under hypnosis may have something in common with the drugged and dizzy roar of the bear who wakes up to discover a radio-tracking chip stapled to his ear:

Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind (CE-IV): The contactee is abducted by the UFO occupants, taken aboard the landed craft, and subjected to a variety of “tests” and “experiments.” Some investigators claim to have recovered physical evidence of these interactions in the form of scars from alien surgical incisions. Some abductees report memories of devices being implanted within their bodies, typically through the nose.14

Conclusion

Perhaps most alien civilisations are unable or unwilling to colonise other worlds, due to their religious beliefs, immersion in video games, or an unfortunate tendency to blow themselves up, but even if 99% were thus incapacitated, this still doesn’t explain why the remaining 1% seem to have left the Earth alone.

On the other hand, if just one ambitious, alien civilisation from among the remaining 1% were to colonise the Earth using any or all of the strategies described above, our seeming isolation would be explained and Fermi’s paradox would stand resolved – as long as they did so covertly.

Are we then, mere talking monkeys in a cosmic cage, simulated serfs in a vast video game or experiments in an extraterrestrial Petri dish, as some of the most plausible solutions to Fermi’s famous question would seem to imply?
Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), the “covert colonisation” hypothesis is by definition almost impossible to disprove; in the end, we may have no choice but to test some of these strange scenarios by launching colonisation programs of our own:

Earth has provided a stable platform for the evolution of life over 4 billion years. But that lease is limited; we know for sure that it will expire after a few billion more. Long before that, our planet may become a place where it is no longer suitable for us to live. Increasing luminosity of the Sun may gradually boil our oceans, or more sudden catastrophes may threaten our existence. If we are wise, we will have furnished our new apartments long before that time….15

Footnotes:

1. “Earth: No Longer the Lonely Planet,” RedOrbit, Saturday, 27 September 2003, www.redorbit.com/news/stories/1/2003/09/27/story003.html

2. “Earth-Like Planets May Be More Common Than Once Thought, Says CU-Boulder-Penn State Study,” University of Colorado at Boulder, 7 September 2006, www.colorado.edu/news/releases/2006/280.html

3. Fritz Freiheit, “The Possibilities of FTL: Or Fermi’s Paradox Reconsidered,” www-personal.engin.umich.edu/~fritx/Ftlessay/essay.html

4. “On the Origin of the World,” from Willis Barnstone’s The Other Bible, p.70, 1984.

5. Dr. David Jacobs, Secret Life, p. 305

6. John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, p.578.

7. Hugo de Garis, “Answering Fermi’s Paradox”, 22 March 2001, www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0188.html

8. Geoffrey Miller, “Runaway consumerism explains the Fermi Paradox,” www.edge.org/q2006/q06_print.html#miller

9. Peter Hough & Jenny Randles, Looking For the Aliens, p.210, 1991.

10. Interview with Zecharia Sitchin, www.metatron.se/asitch.html

11. Zecharia Sitchin, “The Case of Adam’s Alien Genes,” www.sitchin.com/adam.htm

12. For an in-depth discussion of the panspermia hypothesis, please see this author’s previous article “The Incredibly Strange Story of Intelligent Design” in the July/August 2006 issue of New Dawn magazine.

13. The Book of the Damned, A Hypertext Edition of Charles Hoy Fort’s Book, Edited and Annotated by Mr. X, Chapter XII, www.sacred-texts.com/fort/damned/damn12.htm

14. J. Allen Hynek, UFO researcher, from Keith Thompson’s Angels and Aliens, p.144, 1991.

15. Robert Shapiro, Planetary Dreams, 1999.

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REV. ILLUMINATUS MAXIMUS is an occult researcher and visionary artist whose work has been featured in The Independent, New Dawn and Wired. A licensed minister, Rev. Max is widely credited for his role in introducing Gnosticism to the WWW. You can visit his website at www.enemies.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 100 (Jan-Feb 2007).

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