Wisdom, Love, and UFOs

Wisdom, Love, and UFOs

Note: This is a rough transcript. Since the Dangerous Wisdom podcast uses many names and terms that transcription software fails to recognize, a more accurate transcript is not possible at this time. But this version is as close as we can manage.

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Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into the mystery and a gateway to the mind of nature and the nature of mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor. I’m happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

We’re doing the work we need to do to heal self and world at the same time.

What does that have to do with UFOs?

Well, there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our culture’s bad philosophies, and contemplating some of them can help us to free ourselves from our culture’s bad philosophies and put us on a path to real liberation.

I don’t know how many philosophers have taken a serious look at the UFO literature, but I would guess very, very few of them have done any serious work on it. I’m the only philosopher I know of who actually included UFO literature in their doctoral research.

Once upon a time I might have written off experiences of this kind as hallucinations, or sleep paralysis, or any number of other reductionist notions. But it became clear to me that many of us would benefit from a careful consideration of this incredible set of phenomena.

We won’t go into details of encounter experiences this time around. We might do that another time. For now, we want to consider the nature of UFO and alien encounter experiences and think about what they mean for our life. We’re following the thread of the last few episodes to think about how a deep-seated fear can keep us from seeing reality.

Let’s begin with a book written by Whitley Strieber and Jeffrey Kripal, a book called The Super Natural.

union, which was published in: 1987

Why? Why would a serious scholar feel afraid of his own book?

As a first level of answer, we can attribute his fear to the sorts of things we have already considered—that it seems to evoke a bit of fear and trembling to turn toward the possibility that the world is already a Super Natural World.

You can hear me pausing there. I’m not practicing diction. Rather, Kripal invites us to reject the term supernatural, where supernatural is one word. Instead, Kripal uses two words: Super and Natural. It means Nature is already super. The book’s title “The Super Natural” gets at our encounter with the superness of Nature, which can seem alien to us.

To call something “supernatural” in the habitual sense merely repeats the duality of our limiting thinking: We put the “natural” on one side, and “supernatural” on the other; the “rational” on one side, the “irrational” on the other.

But Nature is already wonderous, exceeding all our concepts. The Cosmos can become intelligible without being conceivable.

wrote to Elizabeth Pelham in: 1939

ong of Sixpence. (from Ellman: 1999

By means of intimate experience, we can wonderstand the living Cosmos without “knowing” it, in the manner of ordinary understanding. This wonderstanding involves a non-dualistic “knowing”.

What does that mean? Ordinarily, when we know something, we make ourselves into a knower, and we make something else into an object that we know. We thereby create a gap between knowledge and the whole Cosmos.

However, the Cosmos will abide no such gap, because the Cosmos is not an object. It’s more like a celebration or a sacred love affair we co-discover and co-create.

And of course, those we love, and all our relations who share this living loving World with us, they aren’t objects either. But knowledge in the habitual mode turns everything into an object and creates a mirage of distance in place of the immanent intimacy of the grand Cosmic affair.

To enter life—that engages a sensitivity and responsiveness—in mutuality—and this arises as intelligible and inconceivable at the same time. As the Cosmos evolves and develops, there will always remain more to discover-and-create, in total mutuality.

The World is Super, and the World is Natural. To touch the Superness of Nature, we need to change the way we think, sense, move, touch, taste, commune and communicate. That obviously means a revolution. One of the reasons we prefer relative ignorance has to do with the hardships of revolutions, the burdens of living the life of a true revolutionary or radical.

The wisdom traditions, including many Indigenous traditions, teach us that we can enter the wonder that already is this World.

Entering it means mystical participation, in a sophisticated and positive sense. We can get freaked out by any mention of mysticism. And the term “mystical participation” has a history of being associated with unskillful views about the World.

What we mean is that somehow, we not only can participate in the World, but we must. We are already interwoven into the Cosmos, and it demands our participation. It’s like a sacred responsibility to the being of the World, and to all our relations in the vast community of life, that may extend into the Cosmos in ways we cannot fathom.

The mystical part means we have to enter this mystery and find out for ourselves. No one can tell us how our participation in the World works, and we can’t know it as an object.

But the wisdom traditions offer us training protocols, to empower our participation in the Cosmos, in such a way that we cultivate the whole of life onward in creativity and good will, in wisdom, love, and beauty.

These traditions invite us to become radicals, in the sense of returning to our own roots. That’s what the word radical means—it has to do with the root of something. If our culture were healthy, we could do that without disrupting it. But, in an unhealthy culture, any entrance into wonder threatens revolution in the culture.

The funny thing about this kind of revolution, is that it seems revolutionary only from a limited point of view. The magic of the World challenges our ego and the narrow paradigms that drive the dominant culture.

In this book, The Super Natural, Kripal speaks of “an apocalypse of thought”. I love that turn of phrase.

We’ve already talked about the meaning of apocalypse: Strictly speaking it means a revelation, but it carries the connotation of destruction or the ending of something.

Many philosophers have essentially described an apocalypse of thought, or what Jung called a break-through of total experience.

In an introduction to a collection of essays on Zen written by D.T. Suzuki, Jung wrote the following:

. . . after many years of the hardest practice and the most strenuous demolition of rational understanding, the Zen devotee receives an answer—the only true answer—from Nature herself . . . As one can see for oneself, it is the naturalness of the answer that strikes one most . . . (CW11, para. 901)

We don’t need to demonize rationality. The evil we face is not too much rationality, but rather the division of the rational and the intuitive, the division of the head from the heart.

So, we don’t have to move from the head to the heart, but stop dividing them.

Because they remain divided, we see all sorts of attempts to use rationality, argument, concepts, beliefs, and what we refer to as knowledge. Even crazy politicians use what they think of as reasoning.

One politician recently tried to use reason to question the theory of evolution. I’m thinking here of the former football player, Herschel Walker, who said, If we supposedly come from apes, how come there are still apes?

That to him seemed like an argument.

But, as one comedian replied, That would be like asking, If Honey Nut Cherios come from original Cherios, how come we still have original Cherios? (That was Bill Maher) But in making a cute joke, the comedian may have missed the deeper error in reasoning—namely that human and non-human primates share a common ancestor, who of course no longer exists.

The point is that human beings (like so many other beings in our World) have a kind of instinct for thinking together, and most of us intuitively seek to offer reasons to each other for our behaviors and beliefs.

In the university system and in economic and business realms, we find a good deal of rationality, which often amounts to rationalization when we keep it cut off from our total intelligence. The reasons we give often function like Herschel Walker’s reasoning about evolution: It can sound like reasoning, but in fact it comes down to rationalization. And we do this precisely because we have an expectation of reasoning.

We need critical thinking and skillful reasoning. But genuine and skillful reasoning has a connection to life, and doesn’t try to hide in abstractions, repressions, reactivity, double speak, and the gamut of cognitive biases we have become so infected by.

Somewhere in our psyche, we know that our concepts cannot encompass reality, and so our concepts will inevitably succumb to an apocalypse, and in some fashion get reduced to rubble.

That very fact can make us all the more defensive.

In this regard, we could think back to that passage from Jung, and notice how essential it seems to acknowledge and gently hold in our hearts his phrase about the “true answer—from Nature herself”—a “return to Nature,” we might call it . . . a return to “naturalness” in some sense.

This return to Nature is something many great philosophers, sages, priestesses, and shamans would endorse. Even a philosopher like John Dewey would likely endorse that sentiment, and I always think of him as thoroughly committed to common sense. So, there again, we have to be careful what we mean by a “demolition of rational understanding,” even if that phrase captures something important.

We should note that Jung seems to have seen our psychological maturation as a matter of an apocalypse of thought, even if, at the same time, he thought most people in the dominant culture simply couldn’t handle Zen training. He seems to have thought of us as by and large far too neurotic. and we will talk about that another time.

But I wanted to mention these things because they show that an apocalypse of thought is in one sense something the wisdom traditions expect for us, and on the other hand it’s something that can frighten us, and so we do a lot to avoid it. One of the things we do to avoid it is make a big effort to move toward it.

So, back to Jeff Kripal. In his own book , he writes the following: “I am afraid of this book. There is something about it, something explosive and new. It is not a neutral book. It is an apocalypse of thought waiting for you, the reader, to actualize” (1).

I can think of a lot of books like that in the spiritual traditions of the world. With most of them—maybe all of them—we couldn’t possibly experience an apocalypse of thought without a context for that apocalypse. We have to be engaged in a holistic philosophical practice of life.

But maybe we can at least encourage each other, my friends. We can encourage each other to experience this apocalypse, this revelation of reality that far too many people keep hiding from.

Sometimes people hide in corporate jobs they know don’t really help the world. Sometimes people hide in ayahuasca ceremonies, yoga studios, Zen centers, and churches. Sometimes people hide both in ayahuasca ceremonies and the corporate jobs they return to after the singing stops, or they hide in the Zen center and in their failed relationships, or they hide in their church and their politics.

We need to practice compassion for ourselves, for each other, and for the World that needs us to experience a greater apocalypse of mind and reality than we have so far experienced. It just means almost every last one of us has further to go—more ignorance to dispel, more insight and healing to receive and to give. That sounds exciting, doesn’t it? We each have more insight to gift to the World.

Kripal goes on with words that could serve as a reminder for our contemplations here together. He writes, “The world will not really end as you turn these pages of course.”

Will the World end while you listen?

Why is he talking about the end of the World?

The world, in some literal sense, will not end. But the world of delusion we have entangled ourselves in could end, as could the conditions of life upon which we all depend. The Sun depends on us to help it across the sky. We have to come out of our cave to do that work.

Continuing with his preface—which could serve as a preface to many of our contemplations of dangerous wisdom together—Kripal says that his and Strieber’s book explores “the proposal that we are all embedded in a much larger, fiercely alive and richly conscious reality that is only, at best, indirectly addressed by everything that the human species has ever thought or believed” (1-2). That feels like quite a big claim for a reputable and careful scholar.

On the one hand, I take it seriously, because he’s such an intelligent, well-read, and serious scholar. On the other hand, it’s possible that he goes a little too far there. Nothing in the book strikes me as vastly more shocking than things I have read from the sages of various traditions, including Indigenous traditions. Still, the book has some powerful stuff in it.

Kripal says the book is an attempt,

to understand, to really understand that we are already and always have been living in a super natural world, that we ourselves are highly evolved prisms or mediums of this super nature coming into consciousness, and that many of the things that we are constantly told are impossible are in fact not only possible but also the whispered secrets of what we are, where we are, and why we are here. (2)

We consider Kripal specifically because of his collaboration with Whitley Strieber, one of the most well-known authors in the ufology literature.

I sought out this literature while doing research into the wide array of anomalous data that indicate our science needs a paradigm shift. It felt quite strange as a serious philosopher in the university to read UFO literature seriously. I would often wonder, How would the typical philosopher read an “abduction” account? How does the typical philosopher read any anomalous data—but especially this kind?

The question puzzles me still. We have plenty of anomalous data, including not only some compelling data in the ufology (UFO) literature, but also peer-reviewed scientific data on things like precognition and telepathy. Most of my colleagues in the university know little about these remarkable findings, and those who know about them don’t seem stopped in their tracks. Many of them seem to dismiss such data out of hand.

And many scientists and philosophers try to limit science itself by declaring that any invitation to leap beyond our limited and limiting notions is a leap beyond the world, a leap beyond rationality or reasonableness, a leap into superstition, and so on. So they use the term supernatural to indicate a leap into irrationality and superstition.

But we need to make a leap out of the paradigms of dominant culture science. Anyone who studies the history of science can understand that the evolution of science depends on leaps out of narrow visions of reality. Those leaps will seem like leaps into the impossible—at times leaps into the absurd and the frightening.

Even experiences related to “aliens” may invite us into the kind of leap we need. We have to get beyond thinking about them as irrational, superstitious, or supernatural in the narrow sense. These experiences often point to the superness of Nature.

Whitley Strieber says of these experiences, “Instead of shunning the darkness, we can face straight into it with an open mind. When we do that, the unknown changes. Fearful things become understandable and a truth is suggested: the enigmatic presence of the human mind winks back from the dark” (from Strieber and Kripal, 111).

In reflecting on his own experience and the experiences others shared with him, he writes,

I don’t mean to say that it’s entirely in the mind, but that the mind might not be entirely in us. In other words, mind might not be entirely confined to the brain. Since the moment I began to apprehend the actual dimensions of the experience in all its wonderful improbability and confusing physicality, I have been dogged by that improbability. I can’t get away from it though. My intellect says that it cannot be true. My life bears witness to its truth. (34)

Strieber brings up an important and significantly disturbing suggestion: That our mind is not entirely inside of our skull. We have a hard time making complete sense of that kind of suggestion, and all our indoctrination in the dominant culture gives us the deeply held and obdurately practiced belief that functions precisely opposite to this suggestion.

Another way to put this: We may need to open up to the possibility that the soul itself is our context, the context of philosophy, politics, economics, and everything else—and we have denuded and degraded the soul—and also tried to stuff it inside a skull.

Notions like validity, knowledge, science, economics, and politics all have roots in the soul, and sensing this could reorient our practices.

Jung tried to directly confront our bad ideas about the soul. He wrote that there are,

[fools] who thinks [they have their] soul in [their] pocket . . . [and] although we know how to talk big about the “soul,” the depreciation of everything psychic is a typically Western prejudice. If I make use of the concept “autonomous psychic complex,” my reader immediately comes up with the ready-made prejudice that it is “nothing but a psychic complex.” How can we be so sure that the soul is “nothing but”? It is as if we did not know, or else continually forgot, that everything of which we are conscious is an image, and that image is psyche. . . . . As I see it, the psyche is a world in which the ego is contained. Maybe there are fishes who believe that they contain the sea. We must rid ourselves of this habitual illusion of ours if we wish to consider metaphysical assertions from the standpoint of psychology.

A metaphysical assertion of this kind is the idea of the “diamond body,” the incorruptible breath-body which grows in the golden flower or in the “field of the square inch.” This body is a symbol for a remarkable psychological fact which, precisely because it is objective, first appears in forms dictated by the experience of biological life—that is, as fruit, embryo, child, living body, and so on. This fact could be best expressed by the words “It is not I who live, it lives me.” The illusion of the supremacy of consciousness makes us say, “I live.” Once this illusion is shattered by a recognition of the unconscious, the unconscious will appear as something objective in which the ego is included. . . . (CW13, para. 75-76)

Jung has some big suggestions here that resonate with what Whitley Strieber has to say with regard to his UFO, alien, and abduction experiences.

Strieber wants us to understand that these experiences take place in the psyche, and that doesn’t mean they aren’t real. They aren’t hallucinations. Sometimes they have very physical effects in the world, and other times they seem to involve a mostly psychic experience.

What I mean is that in some cases, after an alien abduction experience, a person can go out in their backyard and find a large disturbed area, as of a spacecraft had landed. But in other cases, physical evidence doesn’t exist. For instance, John Mack related the experience of a person who was taken onboard an alien craft, and when she was returned she discovered that she had fainted, and the experience took place while she was in the arms of another human being. The case remains puzzling because of its reality for the experiencer, and because it makes so little sense that a person would have that particular kind of experience during a fainting spell. Many of us just flash into unconsciousness. The experience does not seem explainable merely as a dream or hallucination.

However we want to think about any particular experience of this kind, the sheer number of UFO experiences invites us to quiet down a little, and open up to something strange—something befitting the strangeness of our context in this mysterious Cosmos, with all its superness.

In some sense, super experiences invite us to transcend the divide between the “rational” and the seemingly irrational potentials of our own experience.

Our most serious science tells us we live in a connected Cosmos, a totally interwoven and entangled Cosmos, a nonlocal and nonlinear Cosmos—which includes what we call mind.

But our “intellect” tells us this cannot be so, and we struggle against it. Militant scientists and politicians make war on it.

To be quite clear, Strieber does not really write about “alien abduction” but about what we might call non-ordinary experience or experience that feels extraordinary because of the ways it ruptures our habitual sense of reality. Strieber writes,

Having been the object of their visitations over a period of years, and the recipient of hundreds of thousands of narratives from others who had similar experiences, I wish to suggest from the outset that this phenomenon is much larger than any of the usual explanations, including alien visitation and such interpretations as brain seizure. It is far richer, more complex, and more ambiguous than we commonly suppose . . . (23)

Gradually, superstitions about everything from seasonal changes to the appearance of diseases and natural disasters and much else gave way to logic and scientific understanding. However, there is one area that remains outside of understanding, and which is by far the most culturally potent of them all. . . . it is what we now call the supernatural. It has reemerged in the form of the alien and UFO stories that abound in our time, and threatens to degenerate into a new superstition if it does not receive the study necessary to determine what it actually is. (21-2)

Should we ever come into more general contact with what I encountered . . . they will not be offering us plans for a starship or a trade in exotic electronics. What will be on offer . . . is a journey into a whole new understanding of reality and the part we play in it. The “alien” is as much a herald from the dark of the universe as it is a signal from the depths of our own minds. The discovery of the reality behind UFO and alien apparitions and the discovery of our own truth will prove to be profoundly intertwined. When this discovery is finally made, we will at that moment become immeasurably larger. Free at last from the constricted vision that now so limits us we will begin the journey toward which we have been struggling from time immemorial into a new relationship with the universe and a new understanding of mind and the natural world. (24)

If we can receive this at least as a serious suggestion, it’s a lot to contemplate, to really chew on and metabolize. If you listened to our last contemplation, you may recall that William James, writing over a century ago, already pointed out that brain seizure and similar explanations were common back then. It’s a convenient way to try and push away something that some part of us fears.

It's not so easy to imagine the kind of fear we’re talking about, because it’s not just life and death, but life and death in the face of something that ruptures our sense of reality. Ardy Clarke, who interviewed indigenous people all over the Americas about their experiences with sky people, reported that one woman was so traumatized by her abduction experience that life became miserable. In her experience, the beings could pass through walls, and human agency had no way to stop them, she felt completely at their mercy, and so she kind of felt like our life is an illusion.

That’s more extreme as far as a view of the meaning of such an encounter, but experiencing profound fear and trauma is not uncommon.

If you haven’t looked into this literature before, it can seem pretty strange, and maybe it seems stranger that some experiencers seem sure they encountered literal beings from another world, and yet Strieber wants to suggest that at least some of these experiences need a different explanation.

When I first read this literature, I thought we were either talking about aliens or not. Now, I’m just not sure what it all is, even if I still tend to guess that at least some of these phenomena have to do with actual beings from other parts of the Cosmos.

We can try to keep an open mind by saying that Strieber makes his suggestions on the basis of data. We will need a separate contemplation of a few general and spiritual aspects of data. But for now, let’s think of this kind of data as somewhat special, coming from a more rare perspective than many of us have access to.

In working with this particularly potent data, Strieber and Kripal take a middle way: They suggest that we see this neither as hallucination, nor as literally creatures from outer space.

Strieber writes,

Despite the fact that I can’t explain them, I frequently see and interact with nonphysical and quasi-physical beings. They seem to be part of nature just like we are, but . . . in some “super” way for which we have neither an adequate religious model nor present science. . . .

They also have, at least in my life, what has come to seem a rather clear aim. They want to challenge me with questions too provocative to be left unanswered, but which I cannot, in all frankness, answer in anything approaching an objective manner. (29)

At this point, maybe we should pause and ask, Why should we bother reading this literature? Let us especially ask, Why should we bother reading and contemplating this literature given the scope and variety of problems we currently face in our World?

Well . . . for one reason, because, whatever is going on here, it involves a different way of knowing, and more importantly it seems an awesome invitation to know differently, rather than follow the conquest consciousness impulse of explaining it all away.

And this is no small literature. Strieber is neither crazy nor an isolated case.

). He estimates that between: 1987

We shouldn’t have to note how astonishing that is—but we do, because most of us have no idea how widespread these experiences have become. Relative to global population, the numbers look small. But to think that possibly millions of people have had experiences like this seems a bit staggering.

When Strieber tried to gather up all this material and offer it for study to neurologists, psychologists, and so on, he says, “There was not just no scientific interest, but the reaction was often hostile” (33).

Perhaps we need to consider how unsurprising that is, and how unfortunate. Why the hostility? Why do the metaphysical police feel such a need to dictate what’s possible?

Strieber claims that, “Most members of the academic, scientific, and intellectual communities, let alone our serious media, have to this day no idea how extensive the experience actually is” (33). Our interest could change, says Strieber, only if “the most interesting aspect of the phenomenon, which is its ambiguity, is to replace the either/or debate” (33).

Again, the either/or is the, “either it’s aliens or it’s delusion or deceit.”

This either/or only expresses the narrowness of our context, our perception, and our imagination. What might be here that most of us don’t perceive?

In his marvelous book, Beyond Words, Carl Safina shows us that we are surrounded by minds—surrounded by Mind, by the Mindedness, Mindfulness (sati), and Sacredness of Nature. But we have cut ourselves off from it, and we don’t walk around experiencing ourselves as alive and alove in a womb of sentience, presencing the mystery of a primordial awareness.

Thus, there is a sad irony in all of the projected techo-fantasies we see both in the ufology literature and in our society in general. We are so closed off to the magic all around us that the Soul can only get some of us to listen by means of these techno-fantasies, which we then take literally—that “tech” can save the world, that aliens have “tech” that may destroy us or help us, that deluded people think they have been taken into alien spacecraft, or whatever it is we declare instead of inquiring and contemplating with care.

It is obviously possible that there are “alien” “visitors,” but even then we seem to need to accept that each case of seeing lights in the sky or seeing various beings may be unique. Some of these experiences might be the soul speaking, while others may even be “aliens” speaking (or some mysterious other, every bit as natural as dolphins and jaguars, and perhaps living “here” with us, as alien as they may seem). Ultimately they are—all of them—both . . . both the soul speaking, and also some new aspect of reality trying to come into our awareness.

The soul speaks in whatever way it can, and our job is to listen, sense, touch, taste—open . . . opening even to apparent madness.

There was a time when the soul made use of fairies and sprites. There was a time when the soul spoke by means of Wolf, and even the spirit of Wolf or through Wolf Medicine.

Once upon a time, we could go out and commune and communicate with Wolf, Bear, Mountain. Coyote could speak. The right kind of soul attunement allows for potent experiences, artful, graceful experiences, consummations of our lives.

Being “abducted” by “aliens” is, in some sense, the same basic kind of spiritual experience as a shamanic journey—only we lack the proper context, the proper Culture, and so the experiences remain virtually wasted. As Strieber wisely puts it, “There is a big mystery here. But the first place to look is not to the skies—it’s to us. We must look into ourselves . . .”

Okay. Now, we haven’t looked at particular experiences. If you want to do that, get in touch. We can do another contemplation, with some of these stories collected from various sources.

The reason we didn’t do that today is that the details could have distracted us from the most important issue, which we tried to emphasize in different ways.

We could summarize it this way:

Nature is super.

We have a deep-seated fear of that superness.

However, we are totally interwoven with Nature.

Therefore, we have a deep-seated fear of ourselves and our own superness.

When we experience the superness of Nature, things that we want to write off as supernatural or superstitious, or just plain delusional, we have encountered something that calls us into a vaster vision of ourselves, something that calls us into the sometimes fearful journey into mystery.

If we can recognize and pacify our fear, we may discover that our limited notions of reality were the real delusion, and that they presented a far greater danger to us and to the community of life.

Our fear is natural, and we don’t have to be ashamed of it. But, since much of it remains beneath the surface of consciousness, at least until a direct encounter with the superness of Nature, we need to deepen our practice of wisdom, love, and beauty. That will help us not only learn that we can face our fear, but it will help us to actively go to the places that scare us, so that we can learn the truth about what we are. That doesn’t mean anything reckless or foolish. It means an ethical quest to face our own fears, for the benefit of all.

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If you have questions, reflections, or stories of magic and mystery to share—stories of wisdom and wonder, compassion and courage, creativity and insight—get in touch through dangerouswisdom.org and we might bring some of them into a future contemplation.

Until then, this is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, reminding you that your soul and the soul of the world are not two things; take good care of them.