Seeing that Alien Dawn was written by the same author of this existentialist classic, I found it to be the obvious choice for a foray into the subject. I had read a lot of ufological literature before, but had found it a struggle, sometimes buying questionable titles. To the now culturally sanctioned and widely published world of existentialism and pessimistic postmodernists, ufology and other paranormal literature, by comparison, seemed kitsch and somewhat trivial. Socially and culturally, at least, it’s the equivalent of sliding into the abyss. An abyss, I felt, no worse than any identified in the works of the existentialists.
And yet, strangely enough, any careful reading of the literature finds you in good company, with a wide range of impressive and intelligent writers on the subject, such as the ones mentioned above: Jacques Vallée, John E. Mack, MD and more recently, Dr Jeffrey Kripal. Despite this the whole topic is plagued by a sense of muddle-headed credulousness or fierce disbelief. Sifting through this, for witnesses, casual readers and even serious researchers, becomes a difficult task.
I was therefore left with a sense of something that was fundamentally incommunicable, and, furthermore, an incomprehensible experience to contend with. My own experience, I should add, was that merely of being a witness of a silent, apparently amorphous and changing series of lights about 30ft above our—there were three other witnesses—heads. There was the added problem of its inherent difficulty to simply describe; it was frankly too unusual and unlikely to convey. There is also the added problem of memory, for one can see quite easily how each witness has his own interpretation of what he saw. Nevertheless, there was a general agreement that we saw something fundamentally ‘other’. One of the problems we all found was the fact that it was rather difficult to share with anybody else. For would there be a sympathetic listener to whom it could be described? There were a few, but more generally it was something you kept under close wrap. Also, of course, was the problem of whether it could be described. Finally I asked myself the question: what does one do with the knowledge and experience of such a phenomenon? The only answer, I found, was to read about the subject and try to understand what meaning it may have had for others, in an attempt to correlate as many accounts as possible and compare them with my own.
Alien Dawn took away some of the stigma of being a UFO witness, and it opened up a genuine and refreshing area fertile with novel ideas. Even though I had been stewing in a sort of materialistic pessimism for a number of years, the essentially science-fictional sensibilities underlying much of the speculation regarding the phenomena enabled a sort of inner-opening to ideas which were essentially impersonal. They were far more open-ended and called into question many other aspects of existence. Unlike the literature I was reading before the event, Alien Dawn threw up so many implications that there was a looming sense of infinity. It presented far more questions that seemed to be as genuine and in sympathy with, fundamentally, an existential frame-of-mind. The event itself represented a mystery, and understanding such mysteries allowed one to see that you were embedded in a larger mystery still. There were mysteries beyond the scope of man’s own existence, and yet—knowingly or unknowingly—we were grappling with something essentially meaningful. Contrasting these ideas against each other unearthed the strangeness of being in itself, for that fundamental was no longer a consistent limitation, but part of a much larger context.
Essentially, this is what Strieber is trying to express regarding his own far more intensive experiences. He felt, like many of us, that instead of being adrift in a meaningless universe, we instead inhabit a reality with an emergent evolutionary context—a part of which our very consciousness is a significant contribution to its implicit and explicit developments.
At this point, I might add that one of the witnesses felt that the environment had become animated, and that he sensed that to some degree the woodland surrounding us was somehow conscious of the whole experience. Whether or not this was the psychological euphoria resultant of something so unusual, it is difficult to tell, but nevertheless the heightening—artificial or authentic—allowed such a sensation to occur. The experience, no doubt, was disorientating, but nevertheless it opened up a great many questions regarding our own perceptions, and each separately came to his own conclusions.
The UFO still remains a mystery, but by delving into books like Alien Dawn, one comes away with a myriad of other approaches, such as quantum physics, mysticism, psychology, comparative mythology, religious and esoteric ideas, even evolutionary theory. And then there’s the anecdotes that temper your own, make your own absurd experience seem normal, even banal, by comparison. But what Wilson himself introduced was a steady-handed phenomenology of the phenomena. Indeed, Wilson even goes on to say in the book, ‘… if an important part of the purpose of these phenomena is the effect on us, then that purpose would seem to be to decondition us from our unquestioning acceptance of consensus reality’ (1999: 326). This, it seems to me, is the essential overall effect of the UFO experience.
One of the great benefits of being introduced to the history of ufology through Wilson is that there’s no shortage of further reading. A voracious reader, Wilson treads the way for any would-be researcher, providing clues and references like a Golden Thread. And even though many of his books on Atlantis and UFOs might not appear, on first glance, to be associated with his earlier work in ‘The Outsider Cycle’—with its focus on the ‘new existentialism’—they are on closer inspection a means to nourish and advance this phenomenological method for understanding extraordinary ‘peak’ states of consciousness. Through the heady final chapter of ‘The Way Outside’ in Alien Dawn, one covers most of the ground of the ‘new existentialism’ through to plasmas, multiple universes, holograms and even John Wheeler’s participatory anthropic principle. Rather, it is an extension of many of the ideas presented in his earliest work, and an attempt to stretch further the analysis of unusual—and/or heightened—states of consciousness for their phenomenological value of unveiling an essential meaning.
What I felt to be one of the most insightful ideas of the book emerges when Wilson very briefly turns to the work of the science-fiction writer, Ian Watson, who wrote The Embedding (1973), which Wilson says, ‘has claims to be one of the best science-fiction novels ever written’ (1999: 350). However, it is Watson’s novel Miracle Visitors (1978) which attempts not only to explore the mystery of UFOs, but, Wilson concludes, to ‘find an answer to the mystery’ (1999: 351). I would argue that Watson’s work is one of the most advanced attempts at an unravelling of this entangled phenomenon that has been yet attempted, and certainly, anyone who is familiar with his work will know that he has an extraordinary and dizzying imaginative range.
Again it is significant that a novelist—like Whitley Strieber—is someone at the avant-garde when it comes to expressing something that baffles ordinary linear expression. There is a freedom that creative thinking and writing can allow, and this ought to inform many of the more analytical works in ufology. It populates the theoretical and hypothetical models with rich and novel insights. Watson had clearly studied the UFO phenomena closely and, in Miracle Visitors, embedded—as it were—an effective condensation of the mystery in an unfolding narrative. It is, in short, one of the most enlightening refractions from the distorted Indra’s net of ufology.
As a novel it is a sort of cultural epiphenomena of the UFO phenomenon itself. The story and the ideas that inform it directly emerge out of the ufological equivalent of the collective unconscious. Indeed, it is a multilayered novel that, in compacting enormous amounts of complex narrative and hypothetical asides, reconfigures the chaos of the UFO folklore into something which, for the first time, can be seen as an evolutionary symbol—an evolutionary metaphor.
Watson himself uses similar language to describe the essential ‘unknowableness’ of the UFO, for in the novel he breaks this down into levels of higher and lower order ‘systems’ of knowledge; a sort of a hierarchy of living episteme:
… individual beings
within the system cannot really know this directly. For I speak of higher-order systems of organization: of higher-order patternings. Lower-order systems cannot fully grasp the Whole of which they are the parts. Logic forbids. It is the natural principle. Which is why, when the processes of the Whole do show themselves, it is as unidentified phenomena—as intrusions into your own knowledge that can be witnessed and experienced but not rationally known: neither analysed, nor identified. Such intrusions are inestimably important. They are the goad towards higher organization. They are what urges the amoeba to evolve towards a higher life form. They are what spurs mind to evolve from natural awareness, and higher consciousness from simple mind. They are the very dynamic of the universe. (2003: 102)
French sociologist Bertrand Méheust comments in Science Fiction and Flying Saucers (1978) that the UFO phenomena acts like a ‘“super-dream” … that works through a process of radical “absurdization”’ (quoted in Kripal; 2010: 213). The ‘absurdization’, it could be argued, is Watson’s ‘unknowableness’, ‘experienced but not rationally known’ due to their ‘higher-ordering patternings’. Goading us by their absurdity—their boundary-stretching incomprehensibility—they posit the limits of human knowledge while stretching the mystery back into the heavens, that birthplace of metaphysical speculation. The very conceptual fuzziness of the phenomena leaves us in the dark; its informational complexity and irrationality is of course something contrary to the rationalist and mechanistic idea of a basically ‘functional’ i.e. unconscious universe that unpacks itself without any recourse to mystery or meaning. A universe displaced of Why? with How?—for the question of why, of course, presupposes a meaning in a cosmology of materialism that rejects meaning as merely subjective, and not present in a material world of happenstance existence.
It is worth mentioning that I am here reminded of Peter Hitchens’ comments on his ‘atheist period’, in which he ‘became an enthusiast for total rationality’. Hitchens continues by saying that he happily embraced ‘the cold, sharp metric and decimal systems, disregarding the polished-in-use, apparently irrational but human and friendly measures’, and this so developed that he ‘sought out buildings without dark corners or any hint of faith in their shape… I longed for a world of clean, squared-off structures, places where there was no darkness’ (2010: 32). Significantly this, as we will see later, may have something to do with the two hemispheres of the brain.
In this ‘atheist period’ the architecture, like our cosmology, offers only a Why? in the utilitarian sense of convenience, of materialistic practicality, or ‘conservation of energy’. There is no darkness, no ‘unknowableness’ that draws us onward and upwards, only a sense of static values that science, even when presented as ‘magic’ as in one of Richard Dawkins’ books, does not inspire awe, but only Eliot’s ‘whimper’. It is what Martha Heyneman means when she says, ‘If the whole had no pattern, the part could have no meaning. It was lost in a chaos without a centre, a principle of unity, a “point”’ (2001:37). Paradoxically this very ‘point’ is darkness itself, the parts of what we are embedded in as human beings, that remains unenlightened. This is the same darkness that represents enormous potentiality in contrast to nihilism and drifting; it is the ‘deliberate unknowability’ that is, in a paradoxical sort of way, directional. The cathedral, rather than the utilitarian building of the metric and measured variety, infers something more than itself; its architecture is designed in a sort of metaphorical means to cross over with the measurements of the infinite, and in doing so emerge as a visual representation of the evolutionary metaphor. It precisely inspires because it infers more than it is—in contrast, of course, to being merely utilitarian, inferring only its purposes of utility.
Now, in his essay, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, the philosopher Martin Heidegger states his belief that by ‘means of this shadow the modern world extends itself out into a space withdrawn from representation… This shadow… points to something else, which it is denied to us of today to know.’7 Indeed, Heidegger’s shadow is what, for him, drives technological and scientific progress, for we seek out with our instruments new domains by transmuting the unknown into the scientifically ‘known’. However, similar to Watson’s posited ‘unknown’, this approach lends itself just as well to a mythological interpretation, for as Jordan Peterson notes: ‘[myth] tends to portray the generative individual consciousness eternally willing to face this unknown… in essence—in contradistinction to unconscious, impersonal, and [the] unpredictable… in light of its “seminal”, active, “fructifying” nature’ (1999: 181).
By delving into the field of ufology it is certain that, whether one will emerge with an evolutionary idea or not, nevertheless the task becomes the equivalent of navigating the strange world of mythological archetypes. The Jungian James Hillman has even noted that ‘mythology is ancient psychology and psychology is recent mythology.’ The dreamlike logic, of course, is so rich with archetypal symbolism that it seems to emerge out of a rich stream of a ‘collective unconscious’, and, as the UFO cloaks itself in mythical garb—or, indeed, we capture it in a mythologizing consciousness—it seems reasonable to suggest that one approaches it as such. Indeed, Patrick Harpur believes the most convincing ‘reason for attributing mythological status to [UFO phenomena] is that, like myths, they are capable of bearing an inexhaustible number of interpretations, no single one of which can finally explain them’ (2003: 123). This very interpretive nature, as we have seen, informs stories, works of fiction—all effective vehicles of the mythological imagination.
But if we venture forth into this territory it is wise to heed the words of Jordan Peterson, for it is the ‘“fructifying” nature of the hero’s grappling with the unknown that should be the boon of his return.’ It is, in other words, a call to return with something useful, practical, invigorating and fundamentally evolutionary in value. It is for this reason that I believe an active approach in the vein of Wilson’s ‘new existentialism’ can help us converge upon the evolutionary principles that may underlie both the esoteric works of the past, and simultaneously, the emerging folklore of the UFO, offering, as it does, an evolutionary interpretation of their myriad forms and narratives that they undertake.
For, as Wilson says, if such ‘psychic phenomena have a purpose it is to wake us up from our “dogmatic slumber”, and galvanize us to evolve a higher form of consciousness’. Indeed, he concludes that, ‘this is the only positive and unambiguous lesson we can learn from the strange mystery of the flying saucers’ (1999: 186).
As we can see, from the above interpretation(s)—beginning from Heidegger’s more materialistic development by positing mystery as man’s primary motive force behind technological advancement—we may perceive the juxtaposition of man’s orientation towards progress; scientific, spiritual and mythological. And, if anyone of these should gain undue promotion as man’s primary motive, there will be resultant psychic dis-ease. It is, rather, a call for the integration of all the streams which, in their own ways, are products of a much larger evolutionary impulse and context. It is, in fact, a matter of widening our existential foundations to take the weight of a much more responsible enterprise of our future development. One could say it is a call for a catalyst as well as a buttress against the forces of an unbalanced development. In other words, it is the recognition of a psycho-social context in which we can incorporate the largest—and sometimes dangerously unrecognised—of man’s impulses.
Now, we may speculate here that the UFO is a symptom and symbol of a culture on the precipice of environmental and psychic breakdown, whereby it haunts us by utilising the cultural props to appear as simultaneously a scientific phenomenon, as well as a quasi-spiritual and mythological form that defies many of the conventions of each ‘conceptual net’. One might call it a dialectic in action, a gauntlet of ambiguity thrown down for minds to disentangle, or, indeed, influence a modality of thinking that might bridge the gap between man’s psychic schisms. Again, as a sort of giant Zen kōan
that it benefits us to understand.
Pertaining to the imaginatively expansive and therapeutic nature of symbols, PD Ouspensky notes in his essay ‘The Symbolism of the Tarot’ that it is ‘perfectly clear that symbols are not created for expounding what are called scientific truths’, and this in light of the UFO phenomena may be precisely the reason why it confounds science—for that might be its very intention. In fact, Ouspensky continues by saying that the ‘very nature of symbols must remain elastic, vague and ambiguous, like the sayings of an oracle. Their role is to unveil mysteries, leaving the mind all its freedom’ (1989: 218). By emphasising the purposeful ambiguity of ‘living symbols’, Ouspensky has hit upon a profoundly interesting approach towards phenomena in general, for if, like Wilson proposes, the only healthy way of approaching psychic phenomena is to heed them as wake-up calls out of our ‘dogmatic slumber’, then, we might grapple—on all of man’s psychic levels—with a modern, living symbol that may be entirely a revolutionary paradigm unto itself. Indeed, Oswald Wirth in Le symbolisme hermétique says as much: ‘symbols are precisely intended to awaken ideas sleeping in our consciousness. They arouse thought by means of suggestion and thus cause the truth which lies hidden in the depths of our spirit to suggest itself’ (1989: 217).
Through the living symbol of the UFO, we may begin to see a semblance of unification of the mythological and the scientific/technological impulse, and through this a development of mankind may be initiated. In other words, the shadows of all our drives may be integrated—intuitive, rational, materialistic and spiritual—into an evolutionary dynamic. And as the UFO is ‘withdrawn from [explicit-materialistic] representation’, it nevertheless, and as an idea, inspires in us a speculative and intuitive approach that ‘fructifies’, brings new life, into areas of our psyches that may have become numb under too much materialism and ‘nothing-but-ness’. Of course, such a nihilistic cosmology as presented to us in modern science may become dangerously toxic and claustrophobic, for with its closed-system approach it circumscribes man’s potential to a meaningless cosmic fluke.
Evolutionary Metaphors Page 4
