Category: New Science/Consciousness

From New Dawn 110 (Sept-Oct 2008)

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

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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

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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From New Dawn 100 (Jan-Feb 2007)

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

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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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