If things like this are going to happen, the ladies will be afraid to sleep alone in the house if so much as a sewing-machine or apple-corer be about.
—P.T. Barnum, 1855, referring to John Murray Spear’s Machine
In popular current, some people now refer to “extraterrestrials” as “non-human intelligences” (NHI), and “contact modalities” (CM) can be used for human interaction with them.
The nebulous concept of contact modalities is wide enough to encompass what we call synchronicities, NDEs, OBEs, vivid “unwilled” daydreams, intense hypnagogic visions, or conscious encounters with traditional beings such as elementals, earth-spirits, and fairies.
Diana Pasulka & Jacques Vallée
In her recent book American Cosmic,[1] religion scholar Diana Pasulka speaks of this Otherworldly communication phenomenon in the cases of NASA aerospace engineer Timothy Taylor and geneticist Dr. Gary Nolan (“Tyler D” and “James” respectively in the text).
Taylor received “transmissions” from meditative procedures. Designs or concepts for biomedical technologies occurred unbidden in his mind during these processes. He apparently linked these ideas’ irruption to NHIs.
It started for him when he had a strange experience in the aftermath of the Challenger disaster: a memory that a military-proposed experiment on the next shuttle Columbia would work—which it eventually did, but he hadn’t even proposed it yet. He traces this “anomalous reception” to being exposed to a type of energy at a “very special facility” at NASA after briefly leaving then returning to the Administration:
“There was something in (that special room) that either emitted frequencies or signals and they didn’t want those to escape or they didn’t want signals to get in. I never knew which. It was a mysterious place, and we weren’t allowed to talk about it.”
That room, Tyler felt, zapped him with energy that changed the “frequencies” of his body and his thoughts. It was after this experience that he began to have more “memories” of bio-medical technologies.
In the program, I started to find myself on jobs where I interfaced directly with the phenomenon. I know its language. It does speak to us, in space. I don’t know who is responsible for putting me on those on these jobs. I think that somehow they are responsible for it. My own direct boss doesn’t know what I do. This is how the program works.”[2]
Eventually Taylor came to believe that NHIs communicate with persons via a field connected to the energies surrounding DNA.
Gary Nolan had classic abduction experiences while young and in his 30s but kept them secret, apparently, until the past few years. He, too, holds many patents and believes some of his idea-germs to be of non-human origin.
Currently, Taylor and Nolan are pursuing an informational “DNA-antenna” model to potentially explain paranormal phenomena. Along with ex-(?)CIA physician Christopher “Kit” Green, Nolan is investigating MRI scans and the genomes of contactees and experiencers for DNA markers that may predispose them to undergoing the contact modalities.[3]
Pasulka links Taylor’s and Nolan’s experiences with testimony given to her by astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell, who founded the Institute for Noetic Sciences and Foundation (1973-present) and the Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial Encounters (FREE). FREE uses and seeks to establish contact with NHIs using the various contact modalities.
FREE was founded in 2012 by Mitchell, astrophysicist Dr. Rudy Schild, therapist Mary Rodwell, and attorney Rey Hernandez.
In March 2012, Hernandez had an experience (including missing time) involving a “plasma-like being” in his house that healed the family’s dying pet terrier; his wife Dulce described it as an angel, because she had been intensely praying for the dog. Dulce Hernandez then witnessed UFOs (her “angels”) regularly for several months…One night in August 2012 Rey, on a lark, “called down” an enormous craft witnessed by neighbors, friends, and family.
Then driving to work one morning soon after this he received a vision of the contact modalities all arrayed out as spokes in a wheel and seen during what he describes as an out-of-body experience.
This vision so energized Hernandez that he emailed ET abduction/contactee therapist Mary Rodwell, who put him in contact with Rudy Schild, then through Schild, Edgar Mitchell, with whom he ended up having a meeting that very day (Mitchell lived close by).
Within 72 hours of Hernandez’s OBE experience the groundwork had been laid for FREE (in both their views, this was further evidence of a kind of collaboration with these higher intelligences).
Schild became the science advisor and Mitchell would set up the new organization, which would primarily study consciousness with reference to “anomalous cognition” using Mitchell’s quantum hologram theory of physics and consciousness as a model. It has since brought in dozens of researchers including channeling expert Jon Klimo, Dr Joseph Burkes, and perhaps members of the “invisible college” such as Jacques Vallee.[4] Five years of field work canvassing experiencers produced a book on contact with non-human intelligences.[5]
Is this just a new-coined interpretation of natural inspiration during or after the fact?
We have no idea in the least how human imagination and creativity work, let alone how a non-human intelligence would mix with or add to it.
But we do know this: no new idea exists or springs from a vacuum. Except for anecdotes about geniuses such as Leonardo, Ramanujan, Nikola Tesla, and Buckminster Fuller, ideas usually do not spring fully-formed and translatable to paper in the human psyche. When they have done so in the UFO/NHI community since the 1950s, they’ve often been laughable mish-mashes of misunderstood or fantasy science.
The idea of a technology being gifted by higher powers is one of the oldest human myths, and Pasulka elaborates on the myth in the context of Silicon Valley. Much of it involves information theory and DNA, fields, and transmission, in which the arrow of signification is dangerously reversed by literalizing the metaphors between biology and machines.
In Pasulka’s and our contexts, NHI intervention would seem to undermine the idea of the personal ownership of new creations; the inventor instead becomes the “receiver” or “discoverer” of intellectual property.
Such a humble concept becoming accepted in today’s Silicon Valley has the likelihood of Squeaky Fromme making parole.
Pasulka mentions the “extended cognition” that our computers are making possible and believes this mirrors the talk of “Oneness” in traditional mysticism.[6]
Again, none of this is really new. It is just that inventions indistinguishable from magic are now so widespread that they are almost met with yawns…
Consider the fate of Unitarian minister John Murray Spear. After recuperating from a severe beating by thugs in Portland, Maine that put him in a coma, he encountered Andrew Jackson Davis’s work in 1846.
While experimenting with seances in 1851—in true utopist fashion—Spear proclaimed that Spiritualist commune with discarnate intelligences was humanity’s future.
Following his spirit guides’ commands to the letter, he formed an organization consisting of six groups: the Healthfulizers, Educationalizers, Agriculturalizers, Elementizers, Governmentizers, and the Electricizers. As the chosen head of the Electricizers, Spear voraciously channeled the American Founders and, after nine months of trance communications in 1853, claimed to obtain from the spirit of Benjamin Franklin plans for a perpetual energy machine whose fuel was something called the “New Motive Power.”
The machine would grant “life” to other devices via the Mesmeric “electric fluid” and further, could replicate itself or any object one needed—basically, it was a biomechanical 3D nano-printer envisioned in 1854. This device was meant to free humankind from labor.
Through Spear the spirits had chosen to build the machine in a stone cottage upon the hill High Rock in Lynn, Massachusetts—a fitting locale, for two years earlier, channeler Andrew Jackson Davis had a spiritual blowout in which he’d seen angels congregating in the clouds above that hill.
The motor required nine months of “gestation.” A bizarre quasi-alchemical, transhumanistic ritual birthed the working machine: the physical part, having been finished in June 1854, was subject to a laying on of hands by several groups of semi-magnetized persons; then Spear was encased inside the machine in layers of metallic strips of “positive and negative polarity” within a grid of jewels and precious metals, where he went into a trance and emitted a glowing umbilicus from his body that engulfed the machine, to the amazement of his confederates.
Next, a Mrs. Newton, wife of a journalist chosen by the spirits, was to “mother” the half-living contraption—and duly showed signs of physical pregnancy in response. The spirits dictated that she appear at the High Rock house on a certain day to literally give birth to the accumulated energies gathered within her and transfer them to the machine—which she did, showing for several hours the agony of parturition.
The emanations from her body mixed with the chemical auras of the device. Then “its purpose and results were wholly incomprehensible to all but herself; but her own perceptions were clear and distinct that in these agonizing throes the most interior and refined elements of her spiritual being were imparted to, and absorbed by, the appropriate portions of the mechanism—its minerals having been made peculiarly receptive by previous chemical processes,” Reverend S. Crosby Hewitt wrote.
She then spent weeks “nursing” the machine with the New Motive Power. After this, its rotors and bearing supposedly began to work—but not enough to impress any visiting Spiritualists, who opined the motion they witnessed was “not enough to turn a coffee mill.” Davis himself, while praising Spear and his community’s faith, believed Spear to have been misled in principles of science and explained the machine’s weak motions to random fluctuations in the “ether” via the electrical generator to which it was attached.
When asked by Spear and his mediums, Benjamin Franklin & co. answered from the other side in a typically tricksterish way: while the motor didn’t operate properly in the physical sphere, it had succeeded in moving opinion and the spiritual outlook of humanity.
At the spirit cadre’s bidding, the machine was dismantled and taken to Randolph, New York. After having moved it, the machine survived only a few months in its new atmosphere; a mob broke into the room and destroyed it. As Spiritualist journalist S.B. Brittan concluded, “if the New Motor is to be the physical savior of the race, it will probably rise again.”[7]
Spear’s was a Silicon Valley utopian dream 150 years too early. It could be asked, was Spear having precognitive visions of our present inventions? Were NHIs feeding him these ideas in the guise of the Founders—that is, the “best moral and intellectual” persons of which he could conceive?
We will never know, but the contemporary parallel with non-human intelligences seeding minds with technological ideas is striking. Perhaps these Others do possess a kind of physical existence, and perhaps they are much closer than we realize.
Fifteen years after Spear’s fiasco, Utica, New York “electro-alchemist” Cyrus Reed Teed would experiment with exposing himself to dangerously high electrical currents. During one session, “I bent myself to the task of projecting into tangibility the creative principle. Suddenly, I experienced a relaxation at the occiput or back part of the brain, and a peculiar buzzing tension at the forehead or sinciput; succeeding this was a sensation as of a Faradic battery of the softest tension, about the organs of the brain called the lyra, crura pinealis, and conarium. There gradually spread from the center of my brain to the extremities of my body, and, apparently to me, into the auric sphere of my being, miles outside of my body, a vibration so gentle, soft, and dulciferous that I was impressed to lay myself up on the bosom of this gently oscillating ocean of magnetic and spiritual ecstasy. I realized myself gently yielding to the impulse of reclining upon this vibratory sea of this, my newly found delight. My every thought but one had departed from the contemplation of earthly and material things. I had but a lingering, vague remembrance of natural consciousness and desire.”[i]
The zapping produced an OBE-like state. Immediately after this, by force of galvanized will, he called forth “the ultimate power in the universe” to guide him: a beautiful goddess who was the “Father, Mother” who materialized from a mist to give Teed his mission on earth. And also revealed the truth that the earth’s surface actually curves into a perfect concavity containing the sun, moon, stars and rest of the visible universe. Yes, the earth is hollow—but the rest of the cosmos is nestled within it:
“The universe is a cell, a hollow globe, eternally and perpetually renewing itself by virtue of involution and evolution and all life exists on its inner concave surface.
God being perfect is both male and female—a biune being, and personal to every individual.
Matter and energy are inter-convertible. Matter is destructible, resulting in transmutation of its form to energy and conversely, from energy to form.
Reincarnation is the central law of life—one generation passing into another with all humanity flowing down the stream of life together.
Heaven and hell constitute the spiritual world. That is, they are mental conditions and within mankind.
The Bible is the best written expression of the divine mind but is written symbolically. The symbolism must be interpreted by a prophet, who would appear in every age and in the context of that age.
Man lives best by communal principles to correspond with the primitive Christian church. The Koreshan form of socialism would be the expression of the natural laws of order, to include the elimination of money power and wage slavery.
Equity, not equality, is a natural law for women as for men. There is no equality, and to see any two people are equal is merely trying to enforce uniformity.
Dr. Teed indicated there was a great deal more knowledge that had been imparted to his mental consciousness, but he felt the ordinary minds of mortals could not immediately comprehend or evaluate it. It would be presented to the world in time.”[ii]
Apparently, Cyrus Teed received what is typically now called a “download” of which a major part could not be translated into human language.
[i] Teed, Cyrus. The Illumination of Koresh: Marvelous Experiences of the Great Alchemist 30 years ago, at Utica, New York, Chicago, Guiding Star Publishers.
[ii] Sarah Weber Rea, The Koreshan Story, Guiding Star Publication House, 1994.
On the other hand…
An Excursion into Natural Human Creativity, Involuntary/Automatic Imagination, and St. Nick
Kenneth Ring’s abduction experiencer profile fits that of many trance mediums, persons who can receive both self-willed and spontaneous imaginary material with more ease than a non-dissociative person.[8]
Because of the dissociative states to which they are prone, the experiencer/medium possesses minimal to no conscious control over the images that may appear in their mind, and the images that do appear are far more vivid and longer-lasting for them than in the general population.
Spontaneous creative activity can often involve controlled dissociation rituals that partially or completely efface the conscious personality and, paradoxically, through this constricting of the normal ego, make its “reception bands” wider for the intrusion of unexpected material, whether it takes aural, verbal, visual, or physical (automatic writing) forms.
An artist, for instance, may welcome these intrusions and a musician may revel in them. For creative persons, an element of intention is obviously present in the execution of the final product. What we call creativity in general, and the types of work evaluated as genius-level, involves a special state of consciousness that allows material to flow into the artist’s or scientist’s mind:
“(Frederic Myers) linked genius with the classical notion of inspiration, saying that an “inspiration of genius” is a “subliminal uprush,” an emergence into supraliminal consciousness of ideas that the person has “not consciously originated, but which have shaped themselves beyond his will, in profounder regions of his being” (Human Personality Vol. 1, page 71). Another central element of creativity for Myers was the integration of ideas arising from subliminal regions with those of the supraliminal self, the “utilization of a greater proportion of man’s psychical being in subservience to ends desired by his supraliminal control” (HP, Vol. 1, pg. 155). The outcome of the creative process is something intended and desired by the supraliminal, and the supraliminal does plays a key role in the completion of what begins with a subliminal uprush. The heart of the creative process is an automatism, but its combination and completion occur in the realm of the supraliminal. Thus, creativity is a highly desirable integration of the two aspects of the psyche and an instance of superior functioning. It is also an indication of what the human soul is capable of, because there is a hint of something “beyond,” “something incommensurable” with “the results of conscious logical thought” (Vol. 1, pg. 98).” [9] (emphasis added)
Mystics historically also have cultivated methods of altering their physiological and mental states to enter trance that brings their consciousness closer to the “source,” or God, such as extreme fasting, repetitive prayer, or self-mortification. Michael Talbot discusses the Sufis’ repetitive meditational practices of creative visualization meant to bring about both contact with Allah and materialize His emanations of an alternate reality:
“(The Sufis) held that it is a world created solely out of the subtle matter of alam almithal, or thought. Even space itself, including ‘nearness,’ ‘distances,’ and ‘far-off’ places, was created by thought. But this does not mean that the country of the hidden Imam was unreal, a world constituted out of sheer nothingness. Nor was it a landscape created by only one mind. Rather it was a plane of existence created by the imagination of many people, and yet one that still had its own corporeality and dimension, its own forests, mountains, and even cities. The Sufis devoted a good deal of their writings to the clarification of this point. So alien is this idea to many Western thinkers that the late Henry Corbin, a professor of Islamic religion at the Sorbonne in Paris and a leading authority on Iranian-Islamic thought, coin the term imaginal to describe it, meaning a world that is created by imagination but is ontologically no less real than physical reality…Because of the imaginal nature of the afterlife realm, the Sufis concluded that imagination itself is a faculty of perception, an idea that offers new light on why (psychotherapist Joel) Whitton’s subject materialized a hand only after he started thinking, and why visualizing images has such a potent effect on the health and physical structure of our bodies. It also contributed to the Sufis belief that one could use visualization, a process they called ‘creative prayer,’ to alter and reshape the very fabric of one’s destiny.” [10]
This reiterates the theory of Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the 18th-19th Century poets’ conception of the Imagination. Consider this famous quote from Coleridge:
The Primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and is a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.[11]
The current ideas of a non-human extraterrestrial intelligence both figuratively and literally alienate the natural human ability to produce novel ideas (signals) that have been filtered down from the noise of the total consciousness, supraliminal and subliminal, of humanity. Is there a genuine justification to externalize these intrusions to a non-human type of consciousness?
When in trance or mild dissociation, the resting state of a brain’s filtering mechanism is altered to a degree.[12] This allows material that is, to use a metaphor, a mental/aural snapshot of something outside the normal boundaries of personal egoic habitation. Much of the brain’s activity, on both synaptic-neuronal and hemispheric/sectional levels, functions in inhibitory ways to make possible what is considered smooth conscious functioning. The study of damage to a tiny area of the brain can reveal the ostensibly global function that area controls with regard to normal consciousness; collectively accumulated over a century, this catalog of functions helps us understand the productive or inhibitory scheme of the human cognitive world with regard to the brain.
In this way the physical aspects of certain base-level filtering mechanisms have been mapped. Blood flow, electrical activity, and coherent communication between hemispheres all contribute to the norm, of course, but tissue death, damage, or anesthesia can produce states similar to hypnosis, hypnagogia, dreams, or OBEs—and also extraordinary feats of psi activity. The original mesmerists and hypnotists of the 19th century proposed models of the hypnoid mesmeric state that implicated general loss of integrated brain and nervous system functioning during the self-healing, remote healing, telepathy, clairvoyance, and even psychokinesis observed in various patients and volunteer subjects.[13]
There seems to be a general principle, in line with Myers’s thinking, that for every physical loss of a brain function that produces a physical compensation there are ancillary effects to behavior that are sometimes extraordinary.
Neurophysiologist Karl Pribram once puzzled over neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield’s “engram” conjecture that everything ever experienced by a person is recorded in the brain’s trillionfold complex of connections. Penfield had electrically stimulated parts of epileptics’ brains while they were in surgery and received detailed accounts of memory replays (engrams) from earlier moments in the patients’ lives, sometimes going back to early childhood.[14]
Pribram’s work with psychologist Karl Lashley added to the mystery: Lashley had discovered that maze-running rats could still remember the paths they’d figured out despite having both the memory and learning portions of their brains removed—and even having the entire organ rearranged in their skulls. This indicated that the physical substrate was not where the engrams of experience reside. At the very least, memories are distributed throughout the entire brain and can be retrieved despite damage to the areas where they should reside.
Consider the fact that animals, including humans, can still competently function with severe physical brain damage and even without fully formed brains. In cerebellar agenesis, a person is born with an incomplete or even entirely missing cerebellum, which controls motor movement of the limbs and the ability to speak. Yet there are people born with cerebellar agenesis who function relatively normally, such as the Chinese woman found in 2014, where these capacities are only impaired and not entirely absent, as should be the case if the substrate was entirely responsible for the motor competency.[15] There are also startling examples such as the man who suffered from hydrocephaly when a child; at 44, in 2007, he was discovered to have only 30-50% of his brain intact, the rest being simply cerebrospinal fluid. He had an IQ of 75 and led a normal life until the discovery.[16] A boy born in Scotland in 2013 with only a brainstem and a fluid-filled skull is now six and can speak, despite the medical opinion that he should still have only the capacities of a newborn. Another child born in 2014 lacks both a skull and brain and could speak rudimentarily.[17]
These cases obviously at least imply that something more than the physical brain is the key to understanding consciousness and memory; physicalist science has no answer yet as to how these people can function.
An obvious hypothesis is that consciousness does not reside in or is produced by the brain but is filtered via brain structures from a “field” of possible conscious experience, as Myers hinted. This is idea with a long pedigree and has been much denigrated by mainstream scientists since the 19thcentury.
Metachoria
Creativity may involve a narrowing of the physical markers (brain activities) of normal consciousness that produce a corresponding expansion of access to another part of the mind—or even another kind of consciousness altogether.
I believe Coleridge and Corbin are speaking of an energy field we may call (adapting Celia Green’s coinage) the metachoria and the specific images that emerge from it into consciousness (and back again into “unconsciousness”) metachores.
Metachores such as the “heavenly cities” created by the Sufi) are invested with meditational energies both mental and emotional. They may be equivalent to the Buddhist concept of the energies that create an emanation body by prodigious psychic focus over a long period.
Moreover, these images may appear as unwilled and spontaneous in anyone’s consciousness, but the artist as a trained receiver may be able to capture and develop them.
This capacity, of course, comes with repeated practice and discipline. A metachoric impression may linger only temporarily in the short-term memory. This is what causes the distraction so common to a creative person; in the middle of a conversation they may struggle, multitasking, to remember and clarify the sudden intruding idea as the brain produces the proteins to store it in long-term form. The napkin sketch, the pocket notebook, or the digital voice recorder comes out as they get down the idea before it disappears.
The future work—all available choices to the path of a finished, tangible product (a painting or recording, etc.)—are in a superposition of sorts as they hover about the metachore, like a cloud of electrons prior to observation and wave-function collapse.
But recognized works of genius, both great and lesser, are fashioned through a process that is generalizable to all acts of creation:
A traditional descriptive model of the creative process, based on the self-observation and testimony of large numbers of variously eminent persons, provides a useful organizing framework for this discussion. Credit for explicitly formulating this model is usually given to Graham Wallas (1926), a political scientist and administrator primarily concerned with the pedagogical matters, but it was also formulated in nearly identical terms and in greater detail by psychologist Eliot Dole Hutchinson (1931, 1939). The model posits four stages or phases that can often be discerned in a high-level creative effort: (1) preparation; (2) incubation; (3) illumination; and (4) verification. Briefly, preparation refers primarily to the initial stages of intense voluntary effort on a particular work or problem (although it is sometimes generalized to include the typically lengthy period of time in which high level technical skills relevant to the task are laboriously acquired). If this initial effort fails, the work or problem may temporarily be put aside in frustration, this being the stage of incubation or renunciation, in which conscious effort seems to be largely or wholly absent. Something more than simple rest or dissipation of inhibitions seems to be involved during the incubation period, for then comes illumination, inspiration, or insight, in which radically new ideas intrude into consciousness, often suddenly, copiously, and with strong accompanying affect. This leads to a further stage of voluntary effort, verification, in which the new material may be evaluated, elaborated, and worked into the structure of the evolving product.[18]
While cognitive neuroscientific accounts explain Hutchinson’s renunciation-inspiration phase of creativity as a sort of “unconscious cerebration” or a “cognitive unconscious” that functions during both consciousness and sleep, it is still a behaviorist’s black-box model that explains nothing.[19]There are cases of problem solving (if we roughly want to define creativity that way) which so confound science as to be magical. As we noted, a calculating prodigy like Ramanujan could instantly tabulate complex operations on prime numbers within seconds.[20] Since no one had called into public existence the particular prime numbers Ramanujan was asked to do, we still need to ask how he in particular and prodigies in general can do it…It is the same, albeit in slow motion, with the creative constellation of ideas that eventually become artworks that deeply resonate with people down the ages.
Of course, there are only finite numbers of prime numbers (an objective fact) while art almost wholly involves subjective value judgments, but in what sense do they share at least a family resemblance, or a direct parallel at most?
Getting consistently good sleep has been positively correlated with higher levels of creativity; this probably has to do with the integration of emotional and intellectual experiences into one’s general psychological mindset.[21]
Every night, people enter temporary worlds fashioned entirely by their minds, briefly inhabit them, and become agents in them. Our emotional preoccupations drive the dreaming process via the brain stem and limbic system.[22] These centers are very active in emotional states during waking consciousness, and are the most active during dreams, especially the vivid REM dream stage that occurs in its third cycle in late morning.[23] Any dream can show the creative potential for recombination and synthesis that is shaped into a narrative, whether that story is implicit in the dream or imposed during the hypnopompic process of awakening. Something other than the conscious ego imposes these images and the story-like order to them.[24]
Creative breakthroughs come in a flash, or gradually in pieces. This is Frederic Myers’s “subliminal uprush,” in which the solution is often fully-formed and often surprises even the artist or scientist. The artist/scientist’s amazement indicates for Myers the existence of a secondary agency parallel to the stream of willed, accessible memories of consciousness.
AI systems cannot as yet produce the qualitatively different process of creating novelty of the quality that Myers’s uprush solves. Solutions may involve context, “nested contexts,” cross-pattern-recognition, and even decontextualization of individual elements needed to find satisfactory results. The brain’s immense processing power of its present conscious experiences and emotions plus its lifetime’s worth of potentially memorable experiences dwarfs current quantitative computational capabilities. The faculty for understanding context is missing in the cognitive-computational models. It is not enough to say that a human’s personal memory store of experiences can be “algorithmically reshuffled” to produce a novel thought or a creative act, for doesn’t that imply that the answer pre-exists (in some form) in the mind to be discovered as the solution? How is it recognized by the artist or scientist as the eureka! moment?
An additional problem is that an answer to a problem has one meaning in computing and another altogether for an artist. If an AI scientist programs a computer to write an original song based on a style of source material (which has been done in the case of the Beatles) or write poetry (which also has been done), the computer possesses no intentionality in its steps towards the completion of the work; it all depends on the selection process of the person(s) feeding the raw material into the system. Many millions (perhaps billions) of combinations have to be algorithmically tried by the brain when, as a “computing system,” it does not with any exactitude know what it is looking for. In other words, the eureka! moment cannot be programmed for—the emotional rush of re-cognition that the near-perfect to perfect solution has arrived. Again, the artist may be surprised at the result and delighted that the answer appeared, many times accompanied by a numinous eureka! sensation. This emotional component and contextualization of a non-linear process cannot be ignored or minimized by anyone explaining creativity using an AI/computational approach.
What is invoked as explanation when a musician or gymnast or scientist respectively a) plays an astounding violin solo while on “autopilot” (and may herself be as astonished as the audience when she listens to the subsequent recording); b) the gymnast moves her body without conscious volition in a way thought impossible and is equally amazed on viewing a video of the performance; or c) happens to suddenly perceive an insoluble problem with a Gestalt-switch-like perception and its resolution is now easy and almost obvious?
In case C, what has usually been invoked by materialist neuroscience is, again, some kind of “unconscious cerebration” involving the recombination of all past imprinted (or memorable) instances in which the problem figured in her cognition. In the first two examples, an altered state of the consciousness can be used to explain how an artist can leap far beyond what they believe themselves capable of (the so-called flow experience). This can apply to the scientist as well; we all know the feeling of intense concentration/absorption on a task that suddenly breaks into ease.
Yet if we deconstruct these scenarios second by second, let’s imagine we can perceive the biochemical-electrical loops occurring between brain, fingers, and muscles of all three people during this flow state. Just before the astounding performance, in the near future, something quite out of the ordinary is about to occur, relative to the performer, the audience, and field of aesthetic judges. The performance is at this time unimaginable to everyone. It will emerge from the feedback between mind and matter, tension and release—the creatrix’s conscious will plus something extra or outsidetheir consciousness. Might we not say that the answer does not originate inside the brain structures and neuronal firings at all, but somewhere in a field of possible realities being simultaneously scanned in superposition, like a person searching bandwidths for a certain frequency?
Spontaneous actions may end with the person being called a genius. Yet in the current physicalist’s approximation, all that has occurred is a concentrated act of will that, from the outside, is described as conscious because the person exhibits certain signs of consciousness while performing, whether that performance is on a musical instrument or parallel bars or a blackboard. To be a good neo-behaviorist/epiphenomenalist, all our physicalist has to say is that the genius’ years of reward for competent learning has achieved its pinnacle; for the physicalist, there would be no significance to the artist-scientist’s statement that they were not even aware of their mind/body during the performance or when the answer came, when this may be precisely the crucial point of the matter.
Along with the considerations of the sources of genuine creativity comes the problem of evaluating a work as a product of genius. In a 1996 book, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi divided creativity as a total activity as having three components: the creative person, their domain, and the field. The domain is any area of endeavor, such as topological mathematics or oil painting or DJing. The field is the peers and experts and audience adjudicating the worth or novelty of the creation. Thus:
…the definition that follows from this perspective is: Creativity is any act, idea, or product that changes an existing domain, or that transforms an existing domain into a new one. And the definition of a creative person is: someone whose thoughts or actions change a domain, or establish a new domain. It is important to remember, however, that a domain cannot be changed without the explicit or implicit consent of a field responsible for it.[25]
Myers (and I) would embrace this view inasmuch as it recognizes a social collective that responds to a work as something that may communicate truths transcending a particular period and place of origination. We would modify this stance, however, on the grounds that it effaces the element of a shared unconscious or subliminal element whose existence is being displayedthrough the stupendous quality of the work.
Works of genius in poetry, music, and the plastic arts often engage multiple levels of interpretation and position themselves at the edge of an indeterminacy of meaning; they possess a richness of content that evokes a multiplicity of possible responses. The numinous spiritual experience that theologian Rudolf Otto speaks of may very well be encountered in a monumental work of art or a new complex mathematical formula describing, for instance, “imaginary” dimensions that the field of mathematicians have never before noticed.
Many times, a new community is called into existence by the genius; as Luigi Pareyson once said, a genius is a type of person who creates the audience for their work. I think Pareyson means that their works are of such quality that they 1) remind the persons in their audience of profound things they already know, but have never been able to consciously formulate (put into words, sounds, or images themselves); 2) broaden the audience’s perspective on the meaning and/or limits of the domain (as Csikszentmihalyi has it); 3) create converts to the transformative power of art—and thus create new artists; 4) broaden the spectator’s experience of community with other human beings, that is, induce a sympathetic/empathic response that does not diminish in time.
Perhaps Pareyson’s claim sounds glib when one considers the changing tastes and standards of genius throughout history—but it in no way impacts the accomplishments of persons like Leonardo or St. Hildegard, whose lives and works very well could have been forgotten or suppressed in history. This impels a question like Bishop Berkeley’s about the falling tree: if the genius creates a unique masterpiece and no-one is around to experience it, is it still a masterpiece? Against Csikszentmihalyi’s definition, I would argue yes. If an artist had a vision originating via an altered/dissociative state then labored over what they were blessed with experiencing into physical being, whether or not the work is discovered at some later point is irrelevant. It had meaning for the artist, and it signified both the truth of their metachorial encounter and their direct relationship to a field of possible experience far greater than themself.
It is important here to stress that the metachoria is populated with and produces in minds images that may have intrinsic intentionality but do not yet possess an existent referent at the time they occur; they have sense to their experiencer but no reference yet in the world.
Suppose you think of Santa Claus pausing from his toy-making work to have a lager. Santa Claus in a strict sense doesn’t exist, but he can do just about anything one can imagine a human doing—even things humans can’t. The thought of Santa drinking has intentionality: we have a thought that “Santa is/was/will quaff a pint.” It has sense to us, but no referent—that is, it refers to no existing reality, other than the imagined action in the imaginer’s mind. Santa is a “prop.”[26]
Similarly, a painter might have, say, a spontaneous vision of a nightclub filled with nightmarish chimeras performing actions upon one another that no other human has ever imagined.[27] She is chilled by the image’s intensity but also very alert to its details. The imaginal scene also has sense (being set in a phantasmal nightclub, etc.), but no reference in the outer world—the vision does not yet exist in a public way, like Santa Claus does. Her job is then to bring this image’s subjective sense to external form in a tangible work: a painting.
Now suppose the painter were to spend ten years making this one work, and it became spectacularly popular and survived down the centuries, like Bosch’s landscapes. Suppose people named her visionary creatures, wrote iconographies and fiction based around them, made movies and narratives using the rich symbolism of the painting’s world. These creatures too could eventually become imaginative “props” like Santa Claus—they could quaff weird beverages, have adventures, take over the White House, etc.
All because a singular, vivid, unwilled image entered one artist’s head. Did the depicted creatures call themselves into existence via a non-human intelligence? Were they given their long ideal lives via her metachorial imagination?
Or (to get really out there) did her huge future audience’s familiarity, admiration, and even love for her creations somehow retroactively cause the vision to occur in her mind in the first place?
In part three we will summarize the case for the novelty of non-human intelligence communications via the contact modalities in the light of the historical parallels outlined here. Just what part of these phenomena are new?
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[1] Pasulka, D.W., American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology, Oxford University Press, 2019.
[2] Ibid, pgs. 34-35.
[3] See Banias, M.J. UFO People: A Curious Culture, August Night Book, 2019, pgs. 92-97.
[4] Pasulka, pgs 188-95; 198-201.
[5] See Beyond UFOs: The Science of Consciousness & Contact with Non-Human Intelligence Vol. 1, CreateSpace Independent Platform, 2018.
[6] Pasulka, pgs. 140, 203-04, 207-08.
[7] Brown, pgs. 178-189.
[8] See Ring, Kenneth. The Omega Project: Near-Death Experiences, UFO Encounters, and Mind-at-Large, William Morrow & Co., 1992.
[9] Kelly, Edward and Kelly, Emily Williams. Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2009, pg. 354.
[10] Talbot, Michael. The Holographic Universe, Harper Perennial, 1991, pg. 260.
[11] Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biography Literaria, 1817.
[12] Kelly 353-362; see Mavromatis, Andreas. Hypnagogia: The Unique State of Consciousness Between Wakefulness and Sleep, Thyrsos Press, 2010, pgs. 71-80, 194-203, 221-23 for the relationship between relaxation, natural dissociation, and spontaneously unwilled imagery in the hypnagogic trance, the first stage of sleep.
[13] See Gauld, Alan. A History of Hypnotism, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pgs. 105-107, 143-44, 278-79, 284-85, 301, 326-27.
[14] Maybe the specific amplitude or wavelength of Penfield’s charge resonated with amplitude/wavelength of random encoded memories in the patients’ brains. These relived memories by the patients seemed entirely “meaningless” recollections, because most of our lives consist of just these sorts of experiences.
[15] http://yalescientific.org/thescope/2015/03/the-woman-born-without-a-cerebellum/
[16] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12301-man-with-tiny-brain-shocks-doctors
[17] http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/01/health/baby-born-without-complete-skull-turns-1/index.html
[18] Kelly (2009), 427-428, 432-433, 600.
[19] See Kelly, 240-252 for criticism of the unconscious cerebration/cognitive unconscious thesis in neuroscience and psychology, and Kelly, pg. 455 on the shortcomings of the “black” box approach.
[20] Many times, these persons are diagnosed with autism-spectrum disorder or have a type of detriment to the left side of the brain, which has been shown to process experience linguistically in a linear fashion. The right brain, which has been demonstrated to perceive images and wholes with a minimal linguistic, linear component, may in fact, for persons such as Ramanujan, imaginally perceive the entirety of a mathematical world as 3-dimensional table-matrices through which they will the answer not through calculation but location via the matrices’ axes. See Kelly (2009) pgs. 87, 433, and The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist, Yale University Press, 2012, pgs. 12-13, 57-58, 61, 87, 132.
[21] Rock, 142-147.
[22] Rock, Andrea. The Mind at Night: The New Science of How and Why We Dream, Basic Books, 2004, pgs. 22, 122.
[23] ibid, 47-49.
[24] This other could be said to be the realm of the right brain. The difference between a verbal description of an anomaly and a visual representation of it (of a Nordic being such as Adamski’s, or Strieber’s “woman visitor” on the cover of Communion) is profound in its emotional effect. Images activate the right hemisphere of the brain that deals in the symbolic. Symbols can be said to reside and recombine in those areas of the brain. It may be for this reason that traditions from Sumerian religion to mystical Judaism to Roman and Gnostic mythology tell of a “divine twin,” hypnopomp, daemon, szyzgus, or guardian angel that is an everpresent part of us that exists to communicate truths that elude propositional form. The symbolic/emotional nexus has no grasp of linear time, because it exists partially outside it, in the metachoria. These are the dreams we most remember.
[25] Csikszenmihalyi, Mihaly. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, Harper Perennial, 1996, pg. 28.
[26] See Kendall L. Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts, Harvard University Press, 1993, pgs. 37-38, 42-43. Props function within sets of rules that generate fiction. They possess the same intentionality as objects in the “real world.”
[27] The works of surrealists such as Roberto Matta would be very much like the vision suggested by this thought experiment: landscapes that appear as complete abstractions at first, then on close inspection gain signifying details that suggest familiar forms but never get there. Pareidolia alternately fails and succeeds in effectively interpreting the imagery in his works; they are entirely liminal in their engagement with the eye and brain.
[28] Yet ironically, the “true” name is never the real name if they are telling the truth. Although many such as Carla Rueckert’s Ra admit that the names higher entities use are just convenient, human shorthand for what they really are—the “social memory complex” of an evolved race on another dimensional plane—they usually preach that identity itself, of any form, is a metaphysical fiction, as Advaita and madhyamika Buddhism holds.
[29] See the opening pages of Vallee’s Messengers of Deception.
[30] The Akasha idea originated in Alfred Percy Sinnett’s gloss (1883) on H.S. Olcott’s A Buddhist Catechism (but was probably inspired by Indra’s net in the Atharva Veda of 1,500 BCE). The Akashic field can be made to explain and bolster belief in the reality and truthful preachings of new channels in a mutually reinforcing way.
[31] As writer M.J. Banias has pointed out, the UFO is a “cultural apparition.” This characterization can be extended to cover most anomalous manifestations throughout history, including NHIs, but their liminality can be especially corrosive and pronounced to society in our lightning-fast information networks. Building on the seminal 2008 essay “Sovereignty and the UFO” by Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall, Banias claims the UFO is disruptive to nearly the entire spectrum of capitalist cultural discourse, while simultaneously having no unambiguous physical signified to what it represents. There is nothing but the report, the aftereffects of the encounter, and the beliefs by others in the encounter. Belief in UFOs requires a rejection of many factors that make up the worldview consensus that drives our society: physics, religion, trust in the mass media, and products of the “creative class” (novels, TV shows, films) that are products of the same consensus. But judging by the contents of Pasulka’s and Vallee’s books, there are many scientists paying attention and engaging with this taboo subject at the highest levels of the military-space-industrial complex. Or so we are led to believe.
[32] P. Phillips and W.L MacLeod, Here and There: Psychic Communication between Our World and the Next, Corgi Books/Transworld Publications 1975.
[33] The problem may be what psi investigators call “analytic overlay,” which is when a psychic misinterprets an imagistic “signal” by using their own mind’s associations and the left-brain’s labeling power. See MacGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emmisary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Yale University Press, 2010, 106-110, 113-115, 118-126, 195-203.
[34] See Beyond UFOs: The Science of Consciousness & Contact with Non-Human Intelligence, CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2018.
[35] I recently read some documents on a person’s lifelong communicating with the “Zeta grey race” that could’ve come straight out of Allan Kardec, Blavatsky, or Alice Bailey’s writings. Clearly the influence of Theosophy on the framing of any kind of channeled or non-human contact experiences is incalculable. I read the first two Ra Materials books (published 1981/82) and found them interesting as channeled teachings. But again, until some channeler of NHIs makes unambiguous predictions that come true, or writes the formula and plans for an antigravity field generator or something far beyond the normal capabilities of the channel, society will continue to marginalize these things.
[36] This also usually implies an atomistic conception of individual human beings compelled to struggle over many lifetimes to learn their spiritual lessons—and it must be noted that the evolution of humanity only became a channeling trope since Darwin put natural selection into intellectual currency in 1860 and was duly picked up by the Spiritualist mediums.
[37] See Heywood, Rosalind, The Sixth Sense: An Enquiry into Extra-Sensory Perception, Chatto & Windus, 1959, pgs. 69-102;Oppenheim, Janet. The Other Side, 132-135; Tymn, Blum, Deborah. Ghost Hunters, 174-178; 276-281.
[38] In the SPR-studied medium-communications from the deceased there at least is a template for proof: the dead person’s survivors may encounter pet phrases, mannerisms, and memories that only they know and can verify as close to or identical with their loved ones. This occurred hundreds of times in the cross-correspondences.
[39] Parapsychologist Jon Klimo—a major contributor to the Contact Modalities book Beyond UFOs—promised in 1998 to produce such a book, but it has yet to see publication.
[40] See McClenon, James. Wondrous Events: Foundations of Religious Beliefs, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.
[41] But we know that Santa Claus as we think of him was created from an amalgam of sources in the 19th century.
[42] See https://space.nss.org/life-in-extreme-environments/ https://www.space.com/25133-extreme-earth-life-alien-lifeforms.html
1001 Dusks 