Christmas is coming, and with it the 17th anniversary of my
close encounter experience of December 26, 1985. To this
day, it haunts my sleep. My wife tells me that, if she should
get up during the night, I will call out to her immediately, and
grab her hand when she returns to the bed. I still remember
those few minutes as if it had all happened last night. But,
nowadays, I am beginning to be able to sleep more normally.
More often than not, I sleep right through the hour between
three and four, when the incident took place. For the first
fifteen years after it happened, this was not true.
It has been like a black hole in the center of my life, which I
have struggled for years to fill with genuine knowledge and
good questions. Looking back, I see that what began as an
absolute terror had changed within a few years into a sublime
journey of the spirit that I remain on to this day.
In 1970, I joined the Gurdjieff Foundation in New York. This
involved weekly group meetings under the guidance of Joseph
Stein, who conducted careful, hour-long sessions that
involved guided meditation and dialogue while remaining in the
meditative state. He taught us to meditate daily, and I have
continued this practice now for 32 years.
I remained with the foundation until 1983, when it became
clear to me that friction that was developing between me and
some of the leadership was being generated by me, because
of a deep need to leave and challenge my own ability to
sustain my inner work on my own. Between 1983 and 1985, I
continued occasional meetings with Jean Sultzberger and
William C. Segal, who were dear friends in the foundation,
much my senior, and whose mastery, so assured and yet so
humble, seemed very authentic to me.
Then came the close encounter. In January, I went to William
Segal and described the experience to him. He said, ?fifteen
minutes with them, fifteen years of meditation.? I could not
have agreed with him more. Even while I was with the visitors
on that night, so lost in fear that my first title for Communion
was to be Body Terror, I knew from the way they moved and
acted that they were, in the context of Gurdjieff?s
theories, ?awake.?
If you meditate in the manner prescribed by him, dividing your
attention between inner and outer life?forming what he
called the ?double arrow? of attention?you become able to
see when others are doing this as well. The woman whose
portrait is on the cover of Communion, which I am looking up
at now as I write, was without a doubt the greatest master I
have ever known. Her being projected devastatingly powerful
knowledge. A great part of the terror that I knew when I was
with her came not from the situation, but from how it felt to
be seen by her. In fact, she and those around her were
trying to calm me down in some ways, even as they engaged
in very quick but also very intrusive medical actions.
One of these involved inserting a probe into my body through
my rectum, an action that had extraordinary consequences,
not in my life, but in popular culture. Looking back over these
years, two things have entered the culture from my
experience: her face and the rectal probe. I have watched as
one immature male after another made shrill and uneasy fun
of this aspect of what happened to me. It has been
fascinating and grotesque to find the rectal probe appear in
newspaper cartoons, be lampooned on television, and become
a focus of derision of me. I been both amused and disgusted
by the eagerness with which elements of our human
community seek debasement, by concentrating on whatever
they can find that offers them the potential to lower
themselves further.
The powerful, sublime and important parts of my experience,
which I feel are adequately described in Communion, have
gone unremarked and are of no public interest. However, I
met somebody very great on that night, somebody whose life
is vastly larger than a human life, and what I learned from my
time with her is of enormous value not only to me, but to
anybody who wishes to open their mind to the possibilities
that it implies.
After that experience, there were many meetings with the
visitors, some of which I have described in my books. As I
began to understand, from them, the reasons that their
presence is so secret, I began also to act both on our behalf
and on theirs. However, I discovered that theirs is a very
complicated presence among us, and not all of our visitors
are to be trusted or accepted. Some of them are not like the
woman I met and her staff. Some of them qualify as what we
would call monsters, in every sense of that word.
As I learned about the physical and cultural issues that
surround contact, I also came to agree that it would interrupt
man?s chance to make his way into the cosmic community on
his own, and would thus forever diminish us and compromise
our ability to reach our full potential as a species of free and
conscious beings.
In the late eighties, I dreamed daily of final, open contact. I
longed for the moment that I would be able to stand up to
my oppressors and detractors and silence them with the
truth. I was a baby then. In the years since, I have learned a
lot.
To really examine the issues surrounding contact, it is
necessary first to understand what the process actually
entails. To do that, it must be understood that the central
issue is not a cultural or spiritual one, it is physical. It has to
do with the way in which we perceive the world around us.
When visitors possessing different means of perception enter
our world, our way of seeing will also change. In many
people?most, as matters now stand?there will be an
outbreak of perceptual chaos. There will be no way to end
this. I refer not so much to the educated people of the first
world, who will probably develop efficient coping mechanisms
fairly quickly, but to the vast majority of human beings, who
are impoverished, superstitious and poorly educated, if at all.
They will not be able to cope, and until they are able to,
contact will be withheld.
This means that mankind will not achieve any measure of
contact until the least of us is capable of mastering his
measure of contact. So I think that we can safely assume
that open contact is not going to happen here anytime soon.
However, that does not mean that individuals cannot get into
profound contact situations, or that this is not already
happening. It is happening. I know of people who started out
years ago in contact situation that they were able to make
work, who have gone on some truly magnificent journeys in
their lives. To some extent, this is what happened to me.
I cannot agree with those who would reject the contact
experience, or those who go so far as to lie in order to make
it seem entirely terrible. It is not entirely terrible, any more
than contact with us would be entirely terrible, were we to
go to another world.
Let me construct an example of what I mean. Say we were in
the position of the visitors, where movement between worlds
was about as difficult, and as economically available, as
travel on the Concorde is for us today. In other words, so
costly that the great majority cannot enjoy it, but not so
costly that thousands cannot still afford to go.
We learn to detect planets with living atmospheres, and
discover that they are relatively common. Most of them, we
discover at great expense, are not alive in any meaningful
sense. But some are, and some few actually harbor intelligent
species.
Most of these are entirely capable of interstellar travel
themselves, and visiting them is a matter of seeking
challenges of a kind that are hardly known to us now, and
which there is no reason for me to discuss directly unless, by
some miracle, we develop a useful means of interstellar travel
during my lifetime.
Say, however, we find a world where there is an intelligent
species clinging to life, totally ignorant, its numbers sparse,
its chances low. There would be many different schools of
thought about how we should handle the situation. Some
would say that we should leave them entirely alone. Others
would preach limited intervention?just enough to prevent
them from self-destruction. Others might see the possibility
of altering them genetically in order to enhance their
intelligence and speed up their evolution. Others yet might
address them with all kinds of ideological constructs, ranging
from the sublime to the murderous.
In other words, our one, single planet would visit them with
literally dozens of different approaches to contact. Consider,
for example, if the Catholic Church, Communist China, the US
National Security Agency, Buddhists, Hindus, the Ford Motor
Company, the Boy Scouts, the Red Cross, the Moonies, the
Presbyterian Church, the British Royal Family and Mossad all
went.
And they would go. We would go racing to impose all of our
ideas, expectations and hopes on them. Indeed, if we went
armed with technologies that will be in human hands within
just a few years, we might also be able to intervene in their
existence in ways so profound that we would, in later, wiser
times, come to feel deeply responsible for them, for what we
have done to change them, and how profoundly we have
affected them.
Some of us would react with compassion, others with
contempt. Some would be striving to bring us to the point
that we could be free and on our own in the cosmos. Others
would be seeking various degrees of control. Others might
react to the guilt in a sociopathic manner.
If you multiply the amazing chaos suggested by the above
contact scenario by dozens of worlds, and add to them
species and beings who do not even address reality in terms
of living on planets or indeed in space-time as we perceive it,
then you have some idea of what the situation is here on
earth. We are being visited not just by one world, but by
many, and each ?planet? does not present us with a single
personality or ideology. They are even more complex than we
are, for the most part, and they address us across a range of
ideologies, approaches and expectations that is completely
unimaginable.
In all of this, there is only one thing that we do, and that is
that we deny contact. It is not the visitors who hold back, it
is us who make the process impossible. In fact, many of our
visitors are entirely open about their comings and goings.
They don?t care whether we see them or not. Others live
among us, and some can do so quite openly.
This is because some of them look quite like us, and this is
why: Life in the universe evolves according to a set of
matrices that exist along a continuum of possibilities. The
chemical composition of a given planet, and the type of star
that gives it its energy, determine the type of animal forms
that will evolve on its surface. Over eons, the forms that
survive will increasingly appear like surviving forms on other,
similar planets, because these are the most efficient forms in
the particular survival situation that a given planet presents.
Thus there could be other earths on which live beings who
appear similar enough to us to walk freely here. So the idea
that living forms evolving on another planet would be of
necessity radically different from us is false and naive.
Given that people from other worlds might be able to move
freely here, it could be that they would inject themselves into
our society on such a wide scale that they would have very
substantial influence.
The question would then become, why would their influence
not better our world? After all, the proportion of rich to poor,
educated to ignorant has remained relatively stable as the
human population has grown. We have just come through the
most violent century in our known history, and the present
perilous state of the world certainly suggests that there is
more to come.
So, if they are not here to save us, then why are they here?
They are here to protect us from knowledge that would
compromise our freedom to save ourselves. All we are worth
to anybody who cares about our welfare, ourselves included,
depends on this freedom being maintained. The ones who
don?t care about it are not our friends. The result of this is a
kind of paradox: if contact begins to unfold before we are all
capable of coping with it, it will mean that those who cherish
us have been somehow pushed aside by those who would
exploit us.
How can we tell when we are ready? It?s really quite simple.
Go to any poverty-stricken slum in the depths of the third
world, and ask. If the answer is objective, practical, and not
filtered through superstition and ideology, we?re making
progress. But then you must also ask the same question of
people in the first world, and of our leaders at every level of
society.
When the response is a consensus of rationality, the whole
experience of UFOs and such will begin to change. The same
scientific and governmental institutions that were intractably
certain that the very idea of an alien presence here was
absurd will begin to change their positions. As if by a miracle,
institutions like the US National Academy of Science will
suddenly start to acknowledge the possibility that UFOs have
some sort of meaning. Military organizations, previously
secretive, will begin to be more open.
Nobody will have changed policy. It will change on its own, as
attitudes change.
Looking back over these seventeen years, all I can say is
that I have worked faithfully for a good outcome for mankind.
I have sought to do everything in my power to further our
cause, which could not be more clear: the introduction of
mankind into the cosmos as a free and independent species,
able to express itself in every appropriate way imaginable,
and, over time, in many ways that are probably far beyond
our present imagination.
Many others are working in the same direction, both here and
elsewhere. Many are not. Some are so xenophobic that they
react to us very negatively. Others bring jealousies and
hatreds to the situation that reflect their own traumatic
pasts. The situation, in other words, is very complicated, and
made the more so that our view of it is as distorted as our
view of the world around us. We see of it only what we call
its ?physical? manifestations.
In an effort to free ourselves from the superstitions of the
past, we have conditioned ourselves to concentrate only on
physical-sensual inputs?what our bodies tell us. In so doing,
we have actually filtered out and blinded ourselves to most of
what our bodies actually tell us. Those of us who still have
some sensitivity to these less perceivable energies have
divided reality into ?levels? and usually claim that some ?levels?
vibrate at a higher frequency than others or some such thing.
This is all for one purpose: to confine ourselves to the level in
which we are exposed to the most illusion and the least
truth, where, in fact, the only truth that we cannot deny is
death itself?and its inevitability we do deny, every day of
our lives. Instead of living as if this could be our last moment,
we live as if our last moment will never come. Then, when the
body itself finally gives up, nature forces us to face the truth.
Until we can see and be and live as we really are, in the
fullness of our potential, we will not really see what is
happening all around us all the time. We will not see the vast
array of being in which we swim like a little, scared school of
fish, on a journey to where we know not, across an ocean of
space and time that seems without beginning and without
end.
I was privileged, on that night of profound shock, to be
awakened?in a small way?to the reality of the world as it is.
I lost the illusion that the soul and the body are somehow
different, and that we cannot see into realms into which we
choose not to look.
Now, I have lived in this new reality for a very long time. This
came to me because I had been well prepared for it by people
like Joseph Stein and William Segal. They had given me the
tools I needed to go along this path?they and others who,
while less visible, are equally present.
In a few weeks, I am going to begin writing a book that will
be the summation of all of these years of inner and outer
work, the purpose of which will be to help focus us on the
path outward. It is a book that started when my life began,
and that I have been writing with the experience of my living
journey for thirty-two years of conscious effort, seventeen of
them under the care of a truly great and humble master.
So, in a sense, this Christmas marks the very truest of new
beginnings for me. I hope that you, also, find in your heart
and the world around you, the blessings of this ancient
season of faith and affirmation. God bless us all, and
especially those suffering, and those who face peril far from
home. This is a dark season in the life of man, but not as dark
as it was just half a century ago. So, in the shadows that
seem eternal, we now see suggestions of a coming dawn.
May God give each and all of us the courage to raise our
faces to the advent of the sun.
Related Entries:
04-Feb-2003: The Call of the Seven Stars
04-Dec-1999: The Problem with The Press
15-Sep-1999: I'm Back! More Experiences
22-Feb-1999: Are the Visitors 'Real'?
