One thing I realize I left out of the previous post that needs to be addressed (Elephant in room) is the very troubling cognitive dissonance between the Cosmic Consciousness Experience and Life-In-This-World- as we know it.
•Editor’s note: This post is both an addendum to the previous post and a sneak peak of my forthcoming book, Close Encounters of the Highest Kind– SSL
I’m not the first person to have this experience- far from it. As I got older, I read about others who’d been there before me.
It is very weird to be in a god-like state of consciousness and have the overwhelming knowledge that everything in the Universe is working exactly as it should and then return to this ordinary state of everyday life and confront the horrors of this world.
As a student of philosophy (Minor, Chico State University, 1985), I’m not into Western Religion (philosophy people know what I mean), but the Cosmic Consciousness experience that everything is working perfectly and going exactly as it should seems to me to be the equivalent of the old Christian adage that “Everything is God’s will.” Maybe that phrase has similar origins in the Cosmic Consciousness experience, but it seems nonsensical in light of the tragedies we see on a damn-near daily basis, whether it’s the CC Experience or Western religious doctrine.
I don’t have a simple resolution to offer for this paradox. Or even a complicated one. The situation reminds me of a scene in the movie, The Mothman Prophecies, which was allegedly based on a true story about a man-sized, Moth-like creature that appeared to residents of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, warning of an impending disaster in 1966/67, directly preceding the collapse of a bridge, killing dozens of people.
Washington Post reporter John Klein experienced the phenomenon first hand. He sought out a University professor versed in local folklore, including Mothman, who didn’t have any concrete answers either, but made an analogy about a window washer on a skyscraper that can see a car accident a few blocks away that those on the ground can’t see. The professor told Klein “it doesn’t mean he’s god – or even any smarter than we are, but from where he’s sitting, he can see a little further down the road.”
I think that analogy is useful in attempting to understand the existential dissonance between the Cosmic Consciousness experience and our real-world, everyday reality here on the ground.
In this case, the people who may be able to see a little further on down the road are kids five-years-old or less, who are able to remember their most recent past life, near death experiencers like neurosurgeon Eben Alexander, Out-Of-Body experiencers, Remote Viewers, who were trained and used by the military as psychic spies and those who undergo past-life regression through hypnosis.
The sum total of such experiences reveals a universal narrative involving recurring lifetimes most popularly known as Reincarnation, the goal of which is to make progress lifetime after lifetime on a journey through the Universe, which is hierarchal.
This would seem to suggest that life is some sort of game, not unlike a modern video game, in which you must ‘level-up’ in order to make progress in the game- to acquire greater power, resources, capabilities, etc.
One of my favorite movies of all time, Albert Brooks’ Defending Your Life, which bills itself as the true story of what happens after you die, is about making progress in the Universe through a succession of lifetimes. A successful lifetime, which is defined as overcoming fear, results in a promotion in the next life to a more advanced situation than civilization on Earth and an increase of brain use, which is not unlike a software upgrade.
As it has happened so frequently in my life, I happened to know someone, a former colleague, who was connected to the film. He was an Art Director with a background in Hollywood, who told me that the “what happens after you die” line wasn’t just a marketing ploy; that he understood the film really was based on a true story.
Psychologists who use hypnosis in regressive therapy often hear accounts of past lives. The general storyline that emerges is that souls agree to live a life of predetermined circumstances that will teach them lessons they’ll need in order to move on to other lifetimes. Or, they agree to play a certain role in someone else’s life – perhaps having to do with squaring a karmic debt – to assist in learning an important life lesson and move on in the Universe.
Harvard psychologist John Mack studied over a hundred alien abductees, using hypnosis techniques to recover lost or suppressed memories of what occurred during periods of ‘missing time’ that are common in the alien abduction/ET experience phenomenon.
Some reported past lives as extraterrestrials- and what’s even more intriguing is that some report having taken this human lifetime as part of an effort to assist the evolution of civilization on Earth.
In aggregate, these stories imply that life on Earth is meant to be challenging as part of some sort of Universal training program. Perhaps this explains the horrors we are confronted with on this planet?
But can anything justify such suffering? I don’t know. I don’t have that answer, but I have some thoughts.
It may be that the experience of death most people so desperately fear is actually the ultimate ecstasy. The French word for orgasm (le petit mort) means “the little death” to describe that the ecstasy one feels upon release is just a small taste of what release from the coffin that is the dying body feels like.
If this is the case, the suffering may prove to be some sort of spiritual foreplay preceding the ecstatic release from the dying physical body.
Now that’s the rosy picture, and it sound’s like a stretch, but like I said, there’s no simple answer and the complex possibilities just get more complex.
There are no easy ways to reconcile the Cosmic Consciousness experience with the harsh realities we experience on a day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month, year after year basis- here on 21st century Earth.
I know the temptation (for those who’ve never had the experience) is to assume that what someone like me is really experiencing is just some dream form of wishful thinking in the face of harsh reality.
But that’s not it at all.
Anyone who’s experienced OBEs, NDEs, etc., has no fear of The End, because like the window washer in the Mothman analogy, they’ve seen a little farther down the road.
I can imagine other, even more enigmatic scenarios.
What if all of our lesson-learning and suffering-in-the-process of achieving Universal progress is someone else’s form of entertainment?
The greys behind the alien abduction phenomenon are sometimes referred to as The Watchers (see: The Watchers, Raymond Fowler). They could be understood as overseers, which is likely their primary role, but they could also be understood as voyeurs.
As Whitley Strieber has written, they seem to get a vicarious thrill by witnessing our surprise as events unfold. According to Whitley, “The Visitors,” as he calls them, have absolute knowledge about future events and are thus robbed of spontaneous experience, which they can have to some degree through us.
You can think of it like going to see a movie you’ve already seen and then going to see it again with a friend who hasn’t had the experience. You can see it again – as if for the first time – by seeing it through your friend’s virgin eyes.
As we approach the technological Singularity here in 21st century Earth, we face that existential paradox where our ability to predict the future transcends prediction into the ability to engineer the future, which puts us in their boat- unable to experience the unknown. It’s all pre-planned. Isn’t that what NDE experiences and regressive hypnosis patients tell us?
There’s an even deeper dilemma. Warfare. In theory, there is no need for warfare in a post-Singularity civilization. If wars are about vital resources – whether it be food, territory, oil or whatever – war itself should become obsolete after the Singularity.
When there are artificially intelligent robots running 24/7 on free energy devices (whether it be solar or the holy grail, Zero Point Energy) it will replace the current civilization and there will be no logical, material reason to make war.
The only possibility I can think of – which could be a function of my own limitations – is again, entertainment.
Yet, there are stories from antiquity that Ancient Alien theorists believe are descriptions of aerial warfare between extraterrestrial civilizations in Earth’s atmosphere. Then there are the stories that suggest ETs took sides in certain wars, including the revolutionary war that resulted in the United States of America. (see; Ancient Aliens)
If those stories are true – and that’s a BIG IF – what’s actually going on there? As Disclosure Project head Dr. Steven Greer has said, the technologies possessed by these advanced extraterrestrial civilizations capable of interstellar travel (what I call a post-Singularity civilization) are such that a planet could be vaporized in an instant.
It seems warfare is only feasible in a pre-Singularity civilization. Mutually assured destruction in the post-Singularity world would truly be mutual destruction in the blink of an eye.
So maybe that’s where we come in- if The Watchers want to play war games, just like those who like to play Call of Duty or World of Warcraft or something like that.
In a post-Singularity Universe, where the original technological Singularity occurred a long time ago, in a Galaxy far, far, away, this game, call it Battlefield Earth (L. Ron Hubbard), may be one of the most popular games in the post-Singularity Universe.
In my discussion with Whitley Strieber on his Dreamland podcast, Whitley mentioned that he’d gotten an afterlife message from his late wife Anne, that life is a “game.”
Think about it- if the Universe is saturated with post-Singularity Artificial Intelligence (AI), what would an omniscient computer intelligence do? Well, computers run simulations, so…
It could all be some type of elaborate Ant Farm built to entertain The Watchers or whoever. Or it could be The Universal Training Mechanism (reincarnation) that has emerged from the collective subconscious. Or it could be a lot of both and maybe other things we can’t possibly imagine.
As English astronomer, physicist, and mathematician, Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington said, “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”`
Whatever the ultimate truth, it’s hard to see what’s actually happening here and think that things are going exactly as they should- but that’s the Cosmic Consciousness experience. Go figure.