The Mind, the Alien, and the Apocalypse: Part One

PART ONE: SIGNS AND WONDERS AT THE END OF HISTORY

People are pretty hyped about aliens these days. Recently, the military just declassified several documents that were supposedly amassed over the years regarding UFO sightings. Scientists are increasingly baffled over strange satellite-like objects that have emerged in our solar system. Just this spring, a flying pyramid was spotted over the US.

UFO culture is on the rise.

But there other strange emergences occurring across Western society which seem to be of separate concerns, but perhaps we shouldn’t be so hasty.

Many of these emergences seem to originate at the boundaries of modern science: for the first time in human history, we are tweaking the genomes of all sorts of creatures from e. coli to humans in order to produce desired traits and behaviors—essentially the eugenics dream extrapolated to everything on Earth and not just people. We are able to complete similar feats in the realm of climate, cloud-seeding for agriculture and the spraying of aerosols to block out the sun. We have built a worldwide digital network capable of surveying the entire globe, extracting data from appliances, cars, and devices, and forms of communication which were the stuff of sci-fi only twenty years ago. The combination of all these elements—network and cybernetic advancements, nanotechnology, genomics, and general engineering feats—seem bound to coalesce into the emergence of synthetic life.

It’s time for a parade and a good pat on the back, right?

Maybe not. As these scientific achievements have emerged, cultural artifacts seemed to have retracted. Churches are gutted, their congregations dwindling. Smaller rural communities across America are now void of a town square. Huge numbers of children report feeling lonely and depressed due to a lack of physical companionship. Less and less children know the joys of having a sibling. Suicide rates are the highest they have been since WWII, and according to some figures are the highest in record. And then, just last year, something unheard of, something unfathomable to the pre-pandemic mind occurred:

Americans were instructed to lock down their behavior, to avoid social contact, to stay in our homes and refrain from ordinary communal life—all because some computer models predicted an apocalyptic infection rate that never actually came to fruition. Our economy was temporarily halted, our holidays were deleted, and our dreams were put on hold, thanks to a computer simulation.

If there was ever something so Baudrillardian, I haven’t heard it.

But more importantly, our Baudrillardian experiment has resulted in a new paradigm of human rights. Our right to full bodily autonomy is currently on the docket as huge numbers of bureaucrats, scientists, and politicians are calling for the mandating of the new expedited Covid-19 vaccines. Why not? We’ve already consented to the total demolition of our communal autonomy at the word of a miserable incorrect computer simulation. Freedom and liberty are words we have quite literally made pseudo-problematic, having been slyly linked to “alt-right” and “white supremacist” circles by our savvy media. Meanwhile, the Transhuman movement has quietly reached in our sex lives, redefining the most fundamental concepts of identity. “Humanity” and “male” and “female” no longer carry the elemental connotations they once did. Very quickly, right before our screen-tired eyes, reality is being deconstructed and reconstructed. A new world order is on the rise.

As I pointed out in previous posts you can find in Taiga Quarto, this world order is a logical culmination of ancient alchemical and gnostic themes that have been coalescing for literally thousands of years. Where is it heading? What does this new world have in store for us?

There is a deeply strange theory that seems to be coalescing aside of our new alchemical experimental society. A theory that maybe all these elements, synthetic biology, suicide rates, psychedelic compounds and UFO’s, are profoundly interconnected. And I think there might be something to it.

What if the UFO is not a technological entity as much as it is a response to technology? What if the human collective unconscious is reaching into conscious reality in order to save itself? What if we have reached a point in our evolution so vital and dangerous that the evolutionary forces of Nature itself is attempting to snap us out of our stupor and get our attention?

It may seem truly bizarre, absurdly novel, but there have been some incredible minds that have explored this possibility very seriously, among them Carl Jung and Terence McKenna. Recently many more abstract and insightful thinkers have begun exploring these possibilities. In related subjects, scientific heavyweights like Rupert Sheldrake have begun seriously considering the possibilities of panpsychism. Others are exploring the world of psychedelic experience, and the phenomenon of entity-encounters during psilocybin and DMT intoxication.

What if, somehow, none of this was a coincidence? What if we were approaching a horizon from which there is no returning, and humanity is collectively and, to some degree, subconsciously reeling to deal with its implications?

Maybe we can think about this another way: in my series on Taiga Quarto, I discussed Hegel's ideas about The End of History. We know that, since the time of Plato philosophers have considered the existence of a kind of world soul, which Hegel called "Geist". This ghostly presence, embedded in both spirit and matter, acts a teleogical agent which pulls reality toward an event horizon at the end of history. Terence McKenna called this the "Transcendent Object at the End of History". Could the UFO be this elusive but omniscent Geist, finally manifesting itself into material reality--and in a form our deeply left-brained, materialist minds can actually comprehend? In short, is this the 21st century version of angels, burning bushes, and christ figures? If so, what is it trying to tell us?

And what if, as I am at this time most inclined to believe, our UFO is not just an artifact of the human mind, but a mirror image of the Self, an image of our own alienated identity?

LIKE AND TUNE IN TO MY PAGE FOR THE NEXT INSTALLMENT: FEAR AND LOATHING AT THE END OF HISTORY