The 9th Quadrant

A Report on Anomalous Entities, Cosmic Gatherings & the Integral UAP Task Force

(This is a weird mixture of a “fun read” and a “ponderous tome.” I promise the next article will be much shorter. As usual, for paying subscribers, there is an audio version. And this time there is also an autobiographic account of my own experiences with UAP/UFO phenomena.)

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I. ARE ALIENS REAL?

What a stupid question! But why is it so stupid? It is not foolish because the answer is already utterly obvious and well-known. That is not the case. Nor does the idiocy of this query reflect low intelligence on the part of the questioner. Actually, this is quite an intelligent and stimulating topic for sensitive transdisciplinary thinkers. So why say (with obvious hyperbolic playfulness) that the question is stupid?

The purpose of my dismissive jocular statement is to remind us that this particular phrasing & framing tends to inhibit the development of a richer understanding of so-called Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs).

It feels straightforward to ask if “aliens” are “real” but it is precisely the range of strange objects, entities, & encounters hinted at by the word “alien” that calls into question our basic notions of what we mean by Reality. For example:

• Are we talking about subjective, intersubjective, or objective phenomena? Yes.

• Are we talking about perceptions or misperceptions? Yes.

• Is the data consistent or inconsistent? Yes.

• Do we understand deeply enough what we mean by “real” or “entity” or “object” or “encounter” or “matter”? No.

In the following essay/report/manifesto (you choose!) we will see again and again that the full-spectrum, multi-disciplinary challenge of coherent collective sensemaking around the UFO/UAP phenomenon requires a deep dive that re-theorizes our most basic concepts.

And if, by chance, there are any non-philosophers reading this, you will learn everything necessary to sound well-informed at the best cocktail parties.

The trick is to stop saying painfully gauche things like “space aliens” and “UFOs” and instead start using sexy nuanced words such as: celestials, galactics, cryptids, ultraterrestrials, cryptoterrestials, shadow biosphere, non-human intelligences, metamaterials, temporics, multi-naturalism, co-enactment, inter-ontological domains & alt-humans.

II. DID I REALLY SAY “ONTOLOGICALLY GLORY HOLE” ?

Yes. I uttered that improbable phrase in response to a swell guy who was only at the gathering for one evening. My comment got a laugh. It was also somewhat accurate. The story of my life! Wait a minute — what gathering? This all occurred recently at a colloquium for the convergence of meta-level thinking & the phenomenon of extraordinary contact.

The Integral UAP Task Force gathered in the luxurious beauty of the cedar rainforests & eagle-strewn beaches of Canada’s Pacific Northwest to share their multiple views, personal histories, and subtle instincts about how to move forward on this unique “knowledge domain”.

We were a group of transdisciplinary scholars, experiencers, and enthusiasts. Imagine academic experts on exo-studies sitting around the evening fire next to former priests, psychedelic activists, authors, podcasters, cognitive scientists, developmental theorists, therapists, mystics & philosophers of leading-edge postmetaphysical epistemology.

Most of them fit into several of those categories.

These folks, as well as myself, have spent decades, intersecting with & analyzing the discourse and culture around “anomalous encounters.” We were mutually touched by a profound longing for contact of all kinds. Inner. Outer. Human. Nonhuman. And whatever else ya got.

So take a bunch of these people and drop them into a biodiverse environment seething with eagles, owls, ravens, seals, sea lions, ferns, cedars, barnacles, waterfalls, salal bushes (look it up), huckleberries, etc. Facilitate them in deepening their interpersonal communion. Have them scan the stars both externally & internally. And point them in the direction of a better/wiser set of discussions and intellectual tools around the topic of strange entities, crafts, and contact experiences.

Jealous? You should be. And maybe you can come to the next one…

Wait — did I say Integral UAP Task Force?

Yes. It’s a playful monicker in which the word “integral” is only as dubious as the words “UAP” and “task force.” I had to call it something. However, most of the people there were deeply informed by the Integral Metatheory as well as multiple other leading-edge models of transdisciplinary and evolutionary sensemaking. Yet I do have to acknowledge the theorist Ken Wilber when I call all this stuff: the ninth quadrant.

A few years ago, when Bruce Alderman and I were speaking with the eminent philosopher, I asked him whether or not anomalous entities could be adequately described in his famous four-quadrant model. Or could it be, I pressed him, that these things (or some of them) operate in a domain of reality that is orthogonal to his basic categories of subjective, objective, intersubjective & interbehavioral?

Sure, he said, it’s possible. He was not going to focus on that himself but suggested that if he did… well, he would just add more quadrants if needed. Hell, he said, he would introduce a ninth quadrant if he had to! I found that quite charming.

But despite the charm — why is this an important topic?

The answer to that question is pretty obvious to people who have had amazing or disturbing encounters with Somethings that call their perception, sanity, and understanding of basic physics into question. Socially, it is pretty relevant to discover whether or not governments and private corporations have been strategically lying to us about the existence of paradigm-altering facts. Morally, we have got to stop being so marginalizing and dismissive toward people who make radical reports about things outside the political, economic & knowledge consensus of modernity. But more than all this, it is a central issue for human sensemaking.

Today’s philosophers must be daring enough for this topic. Our “extended naturalism” should extend far enough to upgrade our understanding of alien contact, anomalous entities, and cosmic ingression. And if our emerging integrative transdisciplinary meta-theorists cannot make meaningful coherent progress on this slippery convergence of the “reality-plurality” — what good are they?

So this is the test.

And if you can make meaningful, non-reductive progress in this mess then perhaps you do have a sensemaking technology that is robust enough and transferrable to other thorny perspectival tangles faced by our species.

III. THE TASKS OF THE INTEGRAL UAP TASK FORCE

The goals or hopes that I had in mind for this gathering were as follows:

• to establish broad agreement about the validity of the inquiry

• to cultivate mutual emotional solidarity among transdisciplinary thinkers engaged by these topics

• to begin creating conditions for our students & descendants to outperform us in understanding such peculiar phenomena

• to weave our multiple voices together into a roughly shared sense of the particular inquiries, problems, and principles that need to be privileged at this stage in the process of moving all this forward as a meta-discipline

And so what did we decide were the inquiries, problems, and principles that are of immediate concern?

There was, for example, a general consensus around the “a-categorical imperative.” That meant we agreed to treat all of our categories of analysis in this matter as provisional. We simply do not know whether or not we know enough to determine the types of things with which we are dealing. That was a fun sentence. Right out of a Pentagon briefing. Let’s do it again: We simply do not know whether or not we know enough to determine the types of things with which we are dealing.

That’s where we are at the moment.

Our strategies must integrate our ambiguities. In the short term, we must elicit, gather, and vet more data to build up a sense of the topology of this domain but we must be aware that this data could force changes to our basic approach to the topic. In the medium term, there may be emergent political or scientific changes to humanity’s understanding of the cosmos. These could provide necessary analytic tools that we simply lack today and therefore rewrite our entire approach. And in the long term, it may turn out that some of these phenomena are intrinsically a-categorical — somehow made of the “?!” itself. All of that means, therefore, that we have to be quite tentative and somewhat agnostic about the distinctions and definitions we are using.

The problem of categories is actually quite intense. In our discussions, it came up in at least three different forms:

(1) What legitimately falls into the domain of what we are studying? What are the boundaries of the “phenomenon”? How would we tell if something belongs to this field of inquiry or not?

(2) What are the subtypes of the phenomenon? Which criteria or attributes will we use to make designations between different kinds of putative encounters and potential beings?

(3) Are the basic human conceptual categories (e.g. subjective vs. objective) accurate ways of organizing reality — or merely conventional heuristics that may need to be challenged?

The first of these problems (What to include?) provokes two different kinds of responses from people. On the one hand, there is an attitude of inclusive tolerance. This is very common in transdisciplinary meta-studies. Such philosophies typically postulate a “true-but-partial” status for all kinds of co-enacted perspectival experiences. So who are we to leave out any reported class of encounters? Everything is real in its own way! But, on the other hand, there is a real demand for more robust boundaries. Can we not decide, at least in principle, that not everyone’s reports count as true? And that some whole-types-of-experience may be reducible to other categories of reality?

Sean Esbjorn-Hargens (whose laudable Mutual Enactment Hypothesis includes even “thought-forms” among the valid types of beings) has argued for strategic coupling Occam’s Razor with Pollock’s Brush.

Occam’s Razor is the famous scientific heuristic that, all things being equal, we should always favor the simplest explanation. A powerful rule of thumb. It has led to enormous progress in human understanding of technical systems. However, it has some limits. When are all things equal? And what does “simplest” mean? If you are literate in the debates about quantum physics, you will know that there is very strong disagreement among top-level physicists about whether it is simpler to (a) just accept an equation that describes many parallel worlds, or (b) invent extra rules stipulating that there can only be one world.

Which is the simplest approach? Tricky, tricky.

The second principle mentioned above is named after the famous American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock. His paintbrush created wild, colorful streaks and splatters that seemed to defy simplification and push the viewer toward a kaleidoscopic menagerie of forms. He is not reducing and policing the data!

Sean’s opinion is that, at least during the initial phase of data gathering, we should accept the widest & wildest range of possible realities. Then, having filled this bucket of fringe claims, we can begin to sort, reduce, and possibly reject.

That is very practical. It also strikes me, based on my many conversations with the cognitive scientist John Vevaeke, that it has ongoing utility. We must always be vigilant against the possibility that our grooves of thought are becoming over-optimized (and therefore fragile and deluding). So our twin desires to impose rigor & accept a wide swath of strange possibilities must dynamically co-correct for each other. Something like this dialectical tension may be needed at every step of the process of unfolding exo-studies as a meta-discipline. There seemed to be general agreement on this.

We also pondered the cosmological problem. That means: What kind of cosmos would there have to be for the various “anomalous entity data” to make the most sense?

Meaningful information is a match between perception & universe. Confirming the existence of a hamburger requires a whole world in which cows exist (and are delicious). So what kind of idea about the universe allows us to extract the maximum amount of useful information from weird lights, abduction reports, missing time, radar blips, radiation burns, encounters with unusual humanoids, peculiar crafts, etc?

And will that turn out to be the same kind of cosmos that best makes sense of reports about elves, angels, demons, elementals, future beings, paranormal exchanges, dream visitations, and so on?

My summary of what I heard everyone saying is this:

We require a multi-naturalist bio-informational cosmos. That means that it has multiple different and overlapping domains for naturalist exploration (something like different “states” or co-enacted slices of reality with their own “science”).

It also means that we conceive the universe as both deeply alive, organic, intelligent, relational, affective (bio), and yet extraordinarily abstract (informational) in terms of dealing with a vast diversity of patterns that may not be limited to standard material processes.

I am almost tempted to say bio-computational because I strongly suspect that the kinds of work that people like Stephen Wolfram are doing on irreducible algorithms and computational physics will end up playing a significant role in figuring out this stuff.

IV. CE-5

We saw something.

Or thought we did. Some of us did. Or — what was that?

Let me backtrack slightly to explain:

I had asked one of our participants to lead a CE-5 invocation for the gathering. CE-5 sounds cooler than saying “Close Encounters of the 5th Kind.” Blech. These practices are group efforts using focused attention & intention to increase the likelihood of anomalous encounters.

It was popularized by the Disclosure Activist Steven Greer and perpetuated by people like Kosta Makreas. It is an ongoing, evolving practice with many local variations. Collectively our team was quite happy to engage the process as a more shamanic, inclusive, and heart-centric ritual than is normally done. This may even point the way forward for the future unfolding of these practices.

Personally, I was quite skeptical.

Despite my many odd experiences — and my lifelong devotion to intentional attention practices, and coherence-based models of participatory reality — I have a hardwired squint when it comes to the idea that “just thinking about things and feeling nice together” is adequate or functional. Whatever the governments and private corporations of the Earth may have in their subterranean tech vaults was certainly not elicited by an hour of white people focusing their magical consciousness and trying to feel open.

Or was it?

I won’t bore you with the many odd subtle energy experiences that occurred, or the reports from many of us that birds, bugs, and trees started to loom into our perception as if they were un/familiar alien entities of great intensity. The really interesting thing happened afterward:

We had been asked to continue scanning the skies as we transitioned to a fireside discussion. At one point, still feeling the emotional high and shared coherent intention, there was a readjustment of chairs. Suddenly only two of us were facing the dark ocean sky — West toward Vancouver Island.

I absentmindedly noticed an oddly large and incandescent “light in the sky.” It was much bigger and brighter than other stars, planes, or satellites that we had been peering at for some time. Despite its intensity, it seemed to exude a very soft, very quiet mood. And what the hell does “exude” mean in this context???

Moving slightly, and evenly, to the right (North) it suddenly got dimmer. Not gradually. It did not fade. These were discrete and seemingly instantaneous modulations of its luminosity. Again. And again. After the third of these quantum lurches, it had vanished completely. I checked with the only other person who was looking in that direction and he confirmed the visuals. His impression was that we were being “winked at.”

In hindsight, the most peculiar thing was our response.

Despite being in the middle of a concerted discussion about anomalous phenomena, and studying the skies for precisely this type of thing, we were oddly casual to the point of almost forgetting about it.

We did not excitedly point it out to the group. We did not even mention it until much later. It landed like a “non-event.” It should have been at least a contender for proving the astonishing power of a CE-5 practice to catalyze these encounters.

We each tried to imagine ways in which this scintillation was simply our misperception of an ordinary object. Of course that is possible. But it looked and behaved unusually. It felt weird. And we behaved a little oddly. Apparently, these sorts of underwhelming or even “forgetting” processes are common for all kinds of anomalous encounters. For me, it fit with many circumstances that I look back upon and wonder: Why wasn’t I astonished?

We cannot yet say whether Earth lights belong in the same category of study as alien tech, angels, elves, galactic humanoids, etc. but I was quite intrigued to see how easily our variant of the CE-5 protocol drifted us into states and perceptions of an unusual kind. I wondered if the large prehistoric temple sites like Gobekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe could have been places where group intention — possibly with entheogenic supplements — operated to invoke encounters. Those powerfully evocative prehistoric sacred cities are certainly decorated with an obsessive combination of stellar imagery, humanoids, and odd animal creatures.

Speaking of which, members of our party had several vivid experiences with owls over the next few days. Owls, as you know, may not be what they seem.

#twinpeaks

V. SEA CHANGE & DIALECTICS

Our gathering on the edge of the Pacific Ocean was not an isolated irruption in the collective consciousness. It is part of something larger. Something seems to be changing in this domain. Yet that kind of change is a tricky evaluation to make.

This phenomenon itself is old. It did not start when China became capable of manufacturing automated drones. The French information scientist Jacques Vallee was one of the first people to publically describe the continuity of our contemporary encounters with ancient reports of lights, nonhuman beings, missing time, abductions, etc. Religious texts, folklore, and personal accounts of these “perceptions” are extant throughout recorded history. The occurrences are not new. And in many ways, the news is not new. Today’s headlines often read like repeats of UFO headlines from the 1950s. Has anything changed?

Yes.

The mood has definitely shifted — as far as our gathering can tell. There are also the recent grudging and ambiguous admissions of the United States Government and Military coupled with the creation of new legislation and official bodies. The increasing number of cameras and satellites has got to be causing some change in this area. We did not formerly have youtube videos, internet-enabled teamwork and digital cross-referencing of accounts. Outer space has become a recent mainstream issue for military and economic concern. And we have incredible new innovations in human technology which have started to resemble what we previously ascribed to aliens. There is also renewed academic interest. It’s not a 180-degree turn. Maybe only a 15-degree turn. But that’s not nothin’.

This subject is becoming more normalized for good or ill. Conversations in this area are getting more complex. Public admissions from seemingly credible people are becoming more frequent. Zealots and believers are giving way to intrigued investigators. At least I hope they are. This is precisely why we need to avoid slipping into simplistic pro & con narratives. We do not want to foolishly migrate from “officially no aliens” to “officially aliens.” We have to be better than that.

Our task at this moment, therefore, is to make sure that real creative thinking is ongoing. To do that, to remain intelligent, we need friction and cognitive diversity. We need dialectics. Here are three forms of dialectical tension that stand out to me as essential in thinking forward on this topic:

(1) The tension between expansive & reductive thinking. We could call this a dynamic coupling of speculative open-mindedness and skeptical rigor. Skepticism is ongoing and necessary. Both its practice and its mood need to be honored. We do a disservice to this emerging meta-discipline if are either only accepting or only dismissive. The tension between them is the fuel for future discovery.

(2) Minimal vs. maximal paradigm shift. We do not know (and our personal instincts will differ) just how much of the contemporary worldview will be altered by a coherent, non-reductionist, and good-faith exploration of these anomalous data sets. All of it? None of it? 23%? At one extreme exists the possibility that all of this outlandish stuff can, with effort, be explained by mundane things we already know. Going a little further, we may be able to keep our basic paradigm but simply add a few additional facts (such as a previously unknown form of atmospheric electrical phenomena). Slide down the spectrum a little further and we give up a couple of features of our contemporary consensus reality. For example, if Eric Weinstein is right, we may need to jettison our allegiance to the limits of Relativity Theory. But then — what if we are dealing with the souls of the dead? Or our future selves? At what point do we have to rethink our entire vision of reality and adopt some bizarre neo-theosophical model? What if all imaginary things are real??? So because we simply do not know how much of our paradigm will have to be adjusted, we should rely upon, and encourage, a strong dialectical interplay between models that require different degrees of worldview mutation.

(3) I call this one mandala versus lego. These are two strategies for sensemaking. A mandala strategy gathers an increasing amount of diverse data for many types of phenomena without attempting to force them into a single Procrustean explanation. We arrange all the extraneous fringe material as though it were a great mandala of quasi-independent forms. A kind of pantheon of non-reductionism. Alternatively, a Lego strategy builds some new but singular monstrosity out of all the pieces. I gave this a shot with my pranic nano-swarm hypothesis. Whitley Streiber has attempted, in THEM, to force forth a unifying narrative. Can it all be explained by the psychogenic and quasi-material effects of low-temperature cosmic plasma interpenetrating ordinary physical systems? Probably not but we need to encourage BOTH the instinct to avoid a unifying reduction AND also every creative attempt to invent hypotheses that maximally incorporate the greatest variety of the reported objects, entities, and behaviors.

VI. ASKING BETTER QUESTIONS

Questions are a form of consciousness that orient us at the threshold between Known and Unknown information patterns. Or are they? (You get the idea.) And there is an art to asking better questions. More nuanced questions. More complex questions. Inquiries that unfold us beyond the static holding pattern of our current intellectual and sociological debates. We do not, for example, want to waste the next hundred years asking clumsy things like, “Is the government concealing UFOs?” That goes nowhere. Worse. It invites a polarized cultural stand-off. Instead, we may need to ask more delicate and lush questions like, “What could we do that might make it easier for different forms and levels of governance to share whatever they do know & can safely reveal?”

Questions, questions, questions. So on the other side of this Gathering, I am asking myself what are the questions that are stirring my curiosity in this field. Here are several:

• Who is a good observer? Carl Jung lamented, in his famous 1950s monograph on the mass psychological implications of Flying Saucers, that most of the witnesses were “unfortunately, Americans.” Americans, he said, were notoriously prone to exciting and speculative possibilities. Putting aside that vile Euro-slander, we nonetheless face serious questions about the quality of observers. For example, do we validate the average person as a reliable witness to their own experience? Or do we dismiss them as untrained yokels? Do we trust a mentally-trained Air Force pilot to describe nuclear-armed enemy aircraft but then dismiss him as foolish when he talks about “an armada of glowing silver orbs?” Do we know whether the domain of anomalous phenomena ought to have the same criteria for high-quality observations as in more conventional fields — or might it have special requirements? What are those? Can we train each other to be better observers in this area?

• What about lost data sets? Suppose we only have a tiny fraction of the reports. Some were lost because our ancestors did not write them down. Intergenerational data is missing. Other data is self-censored from the reports because witnesses fear it will sound too crazy and discredit an already far-out narrative. There is data that was solicited, compiled then classified and concealed. Or compiled and then forgotten or not yet analyzed. Is it possible, for example, that what we are currently dealing with is a statistically unrepresentative sample of the phenomenon?

• Do the reasons for non-disclosure (e.g. national security, concern about civilization derangement, secret agreements, potential profits, religious concerns, lack of a coherent official plan, acknowledgment that public oversight mechanisms are dysfunctional) actually outweigh the reasons for disclosure (moral right of citizens to know, inclusion of a broader range of scientists, skepticism about the capacity of clandestine management structures, need to develop better public oversight, therapeutic need to redress a dark history) ?

• How do we intelligently move beyond morphological classification? The standard approach in generating a naturalistic taxonomy of these crazy encounters is to organize them by visual shapes. Grays. Tall Nordics. Mantis-like creatures. Yet our optical bias may prove limiting. Especially if there is a protean, shapeshifting or “perceptually flexible” element to their appearance. I have tended to favor a vibe-based approach (i.e. the use of affective qualities rather than visual appearance). We could also use behavior. Or habitat. Or combinations thereof.

• Is the Dark Forest a real possibility? Liu Cixin’s science fiction novels have publically proposed that the reason we do not see the universe teeming with alien life is that they have either been annihilated or are hiding. Despite our idealistic fantasies of galactic brotherhood, could predation be the standard relationship between advanced civilizations? Ought we hope that we never make significant trans-human contact?

• What is an “entity” ? What is a “human” ? What is an “object” ?

• Could UAP encounters be radically more common than we realize but concealed from us by technological means or by some quirk of human brains?

• How much of very familiar phenomena such as “life on Earth” and “my own mind” might be populated by exotic intelligences?

• Which disciplines need to be actively engaged in this conversation? Parapolitics.  Process Philosophy.  Psychedelics. Cosmology.  Deep biology. New Physics.  Subtle energy studies.  Psychoanalysis. Cognitive Science. Meditation. Metamaterials.

• Are there other basic zones of ontology or epistemology we do not yet know about? Or could something operate across, between, or behind our basic reality categories?

• Are UAP encounters having a surprisingly large, or surprisingly small, impact on human civilization and history?

• Do traditional religious and mythic frameworks help or hinder our attempt to make sense of these things? Should we be worried when we hear Pentagon officials talking about angels and demons?

• How do we emotionally and psychologically support ourselves, and others, in dealing with the disrupted and entangled information ecologies around these strange encounters? How do we increase the likelihood that strange personal perceptions and preposterous official disclosures are edifying rather than traumatizing?

• How do we get better at both seeing through paranoid pseudo-narratives AND sidestepping predictable, top-down manipulation of the public consensus by professional networks of misinformation specialists?

• How do we sanely co-construct preparatory worldviews? What is a non-stupid and non-trivial way of doing sensemaking that takes into account the real but incompletely realized fact of future changes to our technological and scientific understanding?

• Do the “Visitors” have a purpose or a use for human beings? Are we being harvested in some fashion? Is our history being skewed toward certain destinies? Are they “trying” to produce particular affective and cognitive states?

• What happens when AI enters the Game? Can we train it to discover patterns in these phenomena to which we are blind? Do we relate to it as an alien intelligence? Are the crafts that people report something like AI-driven drones from other civilizations?

• Are there particular types of human beings who have the most affinity, capacity, resilience, and predilection for experiencing and sanely engaging reality under the conditions of high weirdness, ontological ambiguity, and nonhuman contact?

That last one is the question that was most on my mind as I prepped for the event…

VII. EDGE-PEOPLE OUT YONDER

I prepared myself for the gathering by creating an audio playlist to study. Carl Jung’s lengthy treatise on Flying Saucers made the cut. As did Terence McKenna’s famous Inside Outsider lecture which represented one of the first attempts to bring serious students of UAPs and Entheogens together into the same discussion. I had Sean Esbjorn-Hargens’ original exo-studies paper on the mutual enactment hypothesis. Bernardo Kastrup’s recent essay on the plausibility of cryptoterrestrials within the shadow biosphere. Falconer’s The Others Within that claims Internal Family Systems (IFS) needs to acknowledge the presence of internal aliens and spirit possession. Several interviews with Jacques Vallee. And Whitley Streiber’s THEM.

All chapterized and listened to on random shuffle.

I wanted to soak & saturate in the mood of it.

You can tell a lot from my particular choices. Some of them are classics in the field but all of them are notably shamanic. That word is easy to throw around. I use it to mean that a certain percentage of the population, both now and anciently, tends to be obsessively or instinctively compelled into liminal spaces, nonhuman contact, imaginal journeying, nonlinear pattern making, ritual production, energy sensing, cosmocentric mentation, biospheric immersion, trance states, developmental psychotechnologies, etc.

Most of them don’t get trained. Some of them get institutionalized or burned at the stake. My view is that this is a normal subset of the population, socially and genetically conserved, to be of special service for cultural production, collective intelligence, nonstandard diplomacy, complex oracular intuition & existential growth. And metashamanics is the name that I give to the emerging study of who these people are, where to find them, what they need, how to mature and stabilize them, how to fit them into the necessary cultural roles, etc.

Basically: weirdos.

So, for example, the reason the bardic weirdo Terence McKenna was on my playlist was because we simply do not know how much all this has to do with neurochemistry. Drugs. Do people we might be tempted to call shamanoids represent a population with more (or different) endogenous Dimethyltryptamine than the average brain? The DMT “spirit molecule” is notorious for making other dimensions and bizarre beings appear. What happens if this natural chemical surges while you are walking in the woods? Do you suddenly see an elf? Or an alien? And does that mean it was merely a hallucination — or could it be that this molecule accesses a different range of objective perceptions quite distinct from the pattern-making enacted by our everyday ratio of neurochemicals?

The reason that Whitley Streiber’s THEM (2023) made my list was because of his retrospective attempt to synthesize a model of the attitudes and motives of “the Visitors.” Whether or not he succeeds, it seems to me that one of the skills we anciently expect from a shamanic caste is extraordinary theory of mind. Theory of mind is an idea, in cognitive science and developmental psychology, about how we learn to take Others seriously by evolving an internal model of their perspective.

Witches and medicine men (or insert your own terms) often specialized in becoming-animal (as a Deleuzian might say). Wear the skin of the bear. See through the eyes of the raven. The same basic skill that made shamans good at diplomatic relations with strangers and foreign tribes also facilitated their ability to intuitively anticipate and appreciate the inner life of animals, plants, deities, and lunatics. Socially useful intersubjective modeling of unconventional entities.

Streiber’s book, which contains far too many flights of fancy for me, is an interesting examination of the archive of letters sent to him over the years. They were organized by his deceased wife and are now stored at Rice University. Like Graham Hancock (whose book Supernatural is a very provocative text on shamans, abductees, DMT, DNA & NHIs), Streiber can get lost in the storytelling. However, both men have moments of admirable clarity and balance. I appreciated Streiber’s comment that the Rice University archive is an extremely valuable resource for studying either the Visitors or “contemporary folklore.” Like many of us who have a drop of the fairy blood, I suspect that Mr. Strieber intuits a pertinent imaginal territory that is not quite objective & not quite myth. Perhaps it is upstream from both of those categories? Perhaps it is magic?

Although there was nothing overtly occult or esoteric on my preparatory playlist (and readers of my other substack know I am interested in rehabilitating and evolving the occult discourse), I think that students of magic are a demographic full of so-called shamanoids. They also have a lot of interest in strange entities. Angels, demons, ghosts, spirits, familiars, golems, astral beings, and doppelgangers are part of the standard menagerie of esoteric enthusiasts.

There is also a widely held belief that occult and hermetic networks throughout history have been actively in contact with interdimensional beings. One great story is that Aleister Crowley summoned the first “gray” alien. Crowley, of course, was a queer British espionage agent, philosopher, yogi, pop star, counter-cultural activist, and occult theorist. He frequently engaged in transrational rituals (such as the Amalantrah Working) to contact “entities” — including the Lam intelligence, pictured below, which is sometimes called the First Gray.

Later Crowley’s student Jack Parsons, a prominent American rocket scientist from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), working — you can hardly make this up — with a pre-Scientology L. Ron Hubbard, performed a special ritual to open a thelemic gateway that is believed to connect aliens, magic, government conspiracies and atomic test sites.

It’s pretty wild stuff. Lurid. Evocative. Outlandish. Vaguely suggestive of a liminal something that a subset of the population feels is “almost true.” Maybe it is just dark artistry and parapolitical mindporn. Or maybe groups and lineages of esoterically-oriented human beings have worked out certain heuristic psychotechnologies for inducing access to different features of our reality and identity.

I do not take any of that very seriously but I have always been intrigued, in regards to anomalous entities, by one particular feature of Western occult lore. It is their notion of advanced human mutations of body and mind. Most of us vaguely suspect that it is possible (although maybe not probable) to evolve into wise Christ-like bodhisattvas who exude a benevolent radiance of transpersonal compassionate insight. But are there other pathways for exotic existential mutation?

Are there beings such as the “secret chiefs” that the Golden Dawn (a very prominent 19th-century occult society) founder MacGregor Mathers said were difficult to gaze upon? Buzzing like electricity. Giving him nosebleeds. Seemingly located in more than one place & more than one body. Such beings, moving along divergent pathways of bio-spiritual development, would blur the distinction between human and alien. So perhaps there are degrees or styles of inner mutation that make humans begin to appear like “the Visitors.” And then the people who interact with you have periods of missing time, strange marks on their bodies, and report bizarre half-true stories and fantastical imagery.

Professor Jeffrey Kripal thinks Frederich Nietzsche was dead serious about the emergence of ultrahumans as the purpose of the Earth. Not just in the philosophical sense of a revaluation of all values but as an actual biological, emotional, and psychological mutation into different ranges of capacity. Another species within us.

Have trans-humans haunted our history? Are there networks of such beings? Factions? We are being highly speculative now (!) but this kind of wild comic-book thinking may be needed sometimes to perturb our over-optimized conventional reasoning. And also it may help to direct our focus beyond conspiracies, technologies, and celestial visions toward people and practices. This is not just about figuring out what are the mysterious lights, or what quasi-governmental agency absorbed all that 1950s anti-gravity research, and what isn’t Elon Musk telling us??? This is also about discerning which kind of people are drawn to these topics and what kinds of practices could deepen their experience and capacity in these unusual domains. From the temple pits of Karahan Tepe in ancient Anatolia to a CE-5 protocol on the BC Coast, we need to keep the people, roles, and methodologies in focus.

When you don’t know if you’re talking about real entities, hallucinations, dreams, stories, psychedelic visions — who ya gonna call? It would sure be nice if your Global Village had some highly competent, emotionally mature, technologically updated, and cognitively complex shamans (or whatever).

That seems like part of the ancient standard human response to this nonstandard domain of inter-ontological weirdness.

So that’s the thought I want to leave with today. Let’s be open to the possibility of recognizing, honoring, supporting, evolving, and learning from these weirdos. We may need them. And if you think you might be one of them, here’s a simplistic but fun online questionnaire devised by some friends of mine.

It only takes one account to be real and it changes the narrative of humanity forever.

- Daniel Stubbings