Faith vs UFOs

Let it be still, and it will all gradually become clear.

Lao Tzu

Who doesn’t recall having had light-hearted conversations around dinner tables and campfires over the years, discussing the likelihood of the existence of UFOs aliens? Most of us would be quick to say that we have no problem believing that life exists somewhere out in the great cosmos. It is highly unlikely that in the infinite universe we are the only living beings who are self-aware. The odds on that being the case are infinitely small! When faced with the usual question, ‘but why would governments hide this fact from the public’, I would give my usual answer: “They daren’t validate the claims because it would shatter the foundations of our civilisation. We depend on history staying the same, and it being ours only, in order to keep moving forward in an orderly march on the future.” Something along those lines anyway. It seemed pretty obvious to me. I could see how evidence of aliens from other planets would create fatal cracks in the world’s religions. Was our God theirs too? And, if we were created in his image, how come there seemed to be ETs in other ‘images’? What is God doing with all these other children? Aren’t we enough for him? Are we really no more than one big experiment of many others? I can see how it would cause a new and devastating fear to set into the hearts and minds of the world’s people, one that would easily outshine the fear of nuclear war. But somehow, at the time, I personally didn’t feel conflicted. It was a different time in my life. I wasn’t truly absorbing what I was saying – after all it was mere speculation. There is so much we think we know until we really feel the weight of its knowledge.

Oh for the comforting half-ignorance that existed for me until today! Over recent months I started to become aware that people I take seriously were supporting some of the claims that I had considered more outlandish with regard to our world. Ideas like UFOs and extra-terrestrial settlements have already been established on our planet, or under our oceans, and even within the depths of the Earth. Eh, I thought, a little too weird for me.

Yesterday, and through Greg, my brother, mentioning a talk by Graham Hancock without him knowing who he was, I made the effort to go out in the on-going inclement weather to hear him and Gregory Sams speak. It was the last day of the Amorevore Food and Arts Festival at Casa Maca, here in Ibiza. We went together and I was so grateful at Brother Greg’s timely little push. I even did something I don’t usually do – I sat in the front row! I had listened to many of Hancock’s talks and lectures on YouTube so it wasn’t that I was hearing anything for the first time, but there was something comforting in his ‘familiar’ presence. I got a real sense of his commitment to the subject of not only engaging or experiencing spirit entities as a result of hallucinogenic substances like LSD and DMT, but equally, experiencing his comfortable demeanour when talking about extra-terrestrial activities. I particularly enjoy the format of two people sitting talking to each other about what they have learnt over many years, while sharing the discussion with an audience. Greg Sams, once I had looked into who he was before going to the talk, was also an interesting speaker who had earned his stripes over the years, at the fringes of ‘new age’ thinking. I shared his enthusiasm for the consciousness that exists in all things, and particularly his awareness of the sun as more than just simply another star on the cosmos – it is our star and it communicates with us. Like him, I too have anarchistic tendencies when it comes to the effectiveness of the state in taking care of all the needs of all its people. He and Hancock believe we, the people, have the ability to self-organise, and would do a far better job of caring for our communities than any state government could do. National borders may have served their purpose in the past but with our movement towards globalisation they are unfit for purpose. He has written books about both these subjects. But I imagine that we are stuck with the current structure for a while to come yet. I recalled with Sams, after the talk, a twice-experienced moment with a setting sun in a remote region not far from Montagu, in the Western Cape. As I stared at the setting sun, something one can only safely do during these late-in-the-day moments, I was taken so far backwards in time, that I physically experienced the planet before humankind walked the Earth. I know it will sound a little bizarre, but not to me – I know what I felt, and it was more a powerful sensation than a vision.

Last night, back home with Peter, and about to start cooking, I heard mention of UFOs as Peter looked for something he wanted to watch on TV. I called out to him to record the programme for us to watch after supper. Little did I know that I was about to set in motion the opening up of a can of worms! It was a serious programme, and incorporated footage of a press conference that took place on 9 May 2001. It had been put together by someone called Dr Steven Greer, at the Press Club in Washington DC. These days, with so much fake news about, I like to do a crosscheck, so first I checked that the news conference had actually taken place, and yes, it can be found on YouTube. Then I checked the name, Dr Steven Greer, and I was surprised to find that as soon as I put into Google ‘Dr Ste…’ up popped his name at the top of the list, so that gives you an idea of how many people are Googling him.

Almost all the people sitting on the panel were high up officials in Central Intelligence, the army, the navy and the air force, air traffic controllers, airline pilots, and members of other similar organisations. They all testified to the fact that there had been substantial sightings and experiences of UFOs and even extra-terrestrials. They kept their testimonies short, undramatic and precise. It didn’t seem to have much impact on the news at the time, but there again, it was only a few months later when the world’s heads were caused to swing around violently to face a much greater and immediate problem – that of the Islamic fundamentalist threat. There was even talk of the bodies of aliens at the Roswell site following an alleged 1947 crash of an alien craft or two, and it all started to feel ‘stomach-churningly’ real. Recently I learnt that The Pentagon had been, or continues to, run a secret multi-million dollar programme to investigate UFOs, which has been reported quite widely, and in The New York Times. Now I find that my foundations have been shattered!

Why I am so troubled is that it is only in the last week or so that I have felt that I am beginning to get an understanding of how consciousness works as part of a unified matrix, a mathematical algorithm of great beauty, by which we understand, and are part of, the living world and the universe beyond. There was something so sweet about it. The pieces of the puzzle seemed to be flying into position, and the picture that is emerging is ethereal, quite literally, and how it can all be explained through numbers. It is fascinating to look at how the ancient philosophers interpreted life and the cosmos in terms of numbers. Plato came up with a single number of everything, the ‘nuptial number’, and most interpreters argue that the value of Plato’s number is 216 because it is the cube of 6, i.e. 6³= 216, which is remarkable for being also a sum of the cubes for the Pythagorean triple, i.e. (3, 4, 5): 3³+ 4³+ 5³= 6³. The number hits my sweet spot in every way. Numerology speaking 216 adds up to 9 that is three lots of three, 3³ – this has been a very important figure of numbers for me ever since a dream I had in my early twenties. He even has a Tyrant’s Number. There may be nothing to his numbers but he certainly understood thousands of years ago that answers to the universe could be found in mathematics, as did the great thinkers of many ancient civilisations. Why would they have known this? Interesting stuff, and I am just beginning my explorations of the ancient and modern philosophers and mystics. Suddenly my picture has gone grey and very blurry. I now know the question I couldn’t think of yesterday at the talk, and the one I desperately would love to have heard them answer.

“I have a question for you both. How do you square away your faith in spiritual entities with your belief in extra-terrestrials who appear to be studying and observing us as if we are no more than fish in a glass bowl? Faith speaks of A Oneness, a world in which we matter as we ‘polish’ our reflective facets and ascend the ladder of divinity, while the other is as if we are nothing more than a simulation, a living version of someone else’s algorithm, or something akin to an experiment for reasons unknown to us.”

I am now going to have to see whether I can answer this question for myself. It is going to take some work, but I will get there. I have no idea whether I will like the answer, and perhaps I will have to settle on a compromise again. Something I did before Elle, my younger daughter, died when I told her that I had settled a few things in my mind, and that I no longer felt compelled to trade scientific knowledge for faith. I was going to accept the unanswerable nature of those questions I couldn’t answer for myself. More lately it felt like I was slaying science. It had become an flimsy obstacle to my burgeoning faith, but this – this following so soon afterwards – this felt like a fatal blow! Perhaps I had been asking to be tripped up. Take courage though, Jennie. See how the universe laid a plan for me to go to the talk, and remember the coincidence of the programme on TV. Perhaps there is method somewhere in this madness.

For now, from this icy crevasse into which I have slipped, I look up at the immense cloud evolutions happening above me. They, more than anything else, have become a great source of release of existential dis-ease for me these days. I shall let go of my worrying thoughts for now. They do me no good! There is really little that is more satisfying than the natural world. I am glad I still have so much more to learn, or perhaps I should think rather in terms of unlearning…now that gives me something new to think about.