Paradoxical Thoughts on the UFO Phenomenon
Professor Jeffrey Kripal presentation for The Sol Foundation
I’d like to share excerpts from the Professor Jeffrey Kripal presentation for The Sol Foundation. I recommend watching the entire presentation. He covers many points we explore in various episodes and explores the intersection of the UFO/UAP Phenomenon with consciousness, ancient history, the concept of "a civilization of ancient gods" (spoiler: they are still around), religion, and world mythology. His opinions and perspectives certainly deserve not only to be highlighted but also to be widely recognized.
Quote:
“The first is a quote from Aimé Michel, a French researcher, probably writing this sometime in the 1960s.
He writes:
“Ufology is not a science, but a process of initiation. One starts with field investigations and ends up studying Arab mystics.”
This next quote is from volume four somewhere in the 1990s, and here refers to Spring Hill Observatory and Library that Jaquess Vallee had built.
He writes:
“My view of the phenomenon has evolved here beyond classical physical and biological parameters, to a reality in multiple layers. It melds the pre-existing grid of its logic with the consciousness of the observer, manifesting a display of arbitrary complexity.”
I want to begin by defining my perspective, since it blinds me to some things, especially technological possibilities, even as it brings other things into sharp focus, especially religious or spiritual possibilities.
One cannot see a star through a microscope,
and one cannot see a cell through a telescope.
The lenses through which we see are focusing and limiting at the same time. Put differently, both the telescope and the microscope possess lenses that are intentionally distorted so that we can see at a particular level for specific purposes.
So too with our professional frameworks, they are distortions of the lenses. But these disciplinary foci are also very helpful. And in fact they are necessary to see anything at all.
The first thing I want to say is about scale.
…I want to say that the signs of the UFO extend over immense ranges of space and time, certainly across the entire globe and throughout that tiny slice of memory that we call human history.
…The second thing I want to observe is that the UFO has taken on special urgency because of our human technology. With new advances in radar, sonar and satellite capabilities. We are seeing what was probably always there in the environment, but was generally invisible.
Put more bluntly, these things are not new, but our abilities to see them are. It also needs to be said, many of our present global crises around ecological degradation and nuclear holocaust are precisely because of our sciences and technologies.
…So the statement “it is about technology” is doubly meant or triply. The total UFO event, after all, seems to possess both a material or physical and a mental or spiritual dimension. The UFO clearly violates our present way of dividing reality up into mind and matter.
I continue to think that this fundamental non-duality is the ultimate is its ultimate power and provocation.
Any discussion of technology, then, should take into account this fundamental both ends.
I should also add here that our present realizations around AI will have a major impact in our ability to understand the UFO itself, which has for decades now included descriptions of the robotic ways that the beings are said to move or interact with humans. In other words, there have been AI and abduction accounts for decades.
It's not a recent thing, but I think our ability to see it and to talk about it is fairly recent.
Put a bit differently. AI gives us a new way of imagining and picturing what may have been going on all along. The present case of the UFO can be compared in some ways to the modern near-death experience, which is also heavily dependent on recent biomedical technology.
The phrase near-death experience dates to 1975. It's very very recent. And it's definitely because of biomedical technology. People are being brought back from much further into the death process.
As a consequence, they are remembering more and so they are seeing more. One result is a new genre of literature of still unrealized potential that implies, but never quite theorizes, different types of bodies, physical bodies that die, and subtle or super bodies that do not.
The UFO and near-death experience, then, are in some sense unintended, but quite real consequences of modern human technology.
To be more precise, the two related phenomena cannot be reduced to the technologies, but they also cannot be experienced on a broad level without them.
Number three: it's about religion.
The history of religions can be very helpful, but also very misleading with respect to the UFO. Religion is the elephant in the living room.
This does not mean that religion is our answer. …[but] the history of religions is very helpful. To the extent that the religions give powerful and consistent witness to something transcendent to our ordinary human experience, something other with a capital ‘O’ than the social, human, or rational mind, and so potentially transformative of society and the self.
Cosmologically speaking, in other words, the view of the Universe. The religions commonly place this ‘Other’ in the sky.
The heavens or the stars, which they often understand in physical terms, not metaphorical terms. The similarities to the UFO are obvious.
I often joke about: “weird beings coming down from the sky and screwing with humans. That's called religion”.
But there is a comparative argument here, but we have to be very careful and precise about that comparative argument.
And most people are not careful. They assume their own belief system, their own worldview, whatever that worldview happens to be religious or secular. It should be stressed at this point that many of the prodigies of the religions have been very aware of the basic incommensurability of a non-human intelligence, and very adept at translation and mediation of what looks like a non-human or superhuman presence.
In other words, this thing has been around as far as we can see back. There's really nothing particularly new about it.
It should also be stressed, however, that these very translations by these religious adepts are often not accepted by the believing public. This is one reason the word mystical or mystical means quite literally, secret.
It is not that there is some kind of whispered content that could be shared, but is held back by some kind of power game.
I have the secret and you don't.
It is rather that this form of knowledge is simply not communicable unless the listener is ready, as the requisite experience has ears to hear as the ancient Jewish rabbi once said, as Nietzsche put the same matter, he called it ‘esoteric’, by the way, to get at the same idea. What will be heard in most such cases is nothing at all.
…I also think the physical aspects of the history of religions, especially what I want to call the physics of mystics, have been vastly underestimated in the present regime of knowledge, both in the humanities and the sciences.
Human bodies in the history of religions do all sorts of superhuman things. They levitate. They bi-locate, they know the physical future, and they experience different types of conscious energy. To name just a few.
But we have to be very careful with that past. Very suspicious bias.
What we are often dealing with in the UFO illogical materials is what Christian theology would call demonology, or in other, more positive or transformative modes, angelology. Basically, entities that are not human beings have different types of bodies and are not God.
Such entities have been given multiple interpretations in different religions, and I really want to stress that I'm not assigning my name due to the Christian interpretation, but the demonic beings in particular are generally seen as fairly low within the total ecology of the religions, even below the human, the living human.
This is as true in Hindu South Asia as it is in Christian Europe. This does not mean that this is what such entities, in fact, are going to be really, really clear here.
We also have to remember that both the soul and its double have been called demons by elite religious practitioners. The demon or daimon, as they called it in Greek, is in fact an ancient figure of immense importance and nuance.
Things are different today, but not that different in the modern you of illogical literature. For example, the entities are often considered to be future humans, an interpretation to which I am much drawn and actually find quite persuasive.
…My point, though, is not to opt for a particular model of angels, aliens, or future humans.
My point is that even within the religious traditions themselves, far above the demons or aliens, and very much within the reach of living human beings, are the mystical experiences of unity, communion, emptiness, enlightenment, liberation, deification, and physical metamorphosis that are all understood to be the real purpose and goal of human life.
We do not need to sign our names to any of these particular belief systems, but we should learn from their attempts at ordering the anomalies and affirming both the spiritual and physical nature of the beings involved.
…And it leads to all kinds of belief systems or interpretations from a historical and comparative perspective. None of these systems can be exclusively true for the species as a whole. It is quite possible, of course, that they are all true and some kind of inclusive or pluralist kind of way.
That is, it is possible that all of these belief systems give relative witness to a set of human responses to this super presence.
Such a comparative practice is embedded, for example, in the ancient Asian image of the five blind men and the elephant, in this case literally in our living room. All five blind men feel a different part of the elephant: the trunk, the tusk, the leg, the ear, the tail. They all describe it completely differently. But it's the same elephant.
No one is wrong. But no one is completely correct either.
Maybe what we think of as nature behaves differently in different cultural contexts, because it really is different.
Maybe nature is culturally conditioned. Maybe this is why people fly in some historical epochs and don't in others. That would be weird, but that's what it looks like.
So yes, there is a deep connection between the history of religions and the UFO, but we cannot use our present assumptions about society, science, space exploration and extraterrestrials to understand the past within a kind of presentism, as if our present worldview is somehow complete or infallible.
Nor can we use the assumptions of the past about gods or God, or angels or demons to understand the present. We have to be much more sophisticated than this kind of thinking. Whichever way the arrow flies.
There is simply no debate, for example, that the UFO is related to psychical, psychological, and paranormal phenomena. Serious researchers have been saying this for over half a century. How many times do we need to hear this before it becomes common knowledge?
Perhaps the technology effects or projects the paranormal display, like some kind of movie projector? Perhaps these anomalies are expressions of consciousness itself.
Perhaps consciousness itself is the projector. Perhaps, as I have argued for over a decade.
Such events show us in dramatic terms that there is no final separation between mind and matter. This could be good news if we can accept our sciences for what they are and can do, and what they are not and cannot do.
And then integrate those other intellectual disciplines like anthropology, philosophy, and the history of religions that have rich histories of theorizing consciousness or mind and its relationship to the physical world.
I cannot help but notice that many religious believers will literally demonize paralogical phenomena. Literally, UFOs are real, but they are demons. Mediumship is evil and so on. I can explain to you what such people believe, or the biblical roots of such beliefs or convictions, and why the biblical texts themselves are much more complicated and frankly, much more interesting but that is not my point.
My point is that some religions literally demonize what we are trying to talk about. That takes the topic off the table. It does not keep it on the table. That's not helpful.
…the British writer Arthur C. Clarke wrote a science fiction novel many decades ago.
He called it Childhood's End. And 1953, he basically argued that full disclosure of an alien presence, even a friendly one, would render immediately irrelevant all religions on the planet except the book, which implied Buddhism.
This was, by the way, Clarke's religion.
This was the end of childhood. That is the end of religion. I am somewhat with the early Clarke here, although I seriously doubt that the most Buddhist traditions can survive a fuller revelation either.
I guess I am deeply skeptical that anything resembling what we now call religion or science can survive a truly non-human or superhuman intelligence.
I think we are talking about a different kind of humanity here, a future one that has not yet appeared to us. Or maybe it has.
I sometimes joke, for example, that the president, concerned with threats and national intelligence, is fundamentally misguided. That quote “they might as well be trying to shoot down souls”.
Source: Jeff Kripal on Paradoxical Thoughts on the UFO Phenomenon from a Historian of Religions, The Sol Foundation -
About an author: Jeffrey John Kripal is a college professor. He is the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University in Houston, Texas.
His work includes the study of comparative erotics and ethics in mystical literature, American countercultural translations of Asian religions, and the history of Western esotericism from gnosticism to New Age religions.
Illustration: Jalal al-Din Rumi, Maulana - Townspeople, Who have Never Seen an Elephant, Examine its Appearance in the Dark.
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