Shadow Reality – Much like the fact that we walk around in a world full of electronic signals that we do not see such as television, radio, wireless, etc. there is a reality out there that floats in and out of our perceptions – Audio and Text

Text

by Thomas Minderle (Montalk)
01 July 2016

from JAR-Magazine Website

Spanish version

 

Much of what we know about aliens comes from what abductees and contactees themselves report.

Only when such information is factual and relevant can meaningful conclusions be reached. Fabrication, hallucination, and screen memories obscure the truth, and so various protocols exist to improve the signal to noise ratio.

These include cross-correlating multiple eyewitness accounts and using hypnotic regression techniques to bypass the memory blocks and screen memories installed by abductors.

There is yet another source of noise, one not generally known but potentially widespread, which is the mimicry of alien contact by non-alien entities of an occult nature.

Through telepathic means, occult entities have the ability to generate controlled hallucinations in the minds of their victims in order to reshape their beliefs and thereby control their behavior.

Ras Al Khaimah:

demon or alien?

What are occult entities (OEs)?

They are nonphysical beings familiar to ghost hunters, exorcists, demonologists, and occultists; they are what we might call,

• ghosts

• demons

• phantoms

• shadow people

• lower astral entities

• thoughtforms

Their ability to induce guided hallucinations in the vulnerable means that they can project whatever scenario and cast of characters they wish.

If the target is amenable to manipulation via an alien storyline, then that is what is used.

These occult entities can just as easily take the guise of,

• ascended masters

• archangels

• spirit guides

• departed human spirits

That is not to say the latter are all a farce, just that OEs can mimic them to varying degrees.

So the concern is that some individuals claiming alien contact may instead be under the influence of one or more OEs feeding them counterfeit experiences. Since they may appear sane and show no signs of intentional fabrication, one risks concluding that the contact is genuine and contributes to our understanding of the alien presence.

To avoid this contamination of our knowledge pool, we must develop an understanding of occult entities how their abilities, limitations, methods of operation, and possible motivations compare and contrast with those of aliens.

Naturally this concept goes against the simplistic idea that aliens are just demons in disguise, or that the demons of mythology were all just aliens. It’s not that simple. Experiencers who endure both occult and alien activity may notice over time the various nuances that differentiate one from the other; both aliens and OEs exist as distinct categories.

While much can be deduced from personal observation, the context for deeper understanding can only be provided by diving into the existing literature on,

• UFOlogy

• demonology

• metaphysics

• Forteana

• occult theory

The more dots, the more revealing the picture.

Toward that end, I have researched these and related subjects for over two decades and have corresponded with thousands of contacts who were kind enough to privately share with me their anomalous experiences.

Being an abductee myself and having dealt with paranormal phenomena since childhood, I was able to personally verify or support much of what I heard from others or read in the literature.

What follows is a distillation of that effort.

Definitions

In this article, “alien” encompasses the entire cadre of intelligent and technologically sophisticated,

• extraterrestrial

• interdimensional

• time traveling humanoids,

…who are foreign to our civilization.

Some appear to be physical like ourselves while others are quasi-physical in that they normally inhabit a higher meta-reality beyond three dimensions of space and linear time and project themselves into our reality as required.

Through a combination of technology and mind-power they can,

• defy gravity and inertia

• alter the local rate of time

• create structures containing more internal volume than is apparent from the outside

• dephase solid objects to allow passage through solid matter or coexistence within solid matter

• create wormholes between locations

Many can also,

• read human thoughts

• communicate telepathically

• view probable futures with great accuracy

The term “occult entities” (OEs) refers to non-alien autonomous intelligences lacking physical bodies.

For purposes of this article, the case is limited to the more malevolent or mischievous types including:

• dark ghosts, which are deceased humans of a hostile disposition who continue linger near the physical plane after death

• thoughtforms or etheric parasites, which are rudimentary constructs generated in the etheric plane by intense human thoughts and emotions, and which like leeches seek out more of the same nourishment that created them

• demons, who are particularly malicious entities consisting of a conglomerate of powerful thoughtforms, parasites, and degenerate human or alien discarnates

OEs inhabit nonphysical realms called by occultists the “etheric” and “astral” planes.

• The etheric plane is a boundary zone between the physical and metaphysical. It is a subtle energy medium that permeates, underlies, mirrors, and contains the physical universe. Not only does it contain etheric copies of physical objects, anchored in space and time to those objects, but it also contains etheric entities and constructs that have no physical counterparts.

• The astral plane, on the other hand, is an entirely metaphysical plane of consciousness that has little correspondence to locations in our spacetime continuum.

As living human beings, we have not only physical bodies, but also etheric and astral bodies. The latter together comprise the soul.

The more sentient OEs inhabit the astral plane in their native, weakened, or dormant state. There, they can affect us mentally and emotionally because our astral body extends into the astral plane.

If an OE also acquires sufficient etheric energy, it can then condense for itself an etheric body and inhabit the etheric environment, meaning it then establishes a localized presence near the physical plane. And if it gathers even more energy, it may even begin affecting things physically as seen in the poltergeist phenomenon.

But if the OE grows too weak, it loses its grip on physicality and delocalizes back into the astral plane.

Unlike the nonphysical astral realm of the OEs, the meta-reality inhabited by aliens appears to be a more vibrant and pliable state of physicality with degrees of freedom unfamiliar to us. In the meta-reality, they also have perceptual and technological access to the etheric plane allowing for physico-etheric engineering, which allows them to alter the etheric underpinnings of physicality in order to manipulate physical laws at the quantum level.

Aliens have the ability to dephase their physical bodies out of our physical plane and sufficiently into the etheric such that we cannot perceive them with our five senses. If one were to enter an out-of-body state, then by perceiving through the etheric eyes instead of the physical, one would be able to perceive both dephased aliens and etheric OEs.

Having now discussed the basic nature of aliens and OEs, we will take a closer look at how they compare.

Comparison Between Aliens and Occult Entities

Like humans, most aliens have tangible bodies requiring protection and upkeep, and so they too require shelter, transport, clothing, and technology.

It is no surprise, therefore, that aliens are known to have,

• bases

• ships

• uniforms

• various technologies based on advanced sciences

Discarnate OEs, on the other hand, have only the growth and diminution of their subtle energy bodies to worry about, and so they concern themselves with stealing etheric and astral energies from the living in order to sustain their own form.

OEs don’t require special suits, underground bases, flying crafts, or a host of technologies to carry out their agenda. Rather, they operate more via occult, magickal, or metaphysical principles.

If OEs ever do display clothing, they tend to be malevolent human discarnates symbolically projecting silhouettes of human items such as brimmed hats, capes, and long coats.

Whereas aliens are physical or quasi-physical and therefore have biological bodies, OEs are discarnate and have no physical bodies, let alone genetics.

Consequently, OEs are incapable of hybridizing or interbreeding with humans; nor can they leave behind traces of biological material with analyzable DNA, for example the anomalous blond hair found in Peter Khoury‘s case. ^[1]

Succubi and incubi are OEs known to etherically stimulate a target sexually, but this is more a form of sexual energy harvesting whereas certain alien abductions also involve harvesting the biological products for their hybrid breeding projects.

Out of necessity, aliens are much better versed in physical sciences and engineering than OEs. Unlike OEs, they possess real knowledge and equipment that can be shared with select human groups.

For instance, the astras (celestial weapons) of Hindu mythology and Ark of the Covenant in Judaic mythology trace back to times when alien groups gave their human proxies certain extraterrestrial artifacts to help them carry out their missions.

Same can be said today with allegations of human shadow military groups receiving alien technology in exchange for allowing or assisting with alien abduction of the citizenry.

Unlike aliens, OEs only seem capable of providing imitative or caricaturized “science” and “technology” that are nothing more than props to flesh out their deceptive storylines. There is no novel objective logic behind these props or what is observed of them, anymore than one could derive workable technology from the set of a science fiction movie.

They seem to pull their ideas from our collective consciousness, whether by observing our thoughts or by drawing on memories of having previously been human.

Keen experiencers may note that the average OE is never as intelligent or sophisticated as the average alien.

In terms of providing practical knowledge, at best OEs provide occult instructions on rituals and contraptions like,

• ouija boards

• scrying mirrors

• EVP techniques

• etheric portal inducing arrangements,

…that enhance their ability to interface with our world.

Strong OEs have telekinetic abilities and can generate poltergeist phenomena, their strength being derived from the amount of lifeforce energy they feed upon.

They can also generate electric and magnetic anomalies that induce mild interference in electronic devices up to and including electronic voice phenomena.

Aliens, by comparison, can do all this and also shut down car engines, stop video and audio recorders, and deactivate nuclear missiles; their ships can show up on flight radar as anomalous blips, generate loud humming noises and modulated vibrations, leave ground traces, emit bright multicolored flashing lights, and can be seen by multiple eyewitnesses dashing off into the distance at incredible speeds.

Aliens can even levitate and dephase an abductee through solid walls and closed windows via their infamous blue light beam technology, or quarantine the abductee’s local section of spacetime from surrounding spacetime in order to carry out an abduction in isolation from outside perception or even memory.

OEs only have parlor tricks in comparison.

Both aliens and OEs are capable of performing soul abductions.

• In the case of OEs, it occurs via one or more shadow-like humanoid forms literally tugging and pulling the soul out by the head, feet, or arms.

• In alien soul abductions, alien entities may telepathically induce an OBE and then usher the individual toward an awaiting ship; another reported method involves a kind of vortical tractor beam swirling the soul up and out to the ship.

And whereas alien soul abductions then progress into a structured set of procedures such as programming or etheric implant installation, OE abductions are more a crude form of soul snatching with the goal of severing the connection between soul and body in order to hijack the body simply kill the person in his or her sleep.

While little is known about what happens after a successful OE abduction, a number of individuals have recounted failed attempts where they managed to fight off these “shadow people” and return to their bodies.

It appears that only aliens (and military abductors) can perform physical abductions. OE “abductions” are either soul abductions or induced hallucinatory experiences.

In other words, OEs cannot make a person’s body disappear for a period of time, let alone return it in strange locations or positions or with clothes on backwards as is typical of botched alien abduction return procedures.

So a camera or third party observer will see an OE target remain in bed the entire time, or perhaps engage in some sleep talking or sleep walking at most.

Note that aliens can also induce artificial hallucinations, better known as “virtual reality scenarios” in this context, but they are not limited to that, for they can also take the physical body up into a craft or to an underground, underwater, or orbital base.

Further, alien and military abductions or night visitations can leave physical marks on the body including bruises, scars, punctures, scoop marks, burns, cuts, unusual soreness in suspicious areas like behind the ears or in the reproductive regions, and lumps under the skin from subcutaneous implants.

OEs can only affect the body through telekinetic and etheric effects that alter biological processes.

This includes,

• “etheric burns” that rupture capillaries and leave behind a shallow but well defined bruise

• localized allergic or inflammatory reactions of the skin

• liquid filled cysts ^[2] at points on the body where the OE has sunk in its etheric tendrils

However, OEs would not have the means of producing scoop marks, permanent scars, or solid implants that are removable via surgery.

And it goes without saying that OEs also cannot create pregnancies with fetuses that vanish after the first trimester.

Victims of occult parasitism may not have prior history of alien abduction, and so they will lack the associated signs such as a history of nosebleeds, childhood memories of abductions or visitation, irrational childhood phobias of objects or animals resembling the Greys or Reptilians, post traumatic stress syndrome from unremembered abductions, and the aforementioned bodily marks.

Alien abductions tend to start in childhood or infancy and continue for life, whereas OEs being more opportunistic can enter one’s life suddenly during teenhood or adulthood when the entity chances a moment of psychic vulnerability.

Another important difference is that aliens rely heavily on screen memories and memory erasure to cover up what actually happened during an abduction or visitation. This implies that something objective and tangible took place that must stay hidden.

OEs on the other hand are not generally known to use screen memories or memory erasure techniques, probably because they lack the ability to affect our mind-body system with sufficient depth, knowledge, and precision.

The best they can do is psychically interface with the target and generate artificial hallucinations in real time, including dream manipulation, so that the individual perceives or dreams one thing while in the entity is actually doing something else like plugging into his etheric subsystems and siphoning life-force energy.

To illustrate, if a person were to awaken or snap out of such a state, he might then notice a startled OE hovering or stooping over him. The difference between this and alien screen memory is that the latter can be installed after the fact to retroactively cover up a real memory, while OEs seem to manipulate perception solely as the event occurs.

Again, aliens can do the latter but they can also do what OEs cannot.

Aliens prefer to hide their tracks; an abductee would ideally never remember that something happened unless the abductors see strategic value in letting certain things be remembered. Due to alien diligence, someone can go decades without ever realizing he or she is an abductee.

Aliens are working strategically toward some bigger goal and deniability is an important part of maintaining operational security and preventing temporal paradoxes or instabilities.

OEs are less careful. They are opportunistic predators interested in energy feeding and spiritual control; sometimes that necessitates traumatizing a target or loading his mind with a false storyline that gets him/her caught up in their game.

That entails intentionally producing an experience that sticks with him and preoccupies him.

The only track OEs cover is their true nature, which is that they are really demons or malevolent ghosts and not ascended masters or spirit guides or members of the Ashtar Command, that their ulterior motive is food and control.

In fact, many OEs make it a point to take up as much psychological space as possible in the minds of their targes, like a parasite consuming its host bite by bite, while aliens typically seek to minimize that space or compartmentalize it away unless the goal is to create a disinformation vector or zealously cooperative subject.

This ties into the next point, which is that aliens are logistically limited in number, mobility, and time by having to coordinate the timing of their abduction and contact operations for various reasons.

These reasons include,

• avoiding interference or surveillance by rival factions

• having to juggle a vast abduction program with the unique biological development cycles of each abductee

• having to travel large distances between the target’s location and their home bases or waypoints

This means that aliens come and go; their activity is sporadic and calculated, and sometimes years can pass before they return for another visit.

OEs, on the other hand, tend to set up shop at their target locations and hang out constantly. This is called “nesting” by occultists. The OE saturates the local environment, be it a house or bedroom or part of a room, with its dark etheric energies in order to condition that region of space into something more hospitable to their fragile etheric bodies. ^[3]

The entity attaches its nest to walls, corners, furniture, anything that has an extension into the etheric plane and can hold an etheric charge. In this way, over time the OE builds a kind of base that allows it to stay close to the target with minimal energy loss to the environment.

One example would be a nest hanging from the ceiling down toward where the target sleeps. With enough time, an entire building can become infested with OEs who thereby acquire free reign to move about within at leisure.

Instead of coming and going like aliens, OEs can be there all day every day. In cases of localized nesting, one giveaway is that one’s vital energy, dreams quality, mood, and mental coherence all improve when changing location.

For example, one correspondent who had for years dealt with tormenting voices by a particularly demonic class of OEs experienced significant relief after her apartment caught fire and she had to move to a new place. The new home was not yet nested by the OEs and so she was free of them for the time being.

To go from 24/7 attention to little or no attention simply by moving a few blocks is highly uncharacteristic of alien contact, but highly suggestive of an OE presence. In addition to setting up nests, OEs also try to worm their way ever deeper into a target’s mind and soul with the goal of full possession. Then they can control the target from the astral plane regardless of where he or she travels.

Now, there appear to be metaphysical laws in place and instinctual defense mechanisms in human beings that prevent OEs from doing this to just anyone and everyone at any time, which is why they have to be selective in whom they choose.

Prime targets include,

• those who have been spiritually weakened by heavy drug or alcohol abuse

• those whose minds and souls have been fractured by trauma

• those whose inborn mind-body-soul structure makes them innately prone to easily slipping into hypnagogic and hypnopompic states where OEs can more easily be perceived

• the emotionally neurotic who are easily spooked

• especially the psychically sensitive who are by definition more perceptive and responsive to, and thus manipulable by, the OE’s audio, visual, and kinesthetic telepathic projections

To get around some of the metaphysical laws that bar them from more deeply exploiting their targets, OEs frequently seek the target’s permission to enter them.

This can be done by way of trickery or wearing them down until they lose the will to resist.

For example, it can be done through a series of manipulated dreams that make the target believe the OE is something benevolent, or it can be done directly via telepathic voice interactions where the OE simply asks,

“may I enter?” or “so you give us permission to enter?” or where they repeat hypnotic commands such as “let us in” until the target gives in.

Another OE tactic involves dangling bait, perhaps a serendipitously induced hallucination or sensation that catches the target’s interest and piques his curiosity until he willing reaches out for whatever is at the other end of that mystery. That also amounts to giving permission.

Whatever the case, if the target agrees, then protective barriers fall away and the OE rapidly gains control of the target’s biological-etheric perceptual pathways.

The resulting voices, sensations, dreams, and/or visuals then work to mislead or torture the target toward spiritual destruction.

Aliens can also spin such false storylines and induce virtual reality scenarios telepathically, but the difference is that they do it for strategic reasons that go beyond spiritual control and energy feeding.

For instance, they might need to create a disinformation vector to write a book or website serving their agenda in some way. Or they simply seek to create smoke (multitudes of contradictory nonsensical storylines) that obscures the signal of what they’re really up to.

Their efforts are generally not as sadistic or spiritually poisonous as what OEs engage in, at least not in the short term, because negative alien factions seem more concerned with manipulating the destiny of our planet and shaping the timeline for their benefit. That requires affecting our understanding and perception of them more than anything.

Thus psychological or informational warfare comprises their more ubiquitous activity on this planet.

(One notable exception is the reptilian types of aliens infamous for their terrifying, brutal, and licentious natures; these same beings also seem to feed on fear and life-force energy, which raises the possibility that they are biological hosts for demonic entities.)

So whereas OE false storylines are concocted tales filled with spiritual disinformation to achieve spiritual control, alien false storylines use alien disinformation to achieve alien control of this planet.

Alien control means,

• genetic

• political

• logistical

• military

• informational

• temporal control

Spiritual control means,

• disconnection of soul from divinity

• the snuffing out of,

  • innocence

  • integrity

  • conscience

  • hope

  • freewill within

These two aren’t mutually exclusive and blend in the middle, but one can reasonably make the generalization that aliens and OEs are acting on separate planes of action, one more physical and temporal, the other more metaphysical and spiritual.

Again, this follows from alien still being physical or quasi-physical and OEs being completely discarnate and having only matters of the soul or spirit to worry about.

Indicators of Occult Entity Deception

In summary, here are some signs that suggest OE deception rather than classic alien abduction or alien contact:

• No matter how vivid and involved the hallucinated experience, none of what’s seen demonstrates objective physical interaction with the local physical environment since all of it plays out in his mind.

   

• What objective aspects do exist merely confirm the presence of OEs.

  At best these include poltergeist/EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena) activities, third party witnessing of shadowy nonphysical entities haunting the premises, and the sighting of dark humanoid figures standing nearby or black forms floating/swirling overhead.

   

• No sign of physical procedures having been performed on the individual, such as physical implants, anomalous scars and markings, phantom pregnancies, history of nosebleeds, radiation sickness and conjunctivitis, etc.

  Any marks left on the physical body are solely those explainable by paranormal trauma including etheric energy burns that look like bruises or localized allergic skin reactions from foreign etheric energy contamination.

   

• Whereas alien activity is intermittent, unchecked OE presence rapidly builds up to 24/7 activity that is incessant, pervasive, overbearing, and strongest in buildings where the target spends the most time.

   

• Elaborate storylines may be given that contain too many elements drawn from the target’s own fantasies and wishful thinking mixed with convenient and creative fabrications by the entities.

  Due to the wealth of hallucinatory experience accumulated by the target, he or she soon becomes an “expert” in the delusional paradigm fed to him or her.

  For alien-style storylines invented by OEs, these may be full of large casts of characters, exciting dramas, galactic histories, personal involvement of the target in fanciful space battles and missions, and whatever else keeps the target entertained and ego-engaged.

  These storylines contain nothing of practical value, verifiability, novelty, and truth since they are just fantasies with a spiritually disinformative twist.

   

• The paradigm in question contains directionality only insofar as it is tailored to ensnare the target, weaken him spiritually, and perhaps promulgate spiritual disinformation concerning matters of the soul, the afterlife, and the sovereignty of the human spirit.

  The more successful deception operations lead to human hosts going on to become cult leaders or channeler of these entities, thereby allowing the parasitical OEs to infect and feed upon a wider captive audience.

  Other storylines are designed to play on the target’s paranoid tendencies and drive him to insanity, homelessness, suicide and death.

   

• OE influence can begin suddenly without a prior history of alien abduction or contact. It may start with a minor anomalous event like a voice, unusual dream, bodily sensation, short hallucination, or haunting event that captivates the target like bait on a hook.

  After the target pursues this and donates enough of his energy, the entity may go in for the kill by asking for permission to enter, and then hallucinatory experiences skyrocket.

   

• The target may eventually come off as schizophrenic, though unlike true schizophrenia the phenomenon stops completely if the entities are banished or simply move on to another target.

  Also, unlike medical schizophrenia, these cases are usually accompanied by some level of paranormal activity witnessed by third parties.

Conclusion

If occult entities exist, might they have an interest in imitating aliens? Yes, if that is what provokes a cooperation from a modern mind.

Obviously they cannot imitate fairies, leprechauns, or gods with as much success as they once had. Due to aliens acclimating the public to their existence, the UFO phenomenon and alien presence has saturated our cultural zeitgeist during the 20^th century to such a degree that we now generally find them to be the most plausible otherworldly possibility.

Accordingly, occult entities would have had to change their marketing to swing with the new beliefs. But what gives them away is the intangibility of their hallucinatory projections and the lack of intrinsic logic and objectivity behind their sham contacts and fake ships.

Occult charades, along with aliens themselves using screen memories and false storylines to cover up their activities and generate disinformation, has lead some to believe that the entire UFO phenomenon is nothing but a joke played on humanity by interdimensional tricksters.

But these two interwoven strands (alien and OE) can be separated through diligent research and deduction.

Archeological, mythological, and genetic research ^[4] reveals the existence of an underlying objectivity and tangibility to the alien presence throughout human history.

For instance:

Ancient observers describing advanced technologies that made no sense them and therefore could not have been projections of their cultural expectations, yet which begin making sense to modern investigators armed with knowledge of quantum, hyperdimensional, and transdimensional science.

Or, consider the anomalies in the human genome suggesting we are genetically modified organisms, if not outright genetic creations by some primordial founder race.

None of the preceding examples can be credited to today’s ghosts, demons, and astral parasites who simply lack the technology and tangibility to accomplish such feats.

But that doesn’t prevent them from imitating aliens crudely, fancifully, and ostentatiously by telepathically interfacing with a gullible subject and spinning for them an elaborate belief system.

So we must be mindful of what these beings can do, what they cannot do, and thereby detect when a potential abductee or contactee has been caught up in a case of occult entity deception.

If a case is questionable, then we should be proportionately more cautious and discerning about drawing from it any conclusions about the alien presence.

 

Notes

1. Bill Chalker, Hair of the Alien: DNA and Other Forensic Evidence of Alien Abduction (New York: Pocket Books, 2005).

2. Robert Bruce, The Practical Psychic Self-Defense Handbook: A Survival Guide (Charlotteville: Hampton Roads, 2011).

3. Fore, My Experiences (Grey, Pleiadeans and Oddities – web archive: http://montalk.net/fore.zip).

4. Lloyd Pye, Everything You Know is Wrong, Book One: Human Origins (Lincoln: Authors Choice Press, 2000).

Selected Resources

• The Nightmare, directed by Rodney Asher (Documentary, 2015).
  

• William Baldwin, CE-VI: Close Encounters of the Possession Kind (Alta: Headline Books, 1999).
  

• Eve Lorgen, The Dark Side of Cupid: Love Affairs, the Supernatural, and Energy Vampirism (Rochester: Keyhole Publishing, 2012).
  

• Joe Fisher, The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts (New York: Paraview Press, 2001).
  

• Barbara O’Brien, Operators and Things: The Inner Life of a Schizophrenic (Cambridge: Arlington Books, 1958).
  

• Kyle Griffith, War in Heaven (Spiritual Revolution Press, 1990).
  

• Matti Aladin, We Oppose Deception (Amazon Kindle Edition, 2013).
  

• Jim Sparks, The Keepers: An Alien Message for the Human Race (Columbus: Wild Flower Press, 2008).
  

• Jeannine Marie Steiner, The Masquerade Party at Secret Canyon (Kearney: Morris Publishing, 1998).

 

by Jason Colavito

from Colavito Website

 

 

A critical examination of the role Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos played in setting the stage for the ancient astronaut hypothesis with an emphasis on the connections among “alternative” authors.

 

INTRODUCTION

The concept of extraterrestrials masquerading as deities has existed in one form or another all throughout the 20th century and well into the 21st. As one of a handful of modern myths capable of generating a huge flow of cash into the hands of their proponents (one of the others being the related UFO myth), this legend has grown exponentially to encompass a wide range of pseudo-scientific and fantastic beliefs.

 

These misguided attempts to explain the ancient past in futuristic terms have direct consequences for modern life.

PRECURSORS OF THE MYTH

The late 19th century was ripe with fantastic tales of scientific romance, as H.G. Wells put it. The world was in the throes of the industrial revolution and the remarkable advances in technology which accompanied it. For those living through this time, it seemed as though a limitless world of scientific advance had opened before them.

Thanks to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, scientific materialism became the de facto and unofficial religion of the intelligentsia, so organized religion became a quaint and outdated method of observing and understanding one’s world. Consequently the archetypes of religion needed a new outlet to stay current. This change in religious thinking would become a key component in the ancient astronaut theory.

It was at this time that the first fictional accounts of extraterrestrials emerged in works like Wells’ War of the Worlds. At the same time, Percival Lowell’s mistranslation of the Italian canali and poor quality telescopic pictures of non-existent canals on Mars had convinced the world that a Martian civilization was not just a fiction but a scientific reality. At about this time, the mysterious blimp-like object sighted over America and called the Great Airship Mystery made many people believe that Martians had airships capable of invading earth. This willingness to believe would make ancient astronauts more than just a theory a century later.

By the 1920s, aliens began to make their way into mainstream culture through exposure in a the new media of film. An adaptation of Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon became one of the first movies to feature extraterrestrials. Many naive viewers believed the aliens real because they could not grasp the concepts behind such a radical change in entertainment as the movie. This inherent gullibility of the masses would also play into the ancient astronaut myth.

ORIGINS OF THE MYTH

By the late 1920s an obscure Providence, RI author named Howard Phillips Lovecraft began publishing in pulp magazines a series of stories which history would record as the Cthulhu Mythos. These tales centered on a group of transdimensional and extraterrestrial entities which served as deities to early man. Lovecraft wrote that Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones, as he (sometimes) called the alien gods, came from dark stars. Some lived on a planet he called Yuggoth and identified in the 1930s with the new-found planet Pluto.

In “Call of Cthulhu,” Lovecraft laid out the basics of his mythological conceit. He said that many millennia ago, the Old Ones came from other planets and took up residence on Earth. When the stars were wrong they could not live, so they vanished beneath the ocean or returned to their home worlds where they used telepathic powers to communicate with man. Central to Lovecraft’s mythos, the Old Ones formed a cult and a religion which worshipped the aliens as gods.

 

In the stories, the Old Ones hover half-way between pure extraterrestrial and true gods, as the plot requires. In his novel At the Mountains of Madness, he wrote that a species of the Old Ones created man to serve them, setting up man’s first civilizations: Atlantis, Lemuria and Mu.

Lovecraft used Sumerian, Egyptian and Greek mythology as a basis for his monstrous demigods. He said that his messenger-god Nyarlathotep was a member of the Egyptian pantheon. He identified the Phoenician fish-god Dagon (formerly Oannes) with Great Cthulhu himself, and thus became the first person to link extraterrestrials to ancient religions. Yet Lovecraft never claimed that his stories were anything but fiction.

On the opposite extreme, another science fiction writer, L. Ron Hubbard, began dabbling with the theme of aliens as protagonists in a cosmic battle. Hubbard briefly flirted with Satanism under the guidance of the aging Aleister Crowley, but decided to forge his own idiosyncratic religious belief. By midcentury he was well on his way to founding Scientology, built on the premise that aliens entered a cosmic battle a million years ago and the losers fell to earth where they genetically modified Homo erectus to carry on their genes.

 

There is no direct evidence that Hubbard read Lovecraft, but since both men wrote sci-fi for pulp magazines in the 1930s, it is unlikely that Hubbard was unfamiliar with his rivals work. In fact, since Hubbard was often rumored to steal or appropriate others ideas as his own (related in Russell Miller’s Bare-Faced Messiah), this identification with the Cthulhu mythos is not out of the question.

 

Hubbard became friends with L. Sprague De Camp, a protégé of Lovecraft, and the two men would often spend late nights sharing stories. Undoubtedly, some of these must have related to De Camp’s mentor Lovecraft. At any rate, both Lovecraft and Hubbard created extraterrestrial-based religions. Only Hubbard claimed his was real.

At the same time, the modern myth of the UFO developed from Hollywood’s attempts to film science-fiction stories about extraterrestrials. The most famous legends are the alleged crash of a UFO at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 and the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill in the 1960s.

 

The government explained the Roswell event as a crashed weather balloon, but that answer did not sit well with believers who adamantly insisted that local folklore about dead aliens was true. When the Hill abduction story came into question for its similarity to the movie Invaders from Mars and an episode of The Outer Limits which aired only days before, true believers found ways around the weight of evidence and a series of new abductions spontaneously appeared.

 

With the public distrusting of official explanations and primed to accept the reality of extraterrestrials, the success of the ancient astronaut hypothesis was guaranteed before it was even written.

CHARIOTS OF THE GODS

In the 1950s Russian pseudoscientist Immanuel Velikovsky put forward his theory of periodic catastrophism in a series of books, the most famous of which was Worlds In Collision. He postulated that the asteroid belt descended from an exploded planet, and he said Venus was a comet or asteroid which whizzed by earth causing floods. He said ancient myths of fires in the sky related to the passing of Venus.

 

To make this claim, myths needed to be read literally with a technological eye. In his zeal to prove his refutation of uniformitarianism, Velikovsky provided the final link between extraterrestrials and ancient man. For the first time ancient stories of gods and monsters became literal histories.

On the other side of the world Prof. Charles Hapgood was busy compiling his Path of the Pole (1958: originally Earth’s Shifting Crust) and Maps of the Ancient Sea-Kings (1966), in which he argued that ancient maps clearly show the influence of a pre-Ice Age civilization capable of mapping the world. In the first book Hapgood argued that earths crust slips in one piece, like a loose orange skin, destroying civilization every 20,000 years or so.

 

This thinking derives itself from Velikovsky’s resurgent catastrophism movement of the 1950s. In the second book, Hapgood reconstructs enigmatic maps to prove that the ancients had a detailed knowledge of geography. His reconstructions were predicated on the assumption that the original source maps from which the ancients traced theirs were perfect and followed modern projections. Consequently, he was bound to conclude that the source maps were perfect, for that was the original conceit. His work would go on to heavily influence the father of the ancient astronaut theory, Erich von Däniken.

In 1968 von Däniken published his magnum opus, Chariots of the Gods? in which he postulated that the ancient works of man, from the pyramids of Egypt to the enigmatic Nazca lines, were the work of extraterrestrials who came down to earth and gave civilization to mankind. The book quickly sold millions of copies, generated millions of loyal followers and spawned a Rod Serling-narrated film adaptation, In Search of Ancient Astronauts.

There is no direct evidence* that von Däniken read Lovecraft or followed Hubbard, but it is doubtful that a young man consumed with the fantastic could have been ignorant of the Lovecraft mythos, even if second-hand. By the 1960s, Cthulhu and his minions had entered, even if tangentially, into hundreds of stories and novels of the weird and fantastic because Lovecraft, who died in 1936, had encouraged his fans to use his fictional creatures in their stories.

 

This was done to give an air of verisimilitude to the tales. During the 1960s many people went in search of Lovecraft’s gods, believing them real. Even if von Däniken never read “Call of Cthulhu,” the idea was in the zeitgeist.

Von Däniken freely admitted the debt he owed to Hapgood and Velikovsky. His books are laced with liberal references to their work. Von Däniken had plenty of time to read Velikovsky and Hapgood because he was in jail. Von Däniken said that he wrote Chariots of the Gods? while working as a hotel apprentice at age 19 (he never finished school). This would place his book in 1954, yet the book was not published until 1968, the same year that his trial ended.

 

Despite his hints in Chariots that his imprisonment stemmed from opposition to his radical theories, Swiss records show he was apparently jailed for embezzlement, having spent 40,000 Swiss francs belonging to his hotel to fund a trip around the world. He would later claim this trip was research for his book. In fact, the only way to place Chariots before Hapgood would be to assume that von Däniken’s world-tour counted as writing his book. Yet since Hapgood and Velikovsky are mentioned in Chariots, this is obviously wrong.

Von Däniken claimed his book would change the world:

“Even if a reactionary army tries to dam up this new intellectual flood, a new world must be conquered in the teeth of all the unteachable in the name of truth and reality.”

Unfortunately, much of Chariots and its immediate sequels Gods from Outer Space (1970) and Gold of the Gods (1972) is heresay, misinformation or outright fabrication.

 

In the mid-1990s von Däniken admitted that some of the original Chariots material was fabricated, but he added that the fraud was necessary to sell the “truth” to the unbelievers. To date, believers have bought millions of copies of his 25 books, and very few question the validity of his arguments.

The many faults and flaws of Chariots and its sequels did not stop the UFO and paranormal community, eagerly seeking credibility, from adopting von Däniken’s view as the unofficial version of history through which they would interpret modern events. By 1976, von Daniken’s theories would branch in two directions leading ultimately to the strange world of alternative history and human cloning.

 

That year Robert Temple published The Sirius Mystery and Zecharia Sitchin published The Twelfth Planet, each a milestone in the paranormal world-view.

THE SIRIUS MYSTERY

Filip Coppens argues on his website that Temple’s Sirius Mystery is the more important of the two 1976 works because Temple’s book attained the status of a semi-scientific work. In it, Temple claimed that the Dogon tribe of western Africa obtained esoteric knowledge of the binary nature of the star Sirius through contact with ancient Egypt.

 

He went on to claim that Egypt received its wisdom about the two-in-one star Sirius from amphibious aliens from that star system who came to earth and founded civilization in the guise of the Sumerian creator-god Oannes, known in the Bible as Dagon, which we have seen Lovecraft identify with his alien-god Cthulhu.

Temple built on the then-current science and related his findings to the scientific dissertation Hamlet’s Mill by Georgio de Santillana and Hertha von Deshund. That book made the claim that the ancients had a very sophisticated knowledge of astronomy which they encoded in their myths and religions. Temple took it one step further and attributed that knowledge to Sirius-dwelling amphibians.

In their otherwise fanciful and unreliable book The Stargate Conspiracy, Lynn Pickett and Clive Prince discovered that Temple received heavy influence from Arthur Young, his mentor. Young was a believer in The Nine, a group of entities psychics of the 1950s claimed represented the nine creator-gods of ancient Egypt.

 

Significantly, these Nine stated (through mediums) that they were extraterrestrials from the Sirius star system. Young attended the 1952 first contact with the Nine, initiated by Andrija Puharich who became famous as the man who brought alleged psychic spoon-bender Uri Gellar to America in the 1970s. The Nine seem heavily influenced by the quasi-mystical Satanism-cum-Egyptology of Aleister Crowley, who influenced Hubbard’s Scientology.

 

The Nine added the extra dimension of UFOs, which were all the rage after the Roswell incident.

Pickett and Prince conclude that Temple’s Sirius Mystery represented a young man’s attempt to please his mentor, and they discovered that the Dogon’s esoteric knowledge of Sirius was provided by the anthropologists studying the tribe, Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen.

 

Anthropologist Walter van Beek talked to the Dogon in 1991:

“All agree… that they learned about the star from Griaule.”

Yet Temple provided a unique addition to the growing mythology about cosmic ancestors. In The Sirius Mystery Temple identifies specific Greek and Egyptian cities with stars, and he makes the extraordinary claim that certain Greco-Egyptian oracle centers, like the Oracle at Delphi, form a giant picture of the constellation Argo. For the first time, the stars had an image on earth.

This unique interpretation of ancient construction was quickly noticed by a former surveyor and amateur archaeologist named Robert Bauval. He sought to apply Temple’s star maps to ancient Egyptian constructions. Bauval noticed a similarity between the layout of the three pyramids at Giza and the three belt stars of the constellation Orion.

 

When he used the Pyramid Texts to identify one with the other, he knew he had something important. He teamed up with Adrian Gilbert to write The Orion Mystery (1994). Gilbert was famous for his book The Mayan Prophesies, where he used the last day of the Mayan calendar, December 23, 2012, as the day of Armageddon in a prediction of cosmic doom.

Bauval’s theory had a simple elegance which previous attempts to rewrite history lacked. The pyramid-star alignment seemed logical and looked convincing. Then Bauval took it a step further and claimed (because Hamlet’s Mill said so) that the Egyptians understood the movements of the stars over time, the precession of the equinoxes, which cycles the stars around the sky every 25,800 years. Therefore, the pyramids must be precisely aligned to the stars. Bauval claimed that the pyramids matched the stars at only one date: 10,500 BC. Ergo, civilization must be that old.

At the same time British author and journalist Graham Hancock arrived in Egypt to explore the work of tour guide John Anthony West and maverick geologist Robert Schoch who both claimed that the great Sphinx dated back to around 10,500 BC on evidence that the statue had been weathered by water.

 

Hancock had become interested in ancient mysteries as a result of his search for the Ark of the Covenant and the subsequent success of his book on the subject, The Sign and the Seal. He sought fresh mysteries to bring to his readers, so the wonders of Egypt were a good place to start. Hancock met Bauval and the two became fast friends. Hancock then published his massive tome on ancient history Fingerprints of the Gods (1995) and wrote a sequel, Mystery of the Sphinx (1997) with Bauval.

In those books Hancock laid out his Temple – and von Däniken – inspired theory that the ancient marvels, like megalithic Tihuanaco and the Pyramids, were the work of a lost civilization which vanished with the Ice Age. Hancock used much of the same evidence as von Däniken but dispensed with the extraterrestrials, cloaking his logic in the mythography of Hamlet’s Mill.

 

Hancock argued that subtle changes in the stars were the driving force behind ancient myth. Much like Lovecraft’s Old Ones for whom when the stars were wrong, they could not live, Hancock implied that the cycle of precession brought with it the beginning and the end of civilizations.

Like the 19th and early 20th century hoaxes of Lemuria and Mu, which Lovecraft borrowed for his ancient civilization, Hancock saw the ancient lost world as one of high technology and culture. Yet by the time he and Robert Bauval wrote The Mars Mystery (1998), their view had changed. The authors now claimed that the lost civilization could have been destroyed by an asteroid during a meteor shower which also wiped out Martian civilization.

 

They implied that previous to this, Mars and Earth could have had sustained contact because of the Face on Mars. They speculated that perhaps Martians had given their civilization to earth, after the work of Richard Hoagland, a von Däniken-inspired researcher.

Yet today Hancock is the king of alternative history, and his theories influence science. Today some scholars have begun to believe the Pyramids represent Orion, and many Egyptologists have begun to examine the role of stars and star-alignments in ancient history. While this is not exclusively the result of Hancock’s books, his market power has forced science to react and incorporate some of his evidence, gathered from other researchers, into mainstream thought.

To date, many monuments have been related to constellations and star images. They include the temples of Ankgor Wat (Draco), the Chinese Pyramid Field (Gemini) and the cathedrals of Notre Dame in France (Virgo).

In the end, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu has wormed his way into science and changed the form of human knowledge. Yet the other side of this picture is darker and more disturbing. That story stems from the other book of 1976.

THE TWELFTH PLANET

Zecharia Sitchin burst onto the scene in a wave of von Däniken furor. Sitchin firmly believed the hypothesis of extraterrestrial intervention in ancient history and sought to apply his knowledge of Sumerian cuneiform and hieroglyphics to providing evidence to fit his theory.

 

By loosely interpreting ancient myths and combining them with von Däniken’s “proof,” Sitchin was able to weave a tale of ancient astronauts departing from the hidden planet Nibiru or Marduk (the Twelfth Planet – the others being the nine planets, the sun and the moon) and arriving on earth where they mined gold to save their planet – very similar to Lovecraft’s Yuggoth.

 

The planet, of course, fell into the solar system and by strange physics created Earth by smashing another planet in the asteroid belt. This all happened about 450,000 years ago, Sitchin said. He called the leader of the aliens Marduk, after the Babylonian god; and he added that Marduk’s attendants were the Anunnaki, the 50 faceless gods of Sumer whom Temple equated to the 50-year orbit of the Sirius stars around each other. The Anunnaki will make another appearance before the end of this paper.

Sitchin built on von Däniken and Velikovsky, adding to the myth a unique aspect. If extraterrestrials had given man civilization, why could they not have created man, for does the Bible not say that God created man in his own image? Sitchin claimed Sumerian sources clearly indicate that the expedition to earth required the Anunnaki to genetically engineer the human race and clone them on a vast scale to provide slave labor for their gold-mining operations – not unlike Lovecraft’s Old Ones. He goes on to say that man and the gods have quarreled for thousands of years, shaping human destiny. He claims to know the identity of of Yahweh, the Hebrew God, but reminds people to buy his latest book for that revelation.

Sitchin sought credibility by distancing himself from the burgeoning UFO movement. He said there were clear differences between ancient and modern UFO encounters. He implied that modern aliens are a different, unrelated species from the old gods. For him, the ancient astronauts departed earth and left their mark on Mars, which they used as a rest-stop on the way back to the Twelfth Planet.

On page 163 of The Twelfth Planet, Sitchin presents a hand-drawn picture, without citation, of a presumably Sumerian cylinder with wings topped by a bird, of which he asked,

“What or who was the Eagle who took Etana to the distant heavens? We cannot help but associate the ancient text with the message beamed to earth in July 1969 by Neil Armstrong, commander of the Apollo 11 spacecraft: Houston! Tranquility base here. The Eagle has landed.”

As Paul Hafernik points out, this argument is pointless. It makes one wonder why these ancient astronaut authors are obsessed with rockets. After all, advanced civilizations should logically have moved beyond the need for fuel-inefficient rockets. However when these books were written, rockets were state of the art.

To date over 30 books by other authors have followed the same vein as Sitchin’s prolific output. But Sitchin’s fans are a loyal bunch. When one of the authors supporting the Sitchin hypothesis disagreed with Sitchin on the rocket point, fire and brimstone rained from the paranormal community.

 

Alan F. Alford wrote Gods of the New Millennium (2000) in which he disagreed with Sitchin’s claim that resurrections in mythology referred to rockets carrying Anunnaki aliens back to their home planet. On April 6, 2000 Alford, who calls himself the voice of common sense, wrote on his website that Sitchin’s theory was wrong:

“I began to realize that the ancient Egyptian gods were not flesh-and-blood extraterrestrials at all. On the contrary, the Egyptian gods were personifications of celestial powers.”

Readers protested by the hundred and Sitchin demanded that Alford not criticize his theory any longer. Far from the open-minded debate alternative authors allegedly encourage, this dissent back to orthodoxy incited a tremendous backlash against the heretic.

But Sitchin wrote many (many, many, many) more books, and his philosophy would influence many authors to come. David Childress, for example, wrote a book about ancient high-technology (including atom bombs) titled, appropriately enough, Technology of the Gods (2000). However, Sitchin’s most lasting impact came in the realm of religion.

Sir Laurence Gardner is the official historian to the House of Stewart, and he has traced the Stewart lineage back to the presumed children of Christ in his best-seller Bloodline of the Holy Grail (1996), in which, incidentally, he identified the Notre Dame cathedrals with Virgo. In his new book Genesis of the Grail Kings (2000), Gardner argues that the Stewart line, through Christ, has its ultimate origins in the line of David, King of Israel.

 

David, in turn, descended from a line of Sumerian kings whose polytheistic religion transformed into Judaism. Gardner believes the Davidic line received its divine right to rule due to descent from the Anunnaki, for whom he adopts Sitchin’s identification with aliens.

On a darker note, both Temple’s Sirius Mystery and Sitchin’s Twelfth Planet were eagerly adopted by UFO cults seeking to provide a mythical and historic backdrop for their New Age faith that beneficent aliens would rescue the elect from Earth in a spaceship. In 1998 the Heaven’s Gate cult committed mass suicide while expecting a spaceship trailing behind the comet Hale-Bopp to receive their souls for transport to a hollowed-out planet Pluto, which Lovecraft called Yuggoth, home of the alien Old Ones.

In a similar vein, Claude Vorhillon claims that on December 13, 1973 he contacted a UFO manned by the Elohim (identified with the Anunnaki) and received a revelation about humanity. In a disclosure too close to Hubbard’s Scientology to be coincidence, he learned that man was the genetically engineered product of alien experimentation. Vorhillon then changed his name to Raël and christened his new faith the Raëlian Revolution. His church claims 55,000 members in 84 countries.

Raël claims that the Elohim (Anunnaki) told him in 1973,

“We were the ones who made all life on earth, you mistook us for gods; we were at the origin of your main religions.”

On the surface it would seem that this faith is independent of Sitchin because it was founded before Twelfth Planet debuted. However, a closer reading of Raëlian literature shows that the first Raëlian book was not published until 1976, the year of Temple’s and Sitchin’s books; and the cult took off in the early 1980s. Only then did the Raelians begin to add genetic engineering to their doctrines of faith.

 

Consequently, it would seem that Raël’s faith was originally a von Däniken/UFO cult which took on the trappings of genetics and Anunnaki (Elohim) after Sitchin and Temple made their “discoveries.” Sitchin is referenced on the Raëlian website. Yet even if Raël did come up with his ideas in 1973, he could have gotten them from hints in von Däniken’s early works which Sitchin developed into his theories. In short, Raëlian belief clearly stems from the ancient astronaut movement of the 1960s combined with the concurrent UFO movement.

While the Raëlian Revolution would seem like harmless belief, there is a serious issue involved. Because Raelians believe extraterrestrials created man by genetic engineering and cloning, they believe it is their religious duty to clone humans. The Raëlians are in the process of cloning a 10-month-old Swiss child whose tragic death left its parents heartbroken.

 

A professor at Hamilton College in Hamilton, NY, who is a member of the Raëlian Revolution, said in March 2001 that the Raëlian cloning project was almost complete and the clone would be implanted within the month. Ethicists immediately raised objections to the cloning, citing the high failure rate and moral considerations.

 

Prof. Brigitte Boisselier resigned from Hamilton in April, 2001 to pursue cloning exclusively, but shut down her cloning lab on June 30, 2001 while a federal grand jury investigated the cloning venture. More than a year later, in December 2002, Boisselier held a news conference to announce the birth of the first human clone, though she offered no immediate evidence to prove her claim.

CONCLUSION

Thus we have seen how the fictional world of H.P. Lovecraft gave rise to alternative archaeology, ancient astronauts and new religions. We have also seen that each of these phenomena produced unforeseen consequences affecting life today. From Egyptology to human cloning, Great Cthulhu still stalks the vistas of the human mind, though he has vanished from direct sight and cloaked himself in the guise of science.

 

What began as fiction has become in the minds of many incontrovertible fact with consequences far beyond the make-believe horrors of Lovecraft’s fiction.

 

by Chip Walter
excerpted from Thumbs, Toes, and Tears

October 25, 2006

from Kurzweilai Website

 

…We will no longer be Homo sapiens, but Cyber sapiens – a creature part digital and part biological that will have placed more distance between its DNA and the destinies they force upon us than any other animal … a creature capable of steering our own evolution….

 

Today nature has slipped,

perhaps finally,

beyond our field of vision.
O. B. Hardison Jr.

Now after six million years of evolution, where do we go next? How will evolution, our newly arrived intellect, our primal drives and the powerful technologies we continually create, change us?

Our current situation is unlike anything nature has seen before because we are not simply a by-product of evolution, we are ourselves now an agent of evolution. We are this animal, filled with ancient emotions and needs, amplified by our intellects and a conscious mind, embarking on a new century where we are creating fresh tools and technologies so rapidly that we are struggling to keep pace with the very changes we are bringing to the table.

Where will this lead?

Will we develop new brain modules, new appendages, revamped capabilities just as we have over the past six million years? Absolutely, but probably not in the way we suspect.

It appears, if we look closely, that the DNA that has been such a perfect ally in the evolution of life, may itself be in for a revamping. Evolution may be prowling for a new partner. And the partner may be us, or at least the technologies we make possible.

The irony is that it takes a being like us, a human being, to bring about change this fundamental.

The job requires an amalgamation of high intelligence and emotion, conscious intent, primal drives and great quantities of knowledge made possible by minds that can communicate in highly complex ways. If you pulled any one of these out, the future, at least one involving intelligent, conscious creatures like us, would fall apart.

It takes not just cleverness, but passion, sometimes fear, fired by focused intention, to create and invent.

Without this combination there would be no technologies, no wheels or steam engines or nuclear bombs or computers. And there would be nothing like the world we live in today. At best we would still be huddled in the black African night, eking out whatever existence the predators waiting in the darkness around us would allow.

Not even fire would be our friend.

But the traits that have shaped us into the human beings we are have endowed us with strange abilities, and they are hurtling us into a future radically unlike the past out of which we have emerged. And that future will be profoundly different from anything most of us can imagine.

Take the thinking of Hans Moravec as an object lesson.

Moravec is a highly respected robotics scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. In the late 1980s, he quietly passed his spare time writing a book that predicted the end of the human race.

The book, entitled Mind Children, didn’t predict that we would destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons or rampant, self-inflicted diseases, or undo the species with self-replicating nanotechnology. Instead, Moravec, who had an abiding and life-long fascination with intelligent machines, predicted we would invent ourselves out of existence, and robots would be the technology of choice.

In a subsequent book (Robot, Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind) Moravec explained that this transformation would unfold one technological generation at a time, and, because of the blistering rate of change today, would pretty much run its course by the middle of the 21st century.

We would manage this by boosting robots up the evolutionary ladder, roughly in decade-long increments, making them smarter, more mobile, more like us. First they would be as intelligent as insects or a simple guppy (we are about there right now), then lab rats, then monkeys and chimps until, finally one day, the machines would become more adept and adaptive than their makers.

That, of course, would quickly raise the question:

“Now who is in charge?”

• Would Homo sapiens, after some 200,000 years living on top of the planet’s food chain, no longer rule the roost?

• Would we, in the cramped space of this evolutionary ellipsis, find ourselves playing Neanderthal to technologies that had become, like us, self-aware – the first conscious tools built by a conscious tool-making creature?

The unavoidable answer would be, yes.

Evolution will have found through us a new way to make a new creature; one that could forsake its ladders of DNA and the fragile, carbon-based biology that nature had been using for nearly four million millennia to manage the job.

The “end” would not come in the form of a Terminator style invasion, it would simply unfold in the natural course of evolutionary events where one species, better adapted to its environment replaces another that is no longer very fit to continue. Except the new species wouldn’t be cobbled out of DNA, it would be fashioned from silicon, alloy, and who knows what else, invented by us. But once successfully invented, we wouldn’t be necessary any more.

Whether events will play out like this or not remains to be seen.

But Moravec’s scenario makes a point – the world and the life upon it changes, and simply because we are the agents of change, doesn’t mean we won’t be affected by it.

***

It is strange to think of the invention of machines, even robotic ones, as having anything to do with Darwin’s natural selection.

We usually regard evolution as biological – a world of cells, DNA and “living” creatures. And we think of our machines as unalive, unintelligent and shifted by economic forces more than natural ones. But it isn’t written anywhere that evolution has to be constrained by what we traditionally think of as biology. In fact each day the lines between biology and technology, humans and the machines we create are blurring.

We are already part and parcel of our technology.

Since the day Homo habilis whacked his first flint knife out of flakes of flint, it has been difficult to know whether we invented our tools or our tools invented us. The world economy would crash if its computer systems failed. We can’t live without laptops, palmtops, cell phones or iPods, which grow continually smaller and more powerful.

We regularly engineer genes, despite the raging debates over stem cell therapy. A human being will very likely be cloned within the next five years. We now have computer processors working at the nano (molecular) level and microelectromechanical machines (MEMS) that operate at cellular dimensions. Already electronic prosthetics make direct connections with human nerves, and electronic brain implants for Parkinson’s disease and weak hearts are common place. Scientists are even experimenting with electronic, implantable eyes.

New clothing weaves digital technologies into their fiber and brings them a step closer to being a part of us. The military are working on “battle-suits” that will fit like gloves, a kind of second skin and amplify a soldier’s senses, strength and ability to communicate, even triangulate the direction of a bullet headed his or her way.

What next? Speech, writing and art enabled us to share inner feelings in new and powerful ways.

But it takes months or years to learn a new language or how to play the piano or master the art of engineering bridges and buildings.

• Will new technologies that accelerate communication (virtual reality, telepresence, digital implants, nanotechnology) create new ways to communicate that can by-pass speech?

• Will we someday communicate by a kind of digital telepathy, downloading information, experiences, skills, even emotions the way we download a file from the Internet to our laptop?

• Will we become machines, or will machines become more powerful versions of us?

• And if any of this comes to pass, what ethical issues do we face?

• At what point to do we stop being human?

Lynn Margulis, probably the world’s leading microbiologist, has argued that this blurring of technology and biology isn’t really all that new.

She has observed ¹ that the shells of clams and snails are a kind of technology dressed in biological clothing. Is there really that much difference between the vast skyscrapers we build or the malls in which we shop, even the cars we drive around, and the hull of a seed?

Seeds and clam shells, which are not alive, hold in them a little bit of water and carbon and DNA, ready to replicate when the time is right, yet we don’t distinguish them from the life they hold. Why should it be any different with office buildings, hospitals and space shuttles?

Put another way, we may make a distinction between living things and the tools those things happen to create, but nature does not.

The processes of evolution simply witness new adaptations and preserve those that perform better than others. That would make Homo habilis’s first flint knife a form of biology as sure as a clamshell, one that set our ancestors on a fresh evolutionary path just as if their DNA had been tweaked to create a new, physical mutation, say an opposable thumb or a big toe.

Even if these technological adaptations were outside what we might consider normal biological bounds, the effect was just as profound, and far more rapid. In an evolutionary snap, that first flint knife changed what we ate and how we interacted with the world and one another. It enhanced our chances of survival. It accelerated our brain growth which in turn allowed us to create still more tools which led to yet bigger brains.

And on we went, continually and with increasing speed and sophistication, fashioning progressively more complex technologies right up to the genetic techniques that enable us to fiddle with the self-same ribbons of our chromosomes that made the brains that conceived tools in the first place. If this is true, all of our technologies are an extension of us, and each human invention is really another expression of biological evolution.

Moravec and Margulis aren’t alone in asking questions that force us to bend our traditional thinking about evolution.

Scientist and inventor Ray Kurzweil has, like Moravec, pointed out that the rate of technological change is increasing at an exponential rate. Also like Moravec, he foresees machines as intelligent as we are evolving by mid century. Unlike Moravec he doesn’t necessarily believe they will arrive in the form of robots.

Initially Kurzweil sees us reengineering ourselves genetically so that we will live longer and healthier lives than the DNA we were born with might normally allow. We will first rejigger genes to reduce disease, grow replacement organs, and generally postpone many of the ravages of old age. This, he says, will get us to a time late in the 2020s when we can create molecule-sized nanomachines that we will program to tackle jobs our DNA never evolved naturally to undertake.

Once these advances are in place we will not simply slow aging, but reverse it, cleaning up and rebuilding our bodies molecule by molecule. We will also use them to amplify our intelligence; nestling them among the billions of neurons that already exist inside our brains. Our memories will improve; we will create entirely new, virtual experiences, on command, and take human imagination to levels our currently unenhanced brains can’t begin to conceive.²

In time (but pretty quickly) we will reverse engineer the human brain into a vastly more powerful, digital version.

This view of the futures isn’t fundamentally different from Moravec’s brain-to-robot download, except it is more gradual. Either way we will have melded with our technology if, in fact, those barriers ever really existed in the first place, and in the end, erase the lines between bits, bytes, neurons and atoms.

Or looked at another way, we will have evolved into another species.

We will no longer be Homo sapiens, but Cyber sapiens – a creature part digital and part biological that will have placed more distance between its DNA and the destinies they force upon us than any other animal. And we will have become a creature capable of steering its own evolution (“cyber” derives from the Greek word for a ship’s steersman or navigator – kybernetes). The world will face an entirely new state of affairs.

Why would we allow ourselves to be displaced? Because in the end, we won’t really have a choice. Our own inventiveness has already unhinged our environment so thoroughly that we are struggling to keep up. In a supreme irony we have created a world fundamentally different from the one into which we originally emerged.

A planet with six and a half billion creatures on it, traveling in flying machines every day by the millions, their minds roped together by satellites and fiber optic cable, rearranging molecules on the one hand and leveling continents of rain forest on the other, growing food and shipping it overnight by the trillions of tons – all of this is a far cry from the hunter-gatherer, nomadic life for which evolution had fashioned us 200,000 years ago.

So it seems the long habit of our inventiveness has placed us in a pickle. In the one-upmanship of evolution, our tools have rendered the world more complex and that complexity requires the invention of still more complex tools to help us keep it all under control. Our new tools enable us to adapt more rapidly, but one advance begs the creation of another, and each increasingly powerful suite of inventions shifts the world around us so powerfully that still more adaptation is required.

The only way to survive is to move faster, get smarter, change with the changes, and the best way to do that is to amplify ourselves eventually right out of our own DNA so we can survive the new environments – physical, emotional and mental – that we keep recreating.

Is all of this too implausible to consider? Will Homo sapiens really give way to Cyber sapiens that seamlessly integrate the molecular and digital worlds just as our ancestors merged the technological and biological worlds two million years ago?

Evolution has presided over stranger things. It took billions of years before the switching and swapping of genes brought us into existence. Our particular brain then took 200,000 years to get us from running around in skins with stone weapons to the world we live in today. Evolution is all about the implausible. And the drive to survive is a relentless shaper of the seemingly impossible. We ourselves are the best proof.

If all of this should happen; if DNA itself goes the way of the dinosaur, what sort of creature will Cyber sapiens be?

In some ways we can’t know the answer anymore than Homo erectus could imagine how his successors would someday create movies, invent computers and write symphonies.

Our progeny, our “mind children,” will certainly be more intelligent with brains that are both massively parallel, like the current version we have, and unimaginably fast.

• But what of those primal drives that we carry inside our skulls, and those non-verbal, unconscious ways of communicating?

• What of laughter and crying and kissing?

• Will Cyber sapiens know a good joke when he hears one, or smile appreciatively at a fine line of poetry?

• Will he tousle the machine made hair of his offspring, hold the hand of the one he loves, kiss soulfully, wantonly and uncontrollably?

• Will there be a difference between the “brains” and behaviors of he and she?

• Will there even be a he and a she?

• And what of pheromones and body language and nervous giggles?

Maybe they will have served their purpose and gone away…

• Will Cyber sapiens sleep, and if they do, will they dream?

• Will they connive and gossip, grow mad with jealousy, plot and murder?

• Will they carry with them a deep, if machine made, unconscious that is the dark matter of the human mind, or will all of those primeval secrets be revealed in the bright light cast by their newly minted brains?

We may face these questions sooner than we imagine. The future gathers speed every day.

I’d like to think the evolutionary innovations and legacies that have combined to make us so remarkable, and so human, won’t be left entirely behind as we march ahead. Perhaps they can’t be. After all, evolution does have a way of working with what is already there, and even after six million years of wrenching change, we still carry with us the echoes of our animal ancestors.

Maybe the best of those echoes will remain.

After all, as heavy as some baggage can be, preserving a few select pieces might be a good thing, even if we are freaks of nature.

References

1. This was during a conversation with Professor Margulis at her home in western Massachusetts.

2. Note: the current version of a creature can never comprehend the experience of the creature that will follow because it does not yet have the evolved capacity (whatever it is) that will make that experience possible. We cannot accurately imagine what a digitally enhanced brain will conceive any more than Homo erectus could imagine our experience of the world.

by Dawn Bailey,
May 13, 2018
from In5D Website

Spanish version

I wrote about 5^th dimensional negative energy and higher that I look for when helping someone.

These energies will leave you alone until right before ascension to the 5^th. They try and hold you down from ascending by lowering your vibration.

I am now going to go into the 4^th dimensional energies to watch out for. These, of course, are meant to keep you from raising your vibration for ascension too.

• Demons and Entities are the ones most are familiar with.

  There are different ones, but they all do the same. They cause negative emotions and thoughts that can mentally wear you down. They can be very painful to those that feel energy.

  They exaggerate your feelings and can cause you to act out of character.

  Perhaps they might make you say something or act in a way that isn’t you, but will not be able to stop yourself. Once removed, you will go back to normal behavior.

   

• Jinn are a type of demon, but these can get into your electronics and cause some crazy problems.

  They do attach to people, also. They have the ability to leave and come back so they can sometimes be tricky to find and catch.

   

• Etheric weapons and objects. These don’t move around and stay in a small, concentrated area. They can be quite painful to those that feel energy.

   

• Suppression Parasite Entities (SPE) and Super Imposed Influences (SII) are meant to lower your vibration by exaggerating your negative thoughts and emotions.

  I feel SPE’s as a dull, throbbing pain in a small area, usually on my back. I feel SII’s as a heavy pressure on my shoulders, almost as someone having their hands on my shoulders and pushing down on them with their hands.

   

• Discarnate Souls are earth bound souls that never crossed over and are trapped on earth due to unresolved karma. Ghosts fit in this category.

  They will be attracted to people who have the same unresolved karma as they did when living, such as addictions, anger problems, etc…

   

• Elementals are nature spirits that also live in the lower world, too.

  Most are not harmful, such as fairies or pixies. One to look out for is the wraith. Wraiths are black, sticky, and oozy with hooks that attach to the back and spread out, eventually wrapping and hooking around someone’s meridians.

• Goblins are mischievous and don’t hurt you but will try and scare you.

  For example, things might get thrown around your house or doors may open and close by themselves. They like to hide in cabinets and closets. My first encounter with one in my house was scary.

  It went around knocking stuff over and then, when I opened a cabinet, a plastic cup was thrown at me. It missed me because they can’t hurt you, only scare you.

  I shut all my windows but one and ordered it to leave out the open window, and it did.

   

• Incubus/Succubus are demons that attach to women and men, eventually causing sex addictions and sexually demeaning behavior. I have know a few men and one woman with these demons.

  They can cause risky harmful sexual behavior, such as sex addictions and promiscuity that causes a person to suffer.

   

• Hex’s, Curses, Spells, Bindings, and Petitions are forms of witchcraft.

  My problem with witchcraft is that almost everything I have seen is designed to interfere with another persons freewill or cause harm. A spell or curse is a form of intent that sends out a negative thought form, harmful entity, or pattern.

  If you have a string of unbelievable bad luck, it could be caused by a hex.

  One lady I helped had all her bank accounts drained, her credit cards stolen and ran up, and a car accident, all in a week.

  I knew two ladies that practiced Wicca.

  The number one rule of Wicca is cause no harm, but these ladies ignored that rule. They used to be friends and ran a metaphysical shop together. They had a falling out and were no longer friends or partners.

  Since I knew both, I knew they were doing some witchcraft to each other. One of them even showed me the doll she had bound to bind her ex friend and partner.

  Eventually both these ladies had massive health problems and got very sick. Whatever you send to another person comes back to you worse than what you sent.

This is a universal law that no one can avoid.

All negative energy is designed to cause suffering and distractions from you living your purpose. Everyone has the capability to heal themselves. Stay on your path and you will find your own way to heal until you find your own healing method that works for you.

You may need to have some help, perhaps from a healer. I went to a healer before I learned how and she helped me. I learned my own method by watching her work on me.

Just like going to a doctor for physical illnesses, you may need to go to a healer for spiritual illnesses.

Shamans, energy healers, or reiki practitioners are here to help you along your journey. It is also important to follow daily spiritual cleansing practices.

Just like showering every day, you need to take care of your aura and chakras, too.

Someone with blocked chakras and a weak aura are much easier for them to attach to. If you feel drained of energy and in a negative mindset, get your spiritual health checked.

Spiritual imbalances, if left too long, can manifest into physical illnesses…