Month: July 2025

Introduction

Yesterday (25/7/2025) I began my 500th non-fiction book since early December 2018. I have been reading across many categories because it’s not safe just to stick with a couple. For example, if you want to understand religion you must read politics, history, psychology, philosophy and so on. 

This was a wake -up call I got when I was a member of an occult group in the late 1970s, and again in the mid 1980s. Yes, I was so dopey I needed two alarms. 

We would talk esoterica until the cows came home but with no idea whether we were talking nonsense or not. Worse, we used our esoteric jargon to describe the world around us in ways that just got sillier and sillier, and again with no idea whether we had an insightful observation. 

In 1988 I put myself on an occult and esoterica-free diet which lasted until 1995 when I was forcibly inserted back into the realm of woo. 

I broke my occult fast when I impulsively picked up a ‘new age’ magazine and read an article which triggered a sudden flood of memories of an ET abduction incident. I was in Sydney in the early 1970s and was coming down from some very nice acid. I was lying down enjoying flying through a museum full of breathtakingly beautiful artefacts when suddenly the scene snapped, and I found myself in a stark clinical setting on a metal table and surrounded by what I’d now call ETs – the familiar ‘greys’ (I knew nothing of them at the time). I freaked out and sat up. After I regained my composure, I tried to get back to the museum but ended up back on the table. I quit trying and went in search of coffee. 

I had forgotten this experience for around 25 years. I make no claims about it being ‘real’. I don’t know what it was, other than something I encountered while coming down from a trip. The point of recounting it here is because it was a theme that was soon to be powerfully reiterated.

A very short time after finding that magazine I was walking past a bookshop on the way to a cafe for my regular Saturday morning indulgence of coffee, breakfast and newspaper crosswords. Before I knew it, I had walked into the bookshop, picked up a book, paid for it and arrived at the cafe with no idea what I had just bought. It was John Mack’s Abduction. I finished it by the next morning. 

The following week I saw signs advertising a ‘psychic fair’ on the coming Saturday at a local motel. I’d normally avoid such events but now I found myself eager to go. So, I did. It was disappointing until I encountered a woman talking about ET abductions and how she could do regressions to retrieve memories. This was in Bathurst, and she was in Sydney so when I booked a session with her, I had to factor in a 4 drive. 

On that Saturday morning when I set off to Sydney it was around 6:00 that my car refused to start for the first time ever. It was way too early to call to reschedule so I waited 2 hours, trying the car several times with the same result. The car was a Mazda 626 I bought around 1987. It had run flawlessly from the day I got it – until now.

The three things happened next. First, my effort to reschedule went foul of a completely awful telephone call quality – that was weird. Next my car started perfectly normally (and never failed me again). Then, when I formed an intent to get to a new appointment I was flooded with an intense sense of threat. If I tried driving, I would have an ‘accident’. I thought it wiser to quit any such plan. Something didn’t want me to go through with the idea and made no bones about it. 

This series of incidents were the beginning of life altering events that took me from Bathurst to Sydney and then to Dover in the UK, to Port Arthur in Tasmania and then to Lismore in northern NSW in 2.5 years. I had left Lismore in 1993 with no intention of going back. This sequence of remarkable events continued there and end in 2002 when I moved into my current home in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. 

The point of this odd tale is that I had previously consumed books on religion, spirituality and the occult to the exclusion of anything else for over a decade in the belief that this was where I’d find what I was looking for. It wasn’t. I needed the ‘woo fast’ to kick my consciousness into a far better place.

My ‘Aha!’ moment came when a friend and colleague, aware of my interests in spiritual and occult matters, asked me to tell her about those interests. To my astonishment and embarrassment nothing I said to her made any sense at all. I realised I was talking jargon that I could not translate into plain language. In fact, I didn’t really understand what I was saying. I didn’t know anything outside repeating jargon.

Imagine for a moment that the only subject you had developed any expertise in was psychology and the only way you could talk about any idea in depth was using the language of psychology. How would you describe what an emotion is to a person unfamiliar with any psychological jargon?

Of course, a regular psychologist would be familiar with the culture of an educated person and be articulate about politics, science, popular and high culture, sports and so on – sufficient to talk about emotions in a way that would be comprehensible to an average person. This isn’t to say that that average person would understand the conversation, but they would feel they did because the ideas and language would be familiar to them. 

After my embarrassing effort with my friend, I gave myself a good talking in terms I could clearly understand. Was I a wanker or a truth-seeker? Did I want to just accumulate woo brownie points or was I prepared to do the hard work of actually trying to understand what was going on in a serious way?

Artificial categories of knowledge 

We routinely speak of science and religion as if these are two distinct bodies of knowledge. They aren’t. Observation of nature has ever been the trigger of deeper reflection. Belief and knowledge aren’t separate categories either. I think belief serves our psychological needs and knowledges arises really only when we achieved decent self-awareness (I am nowhere near that yet.)

The distinctions we make are useful to convey meaning in certain contexts. And hard distinctions arise only when we anchor our beliefs in a certain set of claims. We can be rational and superstitious. That’s true because ‘rational’ people can also be ‘superstitious’ in ways they will not acknowledge because they have settled on a meaning of superstition that excludes them and others like them. 

In the ‘human sciences’ we have an array of fields – sociology, anthropology, psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience for example. And each field may have subsets. But the distinctions are essentially for administrative purposes only. They share the common theme of the human in all its complexity.

Materialist scientists are fond of pooh-poohing religion, usually unaware that their field, once called natural philosophy, was actually established and advanced by religious or esoteric thinkers.

We celebrate the great advances that science and technology have wrought but we scarcely contemplate the accompanying moral and philosophical influences because we believe that science is entirely rational. 

What is rational is how data is processed but not how it is integrated into the human experience. A belief in the ‘conquest of nature’ or the human right to exploit the natural world is present in Christianity but also transfered to materialistic thought in an unself-reflective way. 

Our technology is arguably more shaped by moral influences that are a legacy of a rejection of religion than by rational thought. Our current concern about global warming may have been precipitated by our technologies but those technologies were shaped by moral choices and beliefs about what is virtuous. 

The dogmas of religion or materialism are incomprehensible without appreciation of history, psychology, philosophy, sociology and so on. No field of inquiry is sufficient unto itself.

Why animism?

Animism was the first idea that let me make sense of a lifetime of experiences that were not positively comprehensible by science or religion. I was either mad or bad. I am neither. 

Animism gives permission to a sense of holism and the universality of intelligence. These aren’t dogmatic positions but just better grounds of possibility from which to permit creative thought and imagination. 

Animism better accords with the insight that humans are mostly crap at thinking. For most of us, what we call thinking is a form of emoting – rarified yes but mostly done fleetingly and badly. 

It is fascinating that the history of thinking about intelligence includes people who we call ‘savants’ as a kind of syndrome. They express what we imagine to be high intelligence without evident effort. Others express genius via inspiration.  Intelligence isn’t the singular attribute of rationality residing in our brains but a synthesis of forms of awareness. The hard graft of rational thought is constantly prone to being ‘derailed’ by emotions. But we should also remember that dogmatic systems like materialism also resist inspiration and succumb to emotions. 

For me there’s a certain kind of natural rationalism embodied in mathematics. But it’s a substratum of consciousness rather than the superstructure. The rationalism our culture reflexively favors is not holistic. This matters hugely because it produces non-holistic outcomes. It has an almost psychopathic character to it – free of emotional contamination. 

In our excitement over AI, we imagine that ‘intelligence’ is data processing power and not the ability to build holistic insight. We seem not able to understand that data processing is only a portion of what intelligence is. We now have theories of multiple intelligences. We can read from Psychology Today that “There is no agreed definition or model of intelligence”.

Calling AI ‘artificial intelligence’ could be a profound mischaracterisation. At the moment it’s a marketing term – and a misleading one at that. That is, unless we understand that the ‘artificial’ component denotes severe limitations relative to the spectrum of available intelligences. We made this error when defining human intelligence as well. Its only been since the mid 90s that we have come to value ‘emotional intelligence’.

I grew up at the tail end of a period of hyper rationalism that began several centuries before. Science was valorized as pure reason. Emotions were thought to be signs of weakness. But it was all a PR con. While it was true that such was ardently believed by a vociferous minority who created a social norm, many people were not like that – but had to perform as if they were. The culture heroes were the (mostly) men who exhibited dazzling capabilities to imagine and make things. They brought us climate change – because their minds did not include moral intelligence or environmental intelligence.

In fact, when we pause to be sensible about it, the ‘rational self’ should be holistic. This used to be the soul until materialism got rid of the holistic element and rebranded higher human consciousness as the mind dominated by the virtuous intellect that is sometimes bedeviled by debilitating and corrupting emotions. However, I should also observe that the ‘rational soul’ of Christianity was assumed to be a slave to theological dogma – free of pagan holism.

I had been going bush solo near my home in southern Tasmania in my quest for geological specimens from age 12. Later I joined a walking club and went on adventures into Tasmania’s southwest wilderness with deeply rational adults with the souls of poets and artists. We craved the holistic stimulation that the wilderness imparted. By the time I left Tasmania for the mainland an animistic spirit had been kindled in me. But it would be decades before I understood what it was. 

My interpretation of animism is that it is a fundamental propensity in the human psyche inherent in us all, and probably in all critters. Rationality is present in all life but it’s just not dominant. It’s not dominant in any life form. 

What makes any life form particular in any way is how it expresses itself in its environment. It’s the instincts, sensations and experiences that convey meaning, value and purpose, not just the extent of rationality, that make us intelligent.

Humans have glommed onto rationality as being the secret sauce of life because we have become accustomed to its imbalance expressed in our non-holistic outlook. We are taught to believe that this denotes superiority and singularity. 

Western civilization is dominated by the Christian dogma of human exceptionalism. We were a special creation aside from other created creatures. There is no evidence for this, just a claim made by home team cheerleaders. 

The conceit of exceptionalism is built into the human psyche. Psychologists have long demonstrated that we have inherently inflated opinions of ourselves. We have a natural potential to believe we are ‘chosen of god’. That’s fine if kept as a private humble conceit. But it becomes toxic if unleashed as a public delusion. It’s rather like the way football fans believe their team is ‘the best’. It’s a great bonding conceit when enjoyed in private but it becomes the trigger for conflict when it goes public and is disputed by other fans who think the same of their own. 

Whether gods or football teams, the communal glue of private conceit becomes the ground for toxic conflict when opened up to the zero-sum truth that there can be only one number one.

The mythologist Joseph Campbell observed that western religious thought was influenced by a traumatic relationship with the divine. In the Christian faith there’s the expulsion from paradise, the attempted genocide of the flood, the persecution of Job and the sacrificial crucifixion of Jesus – to name only a small selection. Materialist and secular thought may not retain any literal belief in these tales, but the deep psychological influences of trauma continue to haunt us. Add to this the dominionistic exploitative mindset and what we have is grounds for a sense of traumatic separation from the embrace of holistic consciousness. And at the same time there’s a craving for exceptional acceptance.

It is little wonder, then, that individualism has become a dominant theme of our culture. But rather than creating a sense of particularity, it has been interpreted and exploited as separation. 

The evidence from the human sciences is clear that intentional effort at greater self-awareness is critical for our collective wellbeing. Greater self-awareness can be seen as a form of intensification or particularization of the individual. From this we build our capacity for empathy and compassion – and through them, holistic awareness. 

This is in compelling contrast to separative notion of individuality which can be used in the exploitative ‘divide and conquer’ rationale.

This is the same message from teachers like the Buddha and the Christ and ET.  In fact, it has been a persistent theme in human culture for millennia. But it has been swamped and distorted by dogmas which claim ready-made truths – so no effort required, just believe. That appeal is stronger if it embraces exceptionalism and exclusivity.

Conclusion

Our collective efforts at understanding the nature of the reality we dwell in paint a picture that is not inconsistent with the deepest spiritual insights. 

Going back to our roots, efforts at understanding this reality were not broken into science and religion but the functional and the sacred – a kind of yin/yang symbolic duality that still reflects a simple unity – a holism. 

Our cultural effort at learning to know our reality is just as sacred. The secular essentially means shared, accessible, knowable and mundanely functional, not other than sacred. Science isn’t other than religion, but other than dogma –  belief without thought or responsibility.

The sacred is what is essential to our existential being – the animistic and the holistic. The functional is what sustains our physical being. Functionality informed by holism is what we don’t have. Now our functionality is informed by existential trauma inherited from a faith we mostly do not follow. The sacred has been misrepresented as thoughtless dogma rather than subtle and complex holism. The spirit rejected in opposition to dogma has become the enemy of reason and virtue. 

Campbell’s insight about the underpinning trauma of separation that informs our culture must be considered. How we see individuality as separation rather than particularity and intensification reinforces this need to rethink.

Of course, like any attempt at a description, this one isn’t ideal. I don’t think we have the scholarship yet to fashion a deft interpretation of the evidence.

What I am arguing is that a wider education is invaluable in one’s search for understanding. My intent is not to assert a truth but to provoke contemplation through disruption of habituated thought. 

Please, disagree with me. But craft an elegant and widely educated argument.  😊

Introduction

I grew up reading sci fi with a passion. At the time it seemed to be about anticipating the future. Then suddenly I stopped when it just became space age costume dramas and morality plays. When The Matrix came along, I was initially excited that there might be a deep idea behind it. That feeling didn’t last long. 

Sci fans of my generation often debated the credibility of the ideas. We didn’t know anything about space flight or robots or future tech or future societies, but we strengthened our fledgling minds on those conversations. Then reality kicked in. 

It seems now that we are in a sci fi cusp age. Space flight is almost a thing. Ditto autonomous robots, energy weapons, amazing tech and ET. It feels like we are halfway through the door to our future. 

At the moment, several things are meshing together for me. There’s a book called The AI Con: How To Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want by Emily M. Bender & Alex Hanna. There’s a YouTube video Senior CIA Officer: Even We Don’t Know What the Phenomenon Is coming hot on the heels of Streiber’s The Fourth Mind. And, strangely, there’s my inquiry into neurodiversity. 

Here’s a summary of these 3 things – isn’t real, we have no idea, and it isn’t what it has become. 

The inflatable lifejacket of emotional certainty we hope will keep us afloat in a swirling ocean of doubt will, if we dare seek truth, elude our efforts to blow it up fully. We seem doomed to be tossed in the currents of change. We can be loose like rag dolls or stiff like true believers.

Below I want to reflect on doubt, certainty and general sense of anxiety about what’s coming next.

What does our love of the natural world tell us?

It seems an uncontested truth that we revive ourselves emotionally and psychically when we escape our human constructed and mediated environment into ‘nature’ – especially where plants grow and critters dwell. I don’t know whether this applies to oceans and desert, save maybe in the short term. (A niece who lives on a catamaran doesn’t think the ocean is equivalent to a forest.)

It seems as though who we are doesn’t end at our skin but extends into landscapes. For some being in a relentless urban setting may have become normal, but it does not appear to be sustainable without us losing something vital. 

The idea that we are separate beings seems to be an illusion. Psychologically we rely on connection and belonging. On an organic level we are a complex community of micro-critters and compounds that connect us to the physical world. How would we really be if severed from what holds and sustains us?

Even Star Trek 2nd has the holodeck where simulations of natural settings can be crafted. But is it just the feeling of immersion or is there an actual dependency on actual nature? Can we actually leave this planet in our biological form for any length of time?

Back 1996/7 I quit Australia for the UK intending to be away long term. But after 13 months I felt a deep malaise. I was homesick – not for human community so much as country. I was suffering spiritually.

Maybe organic forms do best when in their natural settings? Would we survive on Mars sans our terrestrial nature? There’s a fair chance we wouldn’t – and maybe that’s what we should pay attention to first, before getting excited over Musk’s wet red dream of loosening the surly bond of Earth? Is this just a case of a dream based on no substance?

The AI dream

In The AI Con the authors argue that AI is an illusion because there is no mind behind any computer that hosts an AI program. 

The idea that the human mind is created by a rational brain is a materialist’s fantasy. 

There is certainly a ‘rational’ structure to our reality as the actuality of mathematics confirms. And it is evident that our minds engage with that. But to what degree? 

How much of our consciousness is rational process and how much is emotion and how much is instinct? We have been induced to champion Mind over Soul, mostly as a reaction against Christian dogma. In a sense the idea of Mind being the site of reason alone is irrational. Mind as in holistic sense cannot champion rationality as pure reason and discount emotion and instinct as lower unworthy things.

Once we move away from the materialistic paradigm, intelligence isn’t at all brain dependent, and neither is it wholly rational. In fact, once we move away from the body, we still have emotions and at least the vestiges of instinctual reflexes (for a time).

There is a deep temptation to believe that if we can create computer generated simulations of our experience of reality then reality must be made up of entirely rational elements. This quite forgetting that very complex human minds made it this illusion at all possible in the first place. Rational elements can simulate emotional and instinctive behaviour – but not emulate them. There’s a difference – and its huge.

The ‘Intelligence’ in AI isn’t mind. It is rational processing power only. There is no prospect of AI ever becoming mind or a self that resembles a human self because it cannot have the experiential components – no body to generate instinctive awareness and no relationships to develop emotional awareness. 

Human intelligence is a trinity – rationality, emotion and instinct. We don’t have a formal breakdown of the elements of that triad but nothing in psychology, neurology or philosophy suggests to me that saying rationality is at 10% would be an over-estimate. A recent comment from the Neuroleadership Institute (NLI), whose work I love, confirms this for me. The NLI observed that we are quite bad at thinking. The regular laments about the paucity of critical thinking skills in an age of conspiracy theories further testifies to this lack. The Bible scholar Dan McClellan often exhorts challengers on his YouTube channel to “learn to google competently and think critically.”

The thing about self-awareness is that the self is there to begin with. It is the seed from which awareness grows.

Does this mean that AI will never become sentient? I don’t think so because we can’t predict what will happen next. However, being rationality only seems to me to be a very primitive level of being – like a precursor state at the very beginning of an evolutionary process. When does self-aware become a thing for an endless chain of processes? This is a bit like the Flatland world. 

Computers are not the bodies of AI in the same way that our organic bodies are the dwelling places of our spirits. This is a major problem for AI boosters. They dance between sci fi, science and metaphysics with no sense that what they have produced as an argument is an incoherent fantasy. 

What we call AI is a Large Language Model that, depending on the number of words it is exposed to predicts what is most likely to come next. Like the predictive text on my phone, it will get things wrong often simply because it doesn’t have the capacity for a sense of context the way humans do. A mind is not just a rational processing system. If we heed what neuroscience is telling us our ability to make rational choices is impeded by our brains because they activate reflexes and instincts out of context. This is why bias is such a problem. We are impeded from making rational merit-based choices because we act on reflexes laid own in our organic being at the dawn of human evolution. An observation from a text on cognitive science stays with me – we operating in the space-age with brains shaped in the stone-age. 

And speaking of cognitive science here’s a damning insight about LLMs – words have no inherent meaning. We attribute meaning to them depending on our capabilities, intent and context. 

All that said there are valid potential benefits from AI – we just have to stop calling it that. It isn’t intelligent – just rational in a boringly literal and stupid way. In human terms it is utterly psychopathic. It has no empathy, but it can be made to appear to be empathetic. Again, in human terms, it is a liar and a deceiver.

In The AI Con the authors make a good argument that the boosters of AI are of a common type in the USA – rich, white and male. They are also of a certain intellectual disposition that is grounded in materialism and seems to have a part dystopian and part idealistic vision of humanity. It’s a sci fi fantasy rather than a philosophically informed vision. The people involved are ‘tech bro’ types. Very rationally intelligent in one sense but seeming also to be on the autism spectrum or somewhat psychopathic in that there’s little empathy for humanity as a whole and more a preference for a certain class. Musk is such an example. Rather than devoting his efforts to addressing common human concerns he is devoting his efforts to escaping to Mars to save a few. This is more sci fi than anything real. Worse, he lacks the empathic and compassionate traits we consider desirable.

Is Musk and his ilk redefining human ideals and values as part of an essential step in our evolution toward a future human? Or do they reflect a deeply unhealthy and unbalanced divergence into fantasy?

What has ET got to do with this?

The YouTube video Senior CIA Officer: Even We Don’t Know What the Phenomenon Is has an interesting assertion about ET and governments. It is that after 70 odd years of engaging with the phenomenon of UFOs governments have no understanding of what is going on. Even more interesting is the observation that very sensible people in the know are flat out opposed to ‘disclosure’. 

I know this was, to me, a random guy talking, but he makes more sense to me than all but a very few others. This may be my bias at play because I agree with his general line of thought. We must find our own relationship with the phenomenon once we decide it is real. 

The point that I want to emphasis here is that here is yet another instance of profound uncertainty about something going on – but it has been happening for a very long time. 

ET has had more than ample opportunity to tell us stuff, but they have elected to take a different approach. Strieber thinks his Visitors are predatory but generally benign relative to the overall population – maybe environmentally sensitive enough to not overtax the prey population?. The fact that they have tech and knowledge way beyond us and don’t see us as fit recipients of their knowledge may gall the hung-ho and vocal advocates for ‘Disclosure’ but it doesn’t surprise those with cause to be more circumspect. 

There is a relationship between the tech bros pushing AI and the disclosure advocates in that both are seeing phenomena entirely on their terms – which are philosophically naive in my view. The AI boosters are making flat statements about AI which appear, on examination, just wrong. The Disclosure boosters have a naive tech focus. Both seem to share a materialistic outlook – which is limiting and distorting. 

ET has occupied a presence in human consciousness for a very long time. It doesn’t occupy a space defined or dominated by technology but a space between our material reality and its metaphysical aspect. Materialism tries to draw everything into a focus of certainty rather than allow uncertainty to be the norm – and yet this is what scientific inquiry persistently points us toward. 

Between science and metaphysics is a central zone of materialistic certainty that is, in a way, a form of sci fi. It has a flavor of science about it, but it’s fiction and even fantasy. On a grander scale it is what we call culture, and it is where we tell stories, including explanations and excuses.

Science and metaphysics are antagonistic only to materialists – it’s as if they pry them apart to insert themselves in an artificial space where they feel at home and comfortable in a warm bed of egotism and illusion. On a more sensible level they are the same thing. At its core, science is disciplined inquiry and nothing more. Metaphysics is the same. What distinguishes them is not the standard of discipline, but the methods employed. Materialists have an irrational bias for material science, which they then often practice badly. It wasn’t materialists who developed quantum science, remember. In fact, it wasn’t materialists who discovered most of the foundational laws of science.

ET has been loudly pooh-poohed by materialists because the ‘scientific’ position is that we are alone in the cosmos. Now, with the high-tech evidence from US Navy aircraft that scorn is being replaced sullen reluctance to confess to be playing catch up to those who have a more metaphysical perspective.

We are obliged to add ET to the list of things we have no definitive ideas about – yet. That list includes mind, intelligence and consciousness.

What we don’t know

We don’t really have a useful and acceptable notion of what intelligence is, or consciousness is. We don’t know what or who ET is. 

But we have a choice about how to live with our ignorance – as a state of uncertainty in acknowledgement of presently incomprehensible complexity or as something from which we mine and endless supply of explanations and illusions of certainty. 

It is remarkable how often our ‘go to’ reaction is to ‘explain’ something rather than figure out how to relate to it. The materialist sees reality as an it to be explained where an animist sees reality as a thou with whom to form a relationship.

There’s a cartoon from the 1950s which depicts a guy in bed with a woman of apparent ill repute in a motel room. The door has been burst open. There is a private eye with camera and behind him a furious wife looking like thunder. The guy blurts out, “But honey I can explain!” Faced with an utter crisis his in his relationship, the guy grasps for reason, not empathy. It is a profound cartoon. Guys, the target audience, will laugh, but not because it’s funny.

If we are realistic about the human condition, very few of us are aware of much on the spectrum of what is knowable – or, rather, what is unknown. Reason has been described as the light of a lantern a traveler is carrying while walking through a forest at night. There is a comforting glow which creates a sense of immediate local safety.

Our choices are to craft an atmosphere of psychological comfort which sustains our natural desire for knowledge and certainty because we tell stories that serve those purposes – or live like a sceptic – comfortable with uncertainty and open to experience. We can try to create certainty and safety as an absolute state, or allow that it has no more than an immediate utility.

At the moment our world is dominated by monstrous egos full of certainty about what they believe. Such certainty fills the world with perilous uncertainty and instability. On the other hand, living with uncertainty in a peaceful way generates stability and thus a kind of relative certainty that serves our deeper impulses well. 

This can seem paradoxical but it’s not. If we attempt to extend knowledge beyond its proper function, we create tensions. We all know, when we encounter people who are full of certainty that what they believe is true, that the risk of conflict or disharmony increases. 

The great sorry history of colonialism was fueled by certainty – disguised as curiosity and the mission of spiritual salvation. Certainties clash. Uncertainties harmonize.

We are all different

I have been doing a deep dive into neurodiversity after a conversation with family members. I have 2 nieces and a nephew with ASD. The term was developed by a sociologist in 1997 as a political term in support of people determined to create awareness of autism. 

It has become a diagnosis with no neurological or medical foundation and the basis a contentious identity movement, which, while arising for no doubt legitimate reasons, has no legitimate medical basis. 

It is another instance of how we create tensions and conflict by pushing certainties contra more informed and disciplined inquiry. There is certainly something going on, and language and stories have been invoked in service of whatever that thing is. But it’s not consistent with the intended meaning of the language and it’s not consistent with currently acknowledged medical science. Here is a source on the matter – from the Mad in America website.

The intent of the current passion seems to be an effort to see our existential crisis in terms of us being different rather than flawed and disabled rather than inadequate. That’s a genuine need and it may be that neurodiversity is the presently the only accessible framework to articulate that need.

In a way it is doing what Musk’s Mars dreams, and the tech bros AI fantasies are doing – providing a metaphor for a deeper existential drama. We must always be careful to give the metaphors we need to process our inner feelings the freedom to do so, while never erring in taking them literally.

Conclusion

On a global scale our world is filled with aching uncertainty because of the peril coming from over-confident egos. 

So many commentators are declaring we are on the cusp of a new age. This is coming from tech bros and astrologers as well as ecologists and social commentators across many fields. It’s not a claim I doubt. But what seems to be up for contention is what form that change will take. 

AI boosters are proclaiming a future predicated on materialistic fantasies. But as The AI Con argues this future is not designed for common benefit. 

Reduction of human existence to the fantasies of materialists is a dangerous course of action because the focus is on tech rather than being human centred. The sales pitch is compelling only if you buy the vision. Don’t, without careful evaluation of the proposition. 

If the anticipate transition into a new future is inevitable (which seems to be so) it must not be controlled or directed by materialistic fantasies. 

Christianity reduced human existence to the cast of grand theological dramas in which monstrous egos (the tech bros of that time) dominated in self-defined virtue. The harm wrought was massive. World domination was the vision at any cost to the individuals who did not concur.

Many are wrestling with the notions of consciousness being fundamental to reality. Recent intellectual arrivals on this idea don’t represent a step forward so much as a recovery of deep insight that humanity developed probably at least half a million years ago. Animism arose out awareness of what is, rather than any ‘discovery’.  Engaging with reality with a sense of uncertainty opens us to the possibility of what is there to be known. Engaging it with settled beliefs sets up tensions and distortions. 

The roots of animistic awareness are important. Materialism developed the idea that reality is stuff as a reaction against the nonsense theology of Christianity. It was a psychologically immature reaction. ‘Your God isn’t real – so no gods are real, and nothing spiritual is real either.’ The early animists had no motive to see their reality as anything in particular, and their most urgent existential mission was figuring out relationships – with each other, living things to eat, living things that eat them, places, spirits and gods. Relationships are still the most important part of our awareness.

ET hasn’t been amenable to certainty. Theories that ET is an alien species from elsewhere in our dimension hasn’t delivered anything of value other that debates about who believes what. 

The belief that Artificial Intelligence is a thing arises because materialism makes it possible. But we don’t know what intelligence is, let alone consciousness or even mind. 

The belief that neurodiversity is real arises because of a need to make sense of an existential crisis felt by many people. The crisis is real, but the story explaining it is not, on current evidence.

We inhabit an uncertainty – which some insist is an illusion. Long before we understood that what we see is processed in our brains and hence only a representation of what is, sages knew this. 

We form beliefs and tell ourselves stories out of necessity- to make meaning and form relationships. Psychologists tell us that we humans are fundamentally communal, and our wellbeing depends on the relationships we create and sustain.

And yet we are harming our capacity to maintain our wellbeing because we are responding to excessive certainty and rigidity because they seem to address a need we do have. We do crave and need a degree of predictability. We do crave and need a degree of explanation. But we also need to be able to live with uncertainty – just not chaos.

Those who market their solutions to our needs for predictability and explanation are acting not out of compassion but profit. So, more is better. It isn’t. We need safe havens in the swirl of uncertainty for balance – but not gated communities, palaces or fortresses. These bring rigidities that tighten things up and which lead to chaos.

AI, ET and neurodiversity are three things that reflect forms of existential crisis that are being distorted through rigid and unrealistic thinking for different motives and in ways that are not helpful. In our current social climate anxiety seems high – and for good reason. We do appear to be going through disruptive and challenging times. Our reflex might be to tighten up and grip harder, but it wiser to do the opposite.

Introduction

I was initially a little worried about The Fourth Mind, fearing Whitley had gone off the ranch a little. But no. He’s still pushing boundaries. 

I take a very critical approach to any material on ET or Visitors, so I am listening carefully. Conveniently Erik Davis just posted an interesting Substack piece – The Wild Awake: Animist Awareness in the Ventana Wilderness that reminded of a vital perspective to take. He makes two particularly relevant points for me.

Davis notes that Times have changed. Consider the following developments, springing up like kudzu, thrusting through the cracks of consensus materialism:

• A post-humanist appreciation for the embeddedness, interconnection, and complex hybridity that surrounds and shapes human subjectivity. Doesn’t the “we” who we think we are include the creatures in our gut biome at least as much as it includes our social media feeds?
• The rise of AI and the explosion of simulacral humans, autonomous drones and robots, and extraordinarily persuasive conversations with digital agents. This tsunami of algorithmic Others is forcing us all to grapple with once sci-fi ideas about technological minds and beings.

I have argued elsewhere that we seem to have an animistic impulse. We are using our prowess with tech to ‘re-animate’ our now increasingly human-mediated environment. Are we trending toward organic tech?

In The Fourth Mind Whitley makes two compelling arguments:

• The Visitors’ primary state of existence is non-material
• They come here in what seem to be engineered organic forms.

Wrapping our brains around these ideas

What we believe is primarily to serve our psychological needs, even though we love to imagine we are engaging in rational activity. Our beliefs are formed from culture (past and present) and our experiences (life generally as well as culture and family of origin). We might be sceptical, susceptible to authority or needing to conform to ensure membership of a culture or community.

Reason doesn’t play as big a role as we like to imagine. It’s just a word that means what we believe it to mean. Developments in cognitive science and neuroscience suggest that we generally aren’t very good at thinking, and doing so is very demanding. We should be modest, and careful about our capabilities.

This matters because how we respond to Whitley’s arguments will depend on the degree to which they unsettle our psychological equilibrium and threaten our beliefs.

The Visitors’ primary state of existence is non-material.

Whitley reminds us that so is ours. Materialists will immediately have a difficult time with this. So too will believers of various religious persuasions for whom the non-material realms of their belief system might be highly ordered and do not include Visitors.

There is a wider body of thought which entirely comfortable with this idea. There are many expressions of it. I found content in the Theosophical movement, the Western Mystery Tradition and in the writings of Robert Monroe, Frank DeMarco and Stewart Edward White. 

They come here in what seem to be engineered organic forms.

This is a more problematic claim. Whitely asserts he has access to confidential or highly restricted material that includes autopsy reports. He also refers to a reddit document. Unfortunately, I must have been distracted when he first mentioned it, so I can’t make any comment. This is a downside of audiobooks. He is of the opinion that this document is credible.

My willingness to allow this position may have merit rests some long held reservations that the apparent physicality of some ET doesn’t appear to have any biological sense behind it. I suspected that maybe they were more metaphor than form. 

We have an intellectual tradition that asserts our organic forms evolved from primates but also religious traditions which asserted humans were created. Abduction reports include efforts at hybridization between humans and Visitors – and this also has traditions in religion and mythology.

Whitley observes that the autopsy reports say the bodies examined appear not to be well-designed. Maybe flawed but still fit for a limited purpose, I guess. There’s a difference between guided evolution and bio-engineering to create a single purpose vehicle. He says that Visitor bodies are more akin to diving suits. Perhaps if they are something you put on and then take off soon after its like a distinction between off the rack clothing and tailored outfits? Some don’t have to be finely crafted.

Thinking about brains and intelligence

The Visitor’s brains are apparently 20% larger than ours, and differently structured. Whitley doesn’t think this means they are more intelligent. I am not sure of his argument for several reasons.

The first is that I am not at all sure that there is a clear divide our non-organic and organic beings, so intelligence can’t be brain-based. In any case there’s a lot of evidence of intelligent activity with brain around.

The second is that the brain has a function in relation to the body’s being in the world, so it’s reasonable to assert that a brain that is the product of evolution in our ecosystem may have a different structure and function to one that might be the product primarily of bio-engineering in an entirely different setting.

So, we can say that brains have a vital role in some organisms, but we cannot assert that they are sum of evidence of what we imagine to be intelligence. As Davis reminds us intelligence may be all around us and we maybe should stop thinking of it as something separable.

Personally, I think we are a long way from understanding ‘intelligence’ and we too deeply mired in what we might call ethnocentric biases to have any hope – for the moment.

A reason for non-disclosure?

Whitley’s efforts to make sense of the evidence he has, and the experiences he has had demonstrate that our current intellectual paradigms do us no favours.

I suspect the reason ‘disclosure’ has taken so long is that our capacity to adapt isn’t as robust as the more confident brashly assert. Whitley asserts that the Visitors are in control of this. This kind of makes sense. The radical non-ordinary has always been carefully managed. It is traumatic and is cordoned off by boundaries marking the sacred and the taboo.

ET has been engaging with humans for a very long time and it, so far as I know, has never been like Star Wars or Star Trek. Although some stories from the Indian tradition and elsewhere do give reason to wonder what it was like before.

We are so entrenched in a human-dominated cultural mindset that we even imagine our measure of our sense of humanity and intelligence would be impressive to Visitors. Now I have no idea what they think, but I would be very surprised if impressive came to their minds. 

As I write this in July 2025 the world seems dominated by tyrants, the psychologically very unhealthy, the ridiculously wealthy and people willing to swallow propagandistic swill and conspiracy theories – as well as the many who have just quit trying to do anything other than survive in their fog of desires and beliefs. In the meantime, systems of all kinds are in crisis. Evidence of ‘intelligence’ is very unbalanced.

Whitley’s struggle to make sense, even with his access, suggests to me that the last thing we’d want is ET or Visitors ripping off our psychological roof and exposing us to the existential reality with no protective filter.

We need to clearly understand the devastating impact of European invaders on indigenous peoples around the world. Yes, spears have been replaced with rifles and cars have replaced long walks. But the psychospiritual wounds have not healed, even after centuries.

Given the long history of engagement between humans and Visitors that has run as an undercurrent in our cultures for millennia, demands for ‘disclosure’ seem imprudent and ill-informed. Steady evolution of our awareness makes much deeper sense.

There’s a kind of cargo-cult mentality at times. ET has tech that can save us. That naïve sci-fi saviour delusion is painful to encounter. If that was the reality it would have happened already, you’d think.

Predators?

Whitley makes some confronting observations about the Visitors as predators. Such notions are not exactly what we want to hear. There are plenty of stories of ET terrorising humans.

I used to fish, and I detested the celebrations of those who thought they were superior because they fished only for the sport and practiced ‘catch and release’. I thought that was sadistic. So, the idea that we are prey doesn’t bother me too much. It’s part of the way of things.

We humans were routinely prey in times gone by, but we got good at eliminating most predators. These days death by predation is relatively rare – even if the predator might be a Visitor.

The psychological difficulty this idea presents is that while we might be ‘top dog’ on this planet we could be way down the pecking order on a cosmic scale. That switch in status could trigger a trauma response – because it would unravel our whole existential framework. Experience-based trauma is what we call PTSD. It is precipitated by a radical violation of our norms.

The imagined encounter with ET is the stuff of sci fi entertainment and we imagine that we’d be cool about it. But that’s what fantasy is about. We can be better than we are.

If ET suddenly appeared in our living room how many norms would be suddenly shattered? Would that experience be traumatic? Our exposure to sci fi would induce us to think not. But imagine ET as a predator rather than a saviour? How different is your assessment now?

They have motives you don’t understand. They have tech that makes ours look positively stone-age. And Whitley tells us that they pretty much do real magic as well. These are agencies that were cordoned off from our normal as either sacred or taboo.

They have always been dangerous to us. We need to remember that our predatory instincts have led to farming and animal health and welfare standards. Our prey have, in one sense, benefited from our predation. We have a massive complex system based on our predatory impulses.

So, predation isn’t an implicit evil, but realisation of it might be traumatic. Pause a moment and consider Christianity which promises safety from the predatory forces of evil – the Devil and his minions. If, suddenly, that promise is rendered ineffective? ET arriving into shared public awareness would likely precipitate such a crisis.

Conclusion

Whitley is speculating, which suggests that his Visitors haven’t told him anything directly about their nature, origin and purpose. He says he is also visited by discarnate entities, with whom he engages.

Mystery about nature, origin and purpose of mysterious beings is common, perhaps because it is meaningless without deeper understanding. An inner plane teacher I spoke with many decades ago was blunt. He hadn’t turned up to tell us things, but to teach us how to learn. He forced us to wrestle with habits of thought and become more open to deeper ideas. I see something similar going on with Whitley.

I must be blunt. He has read some commentaries and said a few things that are, to me, metaphysically naïve – more like a philosophically romantic take on things rather than a more critical analysis.

That said, however, where are you going to find such a sustained and focused meditation on the who/what/why of ETs/Visitors? The fact that I disagree with Whitley isn’t criticism. He is speculating from his standpoint and I from mine. It should be a collaborative endeavour, not a competitive one.

When we encounter the radically disruptive, our sense of normal is often injured and we resist being obliged to change. There’s a reason veterans have a bond. We prefer being normal – uninjured and unchanged. But that’s not an option for many. Hence the company of those who shared the outrage against our normal can become a critical community of a special sense of ‘one of us’ needed to feel okay.

It interests me that those who are calling for disclosure do not appear to be experiencers of any kind. Rather they seem driven by ‘rational’ demands. That should tell us something important

This isn’t a book where you to go to get information so much as get provoked. If you are not reacting emotionally to the ideas and still staying with the text, you are missing an opportunity to have your reality bias (we all have one) rattled.

I do recommend The Fourth Mind as an excellent and challenging disrupter – but only if that’s your jam.

And Erik Davis is a thoughtful and stimulating author whose Substack posts are fun and provocative.