Author: mp2201

Introduction

When I was 15, I came across Paul Brunton’s Hidden Teachings Beyond Yoga. That book made a mess of my head and nipped what many thought was a promising career as a geologist in the tender bud. The book was my introduction to a wholly different way of understanding what it was to be human. It took me 18 months to read because I repeatedly and compulsively fell asleep after reading a paragraph.

This book mattered to me because I had been plagued ‘strange’ experiences since I was a child. 

Normally I don’t talk spirituality with friends or family. It’s so often a fraught thing that can trigger strong emotions. I am personally cool with people believing what makes them feel good. 

But recently, over a coffee, a friend, talking about his recent health scare, confessed he had been contemplating the end of his physical life. So, we chatted. I am firmly of the view that reincarnation is the norm. He did too. He had spent a few years in Nepal in his restless youth and was introduced to Buddhism. I had known him 15 years and this hadn’t come up. But he said, “it’s not about beliefs. It’s about attitude.”

That’s so true in so many ways. But what we believe can shape our attitudes. I have just finished John Fugelsang’s Separation of Church and Hate in which he makes a point that Christians who think themselves ‘saved’ by their belief can behave in ways utterly contrary to Christ’s teachings – and can do so in ways that are cruel and harmful. 

Buddhism is around 2,500 years old. Christianity’s foundational Jewish texts go back at least as long. These days we are awash with research into human behaviour – or at least we would be if we engaged with it. To be fair there is so much it can be overwhelming. In addition, there’s also an abundance of very competent research into such as OOBEs, NDEs and reincarnation. 

So, it is a great time to revisit the idea of being human. Can we blend old and new ideas in a productive way?

How can we know?

We each bring our own experiences and reasons to any question. I can speak only to my own. So, what I assert below is said confidently not because I think I am right in any objective sense but because I satisfy my own needs. Hence, I tell my background story not to convince the reader but to enable some appreciation of my reasoning. 

I accept reincarnation not because I have direct conscious knowledge of it but because it is embedded as a truth in multiple sources of thought that I am familiar with and deeply respect. It is supported by credible contemporary scholarship. 

One thing that allows me to accept reincarnation is my direct experience of an OOBE. It has happened only once. I had woken up an intense thirst and headed off to the kitchen for some water. On the way I paused by a window that was well out of sight of my bed. I saw the moon shining through the mulberry tree right outside my flat and wished I had a better camera than my basic instamatic so I could capture the scene. Then I headed off to the kitchen where I tried to get some water. But my hand went through the glass. I decided I was just so half asleep I wasn’t coordinated, so I decided to drink from the tap. But my hand went through the tap as well. Then suddenly I thought, “I must be out of my body.” The instant I had that thought I was back in my bed and very wide awake. I got out of bed and rushed to the window. The scene was exactly as I had seen a minute before. I went to the kitchen. The glass was where I recalled it. I got my drink of water this time.

I also had an indirect experience as well. I was at my girlfriend’s place. We were sleeping when she shook me awake in an agitated state. She told me that she had again gotten out of her body and was floating up near the ceiling and freaking out. She said I had been talking to her calmly, telling her to chill and slowly come back to her body, which she did. Then I told her that she had woken me from a dream in which I was standing in a desolate landscape. Before me was a multistory structure made entirely from scaffolding. On the top was a crane which was lowering body in a very fragile state and on a stretcher. The target was 2 semi-trailer trucks parked very closely side by side. Even in the dream I had remarked to myself about how ridiculously soft the trucks’ suspension was. 

Suddenly the scene shifted and my girlfriend was lying on the ground. Her daughter was nearby, as was a very much older man I had never seen before. He told me to go away at the instant I was woken.

This experience was evidentiary for important reasons. There was a precise relationship between my girlfriend’s OOBE and my dream. And we were sleeping on 2 single Dunlopillo beds pushed together – matching the trucks in my dream right down to the very soft suspension.

My girlfriend had had several involuntary OOBEs before I met her and she had been deeply worried about her health. She had visited several specialists with no indication of any health issue. Then she read Robert Monroe’s Journeys Out of the Body. This is a seminal book on OOBEs. I read it before my OOBE experience.

I have read all of Monroe’s books as well as other authors associated with the Monroe Institute – which has been around since 1971. To my mind OOBEs are not controversial to people who have inquired into the theme.

Non-physical intelligences

My experiences of forms of what some might call ‘para-normal’ phenomena have endured since early childhood. I recently finished fiddling with a 32-page account of them. I began writing it in 2011 and struggled to compile it. I rewrote it in 2023 and then abandoned it. 

A constant theme in my account is my experience of a compelling intentionality and intelligence directly impinging upon my life. This has been a confronting, challenging and disturbing thing for me. I could make no sense of it at all until 2002 when I finally, mercifully, came across the idea of animism in a kind of dictionary of mythology and the like. As I read the entry on animism things started to make sense to me. There was a non-material kind of ecosystem of spirits. I could live with that. 

This metaphysical ecology seems to be universal among humans. But it seems also to be what Christianity sought to suppress in favour of its starkly depopulated notions of what it was okay to believe, know and experience. 

The early materialists of Western civilisation rejected Christianity and, because that was all they knew, rejected the metaphysical entirely. 

As science became the powerful methodology it is today it eliminated any reference to the spiritual and metaphysical. It has been asserted that this is for want of evidence. But that’s not strictly true. If you don’t go looking for something you won’t find evidence of it, and what’s the point of looking for something you ‘know’ doesn’t exist? An honest history of science will demonstrate that not only are there many scientists who comfortable with the metaphysical, but it also sometimes comes looking for them. That’s my experience exactly.

There’s a far more complex reality here. Evidence of the metaphysical is in abundance. This has been accepted by groups and societies which have operated in our culture as secret, or at least discrete, communities of interest to avoid brutal persecution from the institutional Christian Church. 

Organized institutional Christianity and materialism have both been highly motivated to suppress non-conforming thought. It has been very much the case of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’. 

But both these suppressing influences have been weakening steadily in the past 3 decades. Interest in alternative and suppressed ideas and experiences has been growing and formal research in universities has been steadily changing the way we can understand what it is to be human. 

Fakes and frauds?

Opponents of what the animistic perspective still insist that forms of heresy, fraud and incompetence prevail. This isn’t so. Yes, there are frauds and incompetents and others whose sanity might be justly questioned. But this applies to science, religion and indeed any domain of human endeavor as well. Efforts to throw a smokescreen over the validity and value non-conforming thought are growing weaker by the year now. 

However, this doesn’t mean that all fans of the animistic/metaphysical perspective are intellectually disciplined, psychologically healthy or well-informed. Sceptical caution is necessary as a constant state of mind.

Advocates and opponents can be genuine inquirers or dogmatic apologists who sincerely believe they are warriors in a zero-sum game as virtuous defenders of truth against deluded dupes and agents of evil. 

But what about God?

This is an immensely messy subject. Sound scholarship is showing the Christian God is derived from a polytheistic belief system. All such systems have supreme deities, and the politics of whose god is highest isn’t unknown. This kind of selective monotheism is a natural response to political and cultural pressures.

The simplest summation of more balanced ideas is that there is one universal unifying consciousness which mystics see as ‘The One’. It is in all things and all beings. But it is also beyond description, measure or knowing. Within that supreme unity there are gods and other spirits which vary in scale from the great down to the very tiny. This constitutes a complex ecosystem in which communities of spirits who may or may not have been human interact with us. 

I have heard this perspective interpreted as –‘God is in us, so we are gods.’ But this evades the bit about God being in everything. The Greek philosopher Thales is said to have declared that, everything is full of gods. We must be careful about assuming inferred meanings are valid. God is in my coffee mug, so my coffee mug is a god? I don’t think so.

Clearly, in the absence of a complex idea a Christian might insist that any such evidence of ‘spirits’ can only be God, Jesus or the Devil. Any materialist will insist it is error, hallucination or chance. 

On a personal level I can make no definitive claims. I am comfortable with the idea of ‘The One’ and an ecosystem and a hierarchy of consciousnesses that could be described as gods, archangels and angels – by whatever language/tradition we care to use.

I have been able to create a theoretical model based on my experiences and research. I think there is a far more complex metaphysical domain than we can yet know and that it is populated by the non-organic aspect of humans and other intelligent agents. There seems to be a community of agents who engage with humans in ways that are both helpful and harmful. Just because they are non-material doesn’t make them good. There is risk to our wellbeing in both physical and non-physical realms. 

As a culture, we are a long way from knowing what’s what with any precision, and access to such information is scattered. Some will claim to have a definitive answer – and may sincerely believe that to be so. While I think that’s unlikely as a rule, some do have useful theories that can work well for now. Of course, others are liars and frauds as well. Some project their delusions and egos with an air of great authority. I am not discounting that there those who do know, those who do tend not to write books or make videos or podcasts.

It is said that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. In this context the price of what is true is eternal scepticism. By that I don’t mean being sceptical in the often mis-used sense of denying something, but employing doubt in a rational and disciplined manner. This also includes listening to one’s intuition and being able to distinguish between genuine intuition, fancy and bias. 

What we choose to believe is dependent on our psychological needs. I try to be rational and disciplined in my approach, but I know I am serving my psychological needs, not some objective truth standard. I think reality is way too complex for that. The best I can say is that I try to have a healthy relationship with ‘truth’. The extent to which I succeed is not something I can say.

So, what is human?

This is my sense. Human is the complexity of our biological nature and the complexity of our metaphysical nature combined. We do have an enduring metaphysical element which can leave and return to our organic body while it is alive and persists after it dies. 

We use the terms humane, humanism, humanity and humanitarian in an imprecise way. But we intend to denote our organic primate being and nature and a mysterious undefined pluselement – something that is ‘better’ than our animal nature. Materialists have only the language of evolution to assert that human is just ‘more evolved’ than our primate ancestors. Christians think in terms of a soul in want of redemption. Either way it’s about improving on what was there in the beginning. For me evolution applies to organic and inorganic states of being. We grow from experience and I am content with idea that there is a ‘moral’ component to that – but one built into nature rather than as a theological dogma. 

Conclusion

We must maintain a sense of balance and appreciate that advances in science and scholarship plus great changes in our cultural values create opportunities for us to revisit our sense of being human. It’s a terribly messy field strewn with ideas that are old hat, fragmented, half baked, deranged, poorly formed, inspirational and insightful. 

Institutional Christianity and materialism have created dogmas that induce a lazy expectation that convenient truths can be delivered to our mental doors ready to be believed. No critical effort required. 

But in many respects, we are in a golden age of inquiry. Far from new insights being packaged and served up conveniently, what we have is an abundant garden full of fresh produce from which we can pick what we like and prepare it in a way that meets our intellectual, psychological and spiritual needs. 

We are responsible for what we believe, how we think and how we act. We also have plenty of lives to get good at owning that responsibility.

Bon appetite!

Introduction

I subscribe to the newsletter from the Global Leadership Foundation. It has a very simple objective – to raise “the emotional health levels of people on the planet.” It seeks to do so by inspiring and supporting “leaders to better understand themselves and their impact on others.”

The last newsletter discussed the awful word ‘permacrisis’ and I was instantly reminded of remarks made by an astrologer about this time last year when asked for advice for his audience concerning 2025 and the next 5-6 years. He said, “Don’t hold onto anything too tight.” 

But are things really that bad? You really have to go back in human history a long time before you come across a time when the world was crisis free. Our sense of permacrisis and drama is really a ‘first world’ disruption of comfort zones and aspirations. Yes. Change momentum is intensifying and there is no let up on the horizon.

Our emotional wellbeing is something we must take charge of. But what’s this got to do with spirituality? A lot.

Can I link emotional health and spirituality?

One of the things that has fascinated me is the way religion has been divided into a discipline of self-awareness and a body of self-serving beliefs, the latter dominating our conception. Rather than knowledge, faith and belief are championed.  Paths of self-awareness aren’t fostered in Christianity, or in the civilization it has engendered.

Contemporary psychology and paths of spiritual self-awareness converge on multiple points. The human spirit has long been understood to be our drive for life in obedience to our better natures. We can debate our conceptions of the ‘science’ underpinning this – but can we agree that emotional wellbeing and self-awareness are companion states of awareness.

The teachings of the Buddha and Jesus are about self-awareness in that deep sense of knowing who you ‘really are’. It is interesting that in so many traditional cultures self-knowledge is understood as necessary to become an effective member of one’s community.

We are more about social status these days – our sense of identity and standing. This seems like a legacy of a culture shaped by the religious, political and economic energies of social control.

Self-awareness pops up periodically – often driven by inspiration from random sources – but never in any systematic manner. I have been fascinated by the way that self-awareness has been growing as a theme in organisational leadership – but as an option rather than a requirement. We still hire and promote psychopathic individuals, and we still celebrate narcissists.

In short, the legacy of our religion is that we esteem gaudy priests over ‘good people’. That tension has been around at least since the emergence of Buddhism. That legacy has severed the connection between being self-aware and emotionally health and being ‘good’ in the social sense – obedient and conforming rather than virtuous.

Its time to heal that disconnection.

Restoring our understanding of who we are

Another legacy of our religious culture has been a distortion of our sense of identity. Between Christianity and materialism – two dark twins – our sense of who and what we are has been devastated. Now, between evolving sound science and the restoration of our sense of our spiritual nature, we are allowing our sense of who we are to reform.

But this is an evolving business driven by intuition as well as rational inquiry and experience. It is a collaborative rather than competitive endeavour motivated by goodwill rather than pride.

For the last close on 15 years there have been voices raised in concern over our collective emotional health. There certainly seems to be a problem that has arisen as a consequence of how we are living – about which too few people feel they have any effective control.

It is unlikely that restoring a sense of who we really are will readily arise amidst our various crises of identity, meaning and purpose. We must be prepared to take personal responsibility for our own emotional wellbeing. We can see this present situation as a ‘permacrisis’ only if we remain uncertain about what our vital needs are and our right to meet them.

Conclusion

The Global Leadership Foundation is only one of many bodies intent on doing real good. Its method is uncomplicated. It says nothing about spirituality at all. I am making the point that it is a spiritual enterprise precisely because it seeks to restore and maintain good spirits in individuals and groups or organisations.

Spirituality isn’t about metaphysics or theology but about how we live regardless of who believes what. It is about what we experience in every aspect of our lives. We can discover who we really are when we are free from influences that try to make us servants of other people’s religious, political and economic ambitions.

Some will say that spirituality cannot be ‘secular’. They will say secular means “Worldly rather than spiritual”. To me ‘secular’ should better mean, ‘not disconnected from the reality that we are in the world’. We have a spirit that must be free to interpret what being in this world means to us.

Secular spirituality is really the only kind we can freely have. This means that being self-aware and emotionally healthy should be of great value to us.  

If we are moving toward greater self-determination, it will not be without confusion as we struggle to make sense of what is going, and resistance from those who see self-determination as an impediment to their ambitions.

Introduction

The subject of being spiritual but not religious (SBNR) has been popping up in my awareness a lot lately. I have finally acknowledged that this label applies to me on a personal level. I also have an intellectual interest in spirituality and religion that supplements my personal concerns. 

The term denotes those who have rejected formal organized religion but retain a desire for spiritual meaning. The Pew Research Centre’s research on US SBNRs is informative:

• 59% have become less religious over their lifetime
• 49% have become more spiritual over the years
• 38% say religion does more harm than good
• 72% say it is essential to be connected to my ‘true self’
• 33% think being connected to God is important (compared with 87% of religious and spiritual)
• 20% believe in God as described in the Bible
• 73% believe there is “some other higher power or spiritual force in the universe”
• 71% think parts of nature have spiritual energies
• 4% think following a religious faith is important
• 54% are religiously unaffiliated where 45% are religiously affiliated (still identify with a religion)

SBNR includes active seekers, practitioners of many kinds and those who essentially have an open frame of mind but don’t feel a need to engage in a specific spiritual practice.

Some observers see SBNR as an ill-disciplined and incoherent approach to one’s spirituality. The chief criticism is the that smorgasbord approach – taking a selection of what you fancy to create an indulgent plate of spiritual titbits – let’s you edit out the hard bits. Yeah. It’s a bit like Christianity in that regard. 

Its also unkind and reflects an ignorance of the value of what’s on offer. It has been my approach. Since age 15 I have borrowed from Vedic, indigenous, Buddhist, Taoist, Zen, Theosophical, Cabalistic, Wiccan sources. I can throw in Tarot, astrology, ritual magic, crystals and spirit communications and still not exhaust the list.  I also embarked on a profoundly frustrating quest of trying to make sense of Christianity – the faith I was born into but rejected when I was six. Fifteen years ago, I finally submitted my Social Ecology thesis on whether animism might be a way of understanding a life of persistent non-ordinary experiences. I thought so. 

Dogmas, theologies and traditions may serve some people just fine, but that’s less and less the case as the declining figures on religious affiliation continue to demonstrate. SBNR is an individual expression of changing one’s diet because what’s on offer is variously unpalatable, unhelpful, uninspiring and sometimes downright toxic. 

Below I want to reflect on being a seasoned SBNR quester, not as an assertion of any authority – just as a seasoned traveler – as one with something of an aerial view of the landscape. 

The basics 

The hardest thing for me was to develop a coherent picture of essential ideas. When I began, around 1966 in Tasmania, there wasn’t access to much at all. A friend’s mother discerned my youthful curiosity and lent me Paul Brunton’s Hidden Teachings Beyond Yoga. It took me 18 months to read the book. I found myself falling asleep after a few paragraphs – not out of boredom but over-stimulation. By the time I had finished I had quit my matriculation studies, abandoned an ambition to study geology and left home. When I finished the book, I could find no replacement and contented myself with reading western philosophy for a few years. In 1970, when I was 18, I knew I needed to leave Tasmania to find a place with more prospects for discovery. 

In Melbourne and Sydney, I discovered the Theosophical Society’s Adyar Bookshop where I developed a basic understanding of the constituent bodies of being human – the physical, astral, mental and spiritual. I had several subsequent experiences that affirmed this way of thinking was useful. 

I have had a persistent sense of spirit presence since around age 5. Through direct personal experience I encountered non-physical agents whose role it was to guide members of esoteric groups. Another was an agent with whom I conversed over several years through my then partner. That particular experience directed me into an inquiry about engaging with non-physical agents – the risks, benefits and pitfalls. 

Subsequent experiences and inquiries established for me these three fundamental principles:

1. We are multi-dimensional. Our physical body is not the core of who we are. 
2. We endure – not as the ‘I’ we presently know – but something greater and better than we presently are.
3. Our consciousness is porous. Relationships and communications are multi-dimensional. 

The god problem

Mostly when people say ‘God’ they mean the God of the Abrahamic faiths. I struggled for years to overcome a sense of revulsion against the term. It persists even now. I try to accept ‘God’ as a common generic term which means whatever we say it means for us.

But it’s a big idea – like Love and Justice. It defies precise universal meaning. One of the non-physical agents was helpful. He spoke of ‘the One’, of which mystics have long said is beyond comprehension and description. 

To me the Abrahamic God is a tribal god inflated to become a cosmic deity – a fiction. This is now backed up by compelling scholarship.

The same agent said the gods were ‘of the One, not as the One’. The Abrahamic god could never be anything more than a tribal focus of attention. 

But gods? He asserted that gods are real. I twice had experience of a presence of overwhelming power that the agent told us was a god. That was an utterly incredible thing to claim. Those experiences still sit in my ‘to be confirmed’ file. I can’t reject the idea because the two experiences were off the scale in intensity – way beyond anything I had encountered before by a massive margin. 

Most of our ideas about gods have been deeply influenced by Christian ideas – which deny any validity to polytheism in favour a fictional monotheism. Other than the sense of ‘the One’ monotheism is a religious fiction. 

So, I am okay with the ideas of gods and with understanding that the idea of gods has been so distorted we are a long way from that being a useful idea on a cultural level. There are those who do not share my caution and fully embrace the idea. But I quit ritual magic because it seemed to me more about taking things on faith – and that’s not something I am into. A case of pushing scepticism too far? Maybe, but that’s me being true to my nature.

Some insist that you can’t be ethical without God. This usually means the fictional monotheist God. But many critters have ethics and values with no evident sense of any divine presence. This could mean that nature is ethical in the widest possible sense and hence ethics is built into life and being. There is a fundamental conscious unity which we cannot describe and within which there are gods and a hierarchy of beings through the dimensions. This is reflected in how things are here. And within all this there seems to be innate laws which favour order and justice. I like the Egyptian goddess, Maat, as an expression of this theme.

The attributes of the One are claimed by the fictional monotheistic deity. This distorts our sense of what is morally okay. The One in a mystical sense is the God of Nature of Enlightenment thinkers. Hence saying we need  God in order to have morals can be also framed as ‘we need nature to have morals’. Tribal gods favour ‘their’ people, so what is ‘good’ in that relationship can only ever be contextual – and never completely universal.

I hear the atheist’s objection – “If there is a God why does he let children suffer?” That’s such an awful argument – beyond dismissing the fictional deity crafted from the Abrahamic tradition. It’s an awful argument because it could be applied to any instance of human unhappiness and suffering, supposing that being made to suffer is a betrayal of trust. The myth that the creator of the cosmos has a personal interventionist interest in anyone has not only infantilized so many it has distorted and debased the idea of the divine – and our foundation of moral values.

To be clear, there are non-physical agents who may act to aid us, as well as do us ill. Catholicism, while depleting our natural ecology of ‘pagan’ spirits substituted saints to meet the intuitive need to seek localized intersession. But its not just saints who are available to us. That’s insight to be recovered.

These days I try to discipline myself to see ‘God’ as a term we use to mean our notion of the divine and not be biased against Christianity. If I were to be asked if I ‘believe in God’ my answer would be evasive – I have an idea of God which I hold to be true. But please don’t assume it’s the same as yours -if you have such a belief. I likewise have a sense of justice and ethics which may not accord with other’s ideas. 

Belief

I spent several years trying to get my head around belief. I concluded that it served our psychological needs, not our rational needs. We use rational language to describe and communicate what we feel. We say ‘think’ when we mean ‘feel’. Thinking is a discipline we are usually pretty bad at, truth be told. So, as our psychological needs evolve, so we change what we believe. Hence when we can inhabit our inner sense of being, our psychological needs quieten, and beliefs evaporate. This is kinda what the Zen notion of no mind is about. 

Debating what we believe – as if any person is right or wrong now – seems very strange and pointless to me. The more vulnerable we feel psychologically the ardently we hold beliefs – in an effort to shield our vulnerability. I am happy to explore ideas with others – but through mutually exploratory conversation rather than debate.

Some commentators assert that the ‘age of reason’ has made the language of science and rationality the social norm. Hence, we are more apt to say ‘think’ when ‘feel’ might be better. There is added gravitas in the term. This was brought home to me when I was watching a show featuring Dynamo, Magician Impossible. In response to an impressive performance a woman of modest educational attainment reacted, saying that what she had seen “ain’t scientific”. We all knew what she meant.

I have read a lot of academic books on religion. The intellectual focus often overruns the prospect that many ways of knowing are experience-based rather than the product of a mental process. This happens when there is no ‘theory of how things are’ that is rooted in experience.  Reports of experiences are reinterpreted and translated as imagination or some psychological process. This is because the academic assumes that things can’t be as described. Everything unfamiliar and outside the assumed model ‘tastes like chicken’ – we frame the unfamiliar in terms of what is familiar to us.

We believe what seems right to us in every respect – whether spiritual or intellectual. Reality is way more complex than we can mostly imagine and all we have is our take on it. We believe out of necessity. We’d go crazy if we didn’t. But we need to hold our beliefs with gentle hands and remember that they are ours alone.

Some sources

There is an abundance of material that the SBNRer can find. It’s of variable value and integrity. For what it’s worth, I reflect a little on what sources I esteem below.

The mystical

There are foundational sources of mystical wisdom that endure across the ages. I still love Zen, Tao, Buddhist and Vedic sources. I am not much into moderns like Steiner or Gurdjieff for no particular reason other than I haven’t been able to feel excited by them.

I don’t recommend sources because people will be drawn to what best suits them at the time through an inner impulse. The point is to be open to other ideas that are not familiar. Being curious helps. 

There’s a lot of dross on YouTube, but there are some gems that can be found with patience. I liked this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KArWcMldPM

Out of body

I read Robert Monroe’s Journeys Out of the Body in the late 1970s and soon after had a verifiable OOBE and then was involved in another verifiable OOBE a friend had. The fact we can be consciously out of our bodies is a fundamental and foundational understanding. I have read all of Robert Monroe’s books and I found Thomas Campbell’s My Big TOEparticularly useful.

Robert Monroe set up the Monroe Institute, which remains an invaluable institution exploring the potential of our capacity to go out of body. It’s not something I am eager to get into. I just don’t feel the need. But I commend it to those who do.

Spirit communication

This is also called channeling and can be anything from the delusions of people who fancy they are the vessel for emotionally agitated archangels or some serious liars and manipulators. Or they could tap into sources of profound and provocative insight. Below are a few sources that I find engaging and provocative. I am careful not to say ‘believe’ because although a source isn’t physical it should be no less subject to critical evaluation.

Some of the Amazon links below have the intended content below what comes up first. I use Amazon because it shows ebooks and audiobooks, and I am committed to accessibility. If you buy 3D books, please use your local bookshop.

• Frank DeMarco is associated with the Monroe Institute and his books featuring a former colleague, Rita, are fascinating and challenging.
• Stewart Edward White’s The Betty Book and The Unobstructed Universe are classics that seem to have fallen out of favour. The Unobstructed Universe, the later of the 2, was published in 1940, so the style is old, but the content, the ideas, is not.
• Jane Roberts’ Seth books.
• Joe Fisher’s The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts is a cautionary tale all who venture into channeling should read.
• I recently discovered Lee Harris’s Conversations with the Zs books. They are intriguing.
• I discovered The Ra Contact a few years back and writing this has reminded to revisit.

This list is neither exhaustive nor definitive. It’s just what I am familiar with and recommend. A lot of the content isn’t suited to linear thinking, so it requires patience and a willingness to place immediate critical reflexes on hold. I don’t mean don’t be critical – just not reflexively and immediately.

The bodies and chakras

My sources were exclusively from the Theosophical Society bookshop from decades ago. I found this book on Amazon and chose because it was highly rated:

Spiritual Anatomy: Meditation, Chakras, and the Journey to the Center

by Daaji Kamlesh D. Patel

NDEs and reincarnation

Both are foundational realities which have been intensely studied and affirm the persistence of our consciousness beyond the body. Both themes can be searched for on Amazon – with an abundance of hits. I haven’t read on the themes for decades, so I can make no recommendations.

YouTube has some good content. Some of the stuff on reincarnation is just silly, but there’s good content as well. I noticed a video with Thomas Campbell that’s worth watching. The content on NDEs merits caution. This isn’t because there’s necessarily intentional misinformation offered. 

The very nature of NDEs is that people experience what they believe. The ‘reality’ entered is subjective rather than objective. There are technical reasons why this is the case, and I don’t want to mislead by attempting a brief explanation. It is sufficient that NDEs are valid experiences. But it also means that we should be wary of taking the reports as literally, objectively, true. The message is what should concern us, not the descriptive detail. 

Psychology

Research into spirituality and into how we think and feel affirms the insights of the past and adds rational depth to our appreciation of why we act as we do. 

Psychology should be the primary insight/wisdom source of our age. Leadership is a theme that is researched and written on intensively. These have been the most inspirational sources for me on a personal level because they deal with personal accountability, self-awareness and emotional intelligence on a daily level. Here are three of my favourite texts:

• Fearless Leadership
• Dare to Lead
• The Dichotomy of Leadership

Overall psychology has revolutionised how we understand being human in the past 40 years. We don’t need ancient texts in archaic language to school us in the essentials of being a decent person. We are moral by nature, and we are far more complex and remarkable than our culture’s religions allow us to imagine.

I read a lot of works on psychology. Below is a very brief sample of what I have engaged with in the past few years.

• Modern Man in Search of a Soul by Carl Gustav Jung
• The Master and His Emissary by Ian McGilchrist
• Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
• The Awakened Brain by Lisa Miller
• The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
• You Are Not So Smart by David McRaney
• The Moral Animal by Robert Wright
• The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van Kolk
• DMT: The Spirit Molecule by Rick Strassman
• Ritual by Dimitris Xygalatas
• How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett

A note on podcasts and audiobooks

The number of podcasts is overwhelming. Audiobooks are growing in number steadily. This reflects a growing trend away from reading 3D printed material. There isn’t a reduced craving for ideas – it’s just that the medium of transmission is evolving. Audio devices are portable and discrete so, in theory, we have more access to ideas and inspiration. This means a SBNRer who is inspired to serious inquiry has an unprecedented opportunity to explore.

My passion is audiobooks. Seventeen years ago, I acquired several disabilities, one which radically diminished my ability to enjoy holding 3D books. Then I went almost exclusively audio. Now I can listen while driving, walking and doing tasks.

Spirituality isn’t just about esoteric stuff. It’s about the human spirit in this world as well. There are great podcasts that explore aspects of being human. Below I have listed my regular go-tos. I haven’t touched on more than a small portion of what’s available.

• ABC’s Late Night Live
• CBC’s Ideas
• The Telepathy Tapes
• People Who Read People
• No Stupid Questions
• You Are Not So Smart
• To The Best of Our Knowledge
• The Psychology Podcast
• Thinking Allowed

Conclusion

Being SBNR is about grazing an extraordinary smorgasbord of offerings to construct a made-to-measure conception of the spiritual – and being human. That’s an evolution in keeping with bespoke creation in so many other areas of human needs and wants. It’s like being able to create your own playlist. What’s not to like?

Of course, those who want to force feed you their dogmas and obey their rules don’t like it. But, as Christian Smith in his excellent Why Religion Went Obsolete shows – that’s a passé mentality. And maybe it will also be an extinct one in the not too distant future. 

Of course there is no uniform model of an SBNRer. Some are content just to have the attitude. Others practice what appeals to them and are context with their niche being replete with ideas they love. Others are serious inquirers for whom it’s a life mission. I am the last sort. I have a passion for inquiring that arose originally from needing to comprehend a seemingly relentless stream of ‘non-ordinary’ experiences that plagued me since age 6. A lot of what I do seems more like therapy than anything else.

The argument that being SBNR is ill-disciplined and chaotic reflects authoritarian passions. Some have a discrete system they have found and stay with. Others see spirit is a universal presence that can be found in anything. Picking and mixing is no different to selecting a bunch of flowers from a great garden. 

To me being SBNR is celebratory. It is liberating.  

There is, however, a certain grounded reality that we need to grasp. That basic knowledge is like physics for the material world and has been taught through the ages -sometimes laced liberally with dogma and lore. It isn’t a belief system. It’s not a dogma. It is experience-based knowledge.

It isn’t taught in the Abrahamic faiths, save maybe to elite members. It is taught in the ‘east’ still because there doesn’t seem to be a history of attempted repression. The traditions of India, Tibet, China and Japan are still available to us. It was taught in the Greek mystery schools that were suppressed by Christians. It is taught in the Theosophical Society and esoteric/occult schools, some other spiritual organizations or groups, and by individuals who operate within a discipline – like yoga – but to a limited degree.

Being SBNR is an opportunity to recover what has been suppressed and to explore what is in potential. SBNR sits between secular materialism and the traditions and dogmas of formal institutional faiths. 

It is where our hope of a better future resides.

Introduction

I am writing this in October 2025. There’s a YouTube channel– Professor Archive – which, among other things, surveys the decline of Christianity. I’ve just watched What a Post-Christian World Might Really Look Like. There are some interesting claims, like in the UK more people practice Wicca than attended Church of England services? True? I haven’t verified, but the fact that the claim is made says so much. The video is against secularism and sees Spiritual But Not Religious (SBNR) as presently incoherent – but may be the beginnings of something new.

In 2025 religion is not the only thing being broken. What we believe and how we live together (with other humans and other lives) are being broken apart in anticipation of new ways of thinking and acting.  Do we respond in fear or in hope?

A few days ago, I finished Why Religion Went Obsolete by Christian Smith. Smith is a sociologist. He charts the rise of the SBNR and the decline of adherence to traditional religions. In the past decade organised Christianity’s loss of followers has been catastrophic to those who are intent on preserving the faith. The emergence of Christian nationalism in the US has been emblematic of the crisis. We see an appeal to politics because the content of faith has lost its power, and shift toward even more pronounced divisiveness and intolerance.

Smith’s survey of the decline of formal religion explores secular forces which have transformed our cultures toward more individualistic values and less reliant on local geographic communities (everything from greater physical mobility and the internet, social media and developments in telecommunications technology). This is quite apart from the growing mismatch between emerging psycho-spiritual needs and what a 1,700-year-old faith can offer.

Late last year I was interested in what astrologers had to say about 2025. One summed things up by saying, “Don’t hold on to things too tightly.” Professor Archive’s video on things post-Christian noted there is a crisis in ‘mental health’, observing that this was evident in countries which had largely abandoned religion and were mostly secular. But I’d also note that faith can also be a way of sandbagging against existential reality. The term ‘religious psychosis’ is becoming very popular.

There is a widely discussed ‘mental health’ crisis. Personally, I detest the term and never use it. Its ‘psychological health’ to me. This crisis seems to signify something important is going on – the loss of the old and emergence of the new. The old is falling away and the new is yet to form in a way that is universally accessible. Transitional times can be traumatic. Do we hang on to what we have, or do we let go?

Below I want to reflect this time and the drama of transition

The way things are now

Smith’s book explores the attitudes of generational cohorts (Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z). Each generation views ‘now’ through a different experiential lens. Our sense of ‘used to be’ can be nostalgic or a relief. 

As a Boomer my nostalgia is about being able to visit places of sublime natural spirit before they became overrun. I treasure the privilege of solitude where hordes now blunder. But I love tech in so many ways.

I abandoned Christianity when I was six years old. But I did not abandon the spiritual – which insistently engaged with me to the point of crisis, and I finally accepted it fully (after several decades). 

In 1970 I left Tasmania as a ‘straight’ person and travelled to Melbourne as the first step of a life adventure. I walked into a radical alternative culture utterly unprepared. I was like the tarot’s Fool. I arrived with a backpack, a small portable typewriter and a camera. I had a dream of getting into journalism. The typewriter and camera were promptly stolen. The dream of journalism evaporated, and I entered an existential drama that took me to the edge several times. I came to understand I was under the watchful eye of spirit after a decade. But it was watching and, if anything, making life tougher for me than I’d cared for.

During that time, I had a telling experience back in Hobart. I had smoked some fiendishly potent weed mixed with hash (I later learned also laced with heroin) and found myself in a seriously bad place. It was a very unpleasant experience, and I knew I had to ensure until the effects of the joint wore off. After a time of grim determination, I suddenly found myself in a quiet calm place full of light. I knew this was the ‘real me’ and nothing external could harm me. Even now that memory remains a potent source of knowing. Some get to that place through devotion, others through trauma.

This present time seem reminiscent of Melbourne in 1970. Only I am now a more seasoned traveller. The familiar seems to be falling apart or have gone completely. The world seems to be going through a crisis of transition between two states. Of course, this transition has been going on for some time and it’s not easy to figure out at what point of the transition we are at. Consider the business of being born into this world. The transition process begins and then passes through stages that are ever more dramatic – and then the umbilical cord is cut. Then begins another transitional phase of adaptation to being in this world.

Where are we now – collectively and individually? Individually some are resisting, some are brashly gung ho. Many are somewhere between – bewildered and worried. “Don’t hang on too tightly.” That seems like good advice. But hardly any comfort.

The drama of transition

Another book I recently finished was The Immortality Key. It explored the idea that from the time of the ‘establishment’ of civilization there has been a tradition of the use of hallucinogenic substances – which started off as ‘spoiled beer’ and evolved into the psychoactive wine of the Greek mystery cults. These cults informed early Christianity. The sacrament of the wine and wafer is an inert residue of practices and beliefs now denied, suppressed and punished.

The book also reminded me of those times in the early ‘70s in Melbourne. We were determined to throw off the repressive influence of a religion we thought debased. We gathered secretly in homes where we shared meals and took our illegal enlightening drugs. We engaged in earnest conversation about life and meaning and explored alternative ways of engaging with the sacred.

This was a transition time that began intensely in the 1960s but can be traced back to the 1950s. It was part of a larger transition period that goes back millennia, but has ages we have distinguished – the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution. Smith charted the fall into obsolesce of religion from post World War 2. That suits us because it is meaningful in concrete ways. For the sake of a conversation, we create start and end dates in a continuum that began when we began. Transition (let us also call it evolution) is a constant but also has periods of great intensity when familiar and cherished things get broken. This includes our senses of meaning and purpose.

We are finally taking ET seriously. AI, still festooned with hype, looks as though it will change a lot of things (for good and ill). Climate change is beyond denial, and its impacts are concerning. Change-denying political movements are hitting us in discomforting ways. Progressive politics seems visionless. There are dire economic indicators that the present system isn’t fit for purpose.

Smith’s sociological survey of the factors of religion’s decline into obsolescence reminded me just how radical change has been. In 1970 I arrived in Melbourne with a portable Olivetti typewriter. It was red and slipped into a hard plastic case. Its gone. Now the equivalent is a notebook computer. When I moved into my current home in 2002 I had maybe 12 boxes of books. Now I have over 300 eBooks on my phone. I can chart the past 60 years of technological change with ease.

Changes in attitudes and values are complex and less easy to list, but no less spectacular. In the ‘60s and ‘70s I protested against the Vietnam War and the drowning of Lake Pedder. I marched for women’s, Gay, and Aboriginal rights. There has been steady progress on equity and inclusion since then. Now new change-resistant religious/political movements want to restore discrimination and inequity.

Conclusion

I can’t see ahead with any clarity. Maybe our world three decades from now will be as radically different to how ‘now’ would seem to three decades ago. Smith’s characterisation of those who are SBNR is hopeful. In three decades, they are likely to be the majority by a wide margin. This will bring welcome changes, but what else will there be?

In that time a lot of things will have to change – especially on the political front. Being SBNR means we can choose our own pathway to the sacred and go alone or in company. But the political must evolve to enable this new way of living together. Disengagement from the debased and distorted politics of our time sends a message to those who imagine they can be of service – but we cannot disengage from the political itself imply because we need functional means of managing our common affairs at the level of community. It has ever been thus for humanity, and we have mostly done it well – until the advent of civilization when elitists imagined they had divine sanction to impose their will.

Our life worlds are being shaken up for good purpose. But it will not seem like that for a lot of folks who will feel their comfort zones are not something they have elected to sacrifice for the sake of a greater vision. But when was that ever a realistic choice?

The SBNR have elected to determine meaning and value on their own account. That means a hive of exploration and innovation with success and failure. The early Christians were inspired by the idea that as individuals they could establish a personal relationship with the divine. Subsequent manifestations of the faith corralled that sense of relationship within constraints of dogma, theology, rituals, rules and imposed authority. And then corruption and scandal killed off any residual loyalty and hope.

The future can be what we make it – well, it will be that, regardless. If we want it better than we fear, then we will have to allow that some things must be broken and discarded – and that includes things we presently imagine to be good. This is especially so in politics, but this is also a proposal that being partisan in a spiritual sense isn’t conducive to shared positive outcome.

Among those who assert their right to believe as they do is a willingness to denigrate and insult others who believe as they choose. Aggressive belief is invasive and likely to stir up conflict for no good outcome. Relationships with our community members are not one of the things we need to break – but mend.

Holding firm to our deep impulse for spirituality is vital. That way we can surrender our grip on things that must change. Belief serves our psychological needs, not our quest for rational or objective truth. If we understand that then we can be free in our quest for meaning and values. Belief about what is ‘truth’ is always context dependent and reliant on what we know and how we think. It is always contestable.

Being SBNR is a personal quest for meaning and values. Professor Archive’s concern that SBNR thinking is a pick and mix smorgasbord of selected elements from many systems and isn’t coherent doesn’t bother me. Other religions aren’t coherent either – especially Christianity. What matters is the quest for meaning and values rather than dogmas.

What we are witnessing now and will continue to witness in the years to come, will not likely bring us comfort. It may distress some of us and excite others. What matters is whether we can discover the core of our values and meaning – where our indestructible nature is affirmed. How we get there is down to us. 

Do explore Christian Smith’s book. A sociologist’s take on generational changes in the way we live, think, feel and act since the end of World War 2 is immensely helpful – not only to understand why formal religion is shrivelling but why so many other things we take for granted are also changing, and must change.

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.

Introduction

Now and then I get hit by themes from multiple unrelated sources. A speaker in a podcast observed that the best thing we might for the human condition was to become more self-aware through intentional effort. I had been writing on the crisis in DEI and concluded that at its core DEI is about our deliberate efforts to be more open to and inclusive of, others. But the motive was more evolutionary than moral. We were evolving more complex and pluralistic cultures but still operating on psychological reflexes established in our very ancient past.  

I liked that the podcast speaker didn’t assert any particular beliefs, or methods – just evolving our self-awareness with intent – and an open mind. 

The danger in the DEI space is that we imagine greater inclusivity is good in a moral sense and assume that those not so inclined are not so good. This is a recipe for conflict – and that’s not how you advance inclusion – by excluding those who disagree with you.  

The DEI crisis emphasized how a sense of moral certainty is neither sufficient nor necessary. Goodwill is, though. 

DEI has become a formalization of a philosophical approach which is embodied in Matthew 22:39 (the 2^nd ‘great commandment’ – love your neighbor as yourself) It is a sense of duty rather than a moral imperative. That is to a say it is on us to behave inclusivity, not something we demand of other people. 

There’s a slippery psychological process that kicks in when we believe we have a right to demand behaviors of others. If they do not conform to what we say, we can exclude them, regardless of whether we are prepared to hold ourselves to the same standard. This is the trouble with moral righteousness. It is rooted in certainty and not in self-awareness.  

This goes to the very core of the Christian story now long overlaid by dogmas, distractions and diversions which give cover to avoid confronting the stark requirement of the two ‘greatest commandments’ – become self-aware (inwardly and outwardly). This isn’t an argument for Christianity. This is a universal principle. But it is the core of our culture (religious or secular), expressed in so many ways.

The simplicity of the theme

The thing about these two commandments is that they are setting a theme without prescription. How to I love my god? (or whatever the secular equivalent is) How do I love my neighbor? These are deep questions that should excite inquiry, reflection and experimentation. From such questions we will generate much commentary and advice – and this is true of whatever tradition/path we elect to follow. 

However, we also see that an exemption is woven into many traditions. We craft exemptions to the ‘love thy neighbor’ commandment because this is the hardest thing to do. We are hardwired to exclude. We innately form in-groups and out-groups, and this gives us a permission to deny, reject or exclude that feels okay deep down. It is natural, but its not always the right or good thing to do.

That the point of this injunction to love thy neighbor is to evolve our sense of common being and fellowship can be safely edited out of religious teaching because it is too hard an ask of a follower – if you want many of them to conform to the larger mission of a religion (which isn’t always to follow the founder’s teachings). 

Adherence to this injunction is reserved for the more saintly followers. The rest are excused the effort beyond being obliged to love those neighbors who are members of their in-group (sect, cult or denomination). There’s a reason the ‘good Samaritan’ story is told. It was okay to exclude some people. It still is.

In terms of how we might understand psychological maturity and health, asking some folks to be sufficiently self-aware of their own biases and self-righteousness might be asking too much. Our more primitive psychological reflexes aren’t ‘wrong’ or bad. They served our survival needs for 100s of thousands of years. 

Wisdom/religious traditions have pearls of great beauty that are only background noise to the majority.  What can apply to individuals will not apply to communities – beyond it being an aspiration, rather than a moral injunction.

Good neighbors

We can aspire to love our neighbors knowing that we are driven by psychological reflexes that value not doing so. 

In general, we live in communities in which we are cool about our neighbors. This might be substantially because we don’t know them beyond a superficial degree. 

David Rock from the Neuroleadership Institute was clear that religion, sexuality and politics were not good subjects for discussion in the workplace. We can be good work neighbors by not delving into themes that might trigger contentious passions. 

This raises the proposition that details of a person’s life that might arouse strong feelings are really none of our business in the context of a workplace or even a neighborhood. 

There are requirements for being a good neighbor that concern civility, a lack of criminality and other behaviors that might otherwise disturb the peace and order of a community. There’s a contentious dimension in that this might also include not drawing attention to one’s own attributes that might arouse adverse passions in others. This is where DEI got into bother. What is fair to demand of others or oneself in a complex, diverse and pluralistic community? I don’t propose an answer to that here. 

There is a well-intended desire that we all have the right to bring our whole selves to work. But that is, I think a vague idealized sentiment. Maybe a trade off in our complex, diverse and pluralistic communities and workplaces is that we don’t – beyond a certain level of discrete authenticity. Even in a setting that is psychologically safe we need to self-police how much we might wisely disclose or express in our behavior.

We cannot demand others be more than they are. For a bunch of reasons that include historic, cultural, religious and personal life experience reasons we are at different degrees of self-awareness and self-control. 

There isn’t a valid moral reason to demand unfettered self-expression. The need for discretion has always been there. 

There is, I believe, a valid aspiration to see that our communities and workplaces are as open and inclusive as possible. It is not reasonable to demand freedom of expression for oneself while denying it to others. But some communities which are dominated by particular outlooks on life will assert their right to dominate. To misread this as a matter of justice and moral right is to assert a right that is not universally recognised. 

Neighbors are who they are, and we live with that reality by not digging too deep. In communities dominated by particular outlooks, it may not be possible to ignore unwelcome interest. Wisdom and political sense should trump naïve assertions of rights.

Pending the widespread growth of self-awareness, we are stuck with what we have, not as a moral affront but as an artefact of history and cultural and personal evolution. 

We do not improve things by pointing at others and demanding they change – and excluding them until they do. 

The injunction to love thy neighbor as thy self means to see that others with whom we may disagree on matters important to us may look at us in the same way. Presumption of moral failing for not conforming to our beliefs and standards is not a fair, reasonable or kind thing. 

Our common attributes

We humans have way more in common than what distinguishes us from each other. The details might be very different but the psychological processes that drive our behaviour are the same. 

There are some who are not good neighbors. They bring strife and disruption to our communities. It is tempting to reject and isolate them, and it is our natural reflex to do so. But is it always just and wise?

With the many challenges facing us as individuals the idea that we might need to collectively become somewhat more self-aware seems reasonable. 

On a distinctly spiritual level we aren’t talking anything different. The idea that our spirituality is essentially about what we believe is a very modern thing. But it’s essentially about attitudes and values. It’s like the way our nutrition is about the essentials of a decent diet and not about cuisines or table manners and table settings. Those things might be important on a personal or cultural level, but they don’t have a determinative impact on our diet. 

Fears and stresses

There is a steady flow of reports on significant mental health challenges that impact people at all ages. Relationships are under stress – or hard to establish. 

We are in a time when certainties are failing us, when those who look into the future see little to enthuse over.

I am not one of them. There are challenges and difficulties ahead. Our economic, social and political systems aren’t fit for purpose anymore. We do need a period of effective and positive change. But we are in a time when we are collectively more disposed to escapism and disengagement than putting an effort in to being part of the solution. 

I like the call for greater self-awareness as a response to these times. It does mean we must put in the cognitive and emotional effort to adapt to the reality that is emerging. 

A call for greater self-awareness isn’t dogmatic or proscriptive. It’s not even moral. It is more pragmatic. It argues that we make a greater effort to be more aware of what is going on around us so we can adapt to the changes that are washing over us. 

I am cautious about assertions that ET will make their presence known so widely that the evidence will be unambiguous. But I have little doubt that should this happen the existential crisis that will be precipitated will be catastrophic to many. It would be a deeply rude shock to those glued to their smart phone screens. 

It is interesting that now even books on management and organizational behaviour are talking of love being a desired attribute of leaders, along with emotional intelligence. It’s not that these sources are outliers, rather they are affirmations of other similar sentiments from less formal sources. 

Being more loving necessarily means being more self-aware. The trends toward significant changes in our lives aren’t necessarily going to be diminished but greater self-awareness (by all the names we might call it) will make our adaptation less traumatic. 

I think the changes are good and necessary. But, looking at the way the far right is responding, denial of them can become desperate. Misconstruing these changes as a moral force also impedes efforts to adapt more gracefully.  From a political perspective both sides of the popular divide have lost realistic vision and voice. 

A vital perspective

There is a necessary distinction to be made between individual spirituality and participation in a religious tradition. Religious traditions are communal constructs that embody cosmologies, cultural histories, philosophies, metaphysical systems, social mores and so on. They are not spiritual pathways – although such pathways will exist within a tradition. These traditions are a cultural ecosystem in which individuals exist – as members of groups and on a personal level. Such ecosystems are not equivalent to personal spiritual practices but can be containers of them. 

There is a larger container, western civilization, which embraces religious and non-religious world views. 

Self-awareness as an intentional personal practice may begin with religious activity but embraces the prospect of transcending it. I don’t here mean that self-awareness will necessarily lead to abandoning a religious tradition, only that it may do. 

Efforts at self-awareness allow for the evolution of insight that may include changing one’s relationship with one’s faith tradition. That might include confronting a distinction between a philosophical issue and a cultural tradition. 

Perhaps the best example of this is Dan McClellan’s work (check it out on YouTube). McClellan is a religious scholar who argues that Christianity is a negotiable belief system. It is not an inherently true system but contains truths of various degrees and shades. One can be a devout Christian but lacking much self-awareness or a deeply self-aware adherent to a very nuanced interpretation of the tradition. 

We can imagine self-awareness as a predictable pathway, but that would be a problematic assumption. As an evolutionary process we might reasonably engage in a movement away from reflexive belief in a dogma, but that may involve a deep examination of the dogma – or a reactive rejection of it. 

Self-awareness isn’t a state we arrive at so much as a process we undertake. 

We can think of our efforts at achieving knowledge, understanding, insight etc as part of the natural impetus upon human consciousness to evolve through states of awareness to a more refined condition. Our traditions describe states of enlightenment or union with the divine. Materialists imagine a disembodied knowledge-infused state. Regardless of what we believe there is a common sense of progression toward a state of awareness beyond what we now have. It could be a restoration, a redemption or a novel progression. But whether our sense is cyclical or linear, getting there is still a goal we have – to the extent that we have a vision of such. 

We can think about self-awareness as a non-dogmatic aspirational goal. It’s a kind of openness to insight about our own beliefs, attitudes and behaviors. The language of reflection is secular and scientific (human sciences). This is not to reject the metaphysical or esoteric but only to free up our awareness from habituated or dogmatic thought.

The power of doubt

I am entirely comfortable with the idea of spirit communication (which I have experienced) but I want a sense of rational (genuine) scepticism to guide how I might reflect upon that experience. Genuine scepticism is about doubting whether one’s interpretation of an experience is appropriate, not whether the experience happened. My fundamentalist Christian family members might assert that God spoke to them.  My reaction is to ask “How do you know that who ‘spoke’ to you was God? I don’t have a fundamental issue with the idea that a deeper spiritual reality motivated a person to talk to themselves in order to allow that person to believe an important truth. But I also allow it was a religiously motivated delusion. I can form a personal belief about their claim, but I must also confess to myself that I do not know. 

Maybe God did speak to them? Maybe that same God speaks to us all – but only through whatever filters we allow to be valid? Our capacity for doubt must include our reflexes to create interpretative narratives about our experiences. Is it okay for us to invalidate another’s experience just because it does not mesh with our beliefs about how reality works? 

A capacity for doubt is the toehold necessary for self-awareness to evolve. But though it’s necessary, it’s not sufficient. 

Doubting what others say is not even half the answer. Self-doubt in the healthy sense is essential. Doubting our interpretation of what we hear or see is important. This not only because these days our information environment is replete with deception and distortion coming from other actors, but because what we believe is a filter that can/will distort our awareness of what is knowable. 

We have become captive to a great myth of our culture- what we fancy is rational thought is free of emotional distortion. Nothing could be further from reality. 

Reason was once the attribute of the soul but, under the persuasive power of materialist thought it became the attribute of mind. And the dark twin of reason was emotion – a lower form of consciousness associated with the body’s lesser processes. 

As our understanding of intelligence has evolved, we are coming to better understand that the great power of intelligence is not the raw processing power of the intellect but a capacity for imagination. So many of our great discoveries have come from imagining, not from reasoned thought – which is more like the housekeeper/librarian of our consciousness – tidying up after an imaginative party. 

In a sense self-awareness is the capacity to dare to imagine what the soul says. It will speak to us any way we allow ourselves to hear. But we often offer up only the filters of belief and dogma as permissible instruments to receive its voice. We can earnestly beseech our inner spirit for wisdom and insight but permit only a distorted voice to reply.

Conclusion

We are in an age when secular rational sources are saying we must become more self-aware so that we can respond effectively to the emerging challenges. These messages are coming from business schools and other entities whose primary functions are to sustain what we have. 

There has been a steady trend towards a convergence of scientific, philosophical and spiritual themes – on the subjects of self-awareness and the need to adapt to emerging disruptive conditions – climatic, technological, political, and social.

So, whether we are thinking in terms of keeping what we have or changing it for something better, we have work to do on ourselves.

Resources

Many of us struggle to find the time to access new ideas that stimulate self-reflection. One useful source is podcasts that can be listened to on a work commute, while exercising or doing chores. All you need is cell phone and earphones/earbuds. Below are some of my go-to podcasts. There is an abundance to explore beyond this brief list:

• The Thinking Mind Podcast
• Evolving Psychiatry
• Freakonomics Radio
• The Psychology Podcast
• To The Best of Our Knowledge
• No Stupid Questions
• You Are Not So Smart
• Ideas (CBC)
• Late Night Live (ABC Radio National)
• The Telepathy Tapes

Introduction

I came across a remark that equated our physical bodies to spacesuits. My immediate reaction was “That’s silly, why not Earth suits?”

This random thought arose from a mess of influences in my mind in the past few months. The idea that ET might be interdimensional. The idea that our reality is the product of multiple minds in a massive co-creation. And the meaning of idea of being human. 

There’s an old saying from my hippy days – We are not physical beings having a spiritual experience but spiritual beings having a physical experience.

So, does being human sit on the spirit side the physical side? Is it a fusion of both? Strictly speaking it seems that human is physical in its original meaning – from humus, apparently. This means we have an essentially materialistic conception of being human – even if it has a religious foundation as well. In Christian terms human creation is certainly physical – red clay. But Genesis has two creations.  The first not being physical. Now I am not suggesting Genesis is history – just a story with complex themes. 

The alternative story is that we are incarnating spirits – essentially inter-dimensional beings whose presence in this physical world is anchored via our donning of an Earth suit. 

We become human when we are wearing our Earth suit. 

Evolutionary biology and psychology tell us useful things about our primate Earth suits. Just in case you struggle with this notion I’d like to remind you that tech geeks dream of creating smart clothing – perpetuating our passion to animate our creations. The idea of a living organic ‘suit’ is not utterly ridiculous. 

The thing about one’s Earth suit being homo sapiens is that it’s essential behaviour is reasonable consistent with our spiritual needs. The fit isn’t perfect – just a reasonable one. However, cognitive science suggests to some that our ‘stone-age’ primate minds are ill-suited to our ‘space-age’ circumstances. Looks like we might have to inject more ‘spirit’ into the flesh.

Another useful observation is that when we dress, we often signal identity. This is true especially when we put on uniforms. Advertisers know putting an actor in a lab coat will make them appear credible sources of ideas about a product. So, donning an Earth suit triggers an identification with others in their Earth suits.

My purpose here is to disrupt our habituated thinking, not to push an idea.

Why an Earth suit?

This question is often answered in myriad unsatisfactory ways that conform to dogmas rather than meet skeptical needs. 

Stewart Edward White, in the Unobstructed Universe. notes that the material physical experience is obstructed. In the spirit of time flying when we are having fun, being in one’s Earth suit isn’t fun. Time plays out relatively slowly. Buddhism talks of escaping desire and the wheel of rebirth – the aspiration to not feel it is necessary to don an Earth suit. Identification isn’t essential, though it might be compulsive.

Robert Monroe observed myriad spirits clamouring to enter the physical realm in order to experience ‘sensation’ in that slowed down state. Christianity echoes Buddhism in the sense of attending to the aspiration to escape desire and ignoble conduct. It also has a lot of guilt associated with its teachings. 

The consensus is that we are here in our Earth suits for ‘sensation’ but we become so immersed in that craving we lose track of our essential nature and purpose. We must redeem ourselves.

I think this is wrong headed. The Genesis story gives an explanation in a moral sense because doing so works psychologically – to a degree. Myth isn’t history. Stories serves purposes in context.

It’s all much more complex than that. The material physical reality is a medium of experience. It is one among many. Some argue we visit other non-material realms routinely. I can say only that I have had not many conscious experiences of such, and none have been evidentiary. Its hence only a plausible idea to me.

A useful parallel might be our relationship with water. Whether we dive, swim or sail there are ways of behaving that aren’t the same as being on dry land. There are skills and strengths that particular to the water medium and which are not directly translatable to dry land – but confer benefits which may be utilized on dry land. 

The point is that functioning in a radically different medium can be beneficial. In White’s sense water is more obstructive than air yet you can do things in water you can’t do in air – like float. 

It’s hard to answer a ‘why?’ question other than to observe that there seem to be multiple dimensions with their own characteristics. Material reality has attributes others don’t. So, if you want to be well rounded getting experience across the range of environments is advantageous. 

If what we understand about the necessity of sleep in relation to our psychological wellbeing it could be that we need to engage with non-physical realities to stay psychologically healthy. Hanging up our Earth suit and enjoying being naked might be something important?

We are focused on what we see through our Earth suit because that is sensible. If we are diving in water, it makes sense to concentrate on where we are rather than what’s going on in the air or on the ground – unless this is relevant to where we are. 

My point here to observe that how things are for us might be entirely ordinary from a certain perspective, but we have been induced to think in complex and mysterious ways that make it all so very elaborate. 

Shamans who go on spirit journeys have a singular ability which is remarkable to others, but this doesn’t mean that where they go is inherently remarkable. 

Likewise conscious OOBErs are relatively uncommon but that doesn’t mean the experience is itself remarkable or the places they go are inherently out of the ordinary. 

The mystification we are used to arises, I believe, for several reasons. 

The first is that the ability to have experiences in the non-physical realms may be limited in terms of personal capacity. The experience is non-ordinary rather than extraordinary. Natural, not supernatural. 

Second this politics of perception and social conformity. The difference between genuine shamans and ordained priests is that latter have the influence of the former upon a given population but not necessarily the capability. Hence the non-ordinary is subject to obfuscation to preserve influence and control that is not merited. 

The third resulting from the second, is there are social structures and discourses that benefit those seeking power. This power comes from elaborating on mysteries or denying them. Mystification is a power game intended to distract, deflect and deflate.

What is our environment?

What we can sense via our Earth suits is very limited relative to what is possible even on the physical plane. Other creatures use ultrasound, infrared or ultraviolet ranges of the spectrum of senses. Indeed, even a casual survey of capabilities of other Earth creatures reminds us that we function within a narrow band of sensory and other bodily capabilities. 

We make a big thing about people with other than normal abilities – intelligence, strength, speed, artistry and so on. 

Over the past half century or so we have become aware of how complex and interconnected our physical environment is. Other sciences are driving our sense of the complexity of reality deeper and deeper. 

Materialistic science insists that what is real is only what can be sensed, including via the mediation of technologies and intellect. Hence there’s a restriction on how our inquiry progresses.

Despite efforts to insist otherwise our religious foundations are soundly rooted in Earth suit experience. They claim authority over the non-physical which is not warranted. 

So, what is beyond the sensory Earth suit awareness? Our Earth suit bias extends our imagination into ‘outer space’ and the seemingly unfathomable dimensions of physical reality. We struggle with the notion of a quantum reality. But interdimensional realities are not on our menu of respectable options.

Human consciousness has always understood the presence of an ecology of lives inhabiting a non-material dimension. But this authoritative information is not part of our cultural narrative. This is despite an abundance of accounts of such extra-dimensional experiences going back to ancient times and richly in the present. 

This absence from our cultural narrative is recent, and primarily because neither religious nor materialistic authorities want to adapt to their inevitable loss of power should this wider dimensional reality become accepted as a cultural truth. 

If Earth ecology is any guide the non-physical dimensions are just as complex. This is a guess on my behalf based on research and experience. It is inferred rather than asserted as a fact.

What does interdimensional mean?

Let us allow that reality is inherently interdimensional. That is the physical is inherently entangled with the non-physical.  We might then be thinking in terms of awareness of what is, rather than what is in absolute terms. The full spectrum of realities exists whether we are aware of it or not.

The complexity of physical ecologies didn’t emerge because we became aware of it. It was there all along. We are becoming more aware of that complexity partly through advances in science and partly through changes in attitude.

Shamans, OOBErs, and evidence from non-physical agents provide at least fundamental evidence of the interdimensionality of our reality. It is basic, at least at a public level. Who knows how sophisticated it is in private.

The idea that ET is interdimensional can provide us with the idea of an unsensed elsewhere – but not as though this suggests a vastness of nothing between our here and that unsensed elsewhere. It could rather be a vastness of complexity – such as exists between Sydney and Paris.

Conclusion

I have no doubt that interdimensional interaction is going to become more apparent, but how long before it becomes part of our normal cultural discourse isn’t something I can’t guess at with any confidence.

We have natural habits of editing out thoughts that don’t fit our expectations. We have all had intuitions we dismissed when they arose in our awareness, only to be later confirmed experientially.

Part of that habit of dismissing awarenesses is how we frame ideas, and the language we use. We can act to fix habits of mind and accidentally activate denial when we what we intended was doubt. What we need is curiosity unencumbered habituated thinking.

I have lived with a steady stream of confirmation of a complex interdimensional reality since childhood, and even so I have been captured by our sticky cultural discourse. This has led me to wrongly imagine there are separated fixed categories of experience. It’s been only the past few years that I have been thinking in terms of ordinary and non-ordinary rather than categories like spiritual, occult, or esoteric.

Interdimensionality is our birthright. It was once normal and still is in some cultures. We are interdimensional beings. Our bodies, our Earth suits, are our vehicles of manifestation on the material plane. Our attention is focused here, through those Earth suits when we are awake and active. When we are asleep, not so much.

We exclude interdimensional awareness mostly because we are told it isn’t real or isn’t a good thing to do. It is real and it is something we engage in to some degree naturally. There are hazards, of course, if we indulge recklessly or excessively.

My argument here is to think differently about it and don’t censor awareness reflexively. Choose freely, and wisely. 

Introduction

The passions of the past 3 or 4 years as articulated in social media especially have obliged me to reimagine the basis of relating and communicating. 

A few years ago I was an active participate in a forum created by the Skeptiko podcast but quit with a few allies after the culture of the forum deteriorated beyond our capacity for tolerance. For me it became a place where aggressive intolerant and dogmatic participants were given free reign and assertive and offensive counters to reasonable statements were deemed appropriate. At least that was my take on it, in company with a lot of other folks.

One of those allies went on to be involved in the creation of Psience Quest [PQ] – an alternative forum which attracted other Skeptiko refugees. They reflected on the motives of the founders of the new forum saying, “We set up PQ to safeguard the community, putting its future into our own hands, and taking it out of the hands of a singular, capricious host.”

The idea that a community needed protecting isn’t novel, it’s just rare to see it working out.

Social media seemed to have so much promise as an opportunity for a collaborative sharing of ideas but it seems to have become an amplifier of our baser reflexes and a stalking ground for predators. I have largely quit social media in deep disappointment. My X/Twitter account has languished unused for over a decade. My Facebook account is likewise abandoned. I have no compelling reason yet to kill either account. 

I have retained Linked-In for professional reasons, but it’s hardly more than a kind social network with job ads these days. 

Last year I read several books on X/Twitter and the problems of social media. The vociferous champions of free speech aggressively assert their rights to lie, mislead, insult and abuse. 

I am not averse to a right to free speech, but I think it comes with responsibilities. These include civility and honesty.

I know a lot of what happened on the Skeptiko forum was down to folks sitting down at their computer and getting steadily drunker. Angry drunks get ruder as they drink. But happy drunks don’t – they just get infuriatingly reasonable – a red rag to an angry drunk’s bull.

Social media has simply concentrated and magnified an existing problem. Our culture has determined that what we think and believe is a contest, rather than a collaboration. We are habituated to the zero-sum game of right or wrong.

This is, I believe psychologically immature – and its time we grew up. 

Having said this, let me assure the reader that I see myself as having only begun the business of growing up.

What is going on?

I believe free speech is vital – but in some communities its exercise has grated against my sensibilities.  I have a bias toward speech that is truthful and respectful – exploratory rather than assertive. And I have a bias toward people who are self-reflective, thoughtful, and not impelled by arrogance or anger – or a compulsion to be right. 

What is true or right isn’t as clear cut as we often think. Certainty at a personal level does not always translate to certainty shared by all members of a community. 

We know this in our families. The psychology of in-groups and out-groups is such that we give far greater latitude to in-group members. We assert that out-group members are wrong in so many ways.

Sometimes it isn’t that an idea is the dealbreaker of a relationship so much as the attitude that accompanies it. We sometimes don’t even bother to assess the integrity of an idea because its mere assertion militates against what we believe to be true – regardless of whether we have assessed that belief against data and reasoned thought.

We frame arguments to defend a belief in ways that serve our needs, rather than tailor them to reasonably convince our audience. And when they are not persuaded, we are certain that this because of their deficits in mentality and integrity, and certainly not in our arguments or the belief they are intended to bolster.

After several years of thinking about belief I concluded that it comes down to what we imagine to be true and then we construct social and intellectual props to support that assertion.

Recently my inquiry into cognitive science and evolutionary anthropology has given me confidence I am least in the right ballpark.

If we don’t understand how and why we form beliefs, we will not escape from the sense that they are fundamental to our sense of being and meaning and hence must be defended with an existential zeal.

In our evolution we lived in communities where shared beliefs and values were critical to our survival. These days we still do need shared beliefs and values to craft a workable society – but at nowhere the level that was once necessary. Now we can accommodate a far wider, more diverse, set of beliefs about the meaning of life etc. We live in complex, pluralistic and diverse communities and yet the essential mechanisms of living together work tolerably well. I was advised many years ago to marvel that things work as well as they do, rather than lament the manifold manifest deficits in our conception and practice. 

I constantly remind myself of the wise words of Tom Peters, a ‘management guru’ I first encountered in the late 1980s. He said that we lived in a ‘sloppy and messy’ world. This,  I subsequently discovered, was an unexpectedly eloquent [but hardly elegant] description of reality – deeply complex and malleable – but with crunchy bits that attract sentiments of certainty. 

Contestation has value in aspects of our lives. However, misinterpretation of evolution has led some to believe that competition is the pervasive and dominant impulse in nature. It isn’t. Interdependence is the norm. Competition functions under the umbrella of interdependence – the crunchy bits.

Kuhn’s lament that science’s progress is only possible one funeral at a time is telling. It makes me wonder how much more progress might have been made if our dominant actors on our cultural stage had been more psychologically mature and less inclined to assert their particular beliefs. It’s as if there is a paradox at play. The passion and determination to rise to the top of one’s field often requires the fuel of egotism – and this becomes part of the colour of success. Combatting egos fool us into believing they model how to do things. Observers of our primate cousins note that alpha males aren’t leaders in any sensible sense – they are just dominant. We can see that in our culture that dominant egos have sold us the lie that they are leaders. We are beginning also to see that their egotistical chest thumping has led us into a perilous cul-de-sac.

Frank and fearless

My long time in the public sector made me accustomed to being expected to offer frank and fearless advice – which I tried to honour. It was expected my advice would be well-informed, accurate, clear, and respectful. But the reality was that it was often not received in a reciprocating spirit. And advice I was given occasionally was neither frank nor fearless – and often wrong and biased. I learned to carefully double check advice from some sources. 

The ideal was fine, but, as with many ideals, living up to it was compromised by human impulses unconsciously obeyed. It doesn’t take too deep a dive into psychology to grasp that we deceive ourselves and others routinely. This isn’t out of any malign spirit. We simply have reflexes that have evolved to serve our needs – but in settings very unlike what live in now.

The ideal and reality don’t mesh neatly. Frank and fearless advice has theoretical merits. But if that ideal is applied injudiciously in the real world, it can and will lead to trouble. A person who now is a good friend was a member of a team I led. One day a director approached me to advise that I should speak to my team member who they assessed to be ‘unreliable’ in meetings. They had dared ask questions which put the director and other leaders on the spot. The questions were entirely sensible. But they also violated the unspoken code of not embarrassing leaders.

So, we had a chat about what happens when intelligence and integrity encounters presumptions of prowess based entirely on position. We had to learn how to candy-coat the truth to power if we wanted to deliver good outcomes for the community we served and survive.

Raw idealism does not work.

Competition vs Cooperation

For a very long time, since the adoption of Darwin’s theory at least, we have been persuaded that competition is the norm in the living world. But science has been unpicking that fabric for decades. Ecologies do have a natural element of competition, but within a far greater impulse to cooperate and be interdependent.

I grew up playing games – cricket, soccer, Aussie rules, chess, Monopoly, Ludo, darts, so many card games, and pool. I also played elaborate war games that lasted several days. In each game competition was essential – but only within a structure of rules and compliance with them. Ill-disciplined competition in the form of cheating was not okay.

I am grateful for the life lessons game playing taught me. I learned to analyze situations, assess people, think strategically and bide my time.

We are told that a certain amount of stress is good for us, indeed it is essential for our well-being. It is very much like competition. Game playing is possible only because of the rules. We can use games to test ourselves or to dominate others – and if domination is our goal, we will try to have the rules favour us. You can see where this might go if the urge to compete is pathological.

What we are learning more and more via science and more mature thinking is that our reality is a complex of interdependencies and collaborations in which competition is a nuanced but necessary flavor.

Why does any of this matter in a spiritual sense

I started to write this on 21 January 2025, the day before my birthday and the anniversary of my mum’s death – an interesting timing that has been elegantly revolutionary over the past 27 years. It has routinely plunged me into deep thought. On the first anniversary my mother’s spirit visited me and gave me a gift of an understanding that transformed my life. This year that reflective period continued into February.

There are already signs that this year is going bring transformational developments that going to change the way many will think about their lives. But those developments can shift us into transcending the impulse to contest what is real and good and true or tip us into full on conflict. There’s no point in saying that ‘we have a choice’ if we don’t know how to exercise it. And it’s going to be less likely we will take the opportunity to find out how to do so if the climate of aggressive assertion of the right to lie, mislead and insult is perpetuated.

The choice we have is to decide whether we are predominantly competitors or collaborators. Even deciding we are predominantly collaborators isn’t enough because we have likely imbibed a lifetime of culturally conditioned competition habits. Deconditioning ourselves is a big and long job. Being aware is an essential beginning though.

Let me put this in context. Today I found 2 sources of ideas that I tapped into in the past few days converging. I started listening to a podcast called The Telepathy Tapes yesterday and watching some recent UFO/ET videos as well. The content of both sources resonated with ideas from David R. Samson’s Our Tribal Future. Samson is an evolutionary anthropologist who observes that our innate psychological reflexes are mismatched against our current social reality and that we need to do intentional work to speedily adapt those reflexes to how things are now.

It’s not that we are doing anything wrong, just that we are lagging behind where we need to be in our adaptation if we want to achieve the outcomes that we desire without more widespread suffering than seems presently likely.

I am a fan of that idea that critical change is achieved one funeral at a time. Younger generations imbibe the new values that are generated by cultural change activists. I can see this happening in my own family. It’s not a smooth transition but the difference in outlook between my parents and my nieces and nephews, and my grandson is stark.

But those changes have happened only because the cultural change activists have undertaken intentional efforts to evolve how they think and believe. Neuroscience tells us that such change is demanding. In the storm of our personal lives the extra cognitive effort to refine our perceptions and feelings is a cost we must pay.

We all know this is true. Keeping new year’s resolutions, breaking habits, sticking to diets, or adopting and following a new belief set all demand cognitive [emotional and intellectual] effort to change how we are to how we want to be. It isn’t easy, but the change won’t happen without the effort. 

For the past 20 months or so I have been responding to an inner urge to think and write on the theme of the future of human spirituality. I wondered whether it was necessary to sayhuman spirituality – and apparently it is. The reason is dawning on me slowly as I find myself drawn to books on the evolution of the biology of our behaviour. This isn’t an area many people with an abiding interest matters spiritual have bothered with. The doggedly materialistic voice that has dominated science has made such curiosity seem pointless from a spiritual perspective.

But things have changed. The newer generations of scientists may be influenced by materialism, but they haven’t grown up loyal to it and they are not cowed by it. They are asking more subtle questions and finding equally subtle responses.

A few days ago, I watched a YouTube video earnestly discussing a biblical text said to be at least 3,000 years old. Why? Why invest so much energy into a text whose actual content had nothing of meaning to say to us? It seemed to me that this was a fusion of game playing and displacement activity. It had value only in the context of the group of people who have a passion for this hobby.

Where we finding meaning about the challenges and opportunities ahead of us matters. I have spent decades seeking insight in sources from the past. This has been an immensely rewarding pursuit and I still engage in it, but to a far lesser degree. 

What seems now a better application of effort is exploring current knowledge – of which there is such an abundance. Little of this knowledge is expressed in ways that satisfy the needs of a spiritual quester, so there’s a job to be done.

My growing interest concerns what it means to be human. It is a question that has become enticingly difficult to answer with any real clarity. I want to craft my own answer because I do believe that we will share an awareness of those we presently call ET in the not very distant future – and I want to be psychologically prepared for that. I presently think ET is interdimensional and their open arrival will transform how we must think about our reality.

In a recent audiobook or podcast there was a fleeting reference to a claimed statement from the Buddha about how reality was woven from the interlacing of the consciousnesses of many lives. That claim sent me off on a fascinating reverie, hence I am no longer sure where it came from.

This is, of course, a very animistic thing but the version I am more familiar with says that ‘we’ create reality with our minds. The ‘we’ here is taken to mean only humans. We are privileging ourselves as creators rather than contributors. We see ourselves major and even dominant players when, in the scheme of things, we may be only players of lesser roles and not the stars of the show.

In the biblical drama humans are the stars on the earthly stage. In a desert setting that might be fair enough. But that’s not the case for forest and jungle dwellers. We have framed our sense of being human on the tales from arid lands and I don’t think that will serve us well when we have to adapt to interdimensional visitation – and discover we live in a multidimensional forest and not a spatial wilderness.

Conclusion

I think we have a lot of hard work to do to reimagine what it is to be human. The mindset of competition being the dominant logic of life has permeated our culture. Our religious roots lie in a zero-sum soil that has been aggressively competitive – there is only one God, to whom all is subject, and we have the exclusive say on how that plays out. 

We are heirs to this mentality, and it saturates and influences us whether we like it or not. This influence goes to our core and just rejecting the language and cultural practices is only a good first step. It isn’t sufficient.

I am not saying it’s all bad. There have been powerful evolutionary impulses for good expressed through our religions, but they remain entangled in historic tribal contexts that do not suit where we are and where we must go. There’s good evidence that western cultures are abandoning institutional religions in favour of DIY spirituality or atheism and materialism. But, as with any desirable trend, it can be boosted by intentional effort.

This effort is about going in the desired direction and not about arguing whether a particular path that suits somebody’s needs is right or wrong for other people. Ultimately what we believe serves our psychological needs, so the fact that what we believe doesn’t serve somebody else’s psychological needs isn’t important. But what is important is that this is understood.

There aren’t right or wrong spiritual beliefs. Some may be unhealthy and even toxic – reflecting a vulnerable psychological state which resonates with them. The risk of predation by promoters of such beliefs upon those vulnerable to manipulation is another matter.

Beliefs may also be expressed using assertions of objective factuality that are either not supported or contradicted by data. That’s fair game in terms of disputing such claims. However, this is something that requires discipline and sensibility. Some atheists love engaging with Christians who see the Bible as a source of literal truth. But to what good end? If the engagement also denigrates their faith and their sense of identity the exercise can become a form of bullying.

In Our Tribal Future Samson observes that members of an in-group will sacrifice truth for myth because identity and shared membership are more important than relying on data and objective truth.

We all make metaphysical guesses about what we believe is good and true and real. Materialists are sincere in their beliefs and constantly demonstrate a willingness to not follow the data – lest their identity and membership of a valued group becomes untenable.

If we look closely at our own conduct, we will maybe discover that we all sacrifice truth for belonging and identity to some degree. It’s what humans do.

We are used to thinking we are the smartest critter on the planet and when we meet with ET it will be a meeting with peers. It won’t be. I have encountered a non-human intelligence, and the comparison is not even toddler to adult. We are in for a profound surprise which may translate into shock and even existential trauma of the kind experienced by indigenous people upon the arrival of white people.

As we discover interdependency and cooperation are more widespread that we assumed we can surrender to that truth – or we can cling to our culturally conditioned beliefs and our familiar sense of identity.

A list of resources

These are only books I have come across, and which have inspired me. So, the list is neither exhaustive nor proscriptive. I urge the reader to be open and curious. 

I read kindle books which I can put on my phone, and I listen to lots audiobooks because I can ‘read’ while I am doing other things. I am often told there’s no time to read much. That really isn’t true – it’s about what we choose to do with our time. I used to commute to work – 1 hour door-to-door each way. That was 2 hours a day, 10 hours a week that was available to me. The question is what we are motivated to do with the time we have. We will make the time available that we think we need. Reading isn’t a competition. It’s a collaboration with our own inner life.

• Biology and Human Behaviours:                     
• The Neurological Origins of Individuality by Robert M. Sapolsky
• Becoming Kin by Patty Krawec and Nick Estes
• A Secular Age by Charles Taylor
• The Power of Us by J.V. Van Bavel & D. J. Packer
• Imminent by Luis Elizondo
• A New Science of the Afterlife by Daniel Drasin
• Tribal by Michael Morris
• The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot
• The Soul by Paul Ham
• The Golden Road by William Dalrymple
• Cognitive Science, Religion, and Theology by Justin L. Barrett
• Thriving with Stone-Age Minds by Justin L. Barrett   & Pamela Ebstyne King
• Behave by Robert M. Sapolsky
• Finding the Mother Tree: Uncovering the Wisdom and Intelligence of the Forest by Suzanne Simard
• The Light Eaters by Zoe Schlanger
• Thus Spoke the Plant by Monica Gagliano
• Our Tribal Future by David R. Samson
• The Telepathy Tapes – a podcast with Ky Dickens
• The Monroe Institute – YouTube Channel
• NDE The Other Side – YouTube Channel
• Ideas – CBC podcast
• To the Best of Our Knowledge – Wisconsin Public Radio