22C+

It's the future, Jim, but not as we know it…

Are the Aliens Coming, and

What Should We Say?

By Marcus T. Anthony (PhD)

mindfutures at gmail dot com
www.22cplus.blogspot.com

This article is a compilation of two posts on my blog www.22cplus.blogspot.com

When the aliens contact us, what should the first communication to them be? There’s a
man whose job it is to decide exactly what that statement might be. This is the famous
physicist Paul Davies, and he was recently interviewed by writer Jon Ronson. Besides
being a scientist and academic, Davies is the fairly famous author of many best-selling
books, including The Mind of God. He also just happens to be chair of Seti (Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence), which uses radio telescopes to scan the cosmos for signals
from other worlds with intelligent life. Seti was instigated by Frank Drake some 50 years
ago. Drake calculated what he thought to be the number of intelligent civilisations there
are in the galaxy, given all the variables that might contribute to the development as life
as we know it. He came up with an answer of 10 000. That’s an awful lot of ETs getting
around up there.

Like most mainstream scientists, Davies dismisses popular UFO culture, and ridicules
reports of cattle mutilations and alien abductions. He says that if there are aliens out
there, it is statistically very unlikely that they are just a few years ahead of us in terms of
technology. It’s an interesting point.

One of the ways we know that UFO witnesses are lying or delusional, Davies says, is that
the descriptions of the aliens and their craft are so unimaginative. Here is where Davies
shows some lack of understanding himself.

Not all descriptions of “UFOs” involve little grey men or flying saucers. In the prelude of
my book Sage of Synchronicity, I describe two UFOs I witnessed in the one evening –
one a great ball of glowing light which moved silently, and the other a series of red
circles travelling in triangle formation.

Some Other reports are far more interesting than mine. In one of his audios, The
Infinite Self, mystic Stuart Wilde describes encountering a life-form which he perceived
to be a kind of beautiful, geometric configuration (he had trouble describing it). He said
he watched it for a few minutes before it vanished.

Clearly then, not all UFO reports fit sci-fi movie stereotypes.

Returning to Seti, what should the first message to our alien friends be, and who should
send it?
 Professor Paul Davies

Paul Davies, predictably, believes that there should be a team of professional scientists
who gather together for this precise task. In fact the group already exists. The Post-
Detection Task Group has been around some 14 years. It is comprised of “30 Seti-
friendly scientists, writers and engineers.”

Davies says that after the Seti message has been confirmed, the next step would be to
create “some sort of science parliament”, whose job it will be to check a draft message to
be sent to the aliens. And what message would that be? Davies, unsurprisingly, says:

“…we should send something about our level of scientific understanding of how the
world works. Some fundamental physics. Maybe some biology. But primarily physics
and astronomy… the theory of relativity is impressive and will surely be understood by
them…”

Davies isn’t so keen on art or music though, as these are tied to or specific cognitive
structures.

I think Davies might be missing something. Some experiments have indicated that
certain kinds of music positively affect even plants, suggesting that music might also
transcend human cognition.

Professor Davies doesn’t completely dismiss the rest of the human race from having say.
After the important scientific stuff, other groups can chime in. This includes, according
to Davies, “all sorts of bizarre and incoherent babble that (the aliens) must treat with
some discretion.”

That’s good news, as it gives hope to lesser mortals like us getting a say.

I respect Paul Davies, and in many ways he is one of the most open-minded scientists
getting about. However, I believe that Davies is most likely wrong on several accounts.
Most importantly, I’m going to outline the significance of this for the future of science
and the future of possible human-alien interaction. Many of my critiques are founded
upon my first-person exploration of the human mind, and working with other
extraordinary individuals who have spent time doing the same. This gives me a rather
different slant on the problem of human/alien interaction than Davies. All argument is
only as valid as the soundness of the presuppositions upon which it is founded. In
Davies case, there are certain givens which (by definition) he assumes to be true, but
which are not.

Professor Davies argues that mathematics will be the only common language that we
will have with the first alien civilisation we contact. His error is that there are cognitive
processes which transcend language.

First-person approaches to the evolution of consciousness have brought forth some very
interesting evidence for human consciousness evolution. This includes levels of
consciousness where mind-to-mind communication is possible, at least to some degree.
(see books by Ken Wilber, and more layman-friendly texts by David E. Hawkins).
Information is capable of being passed from one entity to another this way. My
experience is that it happens all the time, only most of us are unconscious of it. I say this
not so much from a conviction that the growing scientific evidence is confirming it, but
because I have experienced some of these states of consciousness myself, as I wrote in
Sage of Synchronicity. I have also met many others who have experienced, and
demonstrated the same capacities. There are countless people walking the earth who are
living this consciousness connectivity, to lesser or greater degree.

The problem is that they are not permitted a voice in contemporary science, academia or
education.

And this is where the real problem lies with the Seti programme, as I see it.

Seti sits within an implicit hegemony, a hierarchy of valid/invalid realities, and this
mediates the acceptance/rejection of knowledge and ideas according its own self-
limiting understanding of the real. Dominant scientific society has established itself as
an effective priesthood, which then excludes others, including many who might
otherwise contribute important or even essential information.

Concluding his interview with Jon Ronson, Paul Davies enthuses:

“What we are doing is a fantastic and challenging task. It compels us to think about all
the things we should be thinking about. What is life? What is intelligence?”

Unfortunately, while it is possible to think about our gaps in education and thinking, it
is not possible to think about what we don’t know that we don’t know. An added
problem is that the very mental processes that dominate modern science, philosophy
and education are incapable of gleaning the kind of higher knowledge that Davies seeks.

“Rationality” as it is defined in modern education, is a delimited cognitive set which

restricts certain vital human perceptions. It is not simply that these perceptions are
trivia left off after efficiently trimming the fat from the knowledge bone. It is that the
intuitive mind, and in particular integrated intelligence, is capable of accessing
qualitatively transcendent knowledge that potentially revolutionises the context of
human life on this planet, indeed all life on the planet, or other planets for that matter.
 Newton observes light through a glass prism - experimentation is an
"extroverted" way of knowing.

Given that the Seti programme is thus delimited in scope, it is not overly surprising that
aliens have not bothered to contact Professor Davies. Maths and physics are nice, but
the capacity for a relatively advanced mathematical and physical investigation of the
universe is not in itself evidence of a cognitively balanced – let alone “evolved” –
species. Higher order math does constitute a kind of advanced intelligence, but tricky
number crunching in itself is not enough. Maths and physics are a reflection of the
culturally-mediated values and ways of knowing of dominant science, but they have to
be balanced with other humane values and intelligences before they can be expressed as
part of a greater wisdom. John Watson, for example, the father of behaviourist
psychology in the first half of the twentieth century, was rather good at maths and
analysis. He also recommended that babies never be hugged, because this conditions
them into being needy. Despite his considerable academic achievements, I suspect that
Watson didn’t understand that love is central to life and consciousness, because he’d
become hopelessly dissociated from his emotional body.

If I was an alien, I think that emotional and spiritual intelligence would be of just as
much importance as being able to do math. Intelligence includes the capacity to explore
inner worlds, and to come to a deep understanding of ourselves and our place in the
universe. If I was an advanced alien lifeform, I’d probably have figured that out by the
time I was able to communicate with other star systems.

This is very, very important.

And if I were to send a message to a potential alien group communicating with this
plant, it would be this:

“I am.”

In these words - a kind of mantra the Buddhists employ as means to enlightenment -

there is timeless wisdom. The aliens are not going to grant us that wisdom. We have to
discover it again and again for ourselves, until we finally "get it". In turning outwards
 Insight through introspection can deliver knowledge not currently on the map of dominant mind 
science.

and expecting help from alien civilisations, we are expressing, yet again, the human
hubris of wanting to be saved, thus giving our power away to the other. This is one of the
prime issues of the human race at this time. The only alien race that would venture forth
to play such a game would be one with an intention to play a power game. This is an
understanding that only one who has done a deep inner journey can appreciate fully.

Sadly, the world of science and modern education have discarded introspection, making
us a decidedly unattractive prospect for any spiritually evolved alien species.

Finally, the major factor which renders Seti largely obsolete, and a projection of a rather
undeveloped level of human cognitive development, is that the dominant science which
has created the programme is built upon an erroneous model of the cosmos - the
mechanistic paradigm. Despite the fact that modern physics has shown that the cosmos
is multi-dimensional, it is not fully appreciated that consciousness itself also exists
within multiple dimensions; and much of it transcends the constraints of 4-dimensional
space-time. Mind is essentially non-local - or integrated, as I prefer to call it. The human
body too, has a trans-dimensional component. I suspect that John Mack of Harvard was
moving in the right direction when he concluded that a big part of the alien abduction
phenomena was occurring in these domains, which has not been fully appreciated by
modern science. I have had several experiences which lead me to believe that such
"interactions" occur.

Until this multi-dimensional nature of consciousness is better understood in

mainstream science, organisations like Seti will continue to misunderstand the problem
of human-alien interaction, because the scientists involved do not understand the full
context of life, nor of "mind" itself.

This will happen in time. But not yet.

References
Anthony, Marcus T. Sage of Synchronicity, Benjamin Franklin Press, Hong Kong, 2010.
(www.sageofsynchronicity.weebly.com)
Ronson, Jon.“Welcome to my world”. Postmagazine, (Sunday Morning Post), Hong
Kong 11.04.10