Is Infinite Consciousness Having a Bad Trip?

Extreme Relativism, Extraterrestrials, and the Seductive Lure of Manifestation

Art from Andrea Samantha Sanchez, follow her on Instagram: @cosmicgurl00

One of my resolutions for the upcoming Jupiter/Saturn conjunction and Solstice: To criticize in a more loving, empathic, and generous manner. By nature, I am an intensely critical person. In my twenties, I enjoyed writing book reviews and art criticism for magazines. Much of my current focus lies in areas where there isn't much — or any — critical discourse. This lack of critical thinking bothers me. We need discernment even when we explore abstruse, esoteric, and seemingly ineffable subjects. This makes it more challenging, yet perhaps even more necessary.

I have always felt my critiques stem from love, albeit a tough love. When I care about someone or some set of ideas, I want to promote clear thinking around them. I care that people may be led in wrong directions based on specious arguments, subtly manipulative language, or pseudo-science. I want to help people, or at least give them an alternative perspective. Also, through the activity of discernment, I deepen my own understanding of a subject or an idea. Sadly, I often end up alienating or pissing off the targets of my criticisms.

I disagree with those who say we should categorically reject the mind, stop thinking, and just embrace the heart. It is true that intelligence — cognitive capacity, hyper-masculine rationality — is over-valued in our society, compared to intuition and feeling. At the same time, the heart is also a thinking organ. It possesses neurons like the brain. Brain and mind are intermeshed and meant to work together. Instead of rejecting the mind, we can seek to bring together our intuition and imaginative sympathy with analytic rigor and technical precision. 

Our culture tends toward simplistic, dualistic thinking. We break everything into dichotomies. Something is either good or bad, true or false. A prominent person is either a saint and guru or a monster and a pariah. Someone is either a conspiracy theorist or an establishment flunkie. Someone either believes all vaccines are great or is an "anti-vaxxer." You are either an ardent Capitalist or a strident Marxist. Etc.

One teaching of our time is that reality tends to be frustratingly ambiguous. People, events, and things often don't correspond to our yearning for clarity and definition. At the same time, however, it does us no good to surrender into the abyss of absolute relativism. In fact, it is disastrous. 

In his short book Trump and the Post-Truth World, Ken Wilber looked at the fatal flaw in the evolutionary consciousness of the 1960s: a tendency toward moral and philosophical relativism that opened the gates for Trumpism. Essentially, the 60s rebellion against hierarchy, patriarchy, and authority brought forth the idea that there was no such thing as objectivity, certainty, or trustworthy authority. The critical movements of post-structuralism and deconstruction dismantled the privileged position of the author and expert. Discoveries in quantum physics — revealing that the observer is meshed with the observed at the quantum level — supported the deconstructionist view that there was no objective or outside position. This reinforced the ideology of "the death of the author", where all viewpoints deserve equal consideration and an absolute truth does not exist. (However the logical fallacy in this argument is self-evident: Deconstructionists put forward the idea that there is no privileged position or objective truth  as a privileged position and an objective truth that then becomes a new dogma). 

Starting from extreme relativism, it is easy to see how one can jump to belief or faith in just about anything: One might follow arguments down the rabbithole leading to the conviction that the Earth is flat, or that establishment politicians are eating baby's brains in Satanic rituals, or that the Holocaust never happened, or that vaccines for Polio and Small Pox never did anything good. Relativism supports the idea that one’s subjective truth is all that matters — any other perspective is dismissible, “fake news.” It opens the door for those willing to manipulate, distort, and suppress any evidence or alternative viewpoint that goes against their agenda. 

At the same time, I often wonder if we don’t take our subjective viewpoint seriously enough. Let’s make a thought experiment: According to the esoteric perspective, each of us is that singular infinite consciousness (Brahman or Atman, the “One without a Second”) that constructs and continually maintains the illusion of this physical universe. This means that everything I (or you) encounter and everyone I (or you) meet is a holographic projection within my / your illusionary dream-construction. If this is the case, then shouldn’t reality be very mutable — an open, creative process, shaped by my / your thoughts and intentions? 

To continue this thought experiment: if I am infinite consciousness choosing to have this limited human experience in this particular form, then is it only something inside of me (and you), some kind of fear or shadowy quaver or disbelief, that stops incredible miracles from happening all the time? What if nothing is preventing humanity from harnessing free energy, building anti-gravity propulsion systems, living for as long as we want, having meet-ups with otherworldly as well as hyperdimensional aliens, healing the ecological crisis, and so on, then my (your) failure to completely, full-heartedly believe, with 100% conviction, that it is not only attainable in some abstract and distant way, but already here?

I have mulled on this thesis for years. Over that timespan, I notice that subjects once at the remote edge of my own thoughts as well as the collective awareness steadily move from the periphery toward the center of our culture. Psychedelics, and the altered states of consciousness they produce, are one such area. From the 1970s until mid-2000s, psychedelics were totally taboo and outside of mainstream discourse. They now fascinate and delight the elites of Western society. Billionaires invest hundreds of millions into new companies planning to use psychedelics to treat mental illnesses like depression (this all raises many quandaries I will explore in future newsletters, as the psychedelic experience gets tamed, absorbed into the prevailing power structures). 

Another fascinating example of how the periphery is moving toward the center is extraterrestrial contact. Until recently, the mainstream greeted this subject with withering contempt. Where previously only lunatics and fringe-dwellers discussed ETs and UFOs, now The New York Times and CNN publish long sober articles on their existence as well as the well-funded military programs studying them. 

Just last week, Haim Eshed, the 86-year-old former head of the Israeli space program, claimed, in interviews, that the US and Israeli governments have maintained direct contact with a “Galactic Federation” of extraterrestrials for decades. According to Eshed, Trump wanted to reveal this to the public, but the aliens warned him not to do it. Eshed said he is speaking out now because he is too old for any repercussions to bother him. This was relayed in a cartoonish way by the news media, making it easy to dismiss or ignore. 

Meanwhile, a recent Netflix documentary follows the strange career of Bob Lazaar, who claims that he was hired by the US government to work on a secret program to reverse-engineer the propulsion systems of crashed flying saucers. In the documentary and his other media appearances, Lazaar comes across as credible and humble. He describes in compelling detail how the alien craft set up an anti-gravity field around them and then pull themselves through space-time. When he first came forward a few decades ago, he claimed their engines used a particular element, Uranium-15, that scientists didn't know existed at that time. Since then, Uranium-15 has been discovered. Other parts of Lazaar’s story also check out. 

I wrote about crop circles, Grey Aliens, and abductions in my 2006 book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. I elaborated on the subject last year in my short overview, The Occult Control System. The crop circles, in themselves, are an extraordinary subject for investigation that the establishment still ridicules and dismisses. In fact, they are a subject that requires critical thinking and discernment to the highest degree. After psychedelics were legally suppressed and made socially taboo at the end of the ‘60s, we had to wait forty years before these substances could be taken seriously again and made a subject of scientific inquiry. We seem to be experiencing a similar time lag with crop circles and ETs.

I personally believe, based on my research and direct interaction with the patterns, that the crop circle phenomenon is an ongoing communication from a hyper-dimensional consciousness or perhaps a “galactic federation” (or perhaps “us from the future;” or ourselves from what we now call, for lack of a better term, a “higher dimension”). They encode many different types of information in those fields. Yet somehow we (I) have not reached a point in our (my) evolution, as of yet, where they can be investigated properly. 

In The Flying Saucer Myth, his last work, Carl Jung proposed that the round shape of the saucers reveals them to be symbols of psychic wholeness. In the dream text that is consensus reality itself, the emergence of the UFO into mainstream consciousness over the last seventy-five years shows something happening within the collective Psyche: The spiralling or corkscrew movement from the periphery toward the center reflects the movement from the ego-based self to the Higher Self. Jung saw modern civilization engaged in an alchemical process, moving toward the “conjunction of opposites,” where we, as individuals, gain the capacity to integrate our dark matter, our Shadow, and make an evolutionary leap. Jung believed we were entering the archetypal process of Apocalypse. Jung’s followers consider the Apocalypse to be a positive phenomenon, despite its negative repercussions. They define as “the coming of the Self into conscious realization.”

Many contemporary occultists and spiritual teachers take the esoteric realization that the ultimate nature of reality is a unified, nondual field of consciousness as something their followers can tap into, applying it for personal advancement. You can use The Secret or the Law of Manifestation or The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success to enhance your health, gain more personal wealth, and so on. We see this with figures like Joe Dispenza, Abraham Hicks, and Deepak Chopra. 

I find something subtly skewed about this, even though it sells out convention centers and leads to bestsellers. While not entirely untrue, this approach engenders a bland, elitist, neo-spiritual culture that meshes perfectly with the entrepreneurial drive of late-stage Capitalism and its status hierarchies. The problem is that it increases people’s ego-ic attachments to material outcomes rather than dismantling or dissolving them. In a way, these techniques are Luciferic tricks, designed to help people avoid the truly Apocalyptic confrontation that Jung defined, or that ancient Vedanta scriptures speak about — that confrontation that our civilization seems to be rushing toward anyway, whether we like it or not, and no matter what we try to do about it. 

I want to avoid creating a two-tier system where some of my writing is reserved for paid subscribers. I don’t like that model as I feel it contributes to increasing fragmentation. If you find these essays valuable and don’t mind paying for them, please get a paid subscription. You will be supporting my writing and subsidizing keeping my content free for those who don’t have extra funds right now. And if you enjoy these missives, why not share them?