Posthuman Blues

I'm going to lay off the Iraq issue. It's being covered ad nauseum by others. I will remain vigilant, but I don't want to become redundant. So unless I have a profound or original insight, I'll spare you my kvetching. I'm not apologizing, by the way. I just don't want to run this blog into the ground dwelling on trends that should be apparent to any thinking person.

My central stance, for readers who don't feel like slogging through the archives, is that the US administration has been dishonest in its portrayal of Iraq as a threat. I think the "War on Terror," as it is being waged right now, is a politically prudent fiction whose primary goal is to reinvent the world political stage for reasons that, on close inspection, appear to be less than noble and certainly not worth the huge loss of life witnessed in the last few weeks.

But enough about that for now.

I began reading Colin Wilson's "Alien Dawn" last night. So far I'm very impressed. Wilson realizes that the concept of alien contact is thoroughly interconnected with other mysteries. UFOs and abductions (whatever these things turn out to be) are not discrete phenomena that can be plucked from the experiential world with a pair of tweezers and examined in isolation; they're components of something bigger, more confounding...yet possibly more coherent than we typically expect.

Wilson thinks in the same basic vein as Philip K. Dick, R.A. Wilson and Jacques Vallee: postmodern, quantum-era intellectuals who realize that "reality" is being orchestrated, manipulated and consequently hidden. Existence is a juxtaposition of cosmic conspiracies and battling memes. "Nothing is true; everything is permitted."

Our species has taken the easy way out. We've forfeited the achingly weird and beautiful realm of expanded consciousness in favor of trite information management and "politics of the imagination" (to borrow a phrase from Colin Bennett). I've never taken LSD and I don't plan to. But after reading about the work of Leary and Grof, I can't help but feel that we've crippled our psychological horizons (in much the same way that our space program is inherently deficient, promising the notion of limitless space and possibility, but in fact stifling the emergence of mutant paradigms). This is what my Mars book is about. The Face is arguably more important as a metaphor and catalyst than as a possible engineering work, although it will likely function as both.

Reality is a much more complex place than we've allowed ourselves to acknowledge. We're committed to a stupor of denial and politically correct "skepticism," believing in outlandish religious fictions but denying laboratory evidence that quietly but forcibly expels our assumed rule over a "material" world. We like reality spoon-fed to us in Platonic blocks because our cognitive digestive system has atrophied almost beyond repair.

If close encounters mean anything at all, my guess is that they're deliberate shocks to our ontological framework. Nothing is more unnerving than something "alien," even if the special effects are dredged up from our Jungian unconscious. But our visitors go a step farther: they're often absurd, mocking, unbelievable caricatures of what we suppose aliens "should" be like. Close encounters are innately psychedelic experiences that challenge the senses as well as the intellect, all the while ducking the radar of our fact management priesthood (i.e., SETI, CSICOP).

New Agers talk about saintly extraterrestrials who are here to rescue us from ourselves, or to hasten the transition to a new form of being divorced from workaday materialism. They may be close to the truth, although I personally doubt that the "aliens" (if that is indeed what they are) are altruists in the conventional sense. I also doubt that there is an impending change in global consciousness. Our visitors have always been here to whisper strange warnings in our collective ear. The goal, ironically, might not be change so much as homeostasis (as argued by Vallee).