By Giorgio Piacenza
At a time when community sense-making and modern institutions are being challenged by a tribal resurgence of intolerant identity politics among segmented conservatives, progressives, and religious groups in different countries, will an increased level of communication with non-human intelligences (NHI) connected to the UFO phenomenon serve a benign, re-constructive, purpose? Can it inspire us to re-think democracy and the world economic order in the direction of a fairer, more compassionate, and ecologically sane expression accompanying a peaceful worldwide resolution of our cultural rifts? Can communication (the sharing of information and/or meaning between distinct entities) with NHIs inspire us to learn to live with AI, with the management of Big Data, with genetic manipulation, global warming, and other such "wicked problems" that demand effective international cooperation? Can it inform us that we can do it without weakening human self-determination? Can it inspire us to overcome excessive illusory differences across cultures and nationalities?
According to the FREE and MUFON experiencer surveys and to the work of Dr. John Mack, a large percentage of clearly contacted individuals describe an expansion in ethical values towards a kinder, more inclusive identity, universalism, and practical spirituality more adequate for the planet and human reconciliation. I believe that they apparently attained a self-transformative level of communication. But, can the ethical changes undergone by these deeply and personally 'contacted' individuals translate into word-wide value shifts good for a greater appreciation of our connection to life, or will the sense of egoic separation in our 'non-awakened" human nature stubbornly reassert itself?
It seems that most substantial human change is not motivated by pondering or reflection but by a personal crisis or by technological developments that force adaptations. Thus, unless communication with NHIs is sufficient to be socially constitutive, perhaps second-hand information received by others during their direct contacts with NHIs will be insufficient for the rest of humanity to rise to an occasion calling for the acquisition of a deeper, global integrative ethical stage of relatedness or connectedness. However, disclosure may be an important, necessary factor along with others that challenge us.
Allegedly, NHIs have overcome organizing their societies under the psychological sense of separation, coinciding with being seriously limited to scarcity, danger, and greater physical space-time limitations. Generally speaking, they would have probably organized their societies under a greater understanding of meaningful connections. Communicating with them and knowing about them may arouse in us a need to think "outside the box." To stop destroying the world and invent a more connected, respectful way of life, communicating with NHIs and learning about their messages would – at least - have to be as effective as the socialization processes we normally experience within familial, religious, social media, and other value-bestowing groups. They would have to be taken seriously to affect our value formation.
Conceivably, avoiding the need to be replaced by a hybrid species or, perhaps, to be cybernetically or genetically "re-programmed" (by NHI or by humans) in order to survive on Earth may require a form of communication with NHIs in a manner that is tantamount to a transformative communion or a voluntary symbiosis rather than a simplistic imitation. It would have to be as unprecedented as acquiring a new human nature or as an awakening to an otherwise dormant one. What we cannot continue ignoring is that the possibility of a major transformation is frequently described during contact and communication experiences.
But in order to apply the concept of "communication" to an adequate form of contact with NHIs we need to review four basic models that increasingly approximate what experiencers often describe as "telepathic" forms of contact. First, the Shannon-Weaver Communication Theory more applicable to one-way communication through an electronic medium. In it, the sender encodes a message, transmits it through a channel, and the receiver decodes it, but the channel's "noise" might interfere with the receiver's decoding. Meaning is considered to exist in the transmitted patterns, whether they be words or else. SETI scientists listening or sending radio signals limited by the speed of light normally use this transmission model, which is amenable to quantify information in binary code under the concept of entropy.
Then, there is Paul Watzlawick "Interaction Theory," which – besides "noise" - includes feedback from the receiver (which then becomes the "sender"). Next is Gene Barlund's "Transactional Theory," which considers that meaning is not in the patterns or words transmitted but, in the people, that while communicating act simultaneously as senders and receivers, as they are immersed in a context and include non-verbal communication.
But NHI telepathic communication is often described more like an improved Transactional Theory: Not only using feedback and context and physical, non-verbal cues but truly non-locally-simultaneous, with communicants perceiving each other's feelings, intentions, and emotions. This form of communication would more closely resemble Robert Craig's "Constitutive Theory," that stresses that communication not only includes the characteristics of the previous theories but that it is primary because it constitutes our social, cultural, economic, and psychological aspects.
If the latter theory more closely resembles telepathic communication, it may partially explain why NHIs seem to limit communication to brief periods while appearing enigmatic and often camouflaging them in symbolic terms. Perhaps they do it to avoid being reconfigured under a dynamism similar to what Dr. Jacques Vallee proposed in his "Control System Hypothesis," a situation related to cybernetic communication by which we would be able to interfere or exert cybernetic 'control' over them as they are able to exert it over us.
Both proposals would coincide with physicist Karen Barad's concept of "intra-action" (derived from a feminist reading of Quantum Field Theory) in which sentient and non-sentient entangled agents mutually constitute each other previous to space-time separations and – upon doing so – would experience an "objective reality" when (instead of collapsing a wave function) they "cut" or create a boundary among experiential probabilities amidst a continuously self-forming, participatory world. I would add that during telepathic communication between agents originally located in ontologically distinct realities, their epistemological and ontological agentic spaces and times would overlap (much as quantum fields overlap) and become co-creatively commingled. Agents endowed with free will and meaningfulness through emotion would be able to comingle realities much more, and this may be a reason why some species utilize unemotional, android-variety, "short grays."
How would NHIs attempt to communicate with us (primarily cognizing under an either-or, dichotomous mindset if they (whether extraterrestrial or extradimensional) apparently transcend that logic and perhaps utilize a more fundamental, non-physical information level bestowing possibilities to re-program their physical structures in order to resonate with our particular space-time coordinates?
Moreover, what about the NHIs that are more disposed to communicate more directly and clearly over time with particular individuals and an entire group? For instance – even as friends - with small groups of telepaths and psychographic receivers? Is an affinity of purpose or mission the main reason why they do it with greater ease even if they still risk being ontologically modified by the interaction?
Within the Mission Rahma contacts originating in Peru, people are also supposed to prepare through affinity, psychic development exercises, group cohesion, fear control, mantras, meditation exercises, initiations, subtle energy receptions, energetic implants, and diet, and there were guidelines for objectively evaluating the alleged telepathic and/or psychographic messages. In case of important messages leading to working with the "extraterrestrial guides" or even to making direct contact with them, the guidelines (such as the simultaneous reception of the same message with specific details by separate "antennas" in separate places) were stressed. In other words, in what could be called a "programmed trans-ontological interface," there must also be an objective coherence between the messages through which NHI specify how they are going to manifest in our reality, our expectations, and the actual events experienced by the contact group considering that the contact experience itself is a major form of communication.
If my assumptions are correct, these procedures would probably ensure a more coherent and less dangerous reality-modifying, better fitting, and shared "contact field" as NHI lowered their "vibrations" to coincide with ours and Mission Rahma participants raised theirs to meet (in a precisely understood time and place) in a modified, in-between, space-time. Then, the NHIs attempts at communication (moving to occasional physical contacts) objectively cohere with our verifiable reality. By doing so, at least a partially effective communication appears to have taken place, and most of SETI's concerns about basic intelligibility for decoding a signal seem to have been overcome…at least under communications that can involve feelings and some moderately complex concepts that we can understand.
Is the lack of preparation favoring the contact conditions (as in Mission Rahma's practices) the reason why some NHIs attempt to communicate with other persons more through symbols, synchronicities, and even owls as described in Mike Clelland's work?
According to Whitley Strieber, the visitors in his experience badly want a symbiosis with our human experience. His Gurdjieff-related sensing energy exercises strengthening the second, "electric" body allegedly helps them with the symbiosis even if they do not want to use it interfere with us. Strieber mentioned that they have experienced the universe and want something new. That they do not want us to die (from things like climate change), but neither want to get too close because they do not want a "cultural colonization" to take place. Strieber learned that our journey is taking us to a path of extinction. He said that they know everything, but when they "enter us," they can experience a way that is completely different and which they value immensely. He said that the difference between a hungry soul and them is the difference between someone who wants to take or steal something from you and someone that really values what you have.
However, what if some of the further "communications" that we can surmise with some of the NHIs are indeed truthful but not of our liking? For instance, what if some of them have a right to redesign us if we stubbornly hold on to a narrow way of being modestly indifferent to the damage that we are capable of inflicting to the natural world, to them, and to each other by means of technology? What if – given such circumstances – under cosmic governance, we do not really have the 'right' to continue as we are?
Furthermore, how are we going to respond to the knowledge that (as contactee Angela Thompson contends) some NHIs consider themselves earthlings in the sense that they have been cohabiting the Earth for a long time?
As cyberneticist Norbert Wiener would concur, what makes communication interesting is gaining the novelty of new information against entropy. What probably neither us (nor even NHIs that may have been observing us for eons) know about us exists in our human potential, and (according to Strieber and communications sustained within Mission Rahma), they value it. Who knows? Perhaps they and we need our potential to be able to enact a different reality.
Perchance there is an “enactive communication” in which realities can be partially modified and made to fit and it may use a type of “active information” similar to the one proposed by mathematician, biologist and theologian William A. Dembski (applied for “Intelligent Design”) in production of “specified complexity.” I suppose that it may also be used to modify the probabilities of quantum wave functions combining them with probabilities that normally cohere in other universes.
If there are different kinds of NHIs with different needs, plans, and intentions, and they nevertheless, maintain semi-covert, limited interactions, does this show that they at least agree under some basic values and rules?
Unless we know what it takes to be considered a "sovereign species," how are other intelligent species going to stop treating us condescendingly, experimentally, or perhaps, just like we treat animals on Earth (benevolently and exploitatively)?
We may have to learn to communicate more complexly and harmoniously with NHIs to relate as equals and agree with them as a unified species (rather than a species enormously divided into recognized and unrecognized nations). Then, simultaneously, our species sovereignty may be recognized.