What is the Sky?
A tale of lexicons, wonder… confusion… and Origin
The desire to write this essay began with a hypothesis drawn from speculation and experience. The hypothesis was simple. Suppose that we do not ‘see’ same sky at all times and places? (Trivially, the sky seen at various places and times ‘differs’ from the views available elsewhere and elsewhen). Suppose further that each being is seeing a sky that is at once ‘the same thing’ and entirely unique to their orientation in consciousness?
If we turn this into the question: do we all see the same sky? — objectively, the answer is immediate: we do. It is, after all, the same referent that the words ‘the sky’ point toward in all cases. In language, it’s simply true. Because in language, the scope of what is included is limited to the simple derivative that results from the act of reference. It’s automatic.
Over time, this strange and pervasive automatism replaces experience and participation with ‘knowledge’ that is not really knowledge at all; rather it is the substitution of a verbal token for experience, understanding, awareness, curiosity, wonder… and participation. And this is part of why the profuse imaginations of our childhood eventually die into the graveyards of language and common ‘thought’.
What I say of the sky is true of all perception and experience. But when we look to the starlit expanse beyond the Earth… this feature… becomes… primordial.
“No form of reflection, of mediated inference, can create this knowledge — for it is the concern of reflection not to produce the stratum of experience in which it is rooted but only to interpret it theoretically. It is a strange presumption on the part of theory, a kind of intellectual hybris, to suppose that it can not only disclose the peculiar mode of awareness that is here present but also create it. What is thus created remains in the end a phantom, a fiction which pretends to living reality but possesses no independent vital force. And indeed, almost all the well-known explanations of the knowledge of other subjects amount to sheer illusionism. What distinguishes these theories from one another is only the manner in which they describe the illusion and conceive its genesis. What these theories fail to take into account is that the meaning and content of the purely expressive function cannot be made intelligible by way of a single sphere of spiritual formation, because as a truly universal and, as it were, world-encompassing function, it precedes differentiation into the various spheres of meaning; it precedes the divergence of myth and theory, of logical reflection and aesthetic intuition. Its certainty and its ‘truth’ are, in a manner of speaking, premythical, pre-logical and pre-aesthetic; it forms the common ground from which all these formations have in some way sprung and to which they remain attached.”
— Earnst Cassirer The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol 3: The Phenomenology of Knowledge, Chapter 2: The Phenomenon of Expression as the Basic Factor in the Perceptive Consciousness
What is Actually Going On?
I have spent decades in pursuit of a series of fundamental questions arising from a desire to know, firsthand, what it is to see as clearly as possible. Or, failing that, more clearly than I have habitually seen. We all have such questions. In English, they often fall under the rubric of ‘what is it (or (sometimes) better: who) that is actually the case?
Such questions orbit the nature of existence itself, but approach this fundamental human ache for understanding through our experiences of phenomenon, thought, evaluation and emotion.
Scientific methods are the result of this compulsion. So, too, human religions. But our quests to understand are greater, and arise before all possible theories, maps and lexicons. Rationality will never succeed here, however crucial an ingredient it may sometimes become.
The forms of thought that dissect experience, while useful, leave us with the dead remains of what would certainly have become direct personal intimacy with Origin, Nature… and being. With the living mystery of the universe. And the deeper question of our own Origins, natures… and roles.
It is natural to imagine that the desire to know ‘what is actually the case?’ is the correct starting place. Surely, it must be that there is an actual case, and it follows that, whether or not we could directly ‘determine’ its nature, structure, function, meaning and activities… we could, by way of the removal of illusions, delusions and impediments coupled with experiment and discovery, be certain of progress, if not success. And this is, in part, the motivation of scientific and some philosophic endeavors.
Whether we consider it to be fortunate or not, this formation of the question is intrinsically flawed due to the peculiar nature of human awareness, experience, and participation in phenomenon. ‘The actual case’, turns out to be shorthand for something resembling what ‘emotionally and cognitively inert observers’ might detect. This goal supposes a ‘dead universe’ of objects, functions and physical interactions. It’s ‘what a device might detect’.
Nothing like that has ever been ‘the actual case’, though it is also true that the forms of thought and concern from which the physical sciences arise are valid in the scope natural to their ‘objective-knowledge’-oriented value systems. They are not precisely untrue; rather they are incomplete in the sense of being the produce of vast limitations of scope and concern.
Their perspectival bandwidth is necessarily limited to the physically testable. Let’s be clear: that’s a modest (if concrete) portion of human nature and experience. Such perspectives and imperatives arise from vastly richer human interiority.
The sky, our bodies… our lives and minds… are alive. They are beings. And it is not the existence of ‘the case’ that singly determines our experience, understanding, insight… or discovery. For actual human beings, the peculiar features of our relationships with experience produce a union of the apparent physical world, and our purposive relation with it.
So it is that phenomenon are naturally ‘not merely the case’ in the sense our rationalities and ways of knowing might predispose us to ‘see’ or think. The ‘seeing’ is not merely in the method, but in why we are participating in our sensing and experience.
And who with… and for.
The universe is stranger than our common thinking is capable of supposing. And part of the character of this strangeness is that everything responds and transforms according to something like the ‘spirit’ of those who enter into relation with it.
( The universe isn’t an it, by the way. Except in poorly crafted English. Or, perhaps, the language of Science.)
“Evolution has taken something as big and complex as the universe — in fact has taken the universe itself, its collective hieroglyph — and, over billions of years, stuffed it … into something as tiny as the nucleus of a cell.”
— The Night Sky, Richard Grossinger (2014 edition)
At night, when we raise our gaze to the sky… what do we think we are seeing? If we imagine our distant ancestors who lived beneath a ‘starry blanket’ 200,000 or 30,000 years ago, how did they understand, in consciousness, the nature, character and meaning of the sky? What were their felt senses of relation towards the sky?
What did they think it was for? What was it doing? Who was it being?
Personally, I ache to know what they experienced and how they conceptualized it, when they did. And I want to not merely know, but recover their experience in my own… to see and feel and reflect… as they did.
I need to understand The Sky.
And this is no idle curiosity, either. Whatever the nature of the sky, whatever it is, is for, is being, is doing… forms the experiential and conceptual ‘supercontainer’ for all phenomenon.
It’s even the supercontainer (though it is not the only one) for all the concepts in language. If stars were words… the sky would be the dictionary… or the encyclopaedia.
In our lexicons, which partly determine what and how and why we ‘see’ in our minds, this is the element from which all others are derived. Whatever qualities or natures we include when considering the sky are inherited by all other concepts and percepts. Similarly, those we ignore or obscure… will tend to disappear entirely from our thought, awareness, consideration… and, eventually, experience.
If one is trained to think of the universe as a beautiful (but dead inside) machine… then everything else in experience… inherits this damage. Similarly, if one understands the sky to be the origin of life, being, minds and awareness… everything inherits this astonishing transcendental vitality of relation in Origin.
So it turns out that the purposes for which we reflect on the nature of the sky — our local window on the universe — and the kinds of language we employ in our reflections… form the mythical, psychological, conceptual and linguistic parent-element… for everything.
Our Lexicons are Dead Inside
“A perspective which reveals more and more of perception and less and less of thought” (HGH 24), original participation is, Barfield explains in History, Guilt and Habit,
a kind of consciousness for which it was impossible to perceive unfiguratively. But what does one mean when one speaks of perceiving figuratively? One means a kind of consciousness which does not, which cannot, perceive the material merely as such, which in perceiving its environment, perceives at the same time an immaterial within or through, or expressed by it. . . . a kind of consciousness for which there is no such thing as a merely “outer” world”
“The farther back language as a whole is traced,” Barfield notes in History in English Words, “the more poetical and animated do its sources appear, until it seems at last to dissolve into a kind of mist of myth. The beneficence or malignance — which might be called soul-qualities — of natural phenomena, such as clouds, plants or animals, make a more vivid impression at this time than their outer shapes and appearances.”
— Owen Barfield on ‘original participation’, which he poses as intrinsic to human consciousness and experience prior to the rise of formality in cultural milieu, representation and language.
If we were able to gaze into the conceptual and linguistic history of our species and compose a timeline, it would be punctuated with events that represent the sudden loss of rich experiential interiority. These would follow a pattern that we moderns are somewhat familiar with since we are still experiencing it, and the pattern becomes furiously intense over the past 500 years as the dominance of formality and technology rises geometrically.
As our lexicons collapsed into formal representation, particularly over the past 3000 years, the cultures that arose in the wake of this inward series of disasters (this word literally comes from the archaic terror of a situation in which ‘the stars are falling from the sky’) laid waste to the remaining indigenous cultures and their ways of knowing.
The elephant in the living room here is that the colonizing cultures had themselves been colonized — inwardly, by ways of knowing and ideas of identity that were like various species of malware running in human minds.
And the malware coded for a compromise as simple as it was effective: present humans, animals, living places and the world as if devoid of essential being. Render them as objects. Machines. Tools. Commodities.
And embed this process in human languages. Particularly: English.
The humans running this malware at the layer of their societies then began a race to ‘harvest’ all the commodities they could. These societies ‘shattered’ internally and stratified so that a tiny group of humans always hoarded some 95% of the results… while (most of) the rest became slaves and soldiers and guardians of The Cache.
Long before the European colonists tore the living heart out of the Americas and decimated their ecologies and peoples… they had themselves become afflicted with a lethal array of linguistic, ideological and semantic diseases. They were human only in the biological sense. Kurt Vonnegut might have said that ‘the conceptual part of their brains became a scrambled mess of deadly wires that sent them on missions so absurd and terrible that actual insanity would have been a relief.’
And during this process, we literally forgot what the sky was. It’s just some mechanical stuff going on out there in space. We have names for those machines. Star. Planet. Moon. Galaxy. Nebulae. Black Hole. Quasar. Pulsar. You can’t get commodities from it.
And so on.
And it’s not really a problem to have objectivist-materialist language about the sky. The problem is more along the lines of what had to be obliterated for that to become the authoritative standard in common human thought and reflection.
The problem is all that went missing.
Consider the difference in consciousness and participatory enthusiasm of two peoples. One imagines the sky as The Living Waters. The other, just calls it ‘the sky’. The connotations of the former are mythic, mysterious and profound. Those of the latter, at least for us moderns, are largely bereft not only of connotations… but of our relationships in and with the universe.
Is it not true that in moments of dire circumstance and fearful countenance … we naturally attempt to call…
to the sky?
The Stars Are My Origin
“I ask you to solve for the following riddle in the form of a syllogism: As bees are to flowers and honey… X are to living worlds in timespace … and Y.
Solve for X and Y.”
— a student
“Apparently, though the humans are fascinated with the functions and potentials of technology and machines, they have completely overlooked the trenchant fact that the sky — The Sun, the Moon, and the Earth… the planets and stars and galaxies — are doing something.
These words point to a category of more-than-mere-beings that is either missing from our lexicons or would, in English, be relegated to the religious concepts of Gods, Angels, Daimons, etc.
Their ceaseless activity — generates beings and minds such as our own. The sun is quite literally involved in generating the mind with which I am speaking to you right now. So, too, the Moon, the Earth… and timespace itself.
What they are actually doing, who they are being is vastly more crucial than the most heroic of human missions or dreams. Indeed, our inward urges toward rescue, heroism, altruism and understanding, are human-scale reflections of their missions. Missions which the moderns have failed entirely to imagine. And are busy interfering with for trivial purposes.
The Earth is being someone in timeSpace. She has friends and allies. And all the living beings on this world are giving their lives and dreaming to Earth’s missions. Timespace isn’t a machine. It’s a family. And the beings in that family are our own progenitors. Not merely historically. Moment-to-moment.”
— No One Actually Said This
We moderns who live in stable boxes and have lost much of the visible starfield to light pollution, have become so confused by the missing stimuli that we continued to believe something impossible: that the Earth is the center of the universe. This terra-centric perspective is natural to a degree, but our ancestors knew better. Rather than catalogue their stories and ceremonies and senses of relation with the sky, which are worthy of deep respect and consideration, I will present simplified examples that may serve to illustrate some of their concerns and the basic intent of their cultures and practices.
The intent was to honor the relationships, families, and histories that came, in nearly every case… from the sky.
And, particularly, the night sky.
Imagine that you are scientifically illiterate but extremely attentive and have an excellent memory for changes in detail.
What you see in the sky is fascinating. By day, there is a single vast, bright, hot orb (and sometimes the day-moon). At twilight, and dawn, there are profound transformations. At night, the starfield rises, turning, above you. There are certain ‘lights’ that arise first at dawn and twilight. Though the starfield moves above you, there are a small number of lights that have their own paths, and move more quickly among the ‘constellations’.
The moon undergoes her phases, and arcs across the night. You have no formal knowledge of stars, planets and moons. These are clearly beings. This is not because you think they are, but rather, you have the direct and constant experience of this in your human awareness. And they are engaged in celestially important activities and relationships. It is impossible to think of them as objects. And trouble, it seems, certainly comes from any form of misrelation with them. The rain. Searing heat. Earthquakes. Lightning. Frozen winters. Floods. Famine. And abundance.
[ Surely at some time in human history, someone probably thought: at dusk, the sun explodes on the horizon and fills the sky with stars that, at dawn, collapse back into it…]
Their ways of life-in-relation-with-the-sky-beings have little in common with mere superstition or religion. Same approximate category in English, but most of the resemblance ends there. These are representational impressions about that which, for them, was participated, direct experience and their discovery and practice of how to be in mutually beneficial relation with the living beings of Earth, the living places, and the Sky Beings.
Depending on when and where they lived, ancient humans had ‘world ideas’ that integrated the sky, earth, waters… and sometimes ‘underworlds’. Not all ancients had ‘exotic’ stories and maps, but many did. For some of those, the sky played a central role in what we would call their cosmologies.
It’s not clear they thought of the Earth as a planet, though there’s some evidence that some may have. The world had the connotation ‘our home’, and it was a complex conjugate of other ‘worlds’. Organisms and plants, features of the rock and forest, were often understood to originate in the sky. Many of the origin stories begin with people coming from the sky to the Earth. And sometimes… returning. So, too, plants, animals, insects… living places.
Often these worlds were understood as ‘nested’ within each other, and not necessarily in the simple fashion of a russian doll. Each ‘layer’ was generative of and reflected in the other layers so that they ‘encompassed and contained’ the others. A simple rendition of this would be: Water (beings), Land (beings), Sky (beings). But the land contains both the water and the sky. Beneath the waters there is land and sky. In the sky there are land and waters. This is a very clumsy sketch, but it is obvious how estranged we are from the minds and relationships that oriented their lives, experiences and concerns.
In all cases, the beings of the different worlds were not merely physical, and the physical beings displayed the character and orientations… the purposes… of those who were more than merely physical. For them, the universe was a living library of intelligences, peoples, purposes, and family histories.
And I will argue that, whether or not this is the case, if this way of being, reflecting, relating with and for, and learning… is lost?
The skies inside us die to our inner awareness.
The sky is our Origin. Those stars and worlds are not so much outside us as they are within us. It is only within us that they can even appear to awareness. What might we be able to learn and remember if we could free ourselves from the critical formalisms of materialistic knowledge ways long enough to begin to remember what it is like to belong to the sky — especially… together?
In the book If the Stars are Gods (Benford and Ecklund), Aliens establish contact with Earth. But they are not interested in talking to ordinary humans. They ask, instead, who among us ‘Talks with the Sun’; they themselves do not, but the ship they have acquired is known to have been built by a species who did. The humans do not have anyone who does this, but send an astronaut who has been to Mars as their representative.
Why Are We Looking?
“All Theories are False.
Some theories are useful.”
“What you will see, sense, enter into relation with, and come to understand depends not upon ‘what or who is there’ but rather, upon your curiosity, orientation in awareness, and willingness to explore.”
— infraheard
“The faculties associated with dreaming and imagination are not ‘mere inventions’ of the mind, but comprise a complex array of senses and potentials that most modern humans are entirely unaware of. It is these faculties that our ancient ancestors experienced, developed… and enacted in their relations with the living wold, memory and the sky.”
— Darin Stevenson
We are all born with an innate and intense curiosity about the nature of existence, and, particularly, the sky. As we undergo the tumultuous processes of enlanguaging and enculturation we become laden with tokens, models and cultural fictions. This is a staggering burden for our interiority, imagination and wonder that usually leaves in a partly-dissociated state of confusion about Nature, the non-ordinary, myth, our own psyches… and what it can or may mean to be human.
Bereft of a wise guide, most of us will either largely ignore the sky, take on the models of astronomy, or, possibly, those of astrology. The problem with astronomy is that it is a materialistic/objectivist perspective of the nature of spacetime. The problem with astrology is that it is the modern remains of an array of skills that are both sometimes useful, and sometimes completely nonsensical. The latter, however, at least introduces the idea that the planets may be ‘like beings’ and have influence in our lives and development. The ideas central to astrology are incredibly useful in the sense of introducing us to the idea of a manifold within relation, where complex interactions combine to produce a living context. This idea is important, even if astrology is ‘formally’ ‘incorrect’. The entire range of speculative fiction is a library of such ideas, and should never be dismissed ‘because they are not true’. The concept of formal truth is useful and important, yet most of what is absolutely profound about human experience is not ‘the desiccated remains left over when mechanical logics and facts have done their work’.
Where, then are the models that would actually empower us to discover and recover our natural relationship with timespace and the sky?
Some of them are found in the wisdom traditions conserved in indigenous cultures and some eldritch religious traditions. Anyone who is deeply curious and spends time outdoors, especially at night, will begin to naturally recover their relationships and the inward senses that are crucial to our human nature and our potential roles in nature. Primarily, however, it is the formation and pursuit of questions that open the doors in our awareness and interior through which the living intelligences of the sky may begin to awaken in our experience and interiority.
But it is not really models we need, though some may be useful. We must learn to awaken the senses, abilities and imaginal vistas that reorient us in ways that catalyze contact and relation with modes of being and awareness we have been scripted to ignore or denigrate.
Fundamentally, what we bring to the quest for understanding and discovery, awareness and participation — catalyzes our curiosity and senses, creating something like a ‘signal’ or, perhaps, an invitation to relation. This is what is meant, in part, by the idea we moderns refer to as ceremony when applied to our clumsy understanding of the activities of ancient and indigenous peoples. Our ‘version’ of this, for many moderns is prayer. But prayer as moderns commonly understand and practice it is radically different from what the ancients were engaged in, which might be more accurately understood as the embodied enaction of relation with the Earth, the Sky, the living places and ancestors. This is a form of physically and emotionally-enacted memory… that involves the inward resuscitation of faculties associated with dreaming and ecstatic awareness in waking consciousness.
Imagination is absolutely central to these processes that invite or rebuff the possibilities of relation… in every aspect of our lives and thought. Most of us cannot easily imagine how it could be possible to enter into relation with the sky. But there are many different forms of such relation, from those of astronomers, navigators and astrologers, to those of people who knew that the universe is comprised of beings that may be willing to relate with me/us. I would suggest that our actual situation resembles little of our discursive knowledge about spacetime.
Indigenous peoples used specific methods that could ‘crack the shell’ of modern discursive, waking consciousness if we would allow them into our own experience. They could sense, remember, and relate with the beings of the Earth, the Waters and the Sky. Some of their activities utilize various forms of sensory-driving (pulses, tones, rhythms and dances) that allow us to escape the prison-like grip of waking consciousness. Sometimes intoxicants such as psychedelic plants are involved. It is clear that a transformation of consciousness which involved profound desire (if not desperation) such as that involved in quests, a willingness to depart from habit and shelter, and ceremonial objects and activities … tended to succeed.
It has long been common, in cultures around the world, to engage in something resembling a ‘vision-quest’ — this is the intentional production of a non-ordinary situation in consciousness via the act of departing from all familiar shelter and habit into the wilderness, usually alone. In such situations, fasting transforms consciousness rather quickly, and produces states of ‘awareness of the between’ in which the non-ordinary aspects of the Sky and world emerge into our awareness. The quest for visionary experience is usually undertaken within a traditional culture and for purposes that imbue it with passionate or even desperate desire, danger and depth.
In many ancient and indigenous cultures mountains are understood as holy places and places of power. One can easily imagine why. In our imaginations, we might understand the mountains as ‘places where the Earth reaches up, toward its own Origins’. These are places where the different ‘barriers’ between the sky and the terrestrial world are permeable, and many religions present them as ‘the stairways of the Holy Beings’ — or where the Holy Beings descend to the land. In nearly every case, the word ‘holy’ refers to the beings of the sky and the beings who are non-physical and thus ‘transcendent’.
If we ask ‘What Is The Sky’? Some of the most useful speculations present nothing like the materialist model of objects in mechanical relation. Rather, they encourage us to imagine that everything is alive, intelligent, and interested in forming relationships.
Of all the animals on Earth, humans may be the most well-equipped for direct discovery of and relation with non-human intelligences such as those that inhabit spacetime itself. While it is common to think of the Sun as an object of peculiar significance, it is blatantly obvious that, around here, everything is the Sun. Our bodies, minds, and the entire array of terrestrial organisms exist only as consequences of the Sun’s presence and activity. As the hairs on my skin are to my body, organisms are to the Sun…
Rather than thinking of ourselves as ‘separate’ from the Sun (or the sky, or the Earth), a far more useful way of conceptualizing this as that we are the Sun, the Moon, timespace, and the Earth embodied in this form we call human. We are living extensions of their character, nature, imperatives and activities.
Call and Response
“Give me a ping, Vasilli… one ping only.”
— Marko Ramius ( Sean Connery ) : The Hunt for Red October
In Nature, particularly at the scale of macro-organisms, communication fundamentally follows a series of protocols we might refer to as ‘Call-Response’. The fragrance of flowers invites bees and other pollinators into relation. Within the beehive, the dances of scouts catalyze a transformation of the consciousness and activities of the hive. The scent of honey draws animals capable of breaking into the hive and obtaining it. Birdcalls comprise a complex web of communications and information-exchange. The pheromonal and auditory symphonies of insects create a network of communication that can span hundreds of miles. With the right kind of curiosity, coupled with imagination, we can participate in the vast networks of terrestrial and non-terestrial intelligences that comprise our context, history, memory… and Origin.
Consider the uncanny complexity of non-verbal signals between humans that may desire to enter into relation. Brief, non-intrusive eye contact, or an accidental brush of the outer-arm surface may begin such a process, which is profoundly ancient in its origins and astonishingly non-conceptual — except when we begin to analyze it discursively.
There is a wonderful technological example of this in the film The Hunt for Red October in which a Russian sub commander has decided to defect and deliver his ship to the Americans — because it was designed not for defense but rather to initiate nuclear conflict. He tells his trusted co-conspirators that their survival depends on what kind of American sub commander they may encounter. “If we get a buckaroo (a western gunslinger), we are lost.” (paraphrased).
While being hunted by both the Russian fleet and the American fleet, they encounter the sub that has been chasing them. The American commander is aware that it is possible that their intention is to defect, but he has been tasked with sinking the Red October. A delicate sonar-signalling dance ensues, during which the American commander becomes willing to believe that Ramius harbors no hostile intent. In the film, things end well.
We humans are like submarines in the sense that our interiority, intent and orientations are submerged and unavailable for direct evaluation. But the actual situation is stranger than that, because our consciousness transforms as we seek to enter into or avoid relation in actual circumstances. And it’s not a one-sided transformation in the sense that any being we might attempt to contact or relate with will also transform as the partly improvisational dance of signalling proceeds, not merely determining roles… but inventing them together.
Modern humans have spent a great deal of effort in a probably misguided attempt to determine ‘if anyone is listening or signalling in spacetime’. Radio telescopes, and the inclusion of an inscription and recordings on the Voyager space-probes are examples of this. But these examples embody suppositions that are not likely to be born out; specifically, the supposition that other advanced intelligences would, necessarily, be technological in the sense of making machines. While it is possible that, life on other worlds or in other dimensions might employ physical technologies that in some way resemble ours, it is absolutely clear that the primary modes of living systems rely on relationships rather than devices. It is also possible, perhaps even likely, that spacetime is filled with forms of complex life and intelligence of kinds we have yet to imagine. The idea that life could only exist on stable planets… is probably wrong.
In the 1950’s there were reports, however disorganized, of interactions between anomalous sky phenomenon and nuclear weapons bases. Unless the proximity of sightings near missile bases was arbitrary, these situations imply that it is at least plausible that it is possible to send a signal that other intelligences would recognize and respond to. That signal may have been a lethal one: the detonation of nuclear weapons on the surface of the Earth. We may now be facing a second technological situation in which our activities might acquire the attention of other intelligent species in timespace: the onset of Artificial Intelligence systems…
“Each of us is endowed with an imperative and an adventure that is entirely beyond all of the knowledge of our ages and cultures; in short, we are each uniquely recapitulating the entire history of the universe, literally re-living it from a unique position of participation.
We are living this same process in relation to human cognitive evolution; we each spend most of our lives recapitulating that process as a human being, and attempting to ‘catch up’ to the current moment of this process as a unique — yet complete — expression of its present body. And there is another, similar, yet invisible domain, of which we cannot easily speak. A domain of unimaginable participation and membership… in an epic adventure that makes our wildest fantasies and religions appear to be nothing but plastic toys in a catalog of faked virtues.
Your life is not what you have been told, indeed, what you have been told primarily inhibits your actual discovery of all that is your nature, purview and origin.”
— an intelligence agent
We are left to wonder, however, if it is possible for a single human being, or a small group of them, to send relational signals in consciousness that would be recognized and responded to by non-terrestrial intelligences. It seems clear that our ancient ancestors not only composed such signals, but entered into relationships with Sky-beings, whether these were physical organisms like us, or non-physical beings such as those moderns would think of as Gods, demons, or angels — the people of the Sky.
In our estranged modernity, some will be inclined to dismiss such accounts or histories as insane or imaginary. This is relatively sensible; why should we believe that which we have no direct experience of? However, the nature of reality and the sky is not a merely rational nature. If I refused to believe or entertain anything I had no experience of the vast spectrum of possibilities for my own mind and experience would undergo a staggering sequence of endless impoverishments, because the complexity and depth of the possibilities of consciousness and relation would end at what I had already tried, a tiny shred of all that I can actually learn to access and relate with.
There are many situations in which our orientation towards and in relation with the sky participates in the non-ordinary aspects of awareness and relation that our species has become extremely confused about. These potentials are nascent within all of us, and await our courageous and impassioned recovery.
The universe is far stranger than our modern ideas can possibly encompass. Yet, its nature is our own nature. Its Origins are our origins. We are children of the sky, the Earth and timespace. It is not merely likely that these vast features of magnificent complexity and temporality might be responsive to our deepest questions and desires… rather, it is nearly impossible that their apparent silence is the natural fact rather than the result of our profoundly confused objectivist ways of knowing.
We Are More Than Human
The Nature of Timespace is…
We do not merely see what is there. The nature of awareness and vision itself transform when the purposes associated with producing them are modulated. This feature of human interiority and the malleability of awareness and sensing makes it easy to dismiss personal accounts; one can simply say that ‘they did not see what was there, they saw what was in their minds’. Certainly such an objection is reasonable, to a degree — but not to a universal degree.
Could it be that the sky is not a thing, but rather a more-than-merely-living window into the body of an array of anciently evolved intelligences? Might it not be actually reasonable to entertain the idea that timespace itself is intelligent? Or even… transentient? — that the universe is a being whose nature is transcendental to ordinary thought, language and ordinary human concern?
What if the phenomenon we have become scientifically aware of in the sky actually represent a category of being that is far beyond mere organism, that naturally produces organisms and minds as a side-effect of its own nature and activities? The sky is not something that fits neatly into the categories and language we have developed to deal with terrestrial concerns. When we raise our gazes skyward, we might be looking not merely into space but the moment-to-moment origins of consciousness itself…
“The total number of minds in the universe is one. In fact, consciousness is a singularity phasing within all beings.” — Erwin Schrodinger
Some few authors and philosophers have inspired us to ask questions such as these. Many physicists, including Erwin Schrodinger did not believe we had developed models and theories capable of introducing us to unexpected features nature of timespace.
While physicists are primarily concerned with mechanics — philosophers and others have long considered the probability that spacetime is a nonordinary situation teeming with intelligences and that which produces them. This seems obvious if we merely understand that all of the phenomenon on Earth arose ‘naturally’ from the features and characteristics of timespace — including our minds.
Recommended Reading:
The Night Sky : Richard Grossinger
The next segment of this essay:
Aerial Anomalies and … Visitors : UFOs/UAPs
I am insatiably curious about the nature of living beings, intelligence, language, and nearly everything else. I hope my work may contribute to our ability to assemble the authentic sources of what our modern cultures are but the broken remnants and falsified costumes of. Together. With and for each other and our world.
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