Tuesday May 30, 2023
1950
Desert sky
Dream beneath a desert sky
The rivers run but soon run dry
We need new dreams tonight
—U2, “In God’s Country”
“A new knowledge must arrive. Mankind must awaken to it.”
—“The Lady,” addressing Chris Bledsoe, the author of UFO of God:
The Extraordinary True Story of Chris Bledsoe
Disclosure is nigh. At least to hear John Ramirez, Ross Coulthart, and Garry Nolan (among others) tell it, it is. This is the inescapable conclusion of a good listener.
Call it what you will—Disclosure, Confirmation, Scheduled Dissemination—it is gradually happening and has in fact been happening for quite some time. In a highly orchestrated and carefully calibrated fashion, the veil of secrecy continues to be gradually lifted, slowly revealing—in an otherwise ontologically shocking socio-psychological striptease—the bare outlines of the explosive Truth. Very soon—perhaps, some hint, in a mere matter of months (though Lue Elizondo says more like five years; while Chris Bledsoe points to 2026; but who really knows?)—we will, at last, Know.
Know what? And how will we come to know it? Will it be through some parsimonious and meticulously parsed public statement by government officials? Or, as is more likely, will it be through further (controlled) leaks, say of whistleblowers’ (or rather, witnesses’) closed-door testimony to Congress, perhaps as revealed in the “investigative” reports of a major newspaper? What will be said? What will be read?
Certainly, at a bare minimum, there must be an acknowledgment of the historical and continuing presence on earth of multiple non-human “others” who possess intelligence, knowledge, and technology far advanced and superior to our own. These “others” may be extraterrestrial, ultraterrestrial, or cryptoterrestrial, though these terms are not likely to be used. (Not to mention extratempestrials, descendants of human beings hailing from our own or some alternate future.) This rough outline, at a bare minimum, we will come to know, as it has been known by those in the know for a very long time. Or, so it seems.
Yet, will such knowledge, whenever it arrives, be enough? The question is: enough for what?
* * *
To answer this question, we must first enter the desert.
The desert is the place of exile because it is also the place of purification, of cultivating a new vision and dreaming new dreams. It is where the prophets go to talk with God, or struggle against the Devil—or, as Nietzsche would have it, to vanquish our last god who has become our devil: the Great Dragon who stands in the way of our maturation and the evolution of human consciousness. We must slay that dragon, which is to say that we must bring into question all of the old values. Who is the old god? What, in fact, have we been worshiping?
In a word, Greed. More, more, more. You can never have enough! We are insatiably greedy. For what? Wealth. Power. Attention. Clicks. Those, in fact, are all intimately interlinked in the image of the Celebrity, our American Idol. That Idol can be a Politician, an Entertainer, or even an Entrepreneur—perhaps all three rolled into one! That indeed would be the trifecta.
But don’t forget the Scientist. We are also greedy for knowledge; for, as Francis Bacon said, Knowledge is Power. Knowledge gives us technology, and technology gives us control: control over our enemies, our environment, and finally, ourselves. Over Life itself, you might say. What is the ultimate goal of all this control, of putting Nature to the rack to torture her secrets out of Her? When you put together cybernetics and artificial intelligence with genetic manipulation you get the ultimate power to conquer the ultimate enemy: Death itself. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was right. Her images were a bit crude and lurid, but her idea was, as the Brits say, “spot-on.”
Behind and beneath all this greed, then, is the fear of death; death not just of our physical body, but of what Alan Watts called the “skin-encapsulated ego” we call “I,” “me, and “mine.” In fact, without the self-image constructed by the ego, the patterns of reaction and self-identification engrained over time, there is no body, for “body” itself is a concept, a construction of consciousness (or rather, unconsciousness). So merely saving the sheer physical form from destruction would mean nothing without saving my sense of myself, the egoic entity.
And it is crystal clear, from even a cursory glance at the history of humanity, and especially our history from the past several hundred years, that this entity is a devil, a demon hell-bent on exploitation and destruction and getting what it wants at any cost. Any idiot can see that we are homicidal maniacs (check the death totals of the last couple of world wars and sundry global and national revolutions) bent on destroying the planet for our own gratification. But hey, genocide and geocide are small prices to pay when our happiness is at stake! Except that more, more, more never produces happiness, but only further problems and despair. The ego never gets enough. We are digging ourselves a bottomless pit.
* * *
This is why I believe yet more knowledge and more data are not enough; because there is literally never enough. And it is also why I am deeply suspicious of putting salvationist hopes in the basket of Disclosure. We are not alone. We never have been. They monkeyed with us. We have their DNA. We have been reverse engineering their craft, which, in effect, were gifted to us.
So what?
After the initial shock passes, and our institutions regain their footing—and even if they don’t—the same old patterns will reassert themselves. Unless, that is, one of two things happens: (1) “They” assert force majeure and don’t allow us to, thereby saving us from ourselves (which I very much doubt; this is the old salvationist fantasy); or (2) we kill the dragon ourselves and end the current insanity. But this can only be done willingly by individuals committed to their own inward transformation, and an end to the old egoic patterns. It cannot be done to or for you. You must do it yourself, or not at all.
The perdurable strength of these patterns can be seen even among those who can claim to already Know The Truth (or at least some of it). If you read Chris Bledsoe’s book, UFO of God, even in a cursory manner, it is hard to miss the gold rush to exploit this man and his experiences even among many of those—Ufologists, academics, miscellaneous government types—who came to believe in his sincerity and the reality of those experiences. Greed for money, for confirmation of pet theories, for more data, and so on, turns would-be compassionate “helpers” into cold-blooded users. Not all of them, to be sure—but many. I will not name names. Read for yourself.
This is why I believe that the Lady was not talking about knowledge as we usually think about it when she told Chris Bledsoe that, “A new knowledge must arrive. Mankind must awaken to it.” It was the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle who long ago reminded us of the distinction between “knowing that” and “knowing how.” We usually think of knowledge either as facts or as theory, which comes from the Greek word theoria, which is the same root as our English word “theater,” a place where we have a view of the stage or screen. In the proper use of the term, then, a theory is not to be confused with a hypothesis or a conjecture; a theory is a certain view of the facts—a connection of the dots, an assemblage of the data points—which yields understanding and insight. This is all propositional knowledge. But knowing all there is to know about a bicycle is different from knowing how to ride it. We can have great propositional knowledge and still be greatly unconscious and dysfunctional.
I suspect that the kind of knowledge that the Lady was talking about is “knowing how,” and specifically, knowing how to live. This is what wisdom is: knowing how to live in the world in a non-dysfunctional way.
In Greek, “philosophy” (philosophia) literally means “the love of wisdom”—not the love of data, or knowledge, or intellect. This is a point I would discuss with my introductory philosophy classes on the first day of our meeting. Above the door of the temple at the ancient Oracle of Delphi was the inscription, “Know Thyself.” There is no wisdom without self-knowledge. And this self that must be known, as Ananda Coomaraswamy has observed, is not the little egoic self, with which we are constantly and destructively obsessed—the self that sees itself as separate from, and competing with, others and indeed with Life itself—but the Self that is One with the very Source of Life.
In other words, the Lady is talking about gnosis: the deepest wisdom and spiritual truth, directly apprehended. This is the knowledge first facilitated by the presence of the beings that Chris Bledsoe encountered, long before his meeting with the Lady:
“As we stood there looking at each other, an overpowering emotional understanding crashed over me. They communicated to me this obliterating epiphany: the singular, ultimate importance of all living beings. It was a thought and a philosophy as much as it was sweeping emotion. All my memories, all my thoughts, all my emotions were changed. My whole worldview reorganized itself around this foundational priority. A scope of meaning, grander and nobler than anything I had ever felt, bloomed around every lifeform. We living things shared this meaning that summoned in me the utmost care, respect, and, above all, love . . . This was the message [of compassion toward all life] that the beings had gone to such extraordinary ends to convey. This understanding remains at the core of who I am. I never squash a bug, I never fish or hunt. Through all my trials since, this belief has guided me, giving me the hope and courage I have needed to carry on.”
The Lady said that mankind must awaken; but we can only awaken one by one, if we so choose. This we should do now, while we still have time—time to venture forth into our own inner deserts, and there confront our own fierce inner dragons.
Enjoy the desert. See you on the yonder side of Disclosure.