Is This the Real ET? - Test Your Integrated Intelligence!

Real or fake? Can you feel it?

Is this the evidence that we have been waiting for? Is this really ET? You may have heard the story and sent the video already, as it appeared on YouTube today. The YouTube video, below has already been viewed several million times. It’s gone viral as they say. You can see  the video here:

How can we work out if it is really an ET who didn’t quite phone home fast enough, or a fake (for the sake of convenience let’s exclude other theoretical possibilities, such as that it may be some human mutation, a prehistoric creature and so on)?

My purpose here today to compare and contrast an analytical approach to the problem, with an intuitive one, using what I call Integrated Intelligence (INI). You might like to try the exercise below, which will test your ability at INI, and help you improve it.

Standard interpretations of the Siberian ET will take the observable data, and analyse it. The problem with analysis, like all logical deduction, is that there are always implicit assumptions which underpin the way the data is analysed. Let’s take a few examples.

A standard dismissal of the possibility that this is a genuine ET is that there’s no way that an alien could possibly travel the vast distances between stars, given the laws of physics. Yet how much do we really know about the laws of physics? Our science is barely 500 years old, as John Maddox, the late editor of Nature journal once commented. At the turn of the 20^th century a noted physicist stated that there was no way that human beings would ever travel round the world in 24 hours or less. His rationale? There was no way a ship could cut through water that fast, given the laws of physics. I think you get where I’m coming from.

Another obvious reason to dismiss the Russian ET is that it is essentially humanoid. The argument here is that evolution on distant planets would be very unlikely to produce anything remotely human looking. Our DNA is unique to Earth, as are our planetary conditions and history, which are crucial to natural selection and evolution. In fact alien life might be so radically different from us, that we might not even recognise it as life if we did stumble across it.

This is a reasonable argument, but again there are fundamental presuppositions which underpin the analysis. Firstly, it presupposes that there is no connection between Earth and other star systems. This might not be so, even at a physical level. Ironically, it is one of the two men credited with first describing the DNA double helix back in 1951, Francis Crick, who later argued that it was possible that the amino acids which are the foundation of life on Earth may have arrived here on comets. Some recent evidence makes his claim more credible, as apparently amino acids have been confirmed to be existent in some comets.

Given this, there may be some property of our DNA that is shared with other star systems, which lends itself to forming life structures such as we see on earth. Yes, it’s a stretch.

The other physical connection could be the aliens themselves. A common hypothesis in New Age circles is that aliens themselves may have “seeded” the earth. In that case, evolution is not a purely random process.

Evolution may also not be as random as we think if there is an active intelligence behind it. This is commonly ridiculed in mainstream science, and I won’t go into the arguments for intelligent design here. Let me just refer to one rather radical possibility. There are many anecdotal reports of people seeing nature spirits, or something akin to them. These are supposed to be “assigned” roles to nurture particular species of plants and animals. These would the equivalent of spirit guides, only not for humans. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, the late thanatologist, claimed to be a regular communicator with “fairies”. Of course nobody in mainstream science is going to touch this with a 40 foot pole, but I personally would not dismiss the possibility entirely. The reason is that I once had an eerie experience which makes me take the idea seriously.

When I was about 14 years old, I awoke in the middle of the night with a spooky sense that there was something outside my window. My bedhead was directly below an open window, and there was the edge of a garden outside. That night, I gingerly sat up, and looked outside the window, and into the garden directly below. To put it bluntly, what I saw scared the shit out of me. Right below the window, about four feet away from my head was a ball of glowing white light sitting in the garden, almost touching the outside wall of the house. It was about 2/3 the size of a soccer ball. I blinked a few times, then pulled my head in real fast – and right under the blankets. I was totally terrified. The next morning I got up and went outside, and there was nothing there. I had no frame of reference to process the event, so I told myself that it must have been a very fluffy rabbit – although I knew it didn’t look much like a rabbit at all. I put the experience out of my mind for over a decade, until some other “paranormal” experiences made me question once more what I’d seen that days as a teenager. One of those experiences was witnessing a huge ball of glowing white light flying through the night sky, as well as another UFO formation on the same night. (You can read it on page 44 of my book Extraordinary Mind - you can download the first 50 pages for free here if you want).

I could go on and address some other limitations of rational ways of knowing, but let’s just leave that there for the time being. All I am saying is that, despite its wonderful capacity to assist human cognition, rationality as defined in modern western cultures is somewhat self-limiting.

One of the prime differences between INI and rational ways of knowing, is that the former works through a collapse of the gap between knower and known. Western rationalism operates with the insistence of the separation between observer and subject. In fact it is a prime presupposition of Western rationalism that the gap between knower and known cannot be bridged. I, and many mystics and the Romantics of Western lore, believe that this is a false assumption. INI works with the presupposition that consciousness contains non-local properties, and that the universe features an essential, indivisible holism, as well as distinct parts.

OK, enough of the philosophy. Would you like to give Integrated Intelligence a try with the Russian ET? Here’s an activity which combines two INI Tools: The Light Trance State, and the Feeling Sense, as described in my book Discover Your Soul Template. The former is a state of deep relation which allows you to access a non-ordinary way of knowing, and the latter describes a deep intuitive feeling which comes to you as you permit intuition to operate. Here’s what to do.

Watch the video of the Russian incident on YouTube. Try not to make any judgments, just take careful note of the “ET” in the ice. Now, move away from the computer, and sit somewhere quiet where you can relax, away from any noise or distractions. Begin by closing your eyes and focusing upon your breath. Just feel yourself relaxing deeply as your breath moves in and out. Note any tension in the body, and just let it go. As thoughts come into your mind, just acknowledge them, and imagine them floating away in balloons (or just let them go). Return your attention gently to your breathing each time.

After two or three minutes, allow yourself to bring the image of the Russian ET into your mind. See yourself standing over the ice where it lays. Next, imagine your feelings moving out from your chest, and merging with the ET. Just imagine pulling it into you (if you like). What does it feel like? What does it feel like it is made of? Is it organic or non-organic? You might like to imagine yourself touching the surface of the ET with your hand? Go ahead, smell it! Is there any odor? Trust whatever feeling and impressions come to you. This should only take a minute or so. Then imagine yourself moving away from the scene, return your attention to your breathing, and open your eyes.

Ideally, when you do something like this, write down your impressions immediately in an Intuitive Diary. That’s one of the INI Tools I recommend in Discover Your Soul Template. If you can learn to trust your Feeling Sense, it is a very wonderful tool to have at your disposal.

I would love to hear of your impressions. I will tell you mine in a day or two. I don‘t want to “lead” you in any particular direction here.

Marcus

An Alien Mind

Recently there have been quite a few stories circulating about UFOs. Personally, I have a very open mind about the phenomenon of UFOs, and in large part this is based upon my own experience in witnessing unidentified flying objects in Australia about 17 years ago.(you can read it on page 46 of my book Extraordinary Mind: the first 50 pages can be downloaded here – click on the “download file at page centre, to the right of my photo).

Some particularly interesting footage has come out of South America, which seems to be a UFO hotspot.

However something sent to me by 22C+ member Karl Jacobs (http://www.karljacobs.com) yesterday caught my attention. This coming weekend tmore han 100 of the world's leaders in business, politics, education, sports, entertainment, the environment and technology will be meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The subject matter: unusual ways to spark innovation, and subjects discussed will include UFOs and life in outer space. 

Nuclear physicist and UFO researcher Stanton Friedman expressed his thoughts about the conference.

"I think because they recognize that if you want to look for innovation, look for somebody who's way ahead of you… Even if UFOs and aliens weren't real, just thinking about it is a big thing, enlarging the scope of our thinking to include a larger part of the galactic neighborhood instead of the planet."     

The conference is being organised by the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority, whose goal is to bring together business leaders, politicians and intellectuals with a common interest in how competitiveness can be used to find solutions to global challenges.

Stanton Friedman added that he's:

"..convinced, after my work for major corporations as a nuclear physicist, that technological progress comes from doing things differently in an unpredictable way. The future is not an extrapolation of the past."

Astrophysicist/computer scientist Jacques Vallee will also be a key member attending the conference.  He is interested in discussing how UFO patterns can add to our knowledge of physics. He says: "Reviewing the UFO evidence requires us to examine our assumptions about how things work."

Personally, I believe that questioning our assumptions is the key to understanding things at a deeper level. It is the presuppositions which lie behind our thinking, including the assumptions within the models that we use to construct our thought processes, which hold us back from seeing things anew. I have long argued that the reason why consciousnesses is so poorly understood in modern science is because there is an implicit assumption that consciousness is a product of the brain, and is limited by the local infrastructure of the brain. My experience leads me to conclude that consciousness is merely mediated by the brain, and not limited by it.   

Notable is the following statement by astrophysicist/computer scientist Jacques Vallee, who will be a key panel member:

"I'm convinced there's a phenomenon there, that there is a technology… And I'm not kidding myself that we're going to discover a new form of propulsion tomorrow, just by looking at UFO patterns….These things are real and they do something we don't understand, but if we're clever in watching and understanding the patterns, maybe we can learn something about physics that we didn't know before."          

Vellee is correct. We do not need the hardware of alien technology to expand our thinking. As Einstein once famously noted, once a mind is expanded by a new idea, it never returns to its original size.

For many years Vallee has attempted to get UFO research taken seriously. He has faced a lot of resistance, but he believes that things have changed greatly. He now believes that UFOlogy “is a respectable subject."

 "Certainly, internationally, what I've found is that people who are informed and are aware of the phenomenon are much more willing to support people doing serious research on it."  

In my opinion, this is a central issue in the retention of an unbalanced mechanistic paradigm in mainstream science, especially biology. Many people are uninformed of domains of knowledge which lie beyond their worldviews, and are thus resistant to conceptions which lie beyond their maps of reality.

Regardless of whatever personal beliefs we have about UFOs or other domains of knowledge which might be considered anomalous in western cultures, one very useful way to put such domains to good use is to use them as a “provocation”. This is precisely what lateral thinking guru Edward de Bono recommends . He correctly points out that the mind is a self-organising system. The mind tends to slot ideas into pre-existing categories, and in doing so often fails to acknowledge anomalous data or identify patterns that do in fact exist.

In an upcoming volume of the Open Information Science Journal, I have used de Bono’s idea of provocation to encourage academics to explore my idea of Integrated Inquiry, which is a way of employing Integrated Intelligence during research. Using seemingly outlandish ideas as a provocation takes some of the heat out of their use, and those exploring such ideas do not have to necessarily profess a “belief” in them. Thiis takes a the pressure off the academic ego.   

Still, the existence of strange ideas does not guarantee innovative thinking, and one reason for this is that the ways of knowing employed often remain unchanged. As a perfect example, take one of the contributors in the comments section on the web page where the conference is outlined. The comment highlights a tremendous irony. On a web page devoted to innovative thinking, one poster “callendoudna” dismisses the possibility of the existence of interplanetary travel in the following way.

Hit a light pole at 5 miles an hour and you need to replace the fender. Hit it at 50 mph and you need to replace the car. You're the Captain of the SSSS Titanic (Solar System Star Ship Titanic) on Humanity's maiden voyage to the nearest star. You are cruising at 10% of the speed of light when the SSSSTitanic strikes a pebble the size of a pea and having a mass of 13 grams (half an ounce). Assuming only 10% of this 13 grams is converted to distructive energy the resulting blast would equal the atomic bomb that wiped out Hiroshima. So we're not going to travel to other stars anytime soon and they're not going to be in a big hurry to get here. Realistically you need to consider things like O'Neil Cylinders and Space Arks that travel no more than 1% of the speed of light and will take centuries to make the trip. 

The comment points to the limitations of analysis as a way of knowing. Analysis tends to be  rather uncreative, and certainly unimaginative. Analysis can be so focused upon breaking down arguments and facts that it misses the big picture - including questioning the background assumptions. Callendoudna’s logical argument reminds me of the sentiment’s expressed by a certain physicist (whose name escapes me) just before the turn of the twentieth century. He dismissed the possibility that a person could ever travel round the world in 24 hours or less. His reasoning? According to the laws of physics, no boat could ever cut through water at the speed required. Just a few years later the Wright brothers made the first airborne flight, and the rest is history.

What unexamined assumptions  have we made about space travel, UFOs and alien life?


It's worth pondering.

Marcus

Are you Connected?

Here's another simple yet powerful transformation tool from my Urban Enlightenment programme. You'll see the obvious connection with my last post on 22C+.

Connection Day

Today I allow myself to relax, and look for ways to connect with people in spirit. I now see myself to see myself as part of the greater groundswell of humanity.

The modern world is extremely competitive. Hong Kong (where I live) and China are particularly competitive. The education system is a dog-eat dog world of survival of the hardest working, most diligent and most intelligent young people. During their science classes, students are then taught the story of Darwin, and how he revolutionised our thinking, taking the God-centered worldview of medieval religion and supplanting it with the harsh reality of natural selection and survival of the fittest. It seems only natural then, that our educational and social structures perpetuate this ‘natural’ system and encourage the best and brightest to fight it out in the rat race. And there is little doubt that such structures do activate many people’s brilliance, and they enhance our society’s competitive edge. Like Olympic records, the quality of almost all human endeavors in the economic sphere  have improved manifold in the last century.

Despite all this, we do not need to buy into the idea of the rat race, nor buy the survival of the neo-Darwinnian worldview. At the very least, we should take "time out” from the game to restore our souls, and in particular to reactivate ways of knowing and being which are not valued within the modern system. We need to give time to connection, empathy and cooperation.

Human beings are more than mere biological machines fighting it out for reproductive rights. As former Princeton professor David Loye has shown, even Darwin himself believed that there are higher moral drives within the human species. The rat race locks us into a world of me versus them, where others are seen as competitors in the great biological crunching machine.

The world is not a giant machine. It is just that we have created our society in the image of the ego, the part of our minds which emerges from evolutionary survival needs. There is much more to us than this! The world is organic, pulsating, alive, passionate, intimate, playful, even loving. And so are you. Harmony, cooperation and empathy are all part of nature. Indeed they are the essence of the higher human spiritual drives that modern science rarely addresses, and has largely ignored.

Today, walk gently, and feel your connection to the people around you. Sit in a busy public space, and bring your mind fully into presence.  Invite God, Spirit, Love (whatever you call it) to be there with you. Next, imagine a stream of light emerging from your heart and connecting with those around you. Project a sense of love and compassion for them. Imagine also an energy field of love embracing all the people you see. As judgments and thoughts emerge from your mind, just notice them, and return your attention gently to your sense of connection with others. Do this for ten minutes or so.

Repeat this exercise for short periods of time whenever you have a spare moment in your day. You can even do it during meetings, classes, or community activities. Nobody will know, at least not consciously!

Go ahead, make your day! Connection – or love – is the prime drive of the human collective oversoul. It is part of our evolution.

The Connector:

Here's another daily focus process from my booklet Urban Enlightenment. I confess the very simple programme outlined in the booklet was been written as much for me as anyone else. In an urban environment, it's so easy to forget the principles and attitudes that create connection with Spirit. Still, the fact is it's very easy to create a shift in consciousness with just a few simple processes. There's nothing earth-shattering here, just time-honoured spiritual processes that work. "The Connector" is one of my favourites. I have found it very powerful.

Have you ever noticed that in public spaces in many cities people rarely talk to strangers? In Hong Kong where I live, many people don’t even acknowledge the existence of service people in the supermarket or Seven-11, neither looking at them nor making eye contact as they complete their transaction. This has created an increasingly dehumanised urban environment.  Yet the truth is that it is the person who is refusing to connect with others who is creating his own alienation. Is it any wonder that most people look utterly miserable in urban public spaces! People need connection. It’s our bonds with others that sustain our lives. But don’t despair. The Connector is here (and it is you!).

Here's how it works. Today (or tomorrow, if it is late in the day) you will deliberately connect with FIVE people (count ‘em!) in public space. These will be strangers or people you do not know well (although it works just as well, even better maybe, with friends and loved ones). Service people are great "targets" - door men, policewomen, cashiers, bus drivers and so on. You will also find that if you are present, and keep your head up and eyes relaxed and on the people around you (without focusing upon anyone for too long), that opportunities will open up to greet those around you on lifts, on public transport or on the street.

The key to The Connector is that this is no simple "Good morning". This moment of connection will be done in presence. That means that your mind will be fully present to the person you are meeting and greeting. Just for those few seconds, you will leave all thoughts or worries about other things, and give your entire attention to the person before you. Let's get specific.

Firstly, just before you enter the personal space of the person, bring your attention to your breath, and feel yourself fully within your body. As you approach, look them in the eye and SMILE! (try it, it’s easy!). Greet them with a friendly hello or “How are you?” If you have a spare half-minute, and if the person is not too busy, make a small comment like ,“You must have a very busy job” (don’t make it a negative, like “How can you stand dealing with the general public?”, or "This country is going down the crapper"). Make sure you stay present with the person while you are there, even if they are performing some mundane activity like giving you your change. When you leave, look them in the eye and say goodbye or, “Have a nice day.” Most people will respond positively. With service people, they usually welcome customers who actually take a few seconds to connect with them. However, if the person behind the counter remains poker faced, don’t take it personally. Just move on. You can’t please everyone!

So that’s The Connector. It’s simple, and it’s a lot less confronting than the Free Hugs campaign! All you have to do is repeat the process at least five times during your day.  That is easy. There are no excuses! You can try it at work too, with colleagues you might not normally connect with. If you want to go further, extend the connection time with the person.

The Connector is simple and it really will make you feel better. It will make those whom you connect with feel good too! The other great benefit of The Connector is that it helps bring you into presence, and if done regularly, disciplines the mind to value "the now." And it is in the now that connection with Spirit is deepest.

Let me know how you go with it. 

Marcus

Biophobia: Be Very Afraid!

Marcus T Anthony's new web site and blog can be found at www.mind-futures.com.

Simon Buckland on his blogoflove, recently wrote about the revitalising capacity of beautiful parks, and in particular the charming the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, in Paris, where he lives. Deep connectivity, including an intimate connection with nature – green time – simply has to be a priority for policy makers in any city or country in the world. A future without this precious connection with the environment is quite a simply a future not worth living.