If things like this are going to happen, the ladies will be afraid to sleep alone in the house if so much as a sewing-machine or apple-corer be about.

—P.T. Barnum, 1855, on John Murray Spear’s Machine

In one popular current, some now refer to these “extraterrestrials” as “non-human intelligences” (NHI), and “contact modalities” (CM) can be used for humans’ interaction with them. The nebulousness of both concepts, NHI and CM, is wide enough to encompass what we call synchronicities, NDEs, OBEs, vivid “unwilled” daydreams, hypnagogic visions, encounters with elementals, earth-spirits, fairies, and extraterrestrials. 

In her recent book American Cosmic,[1] Diana Pasulka speaks of this Otherworldly communication phenomenon in the cases of NASA aerospace engineer Timothy Taylor and geneticist Dr. Gary Nolan (“Tyler D” and “James” respectively in the text). Taylor received “transmissions” from meditative procedures. Designs or concepts for biomedical technologies occurred unbidden in his mind during these processes. He apparently linked these ideas’ irruption to NHIs. It started for him when he had a strange experience in the aftermath of the Challenger disaster: a “memory” that a military-proposed experiment on the next shuttle Columbia would work—which it eventually did, but he hadn’t even proposed it yet. He traces this “anomalous reception” to being exposed to a type of energy at a “very special facility” at NASA after briefly leaving then returning to the Administration. He apparently linked these ideas’ appearances to NHIs: 

“There was something in (that special room) that either emitted frequencies or signals and they didn’t want those to escape or they didn’t want signals to get in. I never knew which. It was a mysterious place, and we weren’t allowed to talk about it.”

That room, Tyler felt, zapped him with energy that changed the “frequencies” of his body and his thoughts. It was after this experience that he began to have more “memories” of bio-medical technologies.

“In the program, I started to find myself on jobs where I interfaced directly with the phenomenon. I know its language. It does speak to us, in space. I don’t know who is responsible for putting me on those on these jobs. I think that somehow they are responsible for it. My own direct boss doesn’t know what I do. This is how the program works.”[2]

Eventually Taylor came to believe that NHIs communicate with persons via a field connected to the energies surrounding DNA.

Nolan had classic abduction experiences while young and in his 30s but kept them secret, apparently, until the past few years. He, too, holds many patents and believes some of his idea-germs to be of non-human origin. Currently, Taylor and Nolan are pursuing an informational “DNA-antenna” model to potentially explain paranormal phenomena. Along with physician Christopher “Kit” Green, Nolan is investigating MRI scans and the genomes of contactees and experiencers for DNA markers that may predispose them to undergoing the contact modalities.[3]

Pasulka links Taylor’s and Nolan’s experiences with testimony given to her by former astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell, who founded the Institute for Noetic Sciences and Foundation (1973-present) and the Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial Encounters (FREE). FREE uses and seeks to establish contact with NHIs using the various “contact modalities.”

FREE was founded in 2012 by Mitchell, astrophysicist Dr. Rudy Schild, therapist Mary Rodwell, and attorney Rey Hernandez. In March 2012, Hernandez had an experience (including missing time) involving a “plasma-like being” in his house that healed the family’s dying pet terrier; his wife Dulce described it as an angel, because she had been intensely praying for the dog. Dulce Hernandez then witnessed UFOs (her “angels”) regularly for several months…One night in August 2012 Rey, on a lark, “called down” an enormous craft witnessed by neighbors, friends, and family. Then driving to work one morning soon after this he received a vision of the “contact modalities”: NDEs, UFOs, synchronicities, OBEs, telepathic communications, and mediumistic contacts, all arrayed out as spokes in a wheel and seen during what he describes as an out-of-body experience. This experience so energized Hernandez that he emailed ET abduction/contactee therapist Mary Rodwell, who put him in contact with Rudy Schild, then through Schild, Edgar Mitchell, with whom he ended up having a meeting that very day (Mitchell lived close by). Within 72 hours of Hernandez’s OBE experience the groundwork had been laid for FREE (in both their views, this was further evidence of a kind of collaboration with these higher intelligences). Schild became the science advisor and Mitchell would set up the new organization, which would primarily study consciousness with reference to “anomalous cognition” using Mitchell’s quantum hologram theory of physics and consciousness as a model. It has since brought in dozens of researchers including channeling expert Jon Klimo, Dr Joseph Burkes, and perhaps members of the “invisible college” such as Jacques Vallee.[4] Five years of field work canvassing experiencers produced a book on contact with non-human intelligences.[5]

Is this just a new-coined interpretation of natural inspiration during or after the fact? We have no idea in the least how human imagination and creativity work, let alone how a non-human intelligence would mix with or add to it. But we do know this: no “new” idea exists or springs from a vacuum. Except for anecdotes about geniuses such as Leonardo, Ramanujan, Nikola Tesla, andBuckminster Fuller, ideas usually do not spring fully-formed and translatable to paper in the human psyche. When they have done so in the UFO/NHI community, they’ve often been laughable mish-mashes of misunderstood or fantasy science since the 1950s or even before.

The idea of a technology being gifted by higher powers is one of the oldest human myths, and Pasulka elaborates on the myth in the context of Silicon Valley. Much of it involves information theory and DNA, fields, and transmission, in which the arrow of signification is dangerously reversedby literalizing the metaphors between biology and machines. 

In Pasulka’s and our contexts NHI intervention would seem to undermine the idea of the ownership of new creations by a personal ego; the inventor instead becomes the “receiver” or “discoverer” of intellectual property. Such a humble concept becoming accepted in today’s Silicon Valley has the likelihood of Squeaky Fromme making parole. Pasulka mentions the “extended cognition” that our computers are making possible and believes this mirrors the talk of “Oneness” in traditional mysticism.[6]

Again, none of this is really new. It is just that inventions “indistinguishable from magic” are now so widespread that they are almost met with yawns. 

Consider the fate of Unitarian minister John Murray Spear. After recuperating from a severe beating by paleo-MAGAists in Portland, Maine that put him in a coma, he encountered Andrew Jackson Davis’s work in 1846. While experimenting with seances in 1851—in true utopist fashion—Spear proclaimed that Spiritualist commune with discarnate intelligences was humanity’s future. Following his spirit guides’ commands to the letter, he formed an organization consisting of six groups: the Healthfulizers, Educationalizers, Agriculturalizers, Elementizers, Governmentizers, and the Electricizers. As the chosen head of the Electricizers, Spear voraciously channeled the American Founders and, after nine months of trance communications in 1853, claimed to obtain from the spirit of Benjamin Franklin plans for a perpetual energy machine whose fuel was something called the “New Motive Power.” The machine would grant “life” to other devices via the Mesmeric “electric fluid” and further, could replicate itself or any object one needed—basically, it was a biomechanical 3D nano-printer envisioned in 1854. This device was meant to free humankind from labor. 

Through Spear the spirits had chosen to build the machine in a stone cottage upon the hill High Rock in Lynn, Massachusetts—a fitting locale, for in 1852, Andrew Davis had a spiritual blowout in which he’d seen angels congregating in the clouds above it. The motor required nine months of “gestation.” A bizarre quasi-alchemical, transhumanistic ritual birthed the working machine: the physical part, having been finished in June 1854, was subject to a laying on of hands by several groups of semi-magnetized persons; then Spear was encased inside the machine in layers of metallic strips of “positive and negative polarity” within a grid of jewels and precious metals, where he went into a trance and emitted a glowing umbilicus from his body that engulfed the machine, to the amazement of his confederates. Next, a Mrs. Newton, wife of a journalist chosen by the spirits, was to “mother” the half-living contraption—and duly showed signs of physical pregnancy in response. The spirits dictated that she appear at the High Rock house on a certain day to literally give birth to the accumulated energies gathered within her and transfer them to the machine—which she did, showing for several hours the agony of parturition. The emanations from her body mixed with the chemical auras of the device. Then “its purpose and results were wholly incomprehensible to all but herself; but her own perceptions were clear and distinct that in these agonizing throes the most interior and refined elements of her spiritual being were imparted to, and absorbed by, the appropriate portions of the mechanism—its minerals having been made peculiarly receptive by previous chemical processes,” Reverend S. Crosby Hewitt wrote.

She then spent weeks “nursing” the machine with the New Motive Power. After this, its rotors and bearing supposedly began to work—but not enough to impress any visiting Spiritualists, who opined the motion they witnessed was “not enough to turn a coffee mill.” Davis himself, while praising Spear and his community’s faith, believed Spear to have been misled in principles of “science” and explained the machine’s weak motions to random fluctuations in the “ether” via the electrical generator to which it was attached. 

When asked by Spear and his mediums, Benjamin Franklin & co. answered from the other side in a rather typical tricksterish way: while the motor didn’t operate properly in the physical sphere, it had succeeded in moving opinion and the spiritual outlook of humanity. Although “thoroughly, electrically, magnetically, chemically, spiritually, and celestially impregnated” it.

At the spirit cadre’s bidding, the machine was dismantled and taken to Randolph, New York. After having moved it, the machine survived only a few months in its new atmosphere; a mob broke into the room and destroyed it. As Spiritualist journalist S.B. Brittan concluded, “if the New Motor is to be the physical savior of the race, it will probably rise again.”[7]

Spear’s was a Silicon Valley utopian dream 150 years too early. It could be asked, was Spear having precognitive visions of our present inventions? Were NHIs feeding him these ideas in the guise of the Founders—that is, the “best moral and intellectual” persons of which he could conceive? We will never know, but the contemporary parallel with “others” seeding minds with technological ideas is striking. Perhaps these Others do possess a kind of physical existence, and perhaps they are much closer than we realize. 

On the other hand…

 An Excursion into Natural Human Creativity, Involuntary/Automatic Imagination, and St. Nick 

Kenneth Ring’s abduction experiencer profile fits that of many trance mediums, persons who can receive both self-willed and spontaneous imaginary material with more ease than a non-dissociative person.[8] Because of the dissociative states to which they are prone, the experiencer/medium possesses minimal to no conscious control over the images that may appear in their mind, and the images that do appear, are far more vivid and longer-lasting for them than in the general population. 

Spontaneous creative activity can often involve controlled dissociation rituals that partially or completely efface the conscious personality and, paradoxically, through this constricting of the normal ego, make its “reception bands” wider for the intrusion of unexpected material, whether it takes aural, verbal, visual, or physical (automatic writing) forms. 

An artist, for instance, may welcome these intrusions, and a musician may revel in them. For creative persons, an element of intention is obviously present in the execution of the final product. What we call creativity in general, and the types of work evaluated as genius-level, involves a special state of consciousness that allows material to flow into the artist’s or scientist’s mind: 

(Frederic Myers) linked genius with the classical notion of inspiration, saying that an “inspiration of genius” is a “subliminal uprush,” an emergence into supraliminal consciousness of ideas that the person has “not consciously originated, but which have shaped themselves beyond his will, in profounder regions of his being” (Human Personality Vol. 1, page 71). Another central element of creativity for Myers was the integration of ideas arising from subliminal regions with those of the supraliminal self, the “utilization of a greater proportion of man’s psychical being in subservience to ends desired by his supraliminal control” (HP, Vol. 1, pg. 155). The outcome of the creative process is something intended and desired by the supraliminal, and the supraliminal does plays a key role in the completion of what begins with a subliminal uprush. The heart of the creative process is an automatism, but its combination and completion occur in the realm of the supraliminal. Thus, creativity is a highly desirable integration of the two aspects of the psyche and an instance of superior functioning. It is also an indication of what the human soul is capable of, because there is a hint of something “beyond,” “something incommensurable” with “the results of conscious logical thought” (Vol. 1, pg. 98).[9] (emphasis added)

Mystics historically also have cultivated methods of altering their physiological and mental states to enter trance that brings their consciousness closer to the “source,” or God, such as extreme fasting, repetitive prayer, or self-mortification. Michael Talbot discusses the Sufis’ repetitive meditational practices of creative visualization meant to bring about both contact with Allah and materialize His emanations of an alternate reality:

(The Sufis) held that it is a world created solely out of the subtle matter of alam almithal, or thought. Even space itself, including “nearness,” “distances,” and “far-off” places, was created by thought. But this does not mean that the country of the hidden Imam was unreal, a world constituted out of sheer nothingness. Nor was it a landscape created by only one mind. Rather it was a plane of existence created by the imagination of many people, and yet one that still had its own corporeality and dimension, its own forests, mountains, and even cities. The Sufis devoted a good deal of their writings to the clarification of this point. So alien is this idea to many Western thinkers that the late Henry Corbin, a professor of Islamic religion at the Sorbonne in Paris and a leading authority on Iranian-Islamic thought, coin the term imaginal to describe it, meaning a world that is created by imagination but is ontologically no less real than physical reality…Because of the imaginal nature of the afterlife realm, the Sufis concluded that imagination itself is a faculty of perception, an idea that offers new light on why (psychotherapist Joel) Whitton’s subject materialized a hand only after he started thinking, and why visualizing images has such a potent effect on the health and physical structure of our bodies. It also contributed to the Sufis belief that one could use visualization, a process they called “creative prayer,” to alter and reshape the very fabric of one's destiny.[10]

This reiterates the theory of Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the 18^th-19^th Century poets’ conception of the Imagination. Consider this famous quote from Coleridge:

The Primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and is a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.[11]

 The current ideas of a non-human extraterrestrial intelligence both figuratively and literally alienatethe natural human ability to produce novel ideas (signals) that have been filtered down from the noise of the total consciousness, supraliminal and subliminal, of humanity. Is there a genuine justification to externalize these intrusions to a non-human type of consciousness?  

When in trance or mild dissociation, the resting state of a brain’s filtering mechanism is altered to a degree.[12] This allows material that is, to use a metaphor, a mental/aural snapshot of something outside the normal boundaries of personal egoic “habitation.” Much of the brain’s activity, on both synaptic-neuronal and hemispheric/sectional levels, functions in inhibitory ways to make possible what is considered smooth conscious functioning. The study of damage to a tiny area of the brain can reveal the ostensibly global function that area controls with regard to normal consciousness; collectively accumulated over a century, this “catalog of functions” helps us understand the productive or inhibitory scheme of the human cognitive world with regard to the brain. 

In this way the physical aspects of certain base-level filtering mechanisms have been mapped. Blood flow, electrical activity, and coherent communication between hemispheres all contribute to the norm, of course, but tissue death, damage, or anesthesia can produce states similar to hypnosis, hypnagogia, dreams, or OBEs—and also extraordinary feats of psi activity. The original mesmerists and hypnotists of the 19th century proposed models of the hypnoid mesmeric state that implicated general loss of integrated brain and nervous system functioning during the “self-healing,” “remote healing,” telepathy, clairvoyance, and even psychokinesis observed in various patients and volunteer subjects.[13]

There seems to be a general principle, in line with Myers’s thinking, that for every physical loss of a brain function that produces a physical compensation there are ancillary effects to behavior that are sometimes extraordinary…Consider the fact that animals, including humans, can still competently function with severe physical brain damage and even without fully formed brains. Neurophysiologist Karl Pribram once puzzled over neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield’s “engram” conjecture that everything ever experienced by a person is recorded in the brain’s trillionfold complex of connections. Penfield had electrically stimulated parts of epileptics’ brains while they were in surgery and received detailed accounts of memory replays (engrams) from earlier moments in the patients’ lives, sometimes going back to early childhood.[14] Pribram’s work with psychologist Karl Lashley added to the mystery: Lashley had discovered that maze-running rats could still remember the paths they’d figured out despite having both the memory and learning portions of their brains removed—and even having the entire organ rearranged in their skulls. This indicated that the physical substrate was not where the engrams of experience reside. At the very least (on a material level), memories are distributed throughout the entire brain and can be retrieved despite damage to the areas where they should reside. 

In cerebellar agenesis, a person is born with an incomplete or even entirely missing cerebellum, which controls motor movement of the limbs and the ability to speak. Yet there are people born with cerebellar agenesis who function relatively normally, such as the Chinese woman found in 2014, where these capacities are only impaired and not entirely absent, as should be the case if the substrate was entirely responsible for the motor competency.[15] There are also startling examples such as the man who suffered from hydrocephaly when a child; at 44, in 2007, he was discovered to have only 30-50% of his brain intact, the rest being simply cerebrospinal fluid. He had an IQ of 75 and led a normal life until the discovery.[16] A boy born in Scotland in 2013 with only a brainstem and a fluid-filled skull is now six and can speak, despite the medical opinion that he should still have only the capacities of a newborn. Another child born in 2014 lacks both a skull and brain and could speak rudimentarily.[17]

These cases obviously at least imply that something more than the physical brain is the key to understanding consciousness and memory. Physicalist science has no answer yet as to how these people can function. 

An obvious hypothesis is that consciousness does not reside in or is produced by the brain but is filtered via brain structures from a “field” of possible conscious experience, as Myers hinted. This is idea with a long pedigree and has been much denigrated by mainstream scientists since the 19^thcentury. 

Metachoria

Creativity may involve a narrowing of the physical markers (brain activities) of normal consciousness that produces a corresponding expansion of access to another part of the mind—or even another kind of consciousness altogether.

I believe Coleridge and Corbin are speaking of what we may call (adapting Celia Green’s coinage) the metachoria and the specific images that emerge from it into consciousness, metachores. Metachores (such as the “heavenly cities” created by the Sufis) are invested with meditational energies both mental and emotional. They may be equivalent to the Buddhist concept of an emanation body that can be created by prodigious focus over a long period. 

Moreover, these images may appear as unwilled and spontaneous in anyone’s consciousness, but the artist as a trained receiver may be able to capture and develop them.

This capacity, of course, comes with repeated practice and discipline. A metachoric impression may linger only temporarily in the short-term, working memory. This is what causes the distraction so common to a creative person; in the middle of a conversation they may struggle, multitasking, to clarify and remember the sudden idea (as the brain produces the proteins to store it in long-term form). This is when the napkin sketch, the pocket notebook, or the digital voice recorder comes out as they get down the idea before it disappears. 

The future work—all available choices to the path of a finished, tangible product (painting, recording, etc.)—are in a superposition of sorts as they hover about the metachore, like a cloud of electrons prior to observation and wave-function collapse.

But recognized works of genius, both great and lesser, are fashioned through a process that is generalizable to all acts of creation: 

A traditional descriptive model of the creative process, based on the self-observation and testimony of large numbers of variously eminent persons, provides a useful organizing framework for this discussion. Credit for explicitly formulating this model is usually given to Graham Wallas (1926), a political scientist and administrator primarily concerned with the pedagogical matters, but it was also formulated in nearly identical terms and in greater detail by psychologist Eliot Dole Hutchinson (1931, 1939). The model posits four stages or phases that can often be discerned in a high-level creative effort: (1) preparation; (2) incubation; (3) illumination; and (4) verification. Briefly, preparation refers primarily to the initial stages of intense voluntary effort on a particular work or problem (although it is sometimes generalized to include the typically lengthy period of time in which high level technical skills relevant to the task are laboriously acquired). If this initial effort fails, the work or problem may temporarily be put aside in frustration, this being the stage of incubation or renunciation, in which conscious effort seems to be largely or wholly absent. Something more than simple rest or dissipation of inhibitions seems to be involved during the incubation period, for then comes illumination, inspiration, or insight, in which radically new ideas intrude into consciousness, often suddenly, copiously, and with strong accompanying affect. This leads to a further stage of voluntary effort, verification, in which the new material may be evaluated, elaborated, and worked into the structure of the evolving product.[18] 

While cognitive neuroscientific accounts explain Hutchinson’s renunciation-inspiration phase of creativity as a sort of “unconscious cerebration” or a “cognitive unconscious” that functions during both consciousness and sleep, it is still a behaviorist’s black-box model that explains nothing.[19]There are cases of problem solving (if we roughly want to define creativity that way) which so confound science as to be magical. As we noted, a calculating prodigy like Ramanujan could instantly tabulate complex operations on prime numbers within seconds.[20] Since no one has called into public existence the particular prime numbers Ramanujan was asked to do, we still need to ask how he in particular and prodigies in general can do it…It is the same, albeit in “slow motion,” with the creative constellation of ideas that eventually become artworks that deeply resonate with people down the ages. Of course, there are only finite numbers of prime numbers (an objective fact) while art almost wholly involves subjective value judgments, but in what sense do they share a family resemblance at least, or a direct parallel at most?

Getting consistently good sleep has been positively correlated with higher levels of creativity; this probably has to do with the integration of emotional and intellectual experiences into one’s general psychological mindset.[21] Every night, people enter temporary worlds fashioned entirely by their minds, briefly inhabit them, and become agents in them. Our emotional preoccupations drive the dreaming process via the brain stem and limbic system.[22] These centers are very active in emotional states during waking consciousness, and are the most active during dreams, especially the vivid REM dream stage that occurs in its third cycle in late morning.[23] Any dream can show the creative potential for recombination and synthesis that is shaped into a narrative, whether that story is implicit in the dream or imposed during the hypnopompic process of awakening. Something other than the conscious ego imposes these images and the story-like order to them.[24]

Creative breakthroughs come in a flash, or gradually in pieces. This is Frederic Myers’s “subliminal uprush,” in which the solution is often fully-formed and often surprises even the artist or scientist. The artist/scientist’s amazement indicates for Myers the existence of a secondary agency parallel to the stream of willed, accessible memories of consciousness. 

AI systems cannot as yet produce the qualitatively different process of creating novelty of the quality that Myers’s uprush solves. Solutions may involve context, “nested contexts,” cross-pattern-recognition, and even decontextualization of individual elements needed to find satisfactory results. The brain’s immense “processing power” of its present conscious experiences and emotions plus its lifetime’s worth of potentially memorable experiences dwarfs current quantitative computational capabilities. The faculty for understanding context is missing in the cognitive-computational models. It is not enough to say that a human’s personal memory store of experiences can be “algorithmically reshuffled” to produce a novel thought or a creative act, for doesn’t that imply that the answer pre-exists (in some form) in the mind to be discovered as the solution? How is it recognized by the artist or scientist as the eureka! moment?

 An additional problem is that an answer to a problem has one meaning in computing and another altogether for an artist. If an AI scientist programs a computer to write an original song based on a style of source material (which has been done in the case of the Beatles) or write poetry (which also has been done), the computer possesses no intentionality in its steps towards the completion of the work; it all depends on the selection process of the person(s) feeding the raw material into the system. Many millions (perhaps billions) of combinations have to be algorithmically tried by the brain when, as a “computing system,” it does not with any exactitude know what it is looking for. In other words, the eureka moment cannot be programmed for—the emotional rush of re-cognition that the near-perfect to perfect solution has arrived. Again, the artist may be surprised at the result and delighted that the answer appeared, many times accompanied by a numinous eureka! sensation. This emotional component and contextualization of a non-linear process cannot be ignored or minimized by anyone explaining creativity using an AI/computational approach. 

What is invoked as explanation when a musician or gymnast or scientist respectively a) plays an astounding violin solo while on “autopilot” (and may herself be as astonished as the audience when she listens to the subsequent recording); b) the gymnast moves her body without conscious volition in a way thought impossible and is equally amazed on viewing a video of the performance; or c) happens to suddenly perceive an insoluble problem with a Gestalt-switch-like perception and its resolution is now easy and almost obvious? 

In case C, what has usually been invoked by materialist neuroscience is, again, some kind of “unconscious cerebration” involving the recombination of all past imprinted (or memorable) instances in which the problem figured in her cognition. In the first two examples, an altered state of the consciousness can be used to explain how an artist can leap far beyond what they believe themselves capable of (the so-called “flow experience”). This can apply to the scientist as well; we all know the feeling of intense concentration/absorption on a task that suddenly breaks into ease.  

Yet if we deconstruct these scenarios second by second, let’s imagine we can perceive the biochemical-electrical “loops” occurring between brain, fingers, and muscles of all three people during this flow state. Just before the astounding performance, in the near future, something quite out of the ordinary is about to occur, relative to the performer, the audience, and field of aesthetic judges. The performance is at this time unimaginable to everyone. It will emerge from the feedback between mind and matter, tension and release—the creatrix’s conscious will plus something extra or outsidetheir consciousness. Might we not say that the answer does not originate inside the brain structures and neuronal firings at all, but somewhere in a field of possible realities being simultaneously scanned in superposition, like a person searching bandwidths for a certain frequency?

Spontaneous actions may end with the person being called a genius. Yet in the current physicalist’s approximation, all that has occurred is a concentrated act of will that, from the outside, is described as conscious because the person exhibits certain signs of consciousness while performing, whether that performance is on a musical instrument or parallel bars or a blackboard. To be a good neo-behaviorist/epiphenomenalist, all our physicalist has to say is that the genius’ years of reward for competent learning has achieved its pinnacle; for the physicalist, there would be no significance to the artist-scientist’s statement that they were not even aware of their mind/body during the performance or when the answer came, when this may be precisely the crucial point of the matter. 

Along with the considerations of the sources of genuine creativity comes the problem of evaluating a work as a product of genius. In a 1996 book, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi divided creativity as a total activity as having three components: the creative person, their domain, and the field. The domain is any area of endeavor, such as topological mathematics or oil painting or DJing. The field is the peers and experts and audience adjudicating the worth or novelty of the creation. Thus:

…the definition that follows from this perspective is: Creativity is any act, idea, or product that changes an existing domain, or that transforms an existing domain into a new one. And the definition of a creative person is: someone whose thoughts or actions change a domain, or establish a new domain. It is important to remember, however, that a domain cannot be changed without the explicit or implicit consent of a field responsible for it.[25]

Myers (and I) would embrace this view inasmuch as it recognizes a social collective that responds to a work as something that may communicate truths transcending a particular period and place of origination. We would modify this stance, however, on the grounds that it effaces the element of a shared unconscious or subliminal element whose existence is being displayed through the stupendous quality of the work.

Works of genius in poetry, music, and the plastic arts often engage multiple levels of interpretation and position themselves at the edge of an indeterminacy of meaning; they possess a richness of content that evokes a multiplicity of possible responses. The numinous spiritual experience that theologian Rudolf Otto speaks of may very well be encountered in a monumental work of art or a new complex mathematical formula describing, for instance, “imaginary” dimensions that the field of mathematicians have never before noticed. Many times, a new community is called into existence bythe genius; as Luigi Pareyson once said, a genius is a type of person who creates the audience for their work. I think Pareyson means that their works are of such quality that they 1) remind the persons in their audience of profound things they already know, but have never been able to consciously formulate (put into words, sounds, or images themselves); 2) broaden the audience’s perspective on the meaning and/or limits of the domain (as Csikszentmihalyi has it); 3) create converts to the transformative power of art—and thus create new artists; 4) broaden the spectator’s experience of community with other human beings, that is, induce a sympathetic/empathic response that does not diminish in time. 

Perhaps Pareyson’s claim sounds glib when one considers the changing tastes and standards of genius throughout history—but it in no way impacts the accomplishments of persons like Leonardo or St. Hildegard, whose lives and works very well could have been forgotten or suppressed in history. This impels a question like Bishop Berkeley’s about the falling tree: if the genius creates a unique masterpiece and no-one is around to experience it, is it still a masterpiece? Against Csikszentmihalyi’s definition, I would argue yes. If an artist had a vision originating via an altered/dissociative state then labored over what they were blessed with experiencing into physical being, whether or not the work is discovered at some later point is irrelevant. It had meaning for the artist, and it signified both the truth of their metachorial encounter and their direct relationship to a field of possible experience far greater than themself.  

It is important here to stress that the metachoria is populated with and produces in minds images that may have intrinsic intentionality but do not yet possess an existent referent at the time they occur; they have sense to their experiencer but no reference yet in the world. 

Suppose you think of Santa Claus pausing from his toy-making work to have a lager. Santa Claus in a strict sense doesn’t exist, but he can do just about anything one can imagine a human doing—even things humans can’t. The thought of Santa drinking has intentionality: we have a thought that “Santa is/was/will quaff a pint.” It has sense to us, but no referent—that is, it refers to no existing reality, other than the imagined action in the imaginer’s mind. Santa is a “prop.”[26]

Similarly, a painter might have, say, a spontaneous vision of a nightclub filled with nightmarish chimeras performing actions upon one another that no other human has ever imagined.[27] She is chilled by the image’s intensity but also very alert to its details. The imaginal scene also has sense (being set in a phantasmal nightclub, etc.), but no reference in the “outer” world—the vision does not yet exist in a public way, like Santa Claus already does. Her job is then to bring this metachoric image’s subjective sense to external form in a tangible work—a painting.  

Now suppose the painter were to spend ten years making this one work, and it became spectacularly popular and survives down the centuries, like Bosch’s landscapes. Suppose people named her visionary creatures, wrote iconographies and fiction based around them, made movies and narratives using the rich symbolism of the painting’s world. These creatures too could eventually become imaginative “props” like Santa Claus—they could quaff beers, have adventures, take over the White House, etc. 

All because a singular, vivid, unwilled image entered one artist’s head. Did the depicted creatures call themselves into existence via a non-human intelligence? Were they given their long ideal lives via her metachorial imagination? Or to get really out there, did her huge audience’s familiarity, admiration, and even love for her creations retroactively cause the vision to occur in her mind in the first place? 

The Old Wine

So are the terms non-human intelligence and contact modality simply a renaming of the spectrum of psi and channeling phenomena, or something more? The powers ascribed to these NHIs, and their manner of contact, tracks with the ancient Egyptian, Greek, Chaldean, Neoplatonic, and Gnostic ideas of the daemon or god who provides a human with either “hidden” knowledge or future prophecy. These traditional beings were either of the heavens beyond the heavens (the Empyrean), the heavens themselves (the stars), the mid-heavens (the air), or the chthonic realms. Channeling or mediumship is old as humanity. Therefore, clearly distinguishing our hi-tech extraterrestrials from the previous 7,000 years of Otherworldly contact is probably impossible. 

The vocabulary of Theosophical discourse is highly developed and has been used by many channelers since 1875. Researchers have suggested that these NHIs have masqueraded as humans (famous humans, the sitters’ deceased loved ones, etc.) while acting as “controls” on the “other side” simply to give form to their communications and, now that we have evolved in our beliefs to encompass a “cosmic perspective,” the masks have finally come off and we speak to the true names of these NHIs.[28]

What’s different now, according to the CM/NHI proponents, is that a human agent is dealing with something that not only is taken to exist beyond our known earth or even physical universe but can alter or even blend with the human psyche, just like the traditional daemon. Judging by the self-descriptions of their mental states while the communication is occurring, the contactee’s ego very often knows that it is originating in an extra-human source; there is thus a “signature” to the transmissions the contactee recognizes that the communication is of extraterrestrial origin. Sometimes the signature is displaced in time or space. The traditional synchronicity would be an example of such a sign; its content could be anything, but coincidences such as Jacques Vallee’s involving the name “Melchizedek”[29] or the continuing occurrence of simultaneous triangular marks on Dr. X’s and his son’s bodies in the 1968 Aix-en-Provence case (and subsequent triangular marks on abductee/experiencers) would fit as synchronicities, if causality can be absolutely ruled out. 

Many experiencers label these NHIs with places of origination and personal names gotten either directly from the beings during the channelings or by just shorthanding the “raw information” using our innate linguistic abilities. They often speak of “downloads” of information while in contact mode or even while ostensibly fully conscious. 

So what’s the difference between an experiencer receiving a download from a NHI and clairvoyants/mediums such as Swedenborg, Andrew J. Davis, Rudolph Steiner, or Edgar Caycereceiving a cascade of information evoked from the Akashic library?[30] I’d say none, except that the experiencer’s is usually characterized as involuntary while the medium’s is purposely induced. The source of both “modes,” and how the contact occurs, is still beyond explanation (as of yet). Explanation requires sometimes torturous revisions of physics. 

This gap between old-school full-trance (dissociated) communications and the new modality can only be due to ingrained anthropocentric ideas of what “intelligence” is, and deeply conditioned beliefs about the physical brain and its products. Intelligence has been defined in many ways, but they all involve active skills such as quick pattern-recognition, problem-solving, the retrieval of factual knowledge—in short, activities conducive to one’s ability to navigate/negotiate one’s environment successfully in a purely pragmatic way—a survival mechanism. 

As our culture defines it, therefore, intelligence would seem to be the opposite of the mental state in which Otherworldly encounters occur, which often is an altered state in which high cognitive functioning, reality-testing, and quick thinking are impaired or, in some mysterious way, enhanced. 

If this is given as a definition of intelligence, then nature itself must be considered the ultimate problem solver, not simply by the attrition of the individuals who lack survival adaptations, but by the aspects of the organism that already exist to meet a need (and even a need that has yet to arise—the so-called accidental advantageous attribute). 

“Creativity” as such can be measured by testing a pool of random persons with an identical problem and “rating” their responses, generating a hierarchy of novel solutions—but the process of how the “winners’” minds perceived a unique solution has confounded every psychologist, cognitive scientist, and philosopher who has tackled the problem. This is the gap in knowledge which the proponent of the NHI exploits. There is a vast literature on the role of dissociation in creativity. 

Jacques Vallee continues to say that the only fact we can comfortably assert is that these Otherworldly interventions change people’s perceptions of what is possible within our reality, the nature of the universe, and the nature of their own selfhood. This may seem trivial, but its reverberating effects are not—it is the source of religions, as Vallee and scholars J. Gordon Melton, Chris Partridge, James McClenon, and Diana Pasulka point out. But the “UFO consciousness contact”— especially when the messages are meant to address our cosmology—functions in both form and contact to undermine the tenets of physicalist science, just as Spiritualism did 170 years ago.[31]   

Looking at my surroundings, I became aware that I was in a large building of multicolored stones, each vibrating a tune like a great orchestra, and as they vibrated they gave off the most enchanting music…Later on I found out that specially trained souls are trained in the use of thoughtforms to allow the soul to settle down in suitable and familiar surroundings. Whatever you wish is supplied to you, whether it is a farm, factory, halls of music, science laboratory, college of arts.

I walked out into the golden sunlight and saw how much quicker my perception and vision worked… I queried whether there is a different sun for each plane of spirit, and I was told that there is. Each sun is the replica of the master sun and working on a different color vibration.

-Transcript from a medium’s travel to the otherworld[32]

To emphasize again, the idea that a non-human intelligence is assisting humankind is a contemporary take on the divine voice. On the face of it, the new NHI, contact modalities, and DNA-antenna reception sound like updated, digital versions of Mesmerism, the “electric fluid,” Spear’s vision of the “New Motive Power,” and other past theories of how the Otherworld communicates with us. 

As science “naturalized” the workings of the psyche during the 19^th and early 20^th century it also provided the grounds for interpretations of psi phenomena via physical field-like concepts such as Reichenbach’s Odic force, Frederic Myers’s metetherial field, Hans Driesch’s entelechy, Sri Aurobindo’s Supermind, Jung’s collective unconscious, Harold Saxton Burr’s Life-Fields, Aldous Huxley’s Mind-at-Large, etc. These hypotheses have at times been used to explain feats such as Ramanujan’s extraordinary mathematical talents, Tesla’s inventions, the prodigious trance writings of Andrew Jackson Davis and John Newbrough, and of course the spectrum of Spiritualist manifestations. 

These concepts of a quasi-panpsychic universe certainly allowed for the possibility that far-advanced NHIs can intervene in human cognition. The current concept of the NHI brings back those personalaspects—or at least that’s what Pasulka’s book seems to imply, that the NHI has an interest in helping humanity through certain chosen individuals.

In ancient times, a person was expected to follow the “whispered advice” of their person daemon in order to live a successful life. Those unlike Socrates or the sibyls, who were naturally capable of hearing their astral double, sought out mediums to communicate certain courses of action in their lives.

During the late 1980s-2000s, one part of the NHI/ET community went a “Neo-Spiritualist” route via mediums like Darryl Anka, Dolores Cannon’s subjects, etc. as another took the path of believing the NHI abductions were either evil or neutral, while a third took Dr. John Mack’s position that these experiences were another type of intelligence attempting communicate with us via “archetypes” or archetypal “patterns of interaction with an Otherworld.” The concerns for the ecosphere and spiritual evolution were prevalent in the first group and in Dr. Mack’s circle, but to a lesser degree in the Hopkins/Jacobs camp (in these, however, scenes of planetary destruction were used almost as a form of punishment or shock to the experiencer). The Neo-Spiritualist groups, in which we could tentatively include Dr. Mack’s experiencers, we could perhaps call the “Eco-integrated” persons, that is, those who have received and live the messages ultimately meant for them—that the earth is in grave peril from destructive acquisitive human activities.

Reading the accounts of those hardcore in the Eco-integrated NHI community it’s difficult to see much difference between their encounters, except for the hi-tech and “digital” Matrix-like terminology often used, and the ancient accounts of the daemon or the spirit-guide of the 19th century.[33] Despite appearances, in function the “alien” technology ultimately tracks with traditional fairy and djinn lore: light-conveyances in the sky, kidnappings in light, beings made of “smokeless fire,” mind-control, subterranean “bases,” interspecies sex, hybridization. There seem to be only a few core messages given to abductees and contactees and they involve our evolution, our technology, an eschatology, and our transcendence—the same concerns propounded by transhumanists, but steeped in spiritual language.  

The interpretation of NHI experiences is now a group effort,[34] and the meaning of the encounters has often been made using “pre-fabricated” tropes, symbols, and narratives. The degree to which these could not simply be products of the postulated “extended human mind” is unknown; it is all dependent upon the experiencer herself labeling an NHI as the source. And these tropes are mostly products of 19th century Spiritualism, Spiritism, and Theosophy.[35]

Many of the channel sources say that they cannot “help us” technologically because it would interfere with human spiritual progress. Sometimes this is plainly stated by the NHI.[36] Had these disembodied intelligences our “ascension” in good faith, wouldn’t it make sense to convert en massemany millions of people to belief in the larger, hidden worlds (and put people upon the spiritual path) by using at least one channel to produce a beneficial gift, via either the oracular or technological route?  

Or did our human world already receive these unambiguous gifts from daemonic currents but were tragically misunderstood or misused? This is all not to say that the spiritual messages imparted aren’t profound; it’s just that they’ve always been profound. They’re like Jesus’s or Parmenides’s teachings: easy to pronounce, relatively easy to understand, and nearly impossible to live. Instruction on how to live them (when provided) is helpful, but difficult. Which seems to be the ultimate message: to Work on Oneself. Evolve. Put oneself in danger. Evoke peak experiences and different states of consciousness and actualize one’s being.

As Vallee has emphasized for decades, this disembodied NHI “physicalizes” itself to us in culturally-conditioned ways, but the manifestations also are products of our minds. 

There is far more ostensible evidence to believe these NHIs are passed-on human beings than “ascended masters” or extraterrestrials. The best proof that channeling the passed-on is possible is the “cross-correspondences” that were received from 1901-1931 by over a dozen mediums and automatists (those who practiced dissociative or “automatic” writing).[37] These were an elaborate series of references from classical literature known to several members of the Society of Psychical Research (SPR) who had died but vowed, while alive, that they would attempt communication with colleagues through mediums after they had passed on. 

Even after 90 years this material has only been partially interpreted, it is so complex. The receiving mediums: 1. Didn’t personally know these SPR members while alive; 2. Didn’t know that the SPR members had made the pact while alive; 3. Only one medium knew classical literature in scholarly terms enough to be familiar with some of the channeled material; 4. Each didn’t personally know the other psychics, or that these psychics were receiving related scripts from the same group of “discarnates.” It was only after a few years of gathering these scripts that Dr. Alice Johnson, secretary of the SPR, noticed that many were signed in ways familiar to the colleagues she and other SPR members had once known.[38] So began the laborious process of sorting and interpreting the coded and jigsaw-puzzle like references the “scholar ghosts” were laying out for them.   

There is no comparable compelling evidence for the non-human origin of contemporary controls or “guides,” but then as far as I know no one has comprehensively studied the purported ETs’ utterances and scripts.[39] For instance, have any two NHI channels unknown to one another used exact phrasing or expounded identical ideas couched in specific terminology, other than the typical Christian, universalist, or Theosophical cant? Have any produced designs for the same technological devices, or ideas for such devices independently? Apart from the idea of ringed/linked, counter-rotating magnets producing an “anti-gravity engine”—a concept that can intuitively be conjectured to work by anyone who witnesses an object levitating between two magnetics fields—the answer is no. An updated Spear machine run on some zero-point energy “New Motive Power” for our times has yet to appear (although Pasulka and others hint that there is evidence that this has occurred in the hidden world of the military-industrial-space complex). 

In the case of the best-known NHI entities such as Ashtar, Hilarion, Bashar, Lazaris, or Ra(ma), we have no such template. 

So where do these phenomena fit in our general cultural context, especially with regard to technology, science, and their effect on religion and spirituality?

The concept NHI implies a neutrality that collapses distinctions in any given explicit “messages” while attempting to preserve differences via the modalities through which they are transmitted. Despite the differing emotional-mental-spiritual “media”, the message is the same: there is something “alien” outside hitherto anthropocentric human awareness, and it enters our consensual reality via liminal states (between awareness/unconsciousness, being alive/dead, being embodied/disembodied, existing/non-existence). Thus the message is the medium/mediumistic, in both figurative and literal senses. The matured conceptual vocabularies of psychology, physics and information theory are used to outline the interaction process without really explaining anything beyond the bare fact of the experience that “unknown factor x caused y to occur in my consciousness.” The impersonality of the contact is used as evidence that x is a conscious entity far beyond normal comprehension. “Jesus Christ” possesses personality to a degree via scripture and human imagination; angels or aliens, generally, do not. 

Minimally, at best, what we can say is that at some point spirits as both subjects and objects of immediate external or interior experience entered human awareness and memory. As James McClenon’s studies have shown, such primordial encounters expanded human perception of the natural world to include “invisible spirits” and helped create the religious impulse.[40] At some point far in the past it became accepted that intangible realities exist as surely as the sensible, and they or their denizens regularly interact with humanity. At another point in the modern era—perhaps with Swedenborg but certainly by the late 19th century—extraterrestrials as objects of thought entered our common mental imaginary as entities, just like Santa Claus.[41] At a later point in time what are called ETs became subjects, possessing agency and a seemingly independent existence that mirrors that of spirits (and of course the fairy world, with all its parallels to “alien” activities). Along with their ever-changing appearances, the ETs’ “skills and capabilities” in the collective imaginary increased by means of the growing number of complex narratives witnesses and experiencers told. Each new authenticated encounter report, no matter how strange or absurd, increased and expanded the metachorial power of the extraterrestrial/ultraterrestrial being.  

To a degree, certain characterizations of the NHI strip away the status of this “new” Other even as subject and place it in a further state of liminality as a process of interaction between the human and non-human. The signature that this interaction has occurred, apparently, is the resulting ideas that are unfamiliar or “non-indigenous” to the perceiving subject’s mind, such as Rey Hernandez’s inaugural OBE in which he saw the contact modalities. The conditions under which they are received can take any form (but according to FREE’s characterization they are covered but not limited to NDEs, alien encounters and abductions, OBEs, etc.). They produce empirical verifiable changes in personality, skills, and even IQ. Despite experiences such as Rey Hernandez’s and what Taylor claims of the “room’s” effects on him in Pasulka’s book, the NHIs are utterly unpredictable in who they choose, when, and why. What, short of induced “standard” mediumistic practices, could possibly verify a measurable change in brain activity to signify contact is taking place? The absence of such testable traces unfortunately reduces their scientific status to nothing. 

Again, minimally, both spirits and ETs retain an imaginary component to them at all times in the collective consciousness of the population. They are doubly liminal in that they express liminal states between being and non-being and are culturally liminal in that those who believe in their reality are marginalized.

Perhaps with this new nomenclature of non-human intelligence we should take note that its arrow of signification points not just to disembodied or “higher dimensional” beings but also to the animal world all around us. The oceans contain habitats and creatures that, we are finding, challenge the very norms of biology.[42] Exobiologists (those who study what extraterrestrial life might be like) look to the most extreme environments on earth in the deepest seas, volcanos, beneath the polar ice, high in the atmosphere, and deep within the earth—and have been finding fledgling life in the most hostile conditions. Living beings are product of a natural intelligence and are sometimes as “alien” as anything conceivable amongst the stars above us; Neo-Darwinists say these creatures simply won in the struggle to reproduce, but they are at the same time each emanations from an interdependent web of vital power that itself is the organism from which we came—and with which we have lost a spontaneous, communicative connection.  

In most channeled NHI communications, the fact that our planet is a unitary being, and is currently either suffering or readying itself for a massive change, is one of the dominant messages received. This truth has been preached from the Beyond for at least 3,000 years.