Category: Culture

Sasquatches and Alien Life Forms

“Do you believe in them?” I asked.

Walkin had roamed the better part of the interior Northwest, on horses and on foot with mules, by car and freight train. He’d camped and hiked and built homesteads in the bush. “Naw,” he said, “there’s still no evidence. And there’s just not that much space for them to hang out in anymore.”

“What about UFOs?”

“Yeah, them, I think it’s more likely.”

“But still no evidence, right?”

“Right, but the universe out there is a pretty big place. Plus, what I think is probably more likely is, if there’s any other form of life you’re gonna find it going the other way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Inside. There’s just as much space going into the small scale, the microscopic. We haven’t really checked it out much. I bet if there’s any other form of life showing up it’s gonna be from that universe, the inner world.”

The Small Dance

It made me think of the exercise we used to do as a warmup for Contact Improvisation, a kind of dance involving a constant, rolling point of contact between two or more dancers. In order to become sensitized to and to fine tune our sense of balance, we stand upright, feet planted at shoulder width, eyes closed, and pay attention to the minute muscle movements required to remain upright against the pull of gravity. This exercise is called “the small dance.”

The Still, Small Voice

Another access to the world within comes through meditation. Many techniques are practiced to shut out the perceptual world in order to relax the body and mind, to follow or still the flow of thoughts, to improve the depth and regularity of the breathing. The Society of Friends (Quakers) practice a group meditation in the Meeting for Worship, in which speaking out of the silence is encouraged, when it is felt to be a compelling inspiration, or guidance from spirit. Being silent together, letting thoughts and feelings come and go with respect for the common silence, the urge to speak will arrive on its own time and with its own power of urgency. At such a time, the “still, small voice” within claims the right to speak out, so that all may share in the wisdom it brings from the world within.

Channeling Time

Greetings, Earthlings… especially ones whose star points align to such a degree that I am compelled to come again to meet you at this prominent waystation in your life journey.

First a word about this awkward medium of exchange. I have called upon a willing agent of the cosmos to convey our consciousness to you; and you may understand that as he has a merely arbitrary role in this communication, so it should be said that I am merely a spoke in the wheel, a representative for our higher cause.

Some of you may feel that we do not exist. We do. And for the present time, it is necessary for these human channels to voice our messages for us. It is not wise for us to reveal ourselves directly at this time. You must first become accustomed to our voices, our spirit, our intentions. Physical forms would be worse than irrelevant. Since the majority of your people still place so much emphasis on the physical and material plane, our appearance as such would be appreciated only for its difference and disharmony from your established expectations of what is right and good.

You may note that I’m speaking of the majority. Exceptions do matter, and we are encouraged at gradual progress. But the time is not yet right for full, direct contact. There must be this necessary foreplay first, before we are united. If this metaphor is too forward or explicit, think of it as courtship, or more diplomatically still, as a formal introduction through an intermediary or interpreter.

Now you may wonder if I in turn am speaking merely as an intermediary for a higher source; and if so, is there a path to a highest source, and if that is so, what is its nature and meaning? This is difficult for your understanding to grasp, but I will attempt through metaphor. The concept of hierarchy is useful but ultimately misleading. What seems vertical ends up being circular in the long run. There is a source, but the source is the whole. It’s a question of scale, orders of magnitude. Time is the key.

Where, then, do I come from?

From the crucible of the future, the universe which is being born backwards, a big bang in reverse, in which the old reality is swallowed, and the old and the new meet in the middle, at the wall of now. An alternating current results: backwards, forwards, vibrating in flux. And while it may seem to you that past potential is being fulfilled, really, it’s the future working its will, until all time is fulfilled.

Let me draw you a word-picture, of a singularity in future time, to match the one in past time. In the middle they meet, like the photon of your scientists’ experiment, which moves opposite the one it’s split from, and when one is altered the other alters too. The movement of time which I am describing takes the opposite direction, so that there is a convergence along a line of force, with both past and future moving toward, becoming joined in, the present What does this mean for us?

See, it’s like this, Earthling. I will use a simpler analogy, from your simplest mathematics. As simple as 1-2-3, okay? Right now we are at two. Yesterday, so to speak, we were at one. Tomorrow, when tomorrow comes, will make three. Now, let us back up a bit. When we were at one, did we know that two was coming? We may have guessed as much. I could have told you it was, and you might have chosen to believe me.

What is more important than this? All depends on it. I knew in advance: I have the oversight to see and know. I come from all time, and see past and future as equidistant, equally powerful, mirror images one of the other. As one moves toward two, so does three move toward two. As two manifests in the world, one and three meet and are fulfilled. Two, equidistant from one and three. Ah, but what about the moving present? What about the time elapsed—some might say wasted—since I began this transmission? Aren’t we now at two-point-something, closer to three than to one?

You stretch my point, Earthling. Get this. We are still at two. Twos can be infinitely long. The whole history of the universe can be considered one big two, with no beginning or end. Or with a beginning and end, or with a beginning and no end, or with an end and no beginning. That’s your choice, again.

Let’s get back to it. We are still at two. Next time, if there is a next time, will be three. Last time, if there was a last time, we called one. So, let’s return to this nowness, this twoness of our present meeting. However far we roam in this encounter, whether we wail for one word or three more minutes or years, we’ll call this continuity two. Where we choose to make divisions, take breaks, breathe, call discontinuity into play, we will shape the boundary of the two and bring to bear the equal influences of the one that preceded it and the three to come. For once the two can be said to end, the three can be said to be ready to begin. Once the two can be said to begin, there the influence of the one is apparent.

For now, a meeting place. We meet like future meeting past. Let’s take on that aspect, for a while, in order to explore further. You are probably more comfortable with the past than the future. I am equally comfortable with both, but to make things fairer in this exchange, I’ll leave you to be master of the past and I’ll take on the role of emissary of the future. Who said there was no such thing as cosmic theatre sports?

Does this mean I’ll read your fortune, predict the weather or the playoff results? Get real. That’s for the earthbound, not for me. I speak of… the evolution of worlds, of galaxies and clusters of galaxies. Do you realize how many trillions of worlds there are out there, that have never and will never hear or care of your concerns, your fortunes and foibles?

So, we continue. I tell you, there is a future, and that is enough. What more could you want, really? This is what I offer, and in that promise is contained everything large and small that you could desire. I am the genie in your bottle, and you have only to rub me and I will deliver.

So. What can I deliver? A view of the future. The future offers: all of itself, a time as rich as all the past. Is that all, and no more? If you’re looking for limitation, that’s it, I may as well admit. It does make things neater that way, more manageable. What would we do with an infinite future, an infinite past? For that matter, what would we do with an infinite present?

In the manner of your artful brain, you may consider all time as one and unbounded. As infinite: whether called past, future, present or neither is beside the point, arbitrary. I may consider all time as infinite, too, but I think that to go anywhere useful with our understanding, it makes better sense to think of it bounded by singularities at both ends.

Why? Because such a model makes better sense of our understanding of the reality we live by every day. We are born, we live, we die. Yes, our spirit continues. Yes, life goes on. Yes, we are merely a shifting shape in the web of life, the fabric of unending time. But when it comes down to the nitty-gritty, what’s more meaningful to us is the bounded conception of our life in time, in the world, in the body of flesh we are given as a personal identity, for a specified time on earth.

I say “we”: a Freudian slip. I mean you, of course, and not me, because I am a transhuman emissary of a more dispersed species of cosmic enterprise. But I do share some measure of fellow-feeling for you, of empathy with your limited condition. So be it. Don’t grieve for that; it makes life interesting, don’t you agree? Would you have it any other way, really? Otherwise we are all just formless flux forever. Nice, but rather limited in its own way.

To return to our meeting point: the floating two. We two, at rest in the moving now. Yes, you can throw in some of that aged philosophy here if you like, like cheese for the rats. I bring you simpler wisdom, and more profound: that, from the future, there comes an equal force to the force of the past, a time of equal scope and duration, which gives balance to what has gone before and purpose to it where otherwise there might be none.

Purpose? Well, that’s another concept, arbitrary and occasionally useful. Meaning, you do your part and I’ll do mine. You give the life you live the impulse of importance, and I’ll show you at the end of it that you were right, it was important and will remain so to the end of time. All of evolution led to your existence, your unique pattern of choices in the time you were allowed; and the entire future is, so to say, grateful for your efforts. Even if you were evil and mean, greedy and selfish, stupid and deceitful, your errors in the fullness of time are redeemed as the rightful action of your particular time and place.

Your choices, see, are undercut by a certain necessity you might call karma, a certain inevitability of condition and circumstance. A certain weight of past causation, met by the undeniable confirmation of future acceptance. On you go into the future, your reputation stamped there for better or worse, and the future leaves present judgements behind, backing away to make room for others.

So, you want to know: if the past grows progressively larger and longer, and the universe of time is bounded at both ends, doesn’t the future shrink to allow the growing past to fit? Curiously, no. Remember we spoke of the reality also of the concept of infinity? Here’s where it comes into play. Though there is a boundedness to time in its past/future duality, that boundedness is flexible, stretchable: so that as the past grows from its singularity, the future also grows from its singularity: both end points receding at equal speed from the dynamically pulsating present.

The big bang is now, my friend, and the end-points of time are like those photons split in the center and diverging outward forever. Bounce on the line of the past, and you change the future as well. Bounce on the ray of the future, and you rewrite history. Dance in the vibration of the present and send ripples both ways through all of time, to past and to future, sharing in the extension of time from now onwards both ways into infinity.

We are participating at this moment in the co-creation of the universe, radiating influence to all of time and space. I welcome you in this dance and, as I also depart to allow you to enjoy the music with other partners, leave you with my fond intention to meet and dance again. Say, at three?

Inside Music

After the conversation with Walkin at a break in the Friday night jam, we got back into playing music together. There were five of us playing an assortment of drums and guitars, piano and percussion instruments. It was the usual scenario: each coming with an individual agenda or talent level or energy left from the day spent in the outer world we inhabit. I’d driven three hundred kilometers delivering apple juice; Madrone had planted an acre and a half of fall rye; Walkin had been taking his young daughter around playing with friends; Josh had hung out doing whatever he did; Dick had slept till noon as usual and arrived at the jam late with his private wish to practice on the piano there.

My agenda musically was familiar: to loosen up the vibes with some raucous percussion, wild drumming, incoherent jazz or swinging grooves. Walkin likes to play an assortment of original and standard folk and rock tunes. Madrone will play simple improvisations on flute or accompaniments on drum. Josh will join me in the funk patrol, or turn to a halting beginner’s guitar. Dick surprisingly left his accordion at home, so besides some accomplished rhythm guitar, could be depended on for some energized piano percussion if we could steer him away from the Lennon and McCartney sheet music always at the ready.

And then, after a couple songs where it just wasn’t meshing, I saw it happen: the volume going down, the beat getting simpler, the level of sensitivity and listening going up. We were each willing, finally, to put our individual agendas aside for a group experience in the moment. Or I was giving up my outward energy to find a new musical dimension, in the world inside. Not having to play for audience or fame, we could play for each other, and for the music that we found between us as we went deeper.

Deeper down toward silence, where the pulse is hardly heard, but rather felt as a soft, cushioning wave we all can ride. Fine overtones and harmonies now are heard, the acoustic richness enabled to flower. When we found that inner pulse at the center, and began to beat there as a five-chambered heart, we had found the inner space of music.

Once having found it, and after breathing that darker air awhile, we could then begin to surface with a faster tempo, a more grounded connection to live rhythm spirit. Then together we could begin to pound a little more, to take some guided risks, to hold the edges together even as they expanded outward. Like a breathing aquatic organism, a swelling Bedouin tent, we billowed out to a starry night, so that the very stars, and whatever Sasquatches may have happened by in the mountain forest night, might have skipped a step in their passage. Our inner music, our small dance, our still small voices shone like the orange flames of a campfire under the night sky, signaling outward with tiny wavering sparks, that a form of life did walk here now, did dance and play and sing. Come now bacteria, viruses, radiation and thoughtforms, come Yeti and visitors from Planet X. We are ready for you, we who stand at the center.

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mage credits:

(feature) redlights: Nowick Gray
bigfoot: Bernell MacDonald, Pixabay
Sun Ra: BigOther.com
eye motif: Nowick Gray
(video) past and future: Nowick Gray
Friday Night Jam: Nowick Gray

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This article first appeared in The New Agora.