Article/Document:
Joe Firmage at 1999 UFO Symposium - Oral History Project
Joe Firmage
original source | fair use notice
Summary: I would like to share with you a person-to-person version of my story and also share with you a preview of some of the things I have been thinking and writing about which have become a part of the book that I have begun to publish on line.
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT -
A compilation of related and unrelated stories about alien & UFO encounters.
Joe Firmage
1999 Aztec UFO Symposium
I would like to share with you a person-to-person version of my story and also share with you a preview of some of the things I have been thinking and writing about which have become a part of the book that I have begun to publish on line. As many of you know I have spent half of my life studying computer science. It gave rise to my career over the past twelve years or so which has been one of building companies in Silicon Valley and more recently becoming more public and being part of the Internet revolution as it is unfolding around us.
It wasn’t actually computer science, which financed my present freedom, which originally inspired me. It was, instead, astronomy. I grew up so well that by the late single digits of my life, eight or nine, I began to be fascinated with the heavens at that time. I remember saving up my money to help my father purchase me my first telescope with which I gazed into the nighttime sky and imagined what might be. I quickly figured out how to attach a camera onto the back of the telescope and started snapping pictures of the moon and the planets. I ultimately graduated to deep space photography where my eye would be glued to an eyepiece for two hours, freezing myself at night to expose this faint galaxy, M51, which I then developed in my darkroom. I was the yearbook photographer of my high school and I really took advantage of that, both to fulfill my roll and my interests.
It was probably in 1981 or ’82 that a life changing experience first occurred to me. That was witnessing the "Cosmos" series by Carl Sagan. I think it stands today head and shoulders above anything else created in the last 30 years as a testament to the majesty of our world. For me, growing up in a Christian tradition of Mormonism in Salt Lake City, Utah, a somewhat misunderstood but fairly conventional sect of Christianity, but with its own unusual dogmatic slant. It had grown increasingly incompatible with my worldview. When I saw "Cosmos" I said here was a far more beautiful picture of our place in space. Therefore, there must be nothing to this whole spirituality, religion thing. Why don’t I spend the rest of my life in science? This is what I started to do.
I was pretty impatient with my future. It was always an attribute of mine to be looking forward to what I was going to do next. I skipped a couple years of high school and went into the University of Utah on a Physics scholarship. For the next two years I went through the motions of learning how we make rockets fly, how billiard balls move, etc. In the second year we began to explore some broader concepts about the fabric of reality or what physicists call quantum mechanics. In this domain interesting things are afoot. Remember, this is the fabric of everything; this is you in every sense. Any revolution in our revolution of it is a revolution in you.
For me, in studying quantum ideas back in the late ‘80’s, one is led to people who think outside of the box. Some of those thinkers were also thinking about UFO’s. Why is there a connection between physics and UFO’s? It has always fascinated, if not annoyed physicists, because these UFO’s appear not only to violate aerodynamics but violate physics as well. They can’t exist because we don’t have the equation that explains how they move. A 90-degree right turn doesn’t work with human beings or we would be turned to salsa in an ordinary aircraft.
I, then, like most scientists then and now, concluded the whole thing must be just misinterpreted natural phenomena, people seeing interesting things and maybe a few hallucination along the way. I came to the realization that the life of a physicist didn’t seem to be a really interesting life in the modern economy. Unless you want to make nuclear weapons, you really can’t do many interesting things, and I really didn’t want to go do that.
I decided to switch paths, switch hobbies if you will, to match my career, and I pursued computer science and went on to build companies. In 1997 I first touched the Internet. I first touched it to research those old subjects that I loved long ago, before there was an Internet in the public’s hands. What did I find? I found a lot of garbage and a few wonderful gems, connections, people, theories, books, none of which would I have been exposed to were it not for this UFO thing. This is a powerful tool – I call it the lines of humanity. Through it we can learn far more about ourselves than we ever thought possible.
I came upon a press release from one scientist who was at Lockheed Martin named Brunard Heich who had theorized that the quantum vacuum was responsible for inertia, or the force that would turn you into salsa in an aircraft turning 90-degrees. Well, if the quantum vacuum was responsible for inertia, and we were to figure out how to engineer the quantum vacuum, wouldn’t that represent a breakthrough. The light bulbs flashed in my mind and I said, here is a rigorous, scientific hypothesis that makes all the sense in the world. It could, one day in the not too distant future, explain how we could propel ourselves to the stars using a completely new form of propulsion that would make a rocket ship that put man on the moon look like a Model T.
It forced me to reassess everything about my life, everything. This was world shattering as an experience for anyone who truly undergoes it. You know that physics has no answers to the questions that you are seeing the image of an answer to. Whether the hypothesis is accurate in current form or not, I’m pretty certain we’re on the right track. That track leads us in the direction of up and out. That’s important. And it was important enough for me to redirect my life.
What I want to share with you is the direction I’m taking. I published a living book on the Internet. I call it a living book because that’s what things on the Internet are: they’re alive. This should give us pause to again reassess what we pay attention to when we put it on the Internet; i.e. why I called my book what I did was because what we put into this information system hopefully becomes true for a large number of people. This is a responsibility we must treat carefully. This is a living book. Up to this point it represents the collective works of about 15 co-authors who shall remain anonymous. It is called "The Truth" at www.thewordistruth.org. It is a non-profit book you can download.
These co-authors represent brilliant thinkers across physics, theology, ecology, history and governmental sites. It connects into a coherent pattern some of the best evidence that exists. It is incomplete, and intentionally so, particularly in areas that are not yet clear. For example, what is the abduction phenomenon? I do not say anything about it in the book, not because I don’t have views or ideas or conceptions but because I am by no means certain that they are accurate. So this book is going to grow as I learn what everybody teaches me through the books they write and I’ll do the same back. We will use this as a tool to really expand our knowledge.
What I’ve written to this point and integrated is largely a historical position. What I am going to share with you is the cusp at which we find ourselves today and a view based upon everything we see looking backward. The human animal is quite unique in its ability to see into time or what we call time. We can see into the patterns that the quantum universe has created. We can see further than any other animal on earth and that is what, perhaps, most uniquely distinguishes us. I am going to share with you my predictions of the future based upon what I know. I will preface this by saying I could be wrong on any one or a number of these ideas, but I think they are pretty well grounded. They are very compatible with the work of leading thinkers.
This is a short history of Homo sapiens and what is life. First, we have evolved but something is missing from random selection. This simple statement pretty well captures the state of evolutionary biology. The co-discoverer of DNA has profound questions on exactly how it got started in the first place. That is a very important statement. I believe in evolution but I believe in something guiding evolution, and we will get to that later. Second, spirituality has governed our behavior. [Next part of talk missing.]
Science is amoral. It does not have an expressed ethical character. I suggest it have one – truth. To put it in one sentence, the community primate has become an individual scorer in the cosmos. Think of that. We have just recently come down from the trees. That’s really true. That’s not in any manner an exaggeration. Let’s look at the compression of change in the twentieth century alone.
1. We have engineered electromagnetism – light. For whatever the fabric of the quantum vacuum may be, it is expressed as light, as energy. We have begun to engineer this. 2. We have engineered communication. We have taken this power of electricity and have engineered the ability to talk to each other. I have a cell phone and I can call Moscow right now. I can call the middle east or across the street with equal ease. 3. We’ve engineered transportation, from the airplane through various inventions of the automobile, and all forms of transportation now available for hire. 4. We’ve engineered economics. We have built this massive, incredibly sophisticated and amazingly fine tuned engine of productivity called economics that’s organized a society. We have engineered civilization as we know it through these capabilities.
We’ve also just stepped back from the brink of self-destruction. Science discovered the power of the atom and we came close to snuffing out this ancient creation called Homo sapiens. It is a question that we still must ask ourselves because of factors I will share later with you in this presentation. These foundations have empowered us to learn through experience. I, therefore, assert that they have a point; there was a purpose to this progression. This is not simply the universe at random. This has direction; this has a sweep. Let’s look at what that sweep may reveal about our future.
Today, we stand at a cusp of change. We’ve realized, literally in the last year, that Big Bang cosmology is incomplete. It is missing something fundamental. Why is this important? I am going to share with you my thoughts on cosmology and the universe. It’s fundamentally important. We have gained a glimpse of the creation process and it all touches on the subject called energy. Why is that important?
So many mystical traditions through human history have also had this basic idea. It bears serious study. We’ve discerned the human genome and designed forms of life in the past 15 years alone. This year alone we’re coming to the initial conclusions of the human genome copy, understanding how you connect with that double helix. How often does that happen in the history books of the galaxy? How rare is this? In any event it’s special.
We’ve discovered the power of consciousness. There are scientists out there who ignore psychic powers that have now been demonstrated definitively, with absolutely convincing results, replicated over decades, at some of the best institutions on the face of the earth. Consciousness has a real power and this is worldview changing for science.
We have seen evidence of the ability to engineer space/time for the purposes of energy and propulsion. The experiments have just begun, at least in open science, in the public. We do have experiments now that show how we might be able to tap this quantum vacuum for benign energy and advanced propulsion, two things dear to the heart of anybody who loves science fiction.
We have invented this mind of humanity, as I call the Internet, as a way to store and access human knowledge. Think about it. With the Internet, for the first time in known human history we can make a record of ourselves that need not degrade over time. That’s pretty important. We stand genuinely at an amazing cusp in our knowledge. So history has shaped our future, and it every day looks increasingly like science fiction is soon to be fact. Name something in the 1960’s fiction that really hasn’t begun to materialize.
Today, something that is certainly the most controversial of any of the things I’ve been talking about (and, of course, you are here because you share some profound interest in this domain) is that UFO’s do appear to be real and very mysterious objects. We are seeing in our skies things that are not of our construction. The simple best evidence for the UFO phenomenon is the overwhelming ubiquity of similarly reported sightings. People get fixated on one film or one picture, but that’s not the interesting question. The skeptic must essentially say, "All the evidence is untrue. Every one of these is a hoax. Every one of the sightings is misinterpreted. It’s natural phenomena." That’s a stunningly huge challenge for the skeptic. It wasn’t so 20 years ago.
Old physics says they are impossible. New physics disagrees. These visitors do appear relative to this degree and somewhat etheric. They have qualities of experience, when people interact with them, which go beyond just material. So clearly something related to consciousness is in play. They are also discrete, which is, by the way, a subject that the UFO research community ignores. They choose not to land in the Super Bowl. They choose not to land in Times Square. Why? Maybe because they don’t want to. Or maybe because they don’t believe we are ready yet.
They appear to have multiple agendas, but I ask this question. Is there an integrating sovereignty? If we sent a group of research vessels out into the ocean to survey marine life with all sorts of different techniques and strategies, the sea life might not be able to interpret the pattern but there may be one. I think the analogy is reasonably clear. These beings appear to be empowered with some fundamental abilities we appear to lack.
1. They do have technologies of space/time propulsion. They can take space/time and bend it and cause things to move in a manner that goes beyond the sort of Einsteinium limits that we have placed around interstellar travel. 2. They have the facility to draw energy from space/time for the propulsion and other uses. Clearly, they are not burning oil. 3. They do have the capacity to manipulate space/time through consciousness alone. Everybody gets fixated on the warp drive. But what if the warp drive looks a whole lot more like the mind than an engine? This is a real possibility that we should not ignore.
So we stand at this cusp. What is going to happen over the next decade? I say decade though maybe it will be three. But I think this change will happen, as most have in the past, sooner than we project. We caught a glimpse of it. It does appear to be startlingly real. It is just a question of when you have critical mass of analysis, insight and evidence. They are building in all three domains pretty quickly.
Let me take you on a circle of eight subjects that represent the transformations that I think are in store for us. The first couple of these are going to repeat some of the concepts that Edgar Mitchell reviewed so I will go through them more quickly than the latter concepts which talk a bit more about the future of civilization as we may know it.
We start with cosmology, which is the place to start. Why? Cosmology drives all of science for it is science’s version of genesis. Science doesn’t know itself until it knows where it began. Cosmology is the core. It has entered a period of disarray because of the accelerating universe evidence. The Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered some startling new facts that have convinced cosmologists that within the Big Bang Theory, now the universe is known to be accelerating in its expansion. This most likely means that the future is eternal in every way. I will paraphrase the staff editor of Scientific American, which dedicated their January ’99 cover story to this titled, "Revolution in Cosmology." He said, "It may be that the true fate of the universe is for increasing diversity that is entirely impossible to predict." That is a pretty beautiful picture.
There are new alternatives being discussed including the idea that the universe is, in fact, infinite. Einstein said that infinity is repugnant to the mind. Well, maybe it was but that was an accurate comment upon the group of minds as opposed to the cosmos. This is just one of many possibilities. In this possibility, red shift might be accountable as the absorption of light on its way from distant galaxies, which are not, indeed, flying away from us. But rather, red shift is the absorption of amplitude, if you will, by the Zero Point Energy of the.... This is one alternative of many that are now being studied.
Whether the galaxies are flying away from us or not, in both cases, whether it is an infinite universe or not, the science of cosmology now demands that some new form of energy prevent galaxies from gravitational destruction. Something is either pushing them apart or keeping them from collapsing together. That’s very important. A new form of energy is at work in the cosmos. What is it? It is the quantum vacuum of space/time. Some people call it the Zero Point Energy, or the energy that exists at zero temperature, at absolute zero, which stills the vibration of all matter particles at that level.
This is utterly vast and untapped. A cupful of empty space contains enough latent energy to boil the oceans of the planet earth. Yet it is incoherent and therefore, untapped. It would be like you slipping into a bath of water at 98.6 degrees. You are in the water but you don’t feel it. We are like the fish that have just discovered water. This is a place where strange non-local observations are in effect so the non-locality concept is very, very important. All of us and everything is connected at the quantum level to each other in an eternity we call present.
Matter is simply how you see your wave. You are a quantum pattern of force in dynamic equilibrium. In quantum physics we are learning that all things are driven by the shadow of consciousness or the unconscious mind that is ‘the cosmos’. That is what you are. You are a wave in this quantum mind that sees itself as matter. You are a quantum pattern in the dynamic equilibrium you call ‘the present’.
We get to the construct of time. We sort of imagine time to be a line that we are moving along, past, present, future. What quantum mechanics is telling us is that all that exists is the present. History is no more real than the future except as its patterns are carried forward in the present. That’s what you are. You are ‘the present’. Here’s where we get into things like starships and UFOs. This very same quantum vacuum appears to cause both gravity and inertia.
I will give you a visual picture of what gravity looks like given this new model. Basically it looks like this. You have a field of intense energy that’s totally random. Imagine the cosmos is full of random energy that we just can’t see, and you have a particle in it – a quark or an electron or something in an atom. Those of us who study electronics know that particles vibrate in electro-magnetic fields. This vibration bends the energy of space. That bending is what we call "gravity."
Essentially, objects are pushed together because they had a shadow in this quantum vacuum. That’s what causes things to come together. This is a very different view of gravity, but guess what? If this is a field of electro-magnetic energy then we know how to engineer things. We make devices all day long all over the world that engineer electro-magnetism. We may, one day, construct a warp drive in a similar manner.
What are the implications for this revolution in chemistry, the next order above physics? In chemistry we see the makings of a powerfully lifelike pattern at work. Those who have had the opportunity to study geology or ecology or astrophysics, the way solar systems work, have come to appreciate how narrow the band is in which the earth supports life like you and me. There is lifelike precision in the band that the earth exists ecologically not just biologically, the way the oceans and the atmosphere work together, the way the poles and the temperature of the land and the air work as a system to govern the metabolism of this being we call earth.
In the 1970’s, James Lovelock wrote a very important book called, "Gaia", in which he literally took the posture, that I happen to agree with, that we should consider earth as a living being and we, as cells of that living being. We are cells of that living being as are every other life form on this world. We come to appreciate that every galaxy, star, world, ocean, rock, plant, animal and machine is a quantum pattern of forces in balance within the mind science calls "cosmos." That’s a beautiful way of looking at things as part of a living being we call cosmos. You might say that the cosmos imagined you to be.
What does this mean for biology? Biologists have learned that many of the quantum events which define consciousness are at work in every cell of your body, not just your brain, that there are quantum things going on in the cells of your skin, your bones, your blood, everything. It is increasingly apparent that DNA constructs larger cellular structures that act like antennae for quantum information. This is very important. If your mind can, at a distance, impact the quantum vacuum and this vacuum is interacting with the cells in you body like an antennae, what does that say to the power of things like meditation and spiritual subjects like prayer or simply the concentration of intent? It says very powerful things about health and well being in every cell of your body.
What does this mean for consciousness of self? It’s clearly the case at this point that we can say consciousness is a quantum phenomenon. That’s an important statement. It allows us to experience and learn. It may be the ladder for which the disciplines of science are the rungs. So there is a way to say physics isn’t really physics. Physics is a lower order of consciousness. It is a very different way to look at life, isn’t it? If the things that go on inside your mind were the ultimate point of the cosmos, rather than simply an accident, does not that, then, reinterpret every rung of this ladder of science that you stand upon? I think so.
Consciousness can manipulate what we call matter at a distance. What does this mean? It means that there are almost certainly without a doubt beings in this cosmos a billion years more evolved than you or I who have got this down to a science, who can think a thought and cause it to happen in material reality. They could think an orange and have it in their hand. This sounds like utter science fiction but I’m telling you it may well be utter science fact. It may well be in our future. I ask the question again, to what level will this have evolved over a billion years?
I ask one more question. Might the minute and compounded effects of consciousness over time be responsible for the "spontaneous" order that appears in every discipline of science? Could it be that chemistry, in its reaction to this unconscious quantum vacuum, figured out the double helix, almost like learning? That wasn’t a brand new event at all. It was how the universe found its way to evolve as an unconscious, increasingly conscious being. These are very fundamental concepts and I want to reinforce them. This is the crux and it is foreign to many people who study UFOs.
Let’s stop talking about science and start talking about history and what it means for our future in the immediate term.
A revolution is in the wings where we see the saga of our own selves from primate to cosmic explorer. We’re going to see ourselves in a "Star Wars" like saga one day before too long. That’s pretty compelling. Interstellar travel is now scientifically plausible. There’s no question about this. It is just ignorant minds refuse to look at new evidence in a very theocratic dogma. Every culture in history has its tales of human interaction with higher intelligences. No doubt a lot of this is spiritual or psychic phenomena – for example, seeing a collective unconscious represent itself as a being. But some of it may well not be.
The sweep of true human anthropology is likely to rewrite history books with respect to some factors that have given rise to humanity like religion, myths, miracles and other types of civilization altering occurrences in the past. To me, it is now clear that history has not simply been a random process of organization but rather an intended process of self organization, perhaps even with a occasional prompting from above towards a certain point of transition, which I have called in my writings, "a graduation" or "a birth." It’s the advancement of the human species to the next level. We are all trying to peek into the future and see what that next level might actually look like.
Civilization – here’s a really important one. I think the field of UFOlogy is naïve generally speaking. It is understanding with comprehension the implications of this, of the systems that run our lives, the systems that clothe you, that feed you, that propel you and allow you to form families. Civilization is a complex machine. We are about to discover powers a fundamental as fire. How did fire change the primate? Well, you can look at a "fire" shoot through a projector. But this is nothing like the kind of fire we are about to discover.
These new powers will revolutionize the sciences of energy, propulsion, computing and biology. In energy, imagine a world where we can take a desert continent and turn it into a garden. The only reason we can’t do that today is because we have to burn oil to convert the seawater to fresh water and it’s too expensive, not efficient and it pollutes. But, what if tomorrow we had a device that allowed us to do just that, take the vacuum energy and, in a benign way, convert it into useful energy.
In propulsion, what does this mean? There are now scientific papers in print that show us the space/time geometry of the warp drive. If we can figure out how to build a machine or tune consciousness to be able to warp space/time, we know what the pattern looks like. Miguel Alqubierre wrote a very important paper that is compatible with general relativity, that’s compatible with quantum mechanics that shows us what shape looks like.
One of the cover stories on "Discover" magazine, January 1999, was about quantum computers that have the ability to solve problems faster that serial computers do. Might we be tapping the power to create conscious computers? Might the vision that is painted in "Star Wars" of a conscious droid, not be science fiction? That is what quantum computing is about and is knocking on our door. We build our first quantum computers in California this year (1999).
Perhaps most importantly, biology, the human genome, the ability to engineer life. Now I ask you questions. Are these not god like powers? Are these not the powers that we would have ascribed to gods in the past, were we confronted with them and had not known what they were? These will reconstruct civilization from top to bottom. It’s not possible to contain the ripple effect here. The existing economic and political power structures will be completely redefined.
With free energy, guess what? You eliminate subsistence living as the fundamental arbiter of economics. Money is simply a metric system for energy. It allows us to measure energy. The more you have, the more energy you can buy from others; the less money you have, the more of your energy you have to give to others. As we reinvent how to draw energy in a benign way, guess what happens? Economics change around. This has been a if not the (I don’t know which yet as this is a subject we are studying) major contributor to the basis for concealed information.
Remember, we exist as a civilization; we exist as a community of beings. We can’t just flip a switch and transition to the next era. We need to figure it out. It’s not surprising to me that we’ve seen concealment of UFOs. Whether you believe that’s ethically good or not is another question.
But, put yourself 50 years back in time, in Pleasantville, USA. This is a black and white world with very little ethical shade of gray really integrated into the common person’s mind. Almost no science fiction to speak. Most people didn’t know the difference between a moon and a planet. This is a world in which we have just won a world war, built a military industrial complex to fight another hemisphere. There is an astonishing event of, potentially, the crash of an extraterrestrial vehicle. Now whether that event happened or not, or exactly what it’s fine tuned parameters were, is a less important question that what we certainly see as a real UFO phenomenon. Either way the government would have been able to interpret the implications over time. The implications go to the core of civilization. So it is not surprising we spend 50 years enculturing a people to be ready for a major transition. I think that’s a reasonable hypothesis to explain what we see today.
Civilization – that’s the good side. We’ve build up a wonderful, successful exploration of a species in our civilization and articulated it in wondrous ways. We stand at the brink of amazing discoveries. Perhaps, not surprisingly, we face these fundamental problems. We still stand on the brink of self-destruction. How? An ancient tree of life is being hacked away by the excesses of our society today. Thousands of species are going extinct every year, and we are a species that depends upon those for our survival in every way. That is not going to change.
"Jurassic Park" is great fiction; it is not reality. Once a species goes extinct, it cannot be reconstructed in an ecological supportive way. Whether you can clone a wooly mammoth, as the fascinating article in this month’s (Mar. ’99) "Discover" suggests, is not relevant. We can’t build an ecology that was like the ecology that existed to support the wooly mammoth. So when we kill off species, they are gone and we do not know for our future.
Cities outside of this country are deteriorating rapidly. We have a problem of poor planning that is far more prevalent outside of this country than inside, though it also exists here. This problem is rapidly spinning out of control. We see it emerging as economic collapse and ethnic violence around the world.
33% of the world is in depression today. We have a tremendous force of commoditization that consumes the societies of all the economies of the world. It is forcing many countries into depression. People who were once using cell phones are having riots over food. Those are serious problems. Pulling the world out of depression through stimulating consumer growth will magnify our ecological problems.
The front page of "Time" magazine a few weeks back said, "Committee to Save the World." Alan Greenspan, James Ruben – these are brilliant men and I don’t want to diminish their important contribution to stabilizing world economy, but this is not the committee to save the world. Economics of consumer society is not the next step for humanity.
Nationalism and bigotry will gain access to every single technology we have or will pioneer. Our greatest nuclear secrets are leaked out to China. From where they then leak we do not know. When we discover these new fires, are they also, similarly, going to ripple into the hands of a world still punctuated all over the place with bigotry and nationalism. That’s a frightening future. If you were to empower an individual human being to destroy a planet, what kind of ethical framework would that being have to possess?
The last part of the presentation is to ask the question, what is the graduation test for a species? When does the cosmos say, "You deserve to be granted access to this new fire, this power of propulsion and consciousness and energy, because you’ve crossed these thresholds." What are those thresholds? I will submit to you that one of them is what I’m going to talk about next.
It is spirituality. By this I do not mean religion. I mean spirituality, the concept of integrating, again, the observer and the observed into one thing. Every one of us is an "I" and we are all part of the same, big "I". "I AM." The traditions of faith to a higher power have defined human experience throughout history. The Buddhist traditions teach of the unity of all things. The Hindu traditions teach of a progression of order through time. Judaism focused monotheism towards the idea of a God that was concerned with our lives, a cosmos that was concerned about us. Christianity personified God through a man. I encourage you all to pick up this weeks copy of "Newsweek" (about Mar. 25, 1999).
There is a fascinating and extremely cogent argument on how Christianity has shaped the modern western world in fundamental ways that are very important (though also carrying through dogma have caused great wars). But the positives overwhelmingly outweigh the negatives in the framing of western civilization.
All of these traditions have truths that we should be paying attention to. But they also contain fictions. Every traditional faith has been institutionalized, so every one of them carries their own particular vision of the same thing we call the cosmos. Everyone in this room can agree that the cosmos is real, I think. So, it is patently obvious that any tradition is simply describing that same thing from a different point of view. They are bound to all have an element of truth in them.
What we need today is not a new religion but a recognition of the unity of all major faiths into the ethical principles that are now obvious in science. We now know from science that if we lie we will stop evolving. It’s very simple. Lying is not natural. Therefore, it is unethical to lie. These are the teachings science can give spirituality and frame it to its core.
I’m going to talk a bit more about this, and I will reference this through Carl Sagan. Can we rule out the concept of extraterrestrials? I don’t think we can rule out this possibility. I am not saying that Jesus was an E.T. But I am saying that it’s possible that there has been influence from far more advanced beings that we are, people who have already crossed the graduation tests for survival as a cosmic civilization.
What are those tests? I assert to you that it has probably as much to do with a spiritual worldview as a scientific worldview because, again, they are one in the same.
I’ve written an online book. People ask me, "What’s your point in the book?" My point is, sort of deceptively, the Table of Contents. Everything in the Table of Contents is just supporting evidence to my book because this is the most important story. I am going to change both the Table of Contents and the book itself as I learn from everything I read and study. I have appreciated all the great contributions from people who continue to spew into my mailbox at a rate that I cannot believe.
I will ask a few questions. What if science were to stumble on to its grand unified theory, a single model that encompasses the electro-magnetic forces, nuclear forces, and quantum connectedness into one model? What if we could unify all those forces into one? Virtually all scientists believe we will one day unify these forces into one thing, one unified force. Even though we don’t know that theory yet in precise form, we now can say that both machines and biology do control the motions of this force.
As Joseph Campbell wrote, "Every civilization needs its myth." Very perceptively so. We are about to see a wonderful myth from George Lucas about the force that responds to consciousness, that is controlled by consciousness, that is used for all sorts of wondrous things including the types of things we study. This is where science is happening. It’s that level of saga that I’m telling you may one day turn out to be not only real for us in the future but real for all of our past. We just didn’t know about it. We weren’t ready for it. We were still learning and growing up.
A couple quotes. "Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced of a spirit vastly superior to our own." Albert Einstein. Another one that is particularly revealing in my view is this. In answer to the question, "What is the cosmos?" Carl Sagan said, "It is all that is." In Biblical scripture, God says, "I am that I am." These are indistinguishable except one has duality and the other one doesn’t. So if duality is fiction, we should pay attention to the second of these, and recognize that this is real.
So, from my perspective, the great transition that awaits us is when we have the courage as a society to confront these issues, study them fairly without leaping to conclusions and using science as our method of distinguishing truth from fiction. That’s what I’m trying to do.
I have taken a presumptive title for my book ("The Truth") because I want people to know that whatever I find I will print. If it defeats something I’ve written previously, so be it. I am far more concerned about getting it right than defending a posture.
I don’t know whether Roswell happened. I’ve met with a couple generals and scientists who have told me, point blank, that they have seen, up close and personal, some of the stuff. So, therefore, I find it hard to understand how we could be in the UFO situation without a Roswell. But I suppose it is possible. Maybe if we got a gift of a craft or something like. But, to me, for UFO phenomenon, not only do we have good evidence for it but also it is now making sense.
I have had a comment from a gentleman about a rather unusual experience, which I had back in the fall of 1997, where I saw some kind of image of a being for the first time in my life, which was kind of a jarring experience. Did that influence my worldview or my actions? It probably influenced my actions and my worldview. I just don’t know how. I can say it was a wake up call for me to say, there is a larger reality out there that maybe I should look at.
Eastern philosophies say, if you want to tap the zero point consciously, be silent. Drop your temperature, in a philosophical sense; be at peace. The peace of the mind allows you to think beyond your body. Many mystics describe the process as the most beautiful experience they ever go through, when the mind suddenly frees itself from adherence to the brain and is allowed to peek out across the cosmos. That’s possible.
You might be interested in a book called, "The God Hypothesis." It is a good book, which should be read by all those interested in these subjects. Secondly, I would reread as an adult with this knowledge, whatever your favorite scriptural traditions may be. For me, it would be to reread Christianity and doing some noun substitutions, like: substitute "space/time" for "heaven", a modern word for what older generations called the same thing. A really interesting image begins to emerge that is startlingly probable with the field that brought us the time.
These are the kind of subjects that make a government really queasy. How can you talk about spirituality when church and state don’t mix?
I have been asked why do I feed environmental catastrophe is in our children’s’ future? I would say it is within our future, within the next three decades. Certainly we are going to define our children’s lives if we don’t do something about it. Read, "The Future in Plain Sight" by Eugene Linden (?). This is a powerful book and will answer this question far better than anything I can say.
Every person has the power to think differently because of that you have heard (or read) today. I really believe there is a collective force of consciousness. George Lucas has done a brilliant interpretation of what I think is a pretty fair saga of what another world’s history books might look like. We might one day just find a cosmic civilization out there that is startlingly similar to what he has envisaged.
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Unsorted Documents 5
