THE CAPSULE OF INTENTIONALITY

Chapter V

White Crows Rising—-

The Singularity Archetype and the Event Horizon of Human Evolution

© 1996, 2009 by Jonathan Zap

Edited by Austin Iredale

Through a Glass Darkly

When we talk about the future we attempt to look, through a glass darkly, at a landscape that is unknown and unformed. Prophecy is a notoriously tricky and unreliable enterprise. Many people who have sought to look through that dark glass have seen images that were distorted reflections of themselves—of their hopes, fears and expectations. If there is a universal theme in the visions of prophets it is the prediction that extremely dramatic events will occur within their own lifetimes. The authors of the book of Revelations, for example, described events that they believed were going to happen in their time, the First Century AD, a fact rarely mentioned by born-again doomsayers. It is quite possible for someone to have a genuine revelation and then be completely mistaken about the time frame, or fall into the trap of being literal and concrete about the typically metaphorical vision they have seen.

Certain predictions about the future require little vision beyond the ordinary sort. A concise summary of what ordinary vision should tell us about the future is: “We’re in trouble, and we’re due for radical changes.” The fact that we’re in trouble seems almost too obvious to mention. Overpopulation rises exponentially while ecosystems spiral downward. More and more children are trying to suck greedily at the breasts of a mother who has cancer and grows weaker daily. And to this likely terminal situation you can add any of your own favorite force vectors of potential disaster: plague, nuclear or biological terrorism, global economic collapse, pandemics, toxification of the environment, climate change, natural or unnatural disasters, insane mass movements and despotic governments.

The metabolism of the species, and therefore the metabolism of events on this planet, has heated up to feverish intensity. An evolutionary process is rapidly approaching critical mass. Just consider how much change has occurred since 1908. A safe prediction is that we are not heading into a quiescent plateau.

So what is on the horizon if not a plateau? How can we contemplate the future development of our own species in a planetary situation that boils over with an infinite array of variables? And how can we possibly transcend the inherent subjectivity of being fully vested members of the species we’re trying to predict?

Analogical Analysis

When the human mind is confronted with the task of analyzing an almost impossibly complex phenomenon, like the fate of the species, one way it can assist itself is by creating an analog, an analogy to some simpler phenomenon that is of a size more workable for our type of intelligence. This type of analogical analysis can often work surprisingly well because there seems to be an aspect of the universe that is very much like a hologram or a fractal—a small part, the microcosm, seems to recapitulate the essential pattern of the larger part, the macrocosm. To apply analogical analysis to the human species let’s consider the analog of a single human individual.

A single human individual is still a phenomenon at the very boundary of human comprehension. Since we are social primates, our brains have adapted and struggled heroically to understand individuals of our own species more than any other phenomenon. We are marvelously equipped to understand each other and yet each individual personifies all the deepest mysteries that defy understanding. Also, the variables affecting the future of an individual are a magnitude of infinity perhaps greater than those affecting the future of the species because the future of the species is itself an included variable in the life of an individual. So although an individual of our species is certainly a sufficiently complex microcosm, and a phenomenon that obviously parallels the larger phenomenon of the species, he is, unfortunately, an almost equally intimidating phenomenon to attempt to analyze or predict. But pursuing this analogy as a thought experiment may lead us along a convoluted path to some place interesting.
John, a Thought Experiment in Prophecy

To make our thought experiment more concrete let’s give our human individual a specific identity.

I propose that our human sample be named John Doe, and that he be a seventeen-year-old male living right now in a suburb of Los Angeles, California. Of course you may be wondering why I didn’t pick Olga Pietrowski, age fifty-six, mother of three grown children, and a clerical worker at the People’s Agricultural College in Northern Ukraine, or Lee Chung, age thirty two, an unmarried Taiwanese poultry butcher suffering from a rare kidney ailment, or any of a number of other possible human samples.

I picked an adolescent, first of all, because I feel that adolescence is the time of life in Western culture that most closely resembles the present developmental stage of the species. It is a time of intense energy and change when identity is unsure, life is unstable, and it feels like almost anything might happen. I picked a male adolescent because our species is in an immature masculine phase of acting out, often destructively, testing the limits, enamored of speed, aggression and power. Like perpetual adolescents we are obsessed with looks and sex. And like John’s life in a suburb of Los Angeles, we are aware of so many critical problems all around us, while below there are tremors in the San Andreas fault.

To continue our thought experiment let’s fill in some of the gaps in John’s case history. John’s parents are wealthy, but his father, a high-powered advertising executive, a workaholic John rarely sees, is also a big spender and heavily in debt. John’s mother has malignant breast cancer and is currently undergoing aggressive chemotherapy and radiation treatment, which has left her in a state of exhaustion and despair. And although John goes about his life at a frenetic pace, driving along at high speeds in his red V-8 Firebird, using his charismatic looks and charm to pick up a series of girls for sexual encounters that he later boasts about to his friends, he is not without feeling and is deeply disturbed by his mother’s condition. But what can he do? His mother is under the care of the most highly paid experts and they say her condition is “under control.” As much as possible, John tries not to think of his withering mother hooked up to all those machines and tubes at the hospital.

His feelings tend to alternate between acute undifferentiated rage and a crushingly dark despair. When in the rage state he is capable of violent outbursts. John has studied martial arts, and when another teenage male calls him an insulting name in the parking lot outside of Dark Frenzy, an LA dance club, John beats him senseless. While still in the adrenaline rush of this conquest John feels exultant about his victory, but later that night the other boy’s bloodied face appears in a nightmare and John’s victorious feelings turn to anxiety and regret. When in the despair state John can barely get out of bed. He misses school, steals Valium from the medicine cabinet and watches television, utterly bored and lethargic.

But John’s life is not wholly filled with darkness. He has a great facility with computers and a fascination with virtual reality. And although it might not be readily apparent, John is still capable of love. When John hangs out with his friends they typically insult each other in joking putdown contests, but there are also hidden moments of compassion and empathy between John and a couple of his closest friends. John also shares a bond of absolutely unconditional love with his dog, Clyde, a three-year-old pit bull.

Recently, however, John’s mother has taken a turn for the worse and John, in dark sympathetic response, has begun to act out more self-destructively. His drug use is getting more compulsive and sometimes, after doing a couple lines of crystal meth to heighten his reflexes, he tours the express way at night, driving the Firebird with thrilling speed. Hidden under the driver seat is the nine millimeter automatic he bought on the street with most of his birthday money.

Our thought experiment is to predict where John is heading. The conventional prediction would be that John is headed toward relative or absolute self-destruction. But some people survive self-destructive phases of their lives and are even positively transformed by them. The case history simply doesn’t provide enough information to make a prediction that is anything other than broad conjecture. John, like his species, is obviously in a crisis stage and some sort of disaster seems very likely. But even if we knew for certain that John was going to have a serious car wreck we still have a prediction problem. John might be killed in the car wreck; death cannot be excluded as a possibility for John anymore than extinction can be excluded as a possibility for the species. But human lives often take strange, unexpected twists and turns. There are quite a number of possibilities for John that may seem a bit farfetched, but for which there is plenty of human precedent.

Suppose, for example, that John only nearly dies in the car wreck and that while he lies trapped in the wrecked Firebird he has a classic near-death experience. From a disembodied distance he views his mangled body and the wreck of his car. (If this description of an NDE seems like New Age confabulation then you need to do your homework on NDEs. NDEs, including comprehensive life reviews and verifiable remote viewings, have happened when people had no measurable electrical activity in their brains.) He travels through darkness toward a light. A being approaches John from whom he feels unconditional love. John is guided through a complete life review and as he re-experiences encounters with others he is aware of what they are feeling and how they are being impacted by his actions and energy. Much of what he learns is devastating and he sees how arrogant and often cruel he has been in his life, but he also sees how he was influenced to be that way and has a new compassion and understanding for his own flawed nature. He is given a choice of going toward the light or returning to life on earth. EMS technicians resuscitate his body and John emerges from his NDE with the recognition that life is more meaningful and valuable than he ever imagined.

Such a scenario, however unlikely, cannot be excluded as a possibility. There are countless real-life case histories of NDEs creating lasting spiritual transformations in people who had hitherto led dissolute lives. The point is that knowing John is self-destructive and that he is heading toward a very serious car wreck is not enough information to predict his future. We can say with certainty that, like his species, John is in serious trouble and due for radical changes. John and his species are speeding toward a critical nexus, but what will emerge on the other side of this event horizon remains to be seen.

Of course, what is lacking in this analogy is the whole range of middle possibilities, that gradient of gray tones. Suppose John survives the wreck only to become more bitter and negative. Or perhaps he survives the wreck and it moves him toward the functional maturity of an adult, but without much of a spiritual transformation. This may seem counterintuitive, but I think the middle range possibilities are less likely than the extremes. I believe that some individuals, and some species, are so highly charged that when they hit the bifurcation point they are most likely to emerge greatly transformed (higher or lower).

To continue our thought experiment, let’s consider what type of additional information would improve our chances of predicting where John is going. For example, if we could extend the theoretical limits of medical technology so that we could continuously monitor every aspect of John’s physiological condition that could be turned into a number—not just pulse and blood pressure, but also the most minute fluctuations of blood sugar, liver enzymes, neurotransmitters, etc. We would now have megabytes of hard, objective information about John pouring in every second.

Access to objective, physical information of this sort would probably be a delight to a neurological materialist, one of those folks currently crowding our universities and citadels of science who believes that human consciousness is an illusion and that we are essentially a byproduct of neurochemistry suffering from delusions of grandeur. With this new source of information about John, the neurological materialists would be able to show endless correlations between fluctuations of John’s neural peptides and his affective states. But would they be able to tell us where this carbon-based automaton, John, is headed? When Einstein was asked whether we would eventually be able to understand the universe exclusively in terms of numbers, his reply was yes, but it would be like trying to understand a Beethoven symphony in terms of variations in air pressure. Now imagine trying to use variations in air pressure to predict a symphony that has never been heard before, one that composes itself moment by moment and is altered by being observed.

To extend the analogy once more to the species let’s suppose we had instantaneous access to every number in every database on the planet. Suppose we sat in the basement of the Pentagon surrounded by a thousand Cray mainframes with quadrillions of gigabits of statistics on global population, meteorological data, economic trends, market research data, etc. pouring in by the nanosecond. At a moment’s notice we could determine copper sulfate consumption in Eastern Romania in 1959 accurate to six decimal places, or the number of males between the ages of 33 and 38 with peptic ulcers who purchased a major brand of dandruff shampoo with a Visa card last Wednesday. How much would this help us predict where the species was going?

Let’s return to John for a minute. If detailed, objective information about John’s body doesn’t tell us where he’s going, what information could we add to John’s case history that would focus our intuition and allow us to speculate intelligently about his future? Is there a source of subjective but global information that would reflect what is happening on the deepest level of John’s soul? The source I’d like to recommend for consideration is John’s dreams. For three or so hours a day John’s psyche generates its own universe, a parallel dimension where the deepest aspects of his being are given form.

So let’s consider one of John’s dreams. John finds himself standing in the clearing of a forest. The sky is turning very dark. Underground tremors occur and escalate to where the earth seems to be shaking itself to pieces. There is fire and lightening and it seems to be the end of the world. Then everything calms down. The sky clears and now a large white eagle comes spiraling down from above. In its talons it holds a golden egg with a glowing aura. Carefully, it deposits this egg in a nest at the top of a great tree.

This dream suggests that John’s current self-destructive crisis, as represented by the darkening sky and earthquake, might be a rite of passage from which John may emerge spiritually transformed—the eagle bearing a glowing, golden egg. John’s self-destructiveness now seems a necessary part of an evolutionary process, and we can speculate that he will bring his life to the brink of destruction but will emerge spiritually transformed. Of course, this is still only a speculation, but it has a certain intuitive confidence.

Dreams of the Collective

The dream attributed to John was an actual dream reported to me by a young man about John’s age. In his case, the dream may have had a meaning more collective than personal. And this brings us back full circle to our species for which John’s case was intended as analog. If a dream was the most useful source of information for speculating about John’s future, what source of information would have the analogous function for a species? The answer Carl Jung provided was that myths are to the collective what dreams are to the individual. A myth, therefore, is a kind of collective dream.

The work of Jung and his followers demonstrates convincingly the existence of a collective unconscious. From this collective layer of the unconscious emerge the great, primordial images Jung referred to as the “archetypes.”Across cultures and periods we find endless variations of these archetypes. The archetypes may appear as dreams or visions, especially in the fertile psyches of artists, poets, mystics, writers, shamans and prophets. Through such individuals the archetypes become myths and diffuse throughout a culture.

The dreams of an individual in crisis will tend to be dynamic, highly charged, and revealing of the deepest essence of the inner process. Similarly, the mythology of a culture in crisis will be intense and revealing of forces shaping collective destiny beneath the world of surfaces and appearances. Furthermore, the realms of dream and mythology will typically parallel or overlap. For example, while Jung worked as an analyst during the era of the Weimar Republic he found that Wotan, in Germanic mythology a god of war and mayhem, was occurring frequently in the dreams of his educated, highly civilized German patients. Jung was very disturbed by this phenomenon, which he called “Wotanism.” Based on the emergence of this archetype Jung was able to correctly predict the future shape of irrational forces brewing in the German psyche. Meanwhile, many people in various governments who had access to all sorts of statistics, experts and specialists, were found napping, their sleepy heads buried in the sand at the shore of the collective unconscious when the Nazi tidal wave seemed to swell out of nowhere. And surfing at the very top of this tidal wave was a pale, homely looking fellow who began his career as an unemployed artist making daily trips to the occult bookstore. Steeping himself in black magic, young Adolph gained malevolent access to the collective unconscious, adapted an astrological symbol, the Swastika, as the symbol of his world domination cult, and the rest, as they say, is history…

Down the Rabbit Hole

Before we descend, however briefly, through the rabbit hole to encounter the Singularity Archetype, I would like to suggest an invaluable piece of equipment to bring along. Besides all the critical faculties that you bring to bear on this or any other document you read, an encounter with an archetype also requires a deeply intuitive truth sense. As you approach an archetype you will feel a resonance within, a sense of uncanny familiarity and recognition. The Hero with a Thousand Facesis the memorable title of Joseph Campbell’s classic book on the hero archetype. Campbell was being numerically modest because every archetype has billions or trillions of faces. These myriad faces are the individual permutations or manifestations of the archetype, like facets allowing you to look into the prismatic depths of a jewel that can dazzle and overwhelm.

During our brief journey we will have time to look through only a few faces/facets of the Singularity Archetype. Hopefully these few vantages will allow the reader to triangulate the essence of an ever-shifting vision. At most, a fundamentalist looks through a single facet of an archetype and concretizes a single face he has been conditioned to see there. The Jungian approach, however, is to realize that each facet involves its own prismatic distortions of the archetype, like a series of cubist paintings of a single subject. Unlike the fundamentalist, the Jungian doesn’t attach to the idiosyncratic reflections of particular versions, but attempts to see the essence that unites the myriad manifestations of the archetype.

As I mentioned before, “John’s dream” was an actual dream reported to me by an intelligent young man a few years ago. I believe that this dream is an example of what I call the “Singularity Archetype.” This archetype is a resonance, flowing backward through time, of an approaching Singularity in or at the end of human history. This Singularity will be a critical point where transformation, in ways impossible to fully anticipate, will greatly shift human consciousness and therefore the nature of “reality.” From an ordinary, grounded human perspective this Singularity may be perceived as apocalyptic extinction.

As with all archetypes, visions of this approaching Singularity occur in a variety of permutations. When an archetype emerges from the collective unconscious it is colored by the cultural conditioning, personal unconscious and unique individuality of the psyche perceiving it. Attached to what I will hereafter refer to as the”Singularity Archetype” is a constellation of archetypal elements, a developing mythology of a new step in human evolution. These elements reflect changes occurring as we approach the Singularity. The Singularity Archetype is found in the prophecies of great religions and tribal cultures, and many who feel it approaching see it through the particular lens of their religious or cultural tradition. An evangelical Christian, for example, may speak of Armageddon and the Rapture.

While most perceive the Singularity through religious prophecy, it is also possible to view it from a nondenominational vantage. We can do this by looking at a variety of traditions and observing their parallelisms. A recapitulation of the prophecies of various religions and traditions, however, is a tricky business, and well outside the scope of this book. Capsulated summaries would do injustice to the rich complexity of these traditions and would necessarily have to gloss over interpretive controversies and varying points of view. You may already have some familiarity with some of these traditions, and if not, there are countless sources you can investigate.

It may be more helpful to view this Singularity through the eyes of modern individuals. We have already considered “John’s dream” In this dream, apocalyptic events—earthquake and the darkening of the sky—transform into the descent of a divine form—an eagle bearing a glowing, golden egg. There is an obvious suggestion here that destruction will become cosmic rebirth. Alongside this example, let’s consider a couple of dreams recorded by one of Jung’s most brilliant colleagues, Marie Louise Von Franz, in Jung’s classic introductory work: Man and his Symbols.
Two Dreams

Von Franz describes two dreams reported to her by someone she describes as “…a simple woman who was brought up in Protestant surroundings…” In both dreams a supernatural event of great significance is viewed. But in one dream the dreamer views the event from below, standing on the earth, in the other dream she views the same event from above.(The dreamer’s paintings, from Man and His Symbols by C.G. Jung.)

In the earthbound dream, the dreamer stands with a guide, looking down at Jerusalem. The wing of Satan descends and darkens the city. The occurrence in the Middle East of this uncanny wing of the devil immediately brings to mind Antichrist and Armageddon.

But in her other dream, the dreamer witnesses the same event from the heavens. From this vantage the dark wing of Satan appears as the white, wafting cloak of God. This white spiral appears as a symbol of evolution. Von Franz describes,

“…the spectator is high up, somewhere in heaven, and sees in front of her a terrific split between the rocks. The movement in the cloak of God is an attempt to reach Christ, the figure on the right, but it does not quite succeed. In the second painting, the same thing is seen from below—from a human angle. Looking at it from a higher angle, what is moving and spreading is a part of God; above that rises the spiral as a symbol of possible further development. But seen from the basis of our human reality, this same thing in the air is the dark, uncanny wing of the devil.

In the dreamer’s life these two pictures became real in a way that does not concern us here, but it is obvious that they may also contain a collective meaning that reaches beyond the personal. They may prophesy the descent of a divine darkness upon the Christian hemisphere, a darkness that points, however, toward the possibility of further evolution. Since the axis of the spiral does not move upward but into the background of the picture, the further evolution will lead neither to greater spiritual height nor down into the realm of matter, but to another dimension…”

Childhood’s End

We will now switch facets and view a third manifestation of the Singularity Archetype through a very different psyche and medium. The very different psyche belongs to Arthur C. Clarke, who was originally an astrophysicist and later became famous as a science-fiction writer. Perhaps Clarke is best known for the novel and Stanley Kubrik film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. 2001 is one of the most brilliant versions of this archetype, but we are going to consider an earlier example of Clarke’s work, the classic science-fiction novel, Childhood’s End. A science-fiction novel is a consciously created fantasy, and a very different medium than a dream, but it is also an especially fertile and open imaginal realm where the collective unconscious can communicate with modern persons, and a new mythology, however unrecognized, can collectively express itself.

Childhood’s End begins with the appearance of UFOs in the heavens all over the earth. Beings from within these craft break through all communications and announce that they are “the Overlords” and have come to establish peace on earth. This sounds like ominous news, but the Overlords do establish peace on earth and, excepting military aggression, do not curtail any human freedoms. Another curious aspect of the Overlords is that they announce that they will not reveal their physical form to humanity for two generations—fifty years. People speculate that they must be hideous and look like giant insects or slime mold or some other grotesque and horrifying form.

The fifty years pass peacefully for the human species. The Overlords come to be accepted and everyone eagerly awaits the day when the Overlords will descend to earth and reveal themselves. When the long anticipated day arrives the great spacecraft descend. With some ceremony, the Overlords emerge and to the uneasy surprise of the human species they look exactly like gigantic devils with horns, tails and great ebony wings.

This decidedly mythological element is fascinatingly incongruous with the setting of technological materialism stereotypical of the science-fiction genre. What is the meaning of a specter from the Christian and pagan past reemerging in the world of the future? Clarke gradually reveals that the Overlords’ alarming physiognomy is simply the result of their physical adaptation to the environmental conditions of their planet. The Overlords are actually perfectly benevolent and are far more rational and intelligent than humans.

The Overlords are servants of the”Overmind,” a cosmic intelligence permeating the universe that is Clarke’s naturalistic God concept. The Overmind employs the Overlords as midwives. When the Overmind senses that an intelligent species is about to make the evolutionary jump into higher consciousness it sends the Overlords to their planet to supervise the process. This evolutionary process is apparently volatile and unstable, and if not properly supervised could result in disastrous consequences whose effects would reach far beyond the particular world on which the process occurs. The fact that the Overlords have the appearance of a deep ancestral archetype of evil is described by Clarke as, “…a race memory of a future event.” The human race has a premonitory fear of the Overlords because it senses that their arrival signifies the end of the genome, the obsolescence of the species in its old form. From the earthbound perspective of the conservative old form, this evolutionary birth is apocalyptic and evil.

The Overlords, though infinitely superior to humans in every perceivable attribute, are themselves barren and unable to manifest the evolutionary birth process that it is their perpetual task to oversee. On earth, in addition to keeping human beings from destroying each other, the Overlords have a secret task, to search for an extraordinary individual who will be the first human being to exhibit these evolutionary changes. This individual is referred to as “Subject Zero” and the concept seems close to a naturalistic version of searching for the Messiah.

As part of this search, an Overlord named Rasheverak pays a visit to an American man who has one of the largest privately owned collections of books on parapsychology and the occult. Rasheverak is interested in this library because he is looking for any examples of extraordinary functioning that might indicate the emergence of Subject Zero. Like any intelligent, skeptical reader of such material, Rasheverak finds that it is often difficult to sift the truth from the abundant nonsense.

During Rasheverak’s visit, the library owner has several houseguests who are apparently drawn by the celebrity name-dropping opportunity of meeting an Overlord. The guests, like the owner, seem to be narcissistic individuals with a gullible appetite for occult and parapsychological entertainments. In many ways they seem a prophetic anticipation of stereotyped New Agers.

Rasheverak, who has the forbearance of a visiting anthropologist, maintains an observer’s stance as he witnesses many examples of human foolishness and gullibility. At one point he observes these New-Age types conducting a séance with a Ouija board. Unexpectedly, something of great interest occurs. When they ask the Ouija board the traditional question, “Who are you?” its response is highly suggestive of the collective unconscious: “IAMALL.” The Ouija participants next ask, “What are the coordinates of the Overlord’s sun?” This information had always been denied the human species and Rasheverak takes sudden interest when the Ouija planchette spells out the correct coordinates. Rasheverak is forced to conclude that one of these thoroughly mediocre-seeming individuals must be Subject Zero.

Rasheverak investigates and discovers that one member of the Ouija séance, a young woman, is pregnant. Subject Zero turns out to be her unborn child. When Subject Zero is born he exhibits numerous special powers. His Messiah-like status is short-lived, however, because all the children born after him also have similar powers. The children quickly evolve and become more powerful, and their psyches merge to form a collective consciousness. The children materialize themselves on one continent and join hands forming a giant moving spiral. Older, pre-Subject Zero human beings are not destroyed, but having given birth to their successors they become literally sterile and are utterly demoralized by their irrelevance and inevitable extinction.

When the children manifest their ultimate evolution and are able to merge energetically with the Overmind, they appear to the last human being left alive as an aurora borealis, a white spiral of light in the sky.

Childhood’s End uncannily parallels the three dreams we have considered. In the young man’s dream, darkness and earthquake transform into a spiraling white eagle bearing a golden egg. Similarly, the dark wing of Satan descends in the dream of a simple Christian woman, only to be later revealed as the cloak of God. And all three manifestations envision a white spiral of light in the sky as the interdimensional, evolutionary portal of the species. A central, emergent theme is that what seems apocalyptic from the earthbound ego point of view is revealed from a cosmic point of view to be a transcendent evolutionary metamorphosis.

I have recorded and studied numerous other examples of this Singularity Archetype and found the essential pattern repeated with all sorts of interesting variations. To avoid doubling the length of this chapter I’m going to have to omit most of them, but I’m confident that if you keep your eyes open you’ll find many examples for yourself. The world of contemporary culture is intensely mythological; it is only a question of recognizing it. Tune into the right frequencies and you will notice that archetypal information about this approaching Singularity permeates our environment as ubiquitously as radio and television waves. If you remember that the same tools of symbolic analysis employed in dream interpretation may be employed in understanding all sorts of cultural manifestations, you will find yourself provided with endless messages about the approaching event horizon.

UFOs—Harbingers of the Singularity?

Jung on “Flying Saucers”

Like Childhood’s End, many of the messages of an approaching Singularity involve UFOs. Jung, shortly before his death, wrote a book about UFOs entitled, Flying Saucers, a Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky. Jung believed that the relative spiritual vacuum and lack of a ruling myth characteristic of the twentieth century created a great tension in the collective unconscious, an uneasy tabula rasa on which almost anything might appear. Human beings have always looked toward the heavens for signs of God or other transcendent beings monitoring and altering human affairs. Jung was struck by the typically circular appearance of whatever was seen in the sky. To Jung this suggested the mandala, an archetypal circular pattern that represented God, self and wholeness. Jung pointed out that the Sanskrit definition of God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. Jung gave to the UFO field a much-needed examination from the point of view of depth psychology. He did not presume that UFOs were immaterial, and noted that they often seemed to reflect radar waves, but he wondered if they might not be physical exteriorizations of the collective unconscious. Like other archetypal manifestations, UFOs have the ability to appear in dreams and to haunt or inspire the imagination.

Holes in the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis?

Since I wrote this section I have seen substantial evidence favoring the extraterrestrial hypothesis, but I include it anyway because there are so many people who assume that UFOs must mean extraterrestrials in metal spacecraft. In dealing with anomalous phenomenon and other areas of investigation that are at or beyond the boundaries of human comprehension I recommend an avoidance of premature closure. Many people readily adopt some pet theory and then corral evidence and thinking to support it. I feel that it is wiser to learn to endure ambiguity, keep the mind open to multiple possibilities and delay the reaching of ultimate conclusions.

When we investigate anomalous phenomena we need to always be wary about the human tendency to project expectations and needs onto the unknown that are generated by our own psyches. In a technological, materialistic era where the human ego seems to rule, fewer and fewer people have faith that there is a God watching over the human species who is ready to intervene miraculously. Speculations about UFOs, such as that they are the spacecraft of superior beings here to prevent us from destroying each other through nuclear war, etc. create a secular equivalent of an absent Godhead. UFOs, as mysterious signs in the heavens, serve as extraordinary projection screens for people’s needs, fears and archetypal visions. Since they are themselves singularities of a sort, they very naturally become associated with the Singularity Archetype.

This is not to imply, however, that they are purely psychological phantoms or that they do not have a relation to the approaching Singularity that is more than imaginal. Those who have taken an intelligent look at this phenomenon have recognized that underneath the hoaxes and manipulated stories, something of significance is occurring, but its ultimate nature may be beyond the present boundaries of human comprehension. Be forewarned, however, if you want to do research in this field. A great deal of the material available is highly unreliable. Many UFO buffs are gullible true believers, people utterly possessed by their need to believe a particular UFO mythology. Many others consciously perpetuate fraud and illusion.

One of the most insightful people to investigate this subject is the French astronomer, Jacque Valle. Valle, in his book Messengers of Deception, and elsewhere, has shown that exploring UFO lore means entering a trickster world, a carnival of warped mirrors where mental illness, fraud and government manipulation have layered illusion on top of illusion. Much of the warped thinking and conscious manipulation, including government manipulation, has the apparent aim of enforcing the extraterrestrial hypothesis as the ruling UFO creed. Most of the general public who take any interest at all in UFOs is convinced that they must be extraterrestrials.

Although no one can disprove the extraterrestrial hypothesis, the conventional version of it, that they are aliens in nuts and bolts metal space craft here to do scientific research or genetic manipulation, is filled with obvious holes. As Valle points out there have been hundreds of thousands of sightings. If you assume that the supposed aliens are making efforts not to be detected, then presumably there must be millions of actual visitations. What program of scientific research or genetic manipulation could possibly require this much work? They must be dreadfully incompetent scientists to still be at it so often after all this time. Also, the idea that they are here in spacecraft, at least in a conventional sense, is inconsistent with the fact that UFOs are frequently reported to change shape or merge with one another. And wouldn’t such an advanced technology that wanted to avoid detection have some sort of stealth capability? Would they really streak across the sky lit up like Christmas ornaments? The idea that they are technology wielding imperialists, or well-meaning missionaries, may be a case of our recreating the unknown in our image.

Reality Transformers

The truth about UFOs is likely far more interesting and significant than some of the threadbare, conventional alien scenarios. Valle quotes a scientist who describes UFOs as “reality transformers.” Reality transformers may well be the best and most accurate descriptive phrase that can be applied to UFOs at our present level of understanding. UFOs are apparently able to appear in a great variety of different forms to different people and, like an archetype, the variations seem to have much to do with the belief system and cultural conditioning of the perceiving psyche. Valle compares observing the UFO phenomenon to looking at a screen in a movie theater. You look at the screen and all sorts of fantastical images pass before your eyes. But to really understand what’s going on you need to look over your shoulder back at the projector, the source of all the endlessly varying images.

UFOs seem more akin to projectors, capable of projecting all sorts of thoughts and images into the human psyche. The human mind, especially in our materialistic culture, is prone to take what it sees very literally. In the UFO world you can see an obvious inverse relationship between intelligence and how literal and specific a person’s alleged knowledge of UFOs is. On one side of the spectrum, the most conscious observers acknowledge that UFOs are unknowns about which we can make some general speculations. And on the other side are those who know the names of everyone on the Pleiadian high council and who are channeling the most detailed information about superior beings who apparently live on worlds remarkably similar to those of grade B science-fiction movies from the 1950s.

Valle and others make a convincing case that the source of the UFO phenomenon is not new, that it has been involved with human culture throughout human history. Many of the miraculous experiences and visitations recorded from the past may well have been the same phenomenon viewed through psyches conditioned by differing sets of cultural values. We live in an age where magic takes the form of technology and where we launch crude metal spacecraft into the heavens. Unimaginative psyches will tend to view UFOs as an advanced extrapolation of present technology and human motivation. The manifestations of the phenomenon are probably not, however, reducible to the psychological expectations of the witnesses. The phenomenon seems to have an ability to actively, consciously form its own manifestations. Rather than merely reflecting cultural values it may actually be adapting and manipulating them. Think again of the analogy of the movie projector. Movies both reflect and manipulate cultural values.

There is evidence that UFO phenomena, like dreams, are intelligently formed, and are both profoundly aware of the psyches to whom they communicate and capable of exerting powerful influence on them. Like dreams, the phenomenon is real and capable of leaving physical traces and effects. Dreaming is associated with profound energetic changes in the brain easily observed on an EEG. The supposedly solid world of the waking life, as we now know from physics, is actually composed of patterned energy and is comparable to a holographic projection. Dreams are also patterned energy, and in many ways it is merely cultural prejudice to view them as “less real” than the waking reality.

UFOs seem to obey the physics of dreams far more than the old fashioned Newtonian physics, which we expect solid, metal spacecraft to obey. The physics of dreams, where consciousness and reality are inextricable and the universe is infinitely plastic and mutable, is far closer to the universe revealed by quantum mechanics, although both defy our conventional understanding of reality. As J.B.S. Haldane put it, “Reality is not only stranger than you think, it’s stranger than you can think.”

UFOs are powerful reminders of that inconceivable strangeness. It might be very comforting to our innate conservatism and limited imagination to view them as high-speed metal containers bearing “aliens” who stand upright and have two arms, legs and eyes, and familiar human motivations such as curiosity and conquest. But reality is not necessarily as limited as the imaginations of UFO buffs. The evidence seems more supportive of UFOs traveling interdimensionally rather than through long distances of space. They may be just as able to travel through inner psychic space as outer space. Far more likely than their being metal spacecraft, they may be organisms in a more energetic state than we are, or the projections of a consciousness of some sort.

(I am no longer as dismissive of the extraterrestrial hypothesis as I was in 1996 when I wrote the section above. There seems to be substantial evidence for both the reality transformer aspect and more tangible, physical aspects)

Strange Parallels—UFOs, Near Death Experiences, and Psychotropics

Dr. Kenneth Ring, a scientist who has devoted most of his career to formal research on Near Death Experiences, has shown that there are striking similarities between NDEs and UFO experiences. Many of the stages, and lasting effects of NDEs and abduction experiences have strong correspondences. For example, in both types of experience people often report seeing a vision of the earth being destroyed and emerge from the episode with a new and lasting commitment to environmental work. William Buhlman, who has studied thousands of Out of Body Experiences (OBEs), has pointed out how much they resemble, and might be confused with, abductions. Terence McKenna, a visionary genius with much to say about many of the topics discussed in this chapter, has shown connections between UFO experience and the experience of psychotropic hallucinogens. Terence refers to the effects of certain hallucinogens as “UFO experiences on demand.” Although McKenna does have a tendency to overgeneralize from his particular experience, he does demonstrate convincingly that chemically altered mind states are valid access channels to the source of UFO phenomenon. People in deep states of meditation, or in traumatic situations of various sorts, often report nonordinary perceptions of reality that are radical departures from the prevailing societal view and yet are often highly consistent with each other. Therefore, rather than viewing the UFO as a peculiar anomaly occurring in an otherwise stable and homogenous reality, perhaps we should view them as yet another exception that shows us that our perception of reality is woefully lacking in general.

The so-called postmodern approach to UFOs is to study what effect they are having on us rather than what they are. There is a certain validity to this approach because the nature of UFOs may be beyond human comprehension at this point. Nevertheless, I think there is value in our continued speculations about what they might be, keeping in mind that speculation may be an imaginative exercise while we struggle to understand something that is “…stranger than we can think.” In that spirit, I’d like to offer my own wild speculation about a possible “what” in relation to UFOs. Before I do, I want to be absolutely clear that this is pure speculation without a shred of evidence. I would consider it more a catalyst for further imaginative speculation than a finished hypothesis.
Vision of a Multiply Incarnate Organism

My speculation arose from a vision I had of a roughly circular organism. The organism was composed of a series of highly differentiated connected organs. Each of these organs was actually a separate incarnation or lifetime of this organism viewed outside of linear time. An analogy would be to viewing a human being outside of linear time. Rather than seeing a snapshot of a person at a particular age in a particular frozen moment of time we might see the full lifecycle—a fertilized egg connected to a fetus connected to an infant, a child, an adolescent, a middle aged person, an aged person, a corpse. Yet this picture of the human lifecycle would still only represent that portion known to us, the interval between birth and death. We don’t know that the human lifecycle is completely contained between a single birth and death and there is much reason to think that it isn’t.

The circular, manifold incarnate organism I saw presented itself to my mind as the full lifecycle of a being for whom human incarnation was one phase or organ. Outside of linear time all the incarnations or organs were perceived as connected and in a state of simultaneous interdependence and influence with all the other organs and incarnations. Human incarnation was an organ far closer to the “head” rather than the “tail” of this Ouroboros–like organism. In other words, human incarnation was a more conscious, differentiated organ of the body in much the same way that the brain is a more conscious, differentiated organ than the liver. Another analogy would be to the brain itself where we see a living manifestation of the principle, “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” More evolved structures, like the neocortex, are built on top of more primitive structures such as the hypothalamus. But in this manifold incarnate organism human beings were not the most advanced organ or incarnation. Ahead of us were the beings behind the UFOs. And this “alien” incarnation or organ is the most conscious and most aware of all the organs or incarnations.
Evolutionary Design Limitations

Since we’re indulging the bizarre, let’s go off on a tangent for a paragraph or so. Michael Murphy, in his seminal book on human evolution,The Future of the Body, discusses the work of certain theorists in evolutionary biology. These theorists claim that some species have fundamental design limitations or flaws that will not allow them to ever evolve the degree of intelligence human beings have. Marsupial brains, for example, lack the corpus callosum, the dense bundle of nerve cells that connect the left and right hemispheres of the human brain. This neurological limitation means that the marsupial brain can never have the relatively excellent communication between hemispheres that the human brain usually enjoys. But, these theorists continue, the human brain may also have a fundamental design flaw limiting our further evolution or even survival. The structure of our brain is a kind of retrofit where a mammalian brain is superimposed on a reptile brain and the neocortex is retrofitted onto the mammalian brain. The neocortex, said to be the center of our self-reflective consciousness and ego, believes itself to be the head honcho, but unfortunately it has very poor communication with some of the earlier structures that control appetites and aggression and so forth. Anyone who goes on a diet discovers that the neocortex and its creation—the cognitive ego with all its powers—are not necessarily a match for the reptilian brain and its relentless will to defend body weight. Similarly, our sexuality seems largely beyond ego control, and for all our civilization and wisdom our ability to restrain territorial aggression has not prevented world wars and the possibility of our making ourselves extinct through technologically amplified territorial aggression. Poor communication between higher and lower brain structures may be a fundamental design flaw in the human species that may result in our eventual extinction.
One White Crow

On the other hand, I take the theories of many evolutionary theorists, especially if they are neurological materialists, with many grains of salt. In fact, there’s an obvious flaw in the aforementioned theory. As William James once said, “One white crow is all that is needed to disprove the notion that all crows are black.” If we have even a single human being—Jesus, Buddha, whomever—who has overcome the problem of poor communication between brain structures, or whose consciousness transcends appetites and aggression, then there is the possibility that the species can also transcend this limitation. But, if the fatalistic conclusion of the theory is flawed, the problem it describes bears an interesting analogy to my speculation about manifold incarnate being.

In the way that I perceived the manifold incarnate organism, all the organs/incarnations are interdependent. Therefore, the health and fate of the “alien” incarnation is also dependent on the status of the human incarnation. I’ll further speculate that the human incarnation is the adolescent phase of development, a crucial juncture on which the fate of the entire organism depends. The alien part of the organism recognizes that although there is interdependence, there is poor communication between organs or incarnations. It is capable of communication and is seeking to contact us through inner and outer space to make us aware of things crucial to our fate and that of the larger organism.

The “aliens” in this model may actually be dead people. A part of the lifecycle of the human being about which we have much uncertainty is the post-death phase. As Terence McKenna has pointed out, if we wanted to look for an ecology of souls, an intelligent species that seems to be very interested in our evolution, by the principle of logic known as Ockham’s Razor we seek the simplest hypothesis that accounts for all the facts. Our species is a source of intelligent souls that we know for certain exists and is interested in its own evolution. Perhaps the “aliens” are merely us in an after-death phase of incarnation. When Terence showed pictures of grey aliens to tribal shamans in the Amazon they replied, “Oh, the ancestors.” People who have abduction experiences frequently report seeing deceased relatives in the company of the grey aliens.
UFOs—Evolutionary Messages

UFOs seem to bear many messages related to our further evolution. In recent decades, the UFO beings that contactees experience frequently have a stereotyped appearance that UFO buffs used to call “the Delta type humanoid” and that is now more commonly known as “the Greys.” What is perceived is an androgynous being with huge almond-shaped eyes, a somewhat ethereal, willowy body and a small, almost vestigial mouth. The beings typically communicate without spoken words. This characteristic appearance may be a message anticipating an evolutionary future where we have transcended ordinary language and gender limits, and our body is moving from matter toward a more ethereal, energetic state. As mentioned before, people who have UFO abduction experiences are frequently shown images of the earth’s destruction by manmade causes and are influenced by these visions toward a much greater awareness of our interdependence with the planet. Many will devote themselves to environmental causes after these deeply affecting experiences. Another typical theme of abduction experiences involves genetic manipulation, and particularly the cross-fertilization and hybridization of human and alien species. This is often presented as a symbiotic evolutionary step or of actually having greater benefit for the supposedly superior alien species. These experiments could be interpreted as metaphorical communication of our need to evolve and to merge with this other consciousness. Whatever the source of UFOs, they do seem to be bearing a message that we are at a critical nexus and need to evolve. But once again, they remain, perhaps appropriately, in a realm of imaginative speculation. Their nature may not be understood until we have evolved further.

(Twelve years since writing that, I am now more impressed with the physical evidence of the Greys, and would not emphasize them as evolutionary metaphors so much as I did above. Some of the physical evidence seems more impressive now than it did then when I was more influenced by Valle, McKenna, and Jung on the subject. For example, abduction researchers have found that areas where abductees claim to have been touched by Greys will fluoresce under UV light, and Dr. Roger Lier has removed implants from people that laboratory tests have found to be composed of anomalous materials. Dr. David Jacobs, a Temple University professor of history, also seems a very credible researcher who has investigated thousands of abduction cases. Stanton Friedman, a nuclear physicist, also strikes me as highly credible with vast knowledge of the field. While I haven’t personally vetted any of this research, I have been impressed in recent years by how well grounded some of the best researchers seem to be.

Further Speculations on Human Evolution

Our need to evolve may express itself in ways that seem paradoxical and disturbing. For example, there is much reason to believe that this evolutionary rebirth may become possible only as we push the species toward the brink of extinction. If you’ll continue to indulge me, I’d like to offer some further speculations about human evolution.

The Last Great Evolutionary Jump

The last great quantum jump in evolution on this planet was the development of the human capacity to think in words. Some linguists believe that human language originated at one time and one place. Noam Chomsky and others have pointed out that all human languages are essentially the same on the level of deep syntax.

One way of imagining an evolutionary jump is to consider the possibility of an individual mutation that is capable of superior functioning. Most mutations, of course, are disadvantageous and bred out, but occasionally, even random mutagenic forces can generate something superior. This model wouldn’t work very well for the evolution of language, however, which is a collective phenomenon. A single mutation capable of language wouldn’t have anyone to develop language with. Therefore, one can speculate that the structures in the brain that allowed the capacity for language developed gradually, and that for a long period of time some latent capacity for language existed in a great many individuals without it being manifest. One possibility is that some tribe or grouping of early humans was experiencing acute stress. There are numerous possible scenarios in which the tenuous survival of the tribe could be threatened enough to make extinction and complete loss of the genome possible. With this ultimate pressure acting as a catalyst, the long latent capacity for language becomes manifest as a new survival adaptation. The superior consciousness and communication allowed by this adaptation allows the tribe to survive. Perhaps the advantages incurred by this adaptation allow these humans to overtake competing hominid species or other human tribes that lack this development. This scenario may have an analogous relationship to the present situation of our species.
Organisms and Change

Putting aside our species in particular for a moment, let’s consider in general the nature of organisms and change. Organisms are extremely complex patterns or structures, living processes rather than fixed objects. The coherence of these extremely complex processes is constantly being threatened by various insults—attacks by other species, weather and climate change, cosmic rays, environmental toxins, etc.—that can degrade the coherence of the entire pattern/organism. Enough degradation of this coherence and the process may completely destabilize as in disease and especially in death, where there is the most radical apparent loss of coherence and complexity. Organisms, therefore, are conservative in nature, striving to maintain their inner coherence. Biologists refer to this drive toward maintaining inner coherence as”homeostasis.” Similarly, a species seeks to ensure the survival and reproduction of its genome—a coherent genetic pattern changing relatively little between generations.

Human individuals are obviously also organisms. If we change our frame and look at the human species, or at the human psyche, we are still viewing an organismic phenomenon, an extremely complex living process. Both Freud and Jung agreed that the human psyche is essentially conservative. The psyche has its own homeostasis, a powerful drive to maintain its coherence and particular identity. Generally, it strives mightily to maintain that coherence and resist change. An organism will defend homeostasis even if that homeostasis is unsuccessful in some ways. A neurotic psyche, for example, will maintain its coherence, including pathological aspects that produce much suffering and that could be changed. Better the devil I know than the devil I don’t know. Addicts remain in their addictions. People stay in their comfort zones even if they are suffocating in them. The human psyche is a complex and vulnerable structure living in an acutely stressful environment. Most people maintain their feelings of sanity and manufacture a socially acceptable identity by strained, tenuous repression of the irrational. All sorts of powerful, unconscious forces that don’t fit into the model of themselves society has trained them to create must be repressed. They may feel about change what a sentient house of cards might feel about gusts of wind.

The collective psyche of a society or culture can be even more resistant to change. And when such conservative psyches, individually or collectively, sense the approach of a singularity that will thoroughly punctuate their equilibrium, they perceive it as apocalyptic. And their perception may not be far off, as powerful change may require apocalyptic shocks. An analogy to such a threatening level of change can be drawn to tribal rites of initiation. Many tribal cultures take an adolescent and put him or her through life-threatening experiences. They blow down the whole house of cards so that a new structure can be formed. For example, one tribal practice is to give someone what’s called an ordeal poison. Initiates are given a poison that will make them feel horribly ill. At first they will be certain they are dying, then they will suffer so intensely they will beg to die, and then they will completely recover. A physiological apocalypse is created and then it disappears and a transformed psyche emerges. Perhaps the human species, sensing its adolescent crisis and need of initiation, is creating its own global ordeal poison by toxification of the environment.

Terence McKenna and the Attractor Point

Terence McKenna (1946-2000) has written a number of fascinating books that make similar speculations about evolution. The parallels to the conclusions I’ve reached through different means are so numerous that I can only conclude that we are either experiencing exactly the same form of mental illness or are perceiving the same truths. McKenna, for example, refers to what I call the Singularity as either “the end of history” or as”the strange attractor.” McKenna adopted the term”strange attractor” from chaos mathematics. Astrange attractor is apparently an event in the future that is able to bend and warp causality toward it. Although from the point of view of linear time it is an event that has not yet occurred, its influence is pervasive.

I can’t pretend to have much understanding of chaos mathematics, but an analogy occurs to me that what the strange attractor is for the life of the species, death is for the individual. Death is a strange attractor in the life of every individual. While we live, death is obviously a future event that has not occurred but which is inevitable. Our mortality, the fact that we move inexorably toward that attractor, shapes and influences every aspect of our lives. Also, although it is definite that we must pass into that attractor, the moment it will occur and the manner of our passing are not necessarily determined. The inevitability of the attractor is beyond our free will and individuality, but the time and manner of it are often influenced by our choices and personality. I can’t choose whether or not I will die, but the way I care for my body, the life choices I make, the risks I choose, the option of suicide, all demonstrate that the attractor may not be fully determined outside of my will. Like entering a singularity in space, we also don’t know for sure what will happen when we pass the event horizon of death. Spiritual teachings from many cultures and periods, NDEs, etc. suggest that death is a doorway. Where we go when we pass through that doorway may be influenced by choices we make in life. Neurological materialists and other pessimistic types view death as a dead end, as one put it to me, “It’s just lights out and that’s it.” From the untranscendent vantage of the ego, the strange attractor of death is viewed as an apocalyptic extinction. Similarly, our species is heading toward a strange attractor. Many view it as extinction—unredeemed apocalypse. But others view it as a doorway. Where we go when we pass through that doorway may be greatly influenced by the choices that we make now.

One of the reasons that prophecy has been so unreliable relates to the perpetual confusion in the human psyche between the inner world and the outer world. The confusion is only to be expected given that there is often a blurred boundary between inner and outer. Inner and outer converge through synchronicity and through many causative mechanisms such as self-fulfilling prophecies. The most classic confusion of inner and outer is interpersonal projection. We project some disowned part of ourselves on to another or others. For example, a man may project the disowned feminine aspect of his soul onto a beautiful woman he sees walking down the street. He looks at her and feels this sense of eternal recurrence—she was meant for me, I’ve known her from other lifetimes. In a sense, the perception is correct, this aspect of his soul is meant for him, and it has been with him from time immemorial. The incorrect part, and it can be disastrously incorrect, is the confusion of the inner and outer, the acting out interpersonally of what is intrapsychic. Most interpersonal violence, as well as genocide and other forms of collective violence, occur in a state of shadow projection, where disowned and dreaded parts of oneself, or of the collective, are projected onto a despised other or another race, etc.

Anything with a strong emotional charge in the psyche, and especially if the charge is strong and uncomfortable, will be projected outside. One of the strongest charges in most psyches is anxiety about death. A classic projection is for a person to feel their own mortal vulnerability, the imminence of their own death that may come at any time, and to attribute that feeling to the world. I can feel it, this is all temporary, this world is going to end; I am living in the end times! Again, the perception is correct except for the confusion of inner and outer. Every mortal is always living in end times, death is always imminent and even if any of the many possible causes of premature death are avoided, the years left are still only a one or two digit figure. The uncomfortable feeling of perilous temporal fragility must go somewhere and an end of world prophecy is like a lightning rod for this intensely uncomfortable inner charge.

Like a fractal or a hologram, the life cycle of the individual to some extent recapitulates the life cycle of the species. An individual has a certain limited life span before they cross the event horizon of death, and a species also has a limited life span before it becomes extinct. I’ve heard that the average life span of a species is 100,000 years. Because of the parallelism, it is easy for someone to confuse the imminence of personal death with collective eschaton. This confusion is also well motivated as it seems to displace much of the individual anxiety about death, which is usually faced alone, onto a “we’re all in it together”general event that has strong elements of high drama and excitement associated with it. Instead of a feeling of powerlessness about the inevitability of one’s own death, the prophet feels empowered by his sense that he has been privileged with secret knowledge withheld from the common person. Also, the ego is very concerned about its place in the social hierarchy and is appalled by the idea that it could cease to exist while others continue to live. If everyone checks out at once, however, then death involves no such social humiliation. Even better, if there is some sort of Rapture, where the ego is part of an elect that becomes immortal while others of the sort the ego doesn’t like are annihilated or left behind to deal with the Antichrist and Armageddon, then personal anxiety about death gets channeled into an all-satisfying scenario. For these powerful psychological reasons, prophecies of the end of the world usually seem to be conveniently scheduled to occur before the end of the prophet’s expected lifespan, allowing the eschaton to upstage anxiety about personal death.

Many years after I formed this hypothesis I heard of an episode that gave it anecdotal support. In the 1960s there was a well-known woman psychic (but not Jean Dixon) who had a nationally syndicated newspaper column. She had a vision that a gigantic earthquake would destroy most of California on a particular date and reported this in her column. In copycat fashion, other psychics began to predict a quake on the same day. This woman was sincere in her prediction, and at great expense she relocated her family from the Bay Area to Nevada. On the predicted date there was no earthquake, but the woman died of some rare disease.

Approaching the Singularity

To engage another speculative area, let’s consider what may happen as our species approaches the evolutionary event horizon. Our present world may be viewed as being in a rather tense position between realms of matter and of spirit. Much in our world can be explained by Newtonian physics and a very mundane, mechanical model of reality. But those of us not actively trying to repress the atypical notice that there are many white crows in our world. Anomalous events occur that can’t quite be explained by coincidence or cause and effect. Yes, the fields of parapsychology and esoteric studies may contain a certain amount of nonsense and unproven assertions, but if we have even a single authentic instance of one individual exhibiting telekinesis, communicating telepathically, reaching another person through their dreams, etc.—just one example in all of human history—then the door to extraordinary functioning and consciousness is thrown wide open for the whole species. And many of us can point toward a number of such events in our lives. A miraculous evolutionary capacity in human beings, that is mostly latent now, has been manifesting episodically for a long, long time.

As we approach the Singularity, the completely inextricable, interdependent phenomenon of human consciousness and our experience of reality will mutate. Much of the change will be impossible to anticipate, but some broad areas are available for speculation. We can be pretty confident, for example, that the human ego will be considerably altered. Certainly, there are spiritually advanced persons in history or among us right now who have transcended the limits of ego identification. What is possible for them is possible for the species. But before we consider the alteration of the ego, let’s consider its evolutionary significance. (This will, once again, be unannotated speculation, so view as skeptically as you like.)

Although most evolutionary theorists will resist what I’m about to say vehemently, many people have noticed that there is some force in nature that seems to generate greater levels of complexity and consciousness. The creation of the ego has obviously had some unpleasant consequences, but it was also an evolutionary development that allowed for a tremendous increase in complexity and consciousness.
The Future of the Ego—an Evolutionary Perspective

In tribal cultures the ego seems less developed than in modern individuals living in industrialized societies. Tribal societies seem to have less individual boundaries and more group consciousness. Earlier human beings may have had less ego, but also less individuality and differentiation. A fundamental aspect or function of the ego is the creation of isolation. An individual perceives him or herself as a separate identity apart from others and the world. This perception creates a degree of isolation and within this insulating bubble an explosion of novelty occurs. A highly complex, unique, differentiated, often pathologized personality develops. Egocentric isolation, like the irritating grain of sand in an oyster, causes the development of a fantastic structure as complex buffering layers are accreted around the irritant and the beautiful pearl of individuality is created.

The ego is a complex structure and difficult or impossible to define. There is an inevitable imprecision when we use the term, as different people understand very different things by the term “ego.” From some vantage points the ego serves crucial functions in the human psyche. The ego has been called “the self-organizing principle of the organism” and necessary self-reference may not be possible without it. From other angles we see that the ego is often the carrier of will to power and destructive intentions. For all the novelty the human ego helped to create, and the invaluable role it plays in the human psyche, it has also become a very heavy albatross hanging around the neck of the species. It may now, in its present form at least, have exceeded its evolutionary purpose and be a species of psychic structure due for extinction. But the ego, like all organs, clings to life, and can act with a will of its own. Certainly the ego has a virulent will to power, and it is no more willing to quietly withdraw than Napoleon at his prime would be willing to accept life in a retirement home. The dark aspect of the ego, which is what I will sometimes be referring to when I use the loose term “ego,” sees itself as God, as apart from the rest of the universe. It is driven by a will to power, a will to bring external objects, animate and inanimate, under its control. This pathologized version of the ego doesn’t see itself as part of a living matrix, but rather looks out at an abstracted chessboard consisting of real estate, technology and livestock waiting to be owned and exploited.

The power-oriented view of the ego is based on the illusion of separateness. Love may be considered the awareness that everything is connected. Let’s consider two sentences that will illustrate this difference:

“We made love.”

“I fucked Jane.”

In the first example, subject and object are merged; there is an awareness of Eros, connection and mutuality. In the second example we have an unerotic world of separated subject and object. The ego is the royal “I” enjoying conquests over beings that are merely objects to be dominated and controlled. Currently, we are suffering a highly contagious plague of this noxious type of ego that uses sex as a metaphor for power and views mother earth as real estate.

For quite some time the ego has strutted triumphantly across our world consuming and poisoning its mother, the earth. Like many psychic forces, the ego is able to completely possess certain individuals. Of some of these, as it’s done in the past, it will create Antichrists who will seek to prevent this evolutionary birth and will do whatever possible to destroy consciousness, love and life. If they sterilize the mother, then she cannot give birth to creatures that might take their place. The ego wants to be the only one sucking on the breast and would much rather see the mother dead than have her give birth to a more favored, usurping child. Very likely Antichrists—human puppets of the ego—and the herds of unconscious, fearful people eager to follow them, will create a good part of the dark events that will bring us to the edge of extinction. Like Napoleon or Hitler, the ego can be expected to win many costly battles before it gives up the ghost.

The Village of the Damned—the Singularity Seen through the Eyes of the Ego

Still image from the movie, Village of the Damned

I have some personal history with the film,Village of the Damned, and the novel Childhood’s End that may be worth noting here. When I readChildhood’s End at the age of thirteen or fourteen I was shocked. It seemed as if someone had taken what I thought were my most creative and unusual ideas, which I had planned to turn into science-fiction stories myself, and stolen them right out of my head! I might have suspected Arthur C. Clarke of telepathic theft but for the fact that the novel was published four years before I was born. Knowing nothing at the time of Jung or the concept of a collective unconscious, I didn’t know what to make of this overlapping of inner and outer worlds.

There are certain events or occurrences that have what Jung referred to as “numinosity.” Numinmeans spirit, and that which a particular psyche perceives as numinous glows with a mysterious, uncanny significance. Reading Childhood’s End was a numinous event for me, and another powerfully numinous event was watching Village of the Damned on television. I was somewhere between twelve and fourteen years old and saw the 1960 black-and-white British version, which was an adaptation of the novel The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham. I had seen many, many science fiction and horror films by that age, but none affected me the way that this one did. It seemed to stir my deepest and most private obsessions and felt almost like a religious revelation.

By the time I was nineteen, and a senior in college, I set out to understand these numinous visions and was quickly led to a very personal encounter with Jung. A few years ago I described that encounter as follows:

“My first encounter with Jung was intense and had the uncanny stamp of what Jung called ‘synchronicity’ all over it. I was nineteen years old and attempting to investigate certain anomalies. I had had experiences of a parapsychological nature, and found myself fascinated by disturbing fantasies and strange visions, which lit up in my imagination with recurrent intensity, but also appeared, inexplicably, outside of my psyche in sci-fi books and movies. This appearance of artifacts of the inside world materializing outwardly, another example of synchronicity, was especially strange as some of the material pre-dated my incarnation. Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, for example, had been written two years before I was born. Even more disturbing was the British 1960 sci-fi movie, Village of the Damned, which was based on the novel, The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham, published the year I was born. How could fantasies and visions that I thought weirdly peculiar to my imagination turn up in stories that were older than I was?

Unlikely help offered itself to me during the course of my studies. I was in my last year of college and the Chairman of the Philosophy Department, though I was an English major, had become my benefactor and opened doors for me in a highly conservative academic environment, allowing me to pursue interdisciplinary research projects into obscure, shadowy areas. But it was actually my mom who suggested that I read what a Carl Jung had to say about the ‘archetypes and the collective unconscious.’

And so I came to stand before the many elegant black volumes of the Princeton Bollingen edition of Jung’s collected works. But what could this Swiss psychologist, the son of a minister, who reached manhood in the nineteenth century, say of any use to a nineteen-year-old Jewish kid from the Bronx who found himself obsessed with sci-fi fantasies like The Midwich Cuckoos, in which a UFO-related incident somehow resulted in large-eyed, androgynous children with psychic powers and a group mind? I scanned the index volume for a minute or so and came across a late work, Flying Saucers, A Modern Myth of things Seen in the Sky. That was a bit of a shock, as UFOs were a major part of the fantasies and my esoteric research. I went right to volume ten, Civilization in Transition, where flying saucers were considered. This subject seemed to haunt Jung near the end of his life, and he couldn’t let go of it. At the end of the book there was an afterward, followed by an epilogue, followed by a supplement.

As I glanced through the supplement my jaw dropped open in amazement. Jung had devoted this lengthy supplement to analyzing mythological layers of meaning in John Wyndham’sThe Midwich Cuckoos! It seemed as if this dead Swiss guy had stepped out of the bookcase and holographically manifested himself to look over my shoulder at the same sci-fi story that obsessed me. Even more amazing, I saw that we had some parallel ideas about what it might mean.”

From the moment of that first encounter, Jung, like a wizard bearing a torch, became my guide as I followed numinous visions of evolutionary metamorphosis down the rabbit hole and discovered what I now call “the Singularity Archetype.”

The Midwich Cuckoos repeats many of the bizarre particular elements that occur inChildhood’s End. They both open with the appearance of disc-shaped UFOs over the planet. In Childhood’s End the Overlords immediately open communication, but in The Midwich Cuckoos the UFOs shut down human consciousness. In a circular area with a very precise perimeter beneath each UFO, all higher animals, including humans, suddenly lapse into sleep. After twenty-four hours, everyone who wasn’t at the wheel of a car, holding a hot iron or otherwise in an unfortunate situation for nodding off, wakes up as if nothing happened. Everyone who didn’t have an accident seems unchanged until some days pass and the village doctor, Zellaby, discovers that every woman of child bearing age, including young virgins and old maids, has become pregnant. Again, we are seeing an evolutionary change from the point of view of the ego. It sees itself in the helpless, unconscious”little death” of dreamless sleep. And while it is in this helpless, mortal state it is raped and inseminated by a hostile alien life form.

In the novel, the character who personifies the ego is the physician Zellaby. He is the man of science and reason trying to control this irrational, miraculous event. He sets out, like the Overlords, to be midwife to this evolutionary birth. Interestingly, the name “Midwich” sounds much like “midwife” but with the emphasis of “witch” modifying the second syllable. In this mutation of the word midwife we see the ego’s xenophobic, witch-hunting view of the evolutionary birth. Rather than being a selfless midwife, it would rather burn the witches, the new children who possess the dangerous magic and represent change.

Besides his role as midwife, Zellaby has some other commonalties with the Overlords. He is obviously more intelligent and technologically sophisticated than the average human, and he is, like the Overlords, barren. Zellaby and his wife have never been able to conceive a child. So, at first, the Zellabys greet their pregnancy with the enthusiasm of Abraham and Sarah receiving a miraculous blessing from God.

With inhuman speed the pregnancies come to term and all the women give birth to exceptionally large and healthy babies. But the prodigal infants seem to be racially different and unique; they have large golden eyes and platinum blonde hair. The infants grow and develop, physically and mentally, with unnatural speed. It becomes apparent that they have extraordinary powers. For example, after one mother accidentally pricks her daughter with a safety pin she is found compulsively stabbing herself with the pin. Apparently, the superior alien will of the child mind pressured her into this self-violence.

Homogestalt

Zellaby also discovers that the children, like the new children in Childhood’s End, have a collective consciousness. Collective consciousness turns up frequently in expressions of the Singularity Archetype and merits some examination. In Theodore Sturgeon’s science-fiction novel, More than Human, a group of mutants, who each have distinctly different strengths and weaknesses, form a collective consciousness while retaining some individuality and become, in many ways, a single entity where each mutant serves in a specialized role, as if they were organs of a single body. Sturgeon coined the term “homogestalt” to describe this new entity. Similarly, more recent abduction testimony has emphasized the “greys” as having a hive-like collectivity, and this is experienced as another threatening aspect of their alien otherness.

There are a number of possible reasons for this collective consciousness motif appearing in so many permutations of this archetype. One is that it may be a fairly literal indicator of evolutionary change. If the ego ceases to dominate the human psyche, then perhaps the boundaries that it creates around the individual will dissipate and we will become more collectively aware. The shells of the oysters dissolve and the pearls lie together. From the ego’s point of view this would be a catastrophic loss of personal identity. This is also a typical ego view of that other attractor, death. From this pessimistic ego view, humans travel from dust to dust, and are simply returned to the undifferentiated source from which they are thought to emerge.

Enantiodromia

But if this were all that the evolutionary step amounted to it would be regressive and not evolutionary. Instead of expanding the immense novelty of individual identity, it would be contracting it a homogenous mass with a great decrease in complexity. Certainly there are many cycles in nature that reverse themselves, that oscillate between extremes. Jung called this process of returning to the opposite, “enantiodromia,” a term he borrowed from Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher. The ego fears, somewhat reasonably, that the evolutionary process will be enantiodromia, nature just pressing the reset button and erasing all the individual differentiation it sacrificed so much to create. But the Singularity Archetype tells us that the pendulum of enantiodromia, viewed from the right perspective, is an evolutionary spiral.

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