What does UFOlogy—the study of unidentified foreign objects—have to do with death, dying, reincarnation, and immortality? Superficially, nothing. In the popular mind, UFOs are crafts, advanced rockets, from outer space piloted by beings who are trying to visit us, and the government is trying its best to suppress the information. The Steven Spielberg movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, sums up this kind of sentiment.
Some authors believe that such contacts between extraterrestrials and we humans have been made already (for eons); some of their books become best-sellers, suggesting that there is a lot of sympathy for this kind of notion.
This is the stuff that science fiction thrives on, and I personally have always had a soft spot for science fiction. Years ago, I was writing a book on science fiction, so I researched the subject of rocketry quite thoroughly. The question in my mind was, Can rockets from outer space, from other planets belonging to other star systems, travel to us, considering the vast distances such a rocket has to travel?
Science-fiction writers, in general, are not particularly bothered by this problem because modern physics has enhanced their arsenals. In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, science fiction was getting by with Einstein's theory of relativity. Relativity says time slows down inside a ship that is moving at a high speed comparable to lightspeed, so the passengers age slower than they would on their home planet. Beginning in the 1960s, science fiction has used the concept of hyperspace drive for space travel. You see, relativity limits spaceships to sub-lightspeed, but distances between stars even within our galaxy can be as large as 100,000 light years. You cannot speak about galactic empires with puny sub-lightspeeds for the imperial navy. In hyperspace, the ships can travel faster than light, at “warp-speeds.”
Although both ideas make some scientific sense, thanks to Einstein, they are not practical ideas. Consider: Our chemical fuel-burning rockets travel at speeds of tens of kilometers per second; but light travels at the speed of 300,000 kilometers per second. The gap is quite unbridgeable with any physical technology. Rocket scientists have studied them all: plasma rockets, nuclear-fusion rockets, matter-antimatter propulsion (this one is very popular with science fiction), you name it, somebody has cranked out some numbers. All numbers make one thing very clear: no physical rocket can travel at a speed high enough for the relativistic slowing down of aging to help. At realistic speeds, even travel to and from our nearest stars would take such a long time that it is impossible to envision that any living beings with reasonable lifespans could make such trips (although the idea of freezing people for such travel remains popular).
Hyperspace, by the way, is a plausible “fourth” dimension of space, plausible because, according to Einstein's theory, space is curved, which can be interpreted with the concept that we live on the three-dimensional (hyper-)surface of a four-dimensional volume. Some science-fiction writers figure hyperspace to be where the electron goes when it takes a quantum leap. It is a fact that when the electron goes quantum leaping, it does not travel through intervening space; it's here, then it's there. But nobody has ever thought of any macro physical drive to get us to hyperspace, quantum leaping or otherwise.
So the net upshot of my research was this: it is impossible for any extraterrestrials to travel to us. Incidentally, rockets carrying robots are an exception to this rule. It is a mini-mystery why robot-bearing rockets have not reached us yet. As the famous physicist Enrico Fermi used to puzzle, “Where are they?” Many people translate this mystery to mean that there is no extraterrestrial life to launch robots around, that we are quite alone in the universe! I would like to argue in this chapter that we don't have to be that pessimistic.
Of course, people who encounter UFOs and extraterrestrial beings never mention robots; they are meeting with live creatures, mostly ones with by-now-familiar pointed, hollow faces and short bodies. If rockets from outer space are an impossibility, what are these people seeing? Although scientists in general have been very unsympathetic to these people's travails, dismissing their sightings (and even abductions) as hallucinations, psychologists could not entirely disregard the phenomenon; one thing that could not be denied is that the UFO sighters often were traumatized and needed psychological help.
So one idea that gradually became popular with psychologists, beginning with Carl Jung, is that UFOs are altered-state sightings of mental and emotional archetypes. In previous times, people saw these archetypes in their dreams and fantasies as gods and demons. In this scientific-technological age, the archetypes are appearing in this super-space technological form.
While I was working on my book on the physics of science fiction, this idea of UFOs and associated aliens being archetypes of the human consciousness made a lot of sense to me (Goswami 1983). In truth, I myself had already noted the parallel in a slightly different context. The neurophysiologist John Lilly described many of his drug-induced experiences in terms of visitations with aliens (Lilly 1978). But his experiences did not read all that differently from those, for example, of Swami Muktananda, an East Indian spiritual teacher who wrote about his journeys in states of samadhi into the realms of the gods (Muktananda 1994).
As and when I became interested in death and dying and near-death experiences, I came across the work of the psychologist Kenneth Ring (actually, my friend Hugh Harrison brought me one of Ken's books on the subject, The Omega Project). I found that Ring has taken the idea that UFO aliens represent archetypes quite a bit further. One of Ring's ideas particularly appealed to me.
Why are there so many UFO sightings these days? Ring, through a research survey that he conducted, found that a large number of UFO abductees later underwent a kind of transformation of their self-identity beyond ego. No longer were they me-centered; instead, they were more loving toward their human and natural environments (Ring 1992). Ring had discovered previously that the same kind of transformation was quite common among near-death experiencers. Bingo! Perhaps both kinds of experiences are a hint that Gaia-consciousness, our earth mother, is trying to warn us (with a two-by-four, to be sure, but we don't listen to anything less) about an impending ecological disaster. There have been many prophesies for such a disaster to occur around this time, as we go into a new millennia (this is another subject of popular books). And, of course, anybody can look at our hedonistic exploitation of the Earth and its environment during the past hundred years and predict a disaster; and that, too, is quite common.
Right about this time, I was traveling and stopped at Portland, Oregon, for the taping of an interview. Robert McGowan is an amateur astronomer who had designed a new poster of the cosmos that includes, along with the big bang and all that, the idea that the universe is self-aware. He was going to interview me about my book, The Self-Aware Universe. We got to talking, one thing led to another, and he asked me about the meaning of the UFO sightings and abductions. I told him about the physical impossibility of aliens arriving in rockets, but then I heard myself saying, “I think that the UFO sightings and abductions are suggesting that in some altered state of consciousness, some people are communicating with sentient beings from an extraterrestrial civilization.” When Robert pressed me for more details, all I could say was that consciousness is nonlocal and can collapse similar possibilities in two brains correlated by intention, even though they are located at interstellar distances.
Later, I thought more about what I had said to Robert (which surprised me quite a bit) in that interview, and I realized that I was unconsciously processing Ring's thesis and something in it was unsatisfactory. Sure, I can believe that the UFO experience, like the near-death experience, is transformative. But the near-death experience is not just a transformative experience. Many people think, and my own research concurs, that NDEs are also telling us something about the death experience itself. Similarly, suppose that the UFO experience could also be telling us something about extraterrestrials as well. But the problem with asserting that this was nonlocal communication between Earth humans and aliens was, of course, that such communication needs quantum correlation between the subjects.
Meanwhile, Kenneth was coming to Los Angeles for a conference, and Hugh was eager to set up a meeting between us. We met at a midtown L. A. hotel in a conference room reserved for us. There was Hugh, myself, a psychologist named Mike Davidson, Dick Robb, a Theosophist, and, of course, Kenneth Ring.
It took us almost two hours to get warmed up. Sometimes it is so hard to go through the preliminaries. But finally, I asked my question to Ring.
“Ken, whereas I agree that the UFO experience, like the NDE, is transformative, surely you are not ruling out that they may also be telling us something about real extraterrestrial consciousness. Might the UFO abductees really be communicating with aliens from an extraterrestrial civilization through nonlocal consciousness?”
Ken avoided answering me directly, but he didn't voice any disagreement, either. But it was clear that his sympathy lay with the idea he propounded in his book—that there is a catastrophe waiting to happen, geological, environmental, or whatever its nature, and the UFO and the near-death experiences are Gaia's way of warning humankind to transform before the impending disaster. But then things got very interesting. I was sharing with Ken some of the ideas of this book, about disembodied beings, quantum monads, and all that when Ken asked me a question. “Tell me this. Do you think, if a real disaster hit Earth, that we could survive it as disembodied beings? Suppose we transcend the need for a physical body. Could we not carry on our civilization as disembodied beings? Is that our future?”
“We would certainly survive as disembodied beings, just as anybody who dies now does,” I answered. “But, Ken, there is one problem. According to my model, you cannot have experience without a physical body. The state of consciousness of a disembodied being is like that of sleep; the possibility wave does not collapse. So as a civilization, we could hardly choose this state of limbo and be satisfied.”
Dick Robb voiced agreement with what I said. The Theosophical literature has the same view, he insisted. One needs a human birth in order to further one's karma. This is why the human birth is so precious. I was pleased that he saw it that way.
Ken was a little disappointed, or so it seemed to me. I tried to console him. “Of course, it is quite possible that we can choose disembodied existence en masse to survive Armageddon on Earth, and then, through unconscious processing, find another habitable planet and start taking birth there. What's interstellar distance in nonlocality? Everything is ‘near.’”
We went into other issues after that. The meeting broke up after a while, and I returned to where I was staying. And then, suddenly, lightning struck me! Well, I shouldn't really claim that the idea that came had the truth-value of a genuine act of creation, because, in retrospect, I just don't know. But the idea was novel and it sent a shiver up my spine.
What if we reverse what I said to Ken? Suppose the alien abductors connected with the UFO experience are disembodied beings from an extraterrestrial planet who are here because their planet is extinct. They cannot take rebirth on Earth because their species are not quite the same as the human species (so the contexts of the theme body are not the same). But they certainly can communicate with us as disembodied beings communicate with a medium.
This simple idea would explain many strange facets of the UFO experience; for example, how it is possible for a person to experience abduction while his wife, lying in bed beside him, has no idea of what is going on. Read Whitley Strieber's very credible story Communion (1988); you will see what I mean.
I am not saying that the alternative, mass hypnosis, is excluded; it is just far less probable. Even less probable is the possibility of the presence of real, physically embodied beings.
Clearly, I take the idea of discarnate alien quantum monads seeking relationship with us seriously, but much study needs to be done before we know if such a theory is useful to explain data or guide further research. The point is this. When we are ready to found our science on the primacy of consciousness, we can take better note of phenomena that we can handle. Lightning was known to human beings from the beginning of civilization. But until the advent of the science of electricity, we never noticed many of the subtleties of this phenomenon. The same thing is happening with death, reincarnation, and maybe even UFOlogy.
And not so surprising to me, there is now some data about this controversial subject that supports my idea. A distant-viewing researcher named Courtney Brown (1999) claims to have found a protocol for carrying out distant-viewing experiments with discarnate alien beings. One of his findings is that there is a discarnate alien race here now on Earth that is trying to find a new abode on Earth, trying to take human birth even if that needs a genetic alteration of the human genome. The methodology of the research seems sound to me. Check it out.
But what have UFOs got to do with immortality? A couple of years ago, I took part in some very interesting discussions with UFO experts. The discussions took place in one of the most idyllic places that you can imagine: Paradise Island in the Bahamas. How can UFO experts and a quantum physicist afford Paradise Island? We were hosted by Swami Swaroopananda, director of the Sivananda Yoga Retreat Center at the island.
I came away from these discussions with some new respect for the UFO sightings. Materialists debate this data incessantly and as vehemently as the paranormal data. For many years, I have been able to see that the materialist scientist's view of the paranormal is prejudiced. This is partly because I myself have had paranormal experiences and, secondly, because quantum nonlocality gives us an explanatory framework for the paranormal once you introduce consciousness in the equation (see chapter 2). But somehow I continued to accept some of the materialists' criticism of the UFO sightings without much critical examination, until these discussions that is.
The data on the sightings are quite good and their implication may be much more radical than one ordinarily assumes. How do you frame the data when you hear somebody citing a UFO? You probably, like me (until these discussions), assume that if the claim is true then some alien beings are coming to Earth with a spacecraft and all your judgment about the authenticity of the sightings get mixed up with this implicit assumption that you presuppose. At least, that was my implicit assumption, and I have given you earlier in this chapter all the scientific reasons that exist to convince me that there could not be any alien rocket ship from another star visiting Earth. So intimate discussion with these UFO scientists of good credibility created a conflict in me between two belief systems. One belief is based on my theory that the data make no sense; another belief is that since the data collectors were credible, I, as a scientist, must have an open mind to take their data seriously.
I suffered from this conflict for a while, but eventually a new idea broke through. What if the spaceships that the UFO citers experienced were real, but they did not come from outer space? And they are not human-made either! Can this be? It can if you are able to entertain the idea of materialization and dematerialization. Suppose the UFO citers experience alien beings (not every citer experiences alien beings in connection with the spaceships they see, but some do) that are so advanced in their civilization that they can materialize and dematerialize entire spaceships!
What is an advanced civilization? Again, usually, we think of advancement in terms of material technology, and then physical laws exclude certain possible directions of advancements, such as materialization and dematerialization. But as Aurobindo has envisioned, the next evolution of humanity is going to raise us in the supramental direction.
As I mentioned in the last chapter, beings of the supermind who are established in their command of the theme body can go at will (always in harmony with the divine will and purpose) beyond the conventional laws of physics. So in the UFO data, are we seeing a verification of Aurobindo's idea of supramental beings, beings who have already evolved to that supramental stage of evolution with which we are struggling right now?
The psychiatrist Uma Goswami, when she teaches Aurobindo's ideas, likes to talk about the layered structure of the brain. The liver is a lobe, the heart is a muscle, the layered structure is nowhere to be found in the body. Then what does it mean that the brain is layered? It must be a signature of the evolution of the brain. While the other parts of the body have not much evolved from their past, the brain has. The oldest and the hindmost brain is the reptilian brain, the middle brain is the mammalian brain, and the foremost brain, the neocortex, is the human brain. The layered structure of the brain speaks of our animal ancestry. Then she quotes Aurobindo. “The animal was the laboratory for the evolution of man; and man must similarly be the laboratory for the creation of superman.” And maybe this will happen through the further evolution of the brain—a new layer, a neo-neo cortex (Krishnamurthy 2000)?
This is one way to approach the subject of human evolution. But I can find one flaw with it. All the three brains make representation of the mind. The first two layers, evolutionarily speaking, make representations of emotional thoughts, first the crude emotions, and then finer emotions; the neocortex evolved to make representations of abstract thoughts (for which language is necessary). Can any evolution of the brain make representation of something that is not thought, that is beyond thought?
Aurobindo, and also his associate the Mother, themselves experimented with another idea. They intuited that to map the supramental, to make physical representations of the theme body, matter itself has to evolve, has to become more refined. So Aurobindo and the Mother spent major parts of their lives trying to transform the matter of their bodies. But from all unprejudiced accounts, they did not succeed. When Aurobindo died, many disciples thought that the transformation of the body may show in the fact that it won't decay, as normal corpses do; many even thought that the body should be preserved because, like Jesus, Aurobindo may resurrect. The body was preserved for a while, but it decayed. No evidence of transformation of the physical body or resurrection was found.
Is the idea of transformation of matter to a more refined form scientifically tenable? Wouldn't that old problem of dualism—How does the subtle matter interact with the present variety?—haunt us? I myself never liked the idea of another more refined form of matter because of this reason. It is much easier to ponder the evolution of a new structure of the body beyond the brain—a superbrain, perhaps. The superbrain would make representations of the theme body, integrate the functions of the three brains, and would constitute our new god-like identity!
I've already mentioned Swami Swaroopananda of Paradise Island. Born in Israel and quite knowledgeable of the Kabbala, he became a Vedantin (an expert of the Indian Vedanta) after he studied under the famous flying Swami Vishnudevananda (so called because he liked to fly his own airplane). Swami Swaroopa is what the traditions call a jnana yogi, one who discovers the nature of reality through the wisdom path, quantum leaping from thought. So naturally he and I like to converse together and, in general, he approves of the new science within consciousness.
In one of our discussions on Aurobindo's work, he surprised me. “Aren't you being prematurely prejudiced about another form of matter and how it would interact with regular matter?” said he. “Why can't consciousness mediate their interaction just as it does for matter and the psyche?”
And a veil lifted. Why not indeed? Indeed, dualism should not stymie us from recognizing the validity of Aurobindo and the Mother's pursuit. If so, we should also pay heed to the method of integral yoga that they developed for the purpose of transforming matter.
This is not the time and place for discussing the ideas of integral yoga. Very briefly, the proposal is to bring the integrative thrust of all the known yogas (see chapter 9) to bear on the creativity of first the vital body, and then the physical. The key is to be steadfast in the intention of transforming the body so that it can map the supramental theme body, whichever way it comes, or the development of the superbrain, or the development of supermatter.
I also think that the kundalini phenomenon discussed earlier may be a key. Kundalini rising seems to release the latent power of consciousness for making new representations of the vital onto the physical. There is evidence. People in whom kundalini has risen and been properly integrated undergo extraordinary bodily changes (for example, the development of nodules on the body that has the figure of a serpent). There is a living kundalini master by the name of U. G. Krishnamurthy who lives in Bangalore, India, whose body shows such extraordinary physical signs of kundalini integration that anyone can verify it.
If we intend to use the thrust of the kundalini power creatively to make the superbrain or supermatter, as the case may be, and if we do it collectively, maybe we can hasten the hitherto largely unconscious evolutionary ways of nature. The mystic philosopher Teilhard de Chardin (whose idea of the evolution of the humankind to the omega point is quite similar to Aurobindo's idea of the evolution of supermind) used to talk about harnessing the energy of love. (Read, especially, Teilhard de Chardin 1964.) I now think he was literally talking about harnessing kundalini energy. And what better way to harness it than pave the way for the evolution of humanity to the omega point.