Part # 4 Not what you thought, but its true anyway Sajor Speaks We are entering unexplored territory. We do not know what we will find. We had better be open-minded because if we expect extraterrestrial reality to conform to our mythologies -religious, futuristic, or science fiction- we necessarily will be mistaken in evaluating what we will see. A multitude of questions will be answered in the near future but we aren't there yet and this is very troublesome. Alas, no-one can provide reassurance. What can be done, however, is to revisit some of our myths to try and discern whether they have secret meanings implanted in them. This is not any kind of tribute to hucksters who provide us with all sorts of fictions that supposedly explain extraterrestrial mysteries. As if they "are in the know," the rest of us -including scholars and scientists and engineers- cannot possibly understand what is happening as the future invades the present. But it may be useful to conjecture about that future, perhaps to position ourselves in a way that makes sense and that would be helpful. How far back does extraterrestrial contact go? Anyone's guess, of course. Possibly as far as the early Christian era, possibly much further than that. Or maybe it is a fairly recent phenomenon. Even if some cultural artifacts seem to suggest archaic provenance for contact with alien beings that may simply reflect our ignorance of Shamanist religious beliefs lost in time; we think a rock painting depicts a visitor from Zilchtron, it really shows a spirit dancer dressed up to scare away demons. In our era of STEM worship it is all too easy to not know what the lessons of history actually teach us. Among other things we might be better at not making fools of ourselves each time we guess about history and miss the mark by a mile. Besides, history really is an extension of memory, and it should be clear beyond question that the more memory, the better. Most people already know about the value of institutional memory, and surely everyone who owns a computer knows how valuable a terabyte of memory is, priceless. You'd think it would be totally obvious how valuable a terabyte of human memory would be for anyone, also priceless. Instead, because of a narrow interpretation of STEM, human memory is regarded as worthless. Who needs history when you can literally worship technology and be stupid and ignorant about everything else? That kind of attitude doesn't offer any advantages. Its all downside. Yet it is "received wisdom" in popular culture. This needs to change. We are overdue for a reformation in education. There is one prediction about extraterrestrial contact that seems to be a sure bet: The past, our past as a species, will be opened to us in ways we simply cannot imagine now. How many mysteries will finally be revealed to us for what they really are? All speculation about the assassination of Jack Kennedy could some to a halt; we would know, no possibility of doubt, exactly what took place that fateful day in 1963. Going further back in time we might finally learn what really happened to the "lost colony" of Roanoke in Virginia. Further still, we might see for ourselves what a criminal Muhammad actually was, in action, via ET-provided video. Did Jesus really ascend into Heaven after his death? This has always seemed to me to be mythology even though other parts of the Gospels ring very true. In the future there won't be any question. Or there may not be any question. It depends upon how far back in time the ETs have been observing us and what they chose to record for posterity. For various reasons it can be speculated that this sort of thing did not begin until the second century AD or thereabouts; and possibly later, maybe centuries later. But what if it all began much earlier, as Carl Sagan surmised? However this may turn out, it seems highly likely that many of our religious myths will be exploded. But what if you believe with all your heart X is true, that Z is purely factual? The Native Americans who were associated with the Ghost Dance religion found out the hard way that the spirits of dead Indians did not materialize to form a new army of red men able to overturn the successes of the white men and restore the lands of the Sioux and the Cheyenne, and the other tribes that were swept up in their religious revival. It simply never happened. How sure are you that your favorite stories from the Bible are empirically true? How sure are you that Bible prophecies are destined to happen? What about the material in the Book of Jeremiah about how Egypt would be destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians? Chapter 46 is quite clear about this. When its all over, said Jeremiah, all of Egypt will become desolate, utterly ruined, everyone dead, or, anyway, most of the population fated to die. However, that never happened. It simply didn't, despite Nebuchadnezzar's best efforts. The Babylonians did not have the might they needed for the task. Even though they invaded the Egyptian frontier that was as far as they got. No evidence supports some other conclusion. Such "details" don't dissuade true believers, of course, nothing does. In any religion. The problem for such people is that they become marginalized from the rest of society as cranks, loony birds not worth listening to. And the problem for zealous Christians is that they have started to lose the young. Simplistic Bible literalism is regarded by most younger people as unreliable and worse, including the fact that such views are often ridiculed by their peers. Now we face an era of all truth, all the time. What, pray tell, will that do to our religions? And another problem: What will it do to beliefs of various political ideologies? A claim is made that one kind of economic outcome is guaranteed because of the logic of a set of propositions about how economies work. What happens if an extraterrestrial says to someone with such views, "sorry, but that sort of thing has never happened in human history, your ideology is false"? What must be said is that ever since learning about extraterrestrial contact in the past and the high likelihood of extraterrestrial contact in our future, my AQ, -agnostic quotient- has shot up a minimum of 50%. Maybe more like 90%, at least about some empirical claims in the Bible and other sacred texts. When all is said, there are some things I just do not know -nor does anyone else. There isn't the least question that religion is useful to human beings, there is considerable data to the effect that faith contributes to better life choices, hence that faith can extend the number of years you live and how healthy you stay. It also contributes to success in life and to happiness in marriage, or it can do so even if there are no guarantees. But the data doesn't lie, it can't. However, if all that religion is, is the placebo effect writ large, it would take no genius to figure out that religions of all kinds are in serious trouble. Which they are. Yet they do not need to be. There is another way to think about mattes of faith either than the traditional way taught by churches and synagogues and temple communities, or the way of the skeptics, based on nothing but negations of everything to do with religion -including all of its strengths. We don't know if everything in the Bible is false or true even if, for sure, some is quite true. Scholarly research -archaeology, numismatics, historical ecology, literary criticism, etc- tells us that much. But when analyzed, that leaves far more questions than anyone can possibly be happy about. Questions with no reliable answers. Now what? And if this is the predicament of people who regard the Bible as authoritative it is worse in every other religion on Earth -although some Buddhist texts which are basically psychology books may be exempt. What to do? The methodology of Des Cartes can be put to good use. Which is: * Question everything, including material that embarrasses you, * Set aside every belief for which you have no hard evidence, * Identify truths that can withstand every conceivable real world test, * Build upon those truths, put them first in your life. This cannot get you to the place where you find yourself with a full blown theology replete with its own metaphysics and epistemology, but the result can be very good in terms of self assurance, and this isn't nothing, it can be substantial. Remember that platitudes, by themselves, don't do much. They may not do anything. Yet some, expressed as principles, can be profound. It is difficult to do better then one of the principles of Ethical Humanism, for instance, to paraphrase, "always try to bring out the best in other people." Yet, this is one more example of a false absolute; sometimes the right thing to do is to defeat someone, to stop them, to cause them to run away. The objective shouldn't be bringing out their best but preventing them from doing their worst. But if we can distinguish between different kinds of cases, the principle of bringing out the best in others is as good as it gets. In operational terms, you help them be their best and they feel gratitude toward you and, if they have a conscience, will return the favor at some time in the future. In any case, why shouldn't we try and help others do their best? Even if there is no return of the favor your action makes the world a better place. And this philosophy surely is superior to the Gordon Gecko outlook on life: To hell with anyone but number one, gyp everyone possible, cheat all you want, steal all you can with no concern about how your thefts effect people's lives, and if need be, lie about others, smear them, destroy them if they get in the way. 'Help others become the best they can be' isn't said in quite this way in the New Testament but its there in a variety of forms. It is also there in Buddhist texts like the Dhammapada. And in Zoroastrianism, in Hindu literature, Confucian writings, and so forth. The idea is simplicity itself but is so easy to forget in a time when libertarianism views which are prevalent on the Right tell people to be self-centered and not give a damn for others. The same is true for the Left, dominated as it is by Cultural Marxist views once popularized by Herbert Marcuse. This tells people that there is no social contract, that the only truth is that there is no truth, and that we should all be nihilists and live for the moment -and to hell with consequences of anything. The goal of wrecking normal society is the highest 'good' because it paves the way for the rise of the proletariat. That is, the alternatives to "helping others be their best" are evils. The reasonable expectation to helping others be their best is that others would seek to help you become your best -and what could possibly be better than that? All of which says that if we are going to make the most of extraterrestrial contact we need a commensurate philosophy that assumes the ETs will judge us for our morality, not just our technology. And they will have the upper hand about everything, or if not 100% of everything, nearly everything. Suppose that no extraterrestrials show up. All of us would still be far better off following a philosophy predicated on the view that we should always help others -deserving others, anyway- be their best. Everyone would be helping others at least now and then, succeed in life, and at least now and then they would help you. It would not matter if we never saw an extraterrestrial, we would gain real world advantage. And don't you feel a little better about yourself if you lend someone a hand when they need it? You can think to yourself, "well, for once I was not selfish, for once I pitched in to make life better for somebody besides myself." You don't need to tell anyone about your good deed, in fact it would be better if you do not. But you'd know and would have set a good example for yourself. Win / win. Are the extraterrestrials amoral? Does anyone really believe that view of the cosmos? Morality is built into human nature and we can bet that it is built into extra-human nature, also. We had better get our morality right. That is, extraterrestrial contact is far more than a matter of who has the superior technology, "my lasers are better than your lasers, my cyclotron is bigger than your cyclotron." It would be advisable to keep this in mind, particularly because for each and every tecnho-comparison we would lose. How do we know that the ETs aren't like the cynical green men in the movie Mars Attacks? Terrific movie, by the way, funny as hell. "We don't know," is the best answer. Just maybe they are unethical pranksters without functioning consciences; I do not think so, but it would not be the first time in my life that I've been wrong about something. Still, if they turn out to be the space equivalent of the Huns, then what? We would be shafted big time. But at least we would be better socially adapted to co-operate with each other to resist these bad actors. However, it would make the more sense to focus on what seems most probable: They will not be arriving here to ruin our lives but to set a good example and recruit us into their system. That is the best available working hypothesis. It is also a good provisional principle that the more beautiful something is, from a beautiful woman to an elegant mathematical equation, the better off we are. There now is a literature on this topic also, and it tells us that evolution is a process that selects for beauty. To say the same thing, creation of beauty is part of the design of nature. Beauty may not be a direct necessity for survival but it certainly works in tandem with survival needs -not only reproductive success, but boosts to one's morale, new energy when it seemed the supply was depleted, and pride. Beauty may not always be adaptive in the usual sense of the word, but is has a role to play in the drama of life. Why should we neglect beauty in our calculus of the good things in life and what makes life worth living? As the Apostle Paul once said, we are well advised to fill our minds with things that are beautiful, admirable, excellent, of real value. Which, needless to say, is a Good. Libertarians, however, and Cultural Marxists, don't see things that way. For them all that matters is whatever is expedient to achieve very different goals, in the case of libertarians, freedom as a universal solvent for every question in existence no matter how absurd the results may be, for nihilist Cultural Marxists, hatred of all that is noble, uplifting, and psychologically healthy, because their greater good is the abnormalization of society. In other words, the Right and the Left as they currently exist are indefensible. The cultures produced by the Right and the Left are sicknesses themselves, whether speaking of Wall Street or Houston at their greedy and self-indulgent worst, or the subculture of a large part of black America with its acceptance of crime and humiliation of other people as part of how things are, all of it justified on specious grounds that make a mockery of the concept of civil rights. We do not need 'art' that is intended to be disgusting or no better than insipid. All of which may be exaggeration of the evils in question, but to express something of natural revulsion at gangsta Rap, at Rock 'n Roll songs that consist of lot of yelling and screaming, and at so-called 'gothic' tastes in visual pop arts with their black lipstick, body piercing jewelry, and metal chains as fashion statements. Which is not even to discuss Hollywood movies that glorify sado-masochism, gratuitous violence, and extreme selfishness and greed. Why do we as a society tolerate such diseased values? And what the hell is anyone thinking to allow these things as American exports to the rest of the world? We need a sense of beauty, of the beautiful in our lives, as a necessity for a good life, not just science, technology, engineering, and math. Why isn't this totally obvious? We need a philosophy of aesthetics, not just a philosophy based on pragmatism -although the point to make is that the arts are useful, do have pragmatic value, and can help us all become better people. At least if art programs are not turned over to aesthetes or to people whose tastes are in their derrieres. All of this is integral to our response to extraterrestrial contact. Which returns us to the question, "when did some kind of contact actually begin?" If, as Carl Sagan once suggested, it commenced with interventions among the Sumerians of Mesopotamia, ancient history would need to be fundamentally rethought. And it would be no coincidence that the Assyrians and Chinese and Egyptians venerate a host of sky deities. Even the Bible, while this is only a minor theme in its pages, refers to the "Lord of hosts." That is theological terminology; "hosts" means minor gods and goddesses, lower case, or, thinking about major deities in various cultures, Gods and Goddesses, upper case, capitalization which is the practice of historians. For the ancient Hebrews we are talking about a people who carried over from Mesopotamia their worship of a host of deities, similar to the deities of the Canaanites. There isn't any serious dispute about this, While the Book of Joshua criticizes this custom it does so in the context of Hebrews who were doing exactly this. Archaeological discoveries, hundreds of goddess / Goddess figurines, confirm this explicitly. Only much later in the story of the creation of the texts of the Bible, were these beings re-interpreted as angels or archangels. In any case, as ancient people understood things, the heavens were populated with a host of deities -Ishtar, aka the planet Venus, most famously. During the time of the rise of the Persians, Marduk was the planet we call Jupiter. And so forth. Indeed, thanks to the Persians, we get the concept of the equivalent of guardian angels, fravashis in their language, in the many thousands, each one found in the night sky as a star. Was all this mythology intended for entertainment value? Not hardly; the ancients from every indication took this seriously. And just maybe this kind of interpretation of the cosmos had the purpose of telling us that our galaxy is home to other intelligent beings. About such matters it would seem to be advisable to be agnostic; we just don't know. But there may be other evidence to consider... Speculation about the beliefs of the prophet Ezekiel and his miraculous visions have led to conjectures that what he saw, if the images weren't illusions, were extraterrestrial phenomena. Artists who have attempted to portray Ezekiel's visions have devised a wide range of possibilities some of them, like the first image shown here, fairly literalistic pictures of the scene before the prophet's eyes. [Image result for a wheel within a wheel bible] And there is the following well known illustration that depicts a man peering through a celestial sphere, a concept that has it that all heavenly bodies are situated in a serious of spheres, seeing the wheel-within-a -wheel off in the distance. [Image result for celestial sphere art] Quite possibly,of course,there really isn't much of a mystery, What we may actually be discussing are Ezekiel's memories of a time when he witnessed Mesopotamian art. The following picture shows an Assyrian painting which the prophet might have seen, or a Babylonian painting much like it. The Bible tells us that Ezekiel lived in the province of Tel Abib on the banks of the Chebar River within the Neo-Babylonian (Chaldean) Empire. There is no agreed upon date for Ezekiel's visions but they would have taken place around 580 BC. [Image result for a wheel within a wheel bible] Modern era artists have re-interpreted the story in more contemporary ways... [Image result for ezekiel wheel within a wheel] Or perhaps this was what Ezekiel was trying to describe: [Image result for a wheel within a wheel bible] Or even this: [Image result for a wheel within a wheel ezekiel] We may never know but, then again, we may know exactly in a matter of a few years. There is also the incredible story in the Book of Revelation in the New Testament about the future decent of a "heavenly city" from the skies, a "New Jerusalem" due to arrive at the time when Jesus returns to establish his everlasting kingdom. How best to portray this in art is an open question but most Christian artists who have given it a try come up with something along these lines: [Image result for heavenly city new jerusalem] Ethiopian Christian art sometimes shows the city schematically: [Image result for ethiopian art "new jerusalem"] However, it might be more probable that the scene will look something like: [Image result for gigantic spaceship] Or... [Image result for gigantic spaceship] Another approach is to conceive this in a more ethereal manner: [Image result for tusita heaven] We just do not know. And there is no assurance that the story in Revelation is remotely on target. But it just may be telling us to expect great things... [Image result for ezekiel wheel within a wheel] And not only in the West. The mysterious East has produced its own art history filled with images of future visitations to Earth from another realm somewhere in the heavens. [Image result for goloka planet] [Image result for goloka] [Image result for tusita heaven] [Image result for tusita heaven] Our images of the future may reflect something "they" are telling us. The following can only be speculation at this time but there is one model of what is happening that deserves discussion. This is the idea that what we most prefer not to talk about in this kind of context, sexuality, has far more importance than we understand, at least than Western men and women understand; Asians may fathom the concept in ways that Americans simply "don't get." There are two basic traditions in art that capture the idea. One is the concept of the Tao, the path through life each of us take by our choices. This is also known as Yin-Yang, ideally a perfect mixture of male and female, or, to think of this as an abstraction, the active and passive, the positive and negative, day and night. We should seek a balance in our lives even if, case by case, the balance will be different from person to person. [Image result for yin yang] This symbol has been interpreted by artists in a large number of ways, for instance: [Image result for yin yang] The guiding concept is the same in all instances. For our best interests we need a combination of qualities derived from the polarities that comprise our lives. However, in the Vajrayana Buddhist cultures of the East, in Tibet and Mongolia particularly, the idea is expressed in strictly human terms, or Human / Divine terms. This is known as Yab Yum and is generally -frequently- very graphic: [Image result for yab yum] This is an example of the art of Tantra -of which there is a Hindu variant. There also is an entire literature of the subject, its sacred texts called "Tantras," which can be found in either Buddhist or Hindu forms. In case you want to look into this subject is detail the best source to turn to remains a 1973 book by Philip Rawson, The Art of Tantra. Quite often depictions of sexual congress in Tantric art are highly stylized and clearly show two deities in flagrante delicto -plus assorted extra arms and legs and sometimes extra heads. The blue coloration indicates deity although a nearly complete rainbow of solid colors can be made use of depending on which divine being is under consideration. The multiple appendages or heads symbolize various attributes or life functions, not some sort of bizarre belief that spiritual beings are anatomical oddities. As well, these copulating couples may be standing on depictions of people. This symbolizes the death of one's old ego, to be replaced, through the sexual act, by new consciousness that arises out of union of man and woman. [Image result for yab yum] [Image result for yab yum] The point to make is that we may be seeing, in this art, something that we need to focus upon, the absolute necessity of heterosexual relationships for the well being of our species. And as far as sex goes, only heterosexual commingling. This is not optional, it is essential to who and what we are. For many years the thought has been inescapable for me that nearly every religion on Earth has profound truths that it communicates to the world. Some religions are more important than others in the grand scheme of things but nearly all have something the others do not, or do not give sufficient emphasis to. In the case of Tantra this would seem to be its reminder to all of us that the design of nature -of human nature- is heterosexual and that our choice is between maximizing the good to be discovered in relationships between men and women or not developing that good. Any other choice is self destructive and horribly dysfunctional. About which I cannot provide "proof" but think that this concept makes eminent good sense and, if it is correct, which seems self-evidently true, then the sexual nihilism of our time goes a long way toward explaining what is wrong with American culture. To repair our culture, to heal our social illnesses, we need to re-establish a completely heterosexual civilization and eliminate homosexuality from it without exception. The sexual act between loving men and women may, for all we know, generate and release energies into society which are necessary for civilization to flourish, to bring out our best. Which is also to say that the libertarian view that freedom solves all problems not only is false, but it is destructive to our lives. Similarly, the Cultural Marxist values of the Left are equally destructive of our well being and are based on a view of human nature that defies the truths of sociobiology, of humanistic psychology, and of the logic of biology. It is very understandable why homosexuals are in the forefront of the ongoing war against religion. They know perfectly well that the moral foundation of nearly every religion on our planet is anti-homosexual and with good reason. It may be utterly ironic that a "holy war" is at the center of extraterrestrial contact but you had better get used to the idea. This is not what you expected? So what? What counts is the truth, not anyone's expectations. Unseen energies can be understood as emanating from loving sexual communion. Because these energies are invisible to us now does not mean they do not exist. This predicts that they can be detected scientifically if we make the effort to look for them. However, we will do no such thing as long as we are blinded by the mechanistic universe model of the universe propounded by libertarians, or the nihilistic views of the Cultural Marxist political Left which says that there is no order in nature and whatever anyone dreams up by way of sexual values is as good as anything else -which is as absurd an outlook as anything can possibly get. In case you have not noticed, the views expressed here are anything but Left-wing in character and are equally anything but conservative in character. This is about discovering the truth, not about confirming false ideologies. We also need a new ideology but whatever this may turn out to be it will be original and definitely not a restatement of existing political positions. This is what Radical Centrism is all about. Signed: Sajor -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
