The Influence of Science Fiction on Consciosness

It is an iconic image.The serene and stately Michael Renee raises his hand in greeting to the circle of soldiers surrounding his  flying saucer.  It is particularly poignant moment for me because it's one of the few times I remember really connecting emotionaly with my father. We both sat in wonder at the possibilities of the universe. On the remote chance that you have never seen "The Day the Earth Stood Still", you owe yourself a favor..Please do. It's delightfully dated but the message is still relevant. Renee's character stoically presents an ultimatum and an opportunity to mankind - get your act together or face horrific consequences. For me it's more.  Today, contact experiences report receiving an almost identical message from many NHI sources. It's a movie that has entered into the collective consciousness.

Science fiction entered my consciousness several years after my first contact experiences and well before "Day". At age nine the older cousin I looked up to got me to read Robert Heinlein 's The Starbeast about a boy making friends with a large reptillian. This was in 1956. I was hooked on first contact. All the way to the  late 60s I was a nerd for s.f. It painted exciting possibilites for seeing the universe thru an entirely different set of perceptual filters. Other movies slowly followed from Hollywood, most notibly "Forbidden Planet" where a scientist grapples with monsters of his own subconscious made manifest by ancient alien technology, but this was a rare gem. Most Hollywood productions promoted  fear of the unknown somewhat like the grays have been said to do as a a control mechanism.

Meanwhile television, being a newer media, was more exploritory. Serlings "Twilight Zone", then "Outer Limits" led to "Star Trek". "There is nothing wrong with your television set" began Outer Limits, which then proceded to convince me that if I went outside I would see them landing. "Star Trek", despite a poor initial audience, went on to spawn one of the biggest francises ever with a new spin off currently airing on CBS. For the first time in mass media contact was shown as a phenomena as likely to be mutually beneficial as hostile.

Written science fiction was way ahead. Not only did it presage contacts of multiple types, it also delved deeply into questions about the process of consciousness.  Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination went further into the exploration of consciousness when he tryed to describe in prose the phenomenon of synesthesia wherein sensory input is scrambled so that vision becomes smell and touch becomes taste etc. As far as I know the idea of "telepathy" was primarily restricted to science fiction as in A.E.van Vogt's Slan. Mass media was still far behind but the cadre of nerds like myself who read s.f. had been inculcated with the virus.

Then came 2001. Overnight college populations began to read s.f. It became a respectable subject in college literature courses. It entered the minds of the intelligencia. On the screen most s.f. was monsters and dystopia, but the idea of communicating with  other beings in a meaningful wayhad arrived.

 At the end of 2001 is  a light show that left the audience stunned and ecstatic or confused. Ask yourself, just in speculation, isn't it possible that the lighshow at the end was a visual "download. "- A form of telepathy?

Hollywood as a whole still had not caught up. S.F. was still not popular with a large audience. That is until "Star Wars.- A New Hope" in 1977. There rapidly followed a series of movies promoting the possiblilities of beneficial contact: "E.T. - the Extraterrestrial", "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (which envisioned using music as a common language) "Cocoon" (which had glowing golden NHIs similar to many contactee reports) and others less noteworthy.

 As was reported of popular science fiction author, Philip K. Dick, the weave between the open minds of creative minds of extra-terrestrial contactees and science fiction continue.  In my mind they are becoming indistiguishable. I am convinced I am in telepathic contact with extraterrestrial entities. As with Russian philosopher of  science, P.D. Oespensky in his description of "mental conversations with G[urdjieff - ed.] I am simultaneously elated and abashed that the information is recieved in such a subjective manner. I can't prove a word of it, much less meet Carl Sagan's criteria that it should require extraordinary proof. Yet, the synchronicity of serendiptous correlations grows in my conscioussness and, siren-like, beckons my curiousity forward with a caution "Beware of Mind Fields."  Am I to be proven a ludicrous loon should I continue my exploration?

The recent (five star in my book) s.f. movie "Arrival" strikes me as a far more likely first contact scenario than those traditionaly posited by traditional contact. The suggestion that the aliens in the movie percieve time in a non-linear way fits well with information I have. Further, the idea that the visitors are all humanoid is a sticking point for me. Nature is wonderfully imaginative and prolific. If I can imagine a eight foot high semi-liquid intelligent block of jello that knows how to manipulate electro-static fields thru the movement of its organelles inside the cell membrane, why would I expect mother nature to send only humanoids to visit us? I think these objections can be ultimately explained but I'm disturbed by generally the human-centric view of NHI experiences. Has the cosmic mind begun injecting a more generalized view of intelligent beings into Jung's collective subconscious?

The night I began writing this post, Julian May's "Intervention" was playing on an Alexis audiobook:

""Do you know that walnut trees will not bear fruit in the tropics? They need the winter. In the old days, they needed it twice! Once to stimulate the fruit to form, and again to rot the thick husks so that the inner nut would be set free to germinate. Our human cycle is much longer, but we, too, have passed through our first great winter and attained the power of self-reflection. Over the ages our minds have ripened slowly, giving us greater and greater mastery over the physical world, and over our lower nature.”

 

“Oh, very good! And now I suppose the superior nuts are ready to fall! The winter of nuclear war that threatens—is this what will bring about your mental revolution? Are we to look forward to supermen levitating over glowing ashes, singing telepathic dirges?" 

 

“It might work out that way,” the old man admitted. “But think: One doesn’t have to wait for the walnut husks to rot naturally, not if one is determined—and not afraid of stained hands.”""

I think a mass revelation/disclosure is upon us It should be interesting. Hell, I think it will be great fun. It will almost certainly be different than expected. But, I've been known to be wrong.