As we passed the small-plane, grass-surfaced airport of our town the other day, it struck me. The open flat space was only big enough for prop planes, but for something landing helicopter style, there was a quarter of a mile of even grass in all directions ready for it to do so. And then I had another thought - that yes, the government does hide things. In the past several years, we have heard of the bad kinds of hiding, such as the NSA lying about holding our emails, or the FBI lying about warrants, or the … I won’t get into it, as it is too political, but you get the idea. Sometimes the government lies. Sometimes, not for good reasons, but sometimes because it has to, for defense and foreign spying and so forth. Then there are other times when it lies only because it thinks it has to.
Of the last, as we drove past the airstrip, I recalled what my professor friend had told me in a hushed voice nearly thirty years ago: that the wolves were back in northern New England, not just a few, but in breeding pairs and packs. He said this in a hushed voice because the powers that be had decided that no one should know about this. Even to this day, Vermont has a lot of dairy farms, and New Hampshire and the Maine coast are filled with semi-rural communities where nearly every household has a cat or a dog. Wolves eat calves and dogs and cats. If the people new of the packs, the reason was, they would panic and demand their eradication. And so, for the betterment of ecology, the public was kept in ignorance for decades. This is still going on with wolves and cougars and bears in other areas. Keep the panic down; don’t tell the people what many hikers and hunters already know – that in many areas, the big predators are back.
And that’s the thing; we all kind of know they are, from those hunters and hikers who know they are. With that, the mass panic the smart people fear might happen slowly becomes attenuated. That, I believe, is the plan. Bit by bit, we become used to the idea, until, finally, when the big boys decide to tell us their big secret, we already kind of know. There is no panic, just interest, and comments like “I knew that all along!”
This seems to be what the government is doing with the UFO phenomena. The labeling of unidentified flying objects began after WWII, and ever since, we have been titillated with possibilities that are soon poo-pooed, or just left to drift into the ether. We have gradually gotten immune to it all, to the point that about half of Americans think that UFO’s are alien visitors (or there abouts. I can’t remember the exact percentage). Recently, several videos taken from Air Force fighter jets have substantiated that something physical is being directed by intelligence to fly in ways that are now either beyond our technology or are thought to be impossible with any technology carrying living beings (high-speed right-angle turns). They do not have to be directed by aliens – these could be experimental craft that are being hidden from us for defense purposes, or those of another nation whose technology has far surpassed our own. Since the latter is highly improbable, the truth would fall to the former. But if even Air Force pilots see something beyond their understanding, that would be quite a leap for our hidden technocrats; and if it is our own technocrats, why would they fly in front of our aircraft? They would, after all, know that our Air Force fliers are there. Why, if they wanted to keep it a secret, would they show off like that?
The simplest answer for me is that these UFOs are vehicles directed by an alien intelligence. Apparently, the Air Force has no qualms about the pilots showing their films on U Tube. So what we have here, I think, is a government that is willing to slowly let the cat out of the bag. I don’t think they know what these things, or intelligences, are, but I think they are finally willing to let the chips fall where they may. We have been prepped for this for seventy years – a lifetime, or three generations. Maybe now, the big brain people think, is the time to open things up. It could even be that they think others might understand what they obviously cannot. At the very least, though, our unofficial managers seem to finally believe that we can take the news, just like we have learned to accept the idea that the big carnivores are coming back to our woodlots and backyards.
But there still is a problem – wolves are not aliens. As we looked at that big landing area, we envisioned a 200 -yard diameter flying saucer landing there. We both pictured it clearly in our minds, and it was as if it were there. We were frightened, and that was only using our imagination. I believe that if it were real, we would be terrified and almost literally petrified. I have had dreams of spaceships coming, and at first I am wonderfully amazed as the saucers appear, knowing that a new phase of human evolution is now upon us. But then, the aliens themselves start to descend, and they kill. It is the most horrible thing imaginable, this alien death, and I think the dream captures the reality of our fear – that is, that an actual landing on, say, the White House lawn, would not be taken with good humor. We would be overwhelmed, and the old Air Force psychologists would be justified.
Which is not to say that this essay is all about UFOs. It is not that I find them unreal, but believe in the back of my mind with a near certainty that we will not come face to face with alien craft (at least not most of us) in nearly everyone’s lifetime, if ever. What the psychological phenomena really tells us is that huge, life-changing events cannot be duplicated in simulation. In warfare, the attempt is made to turn the reality into a sort of simulation, which apparently works until the bayonets are fixed, or your buddy next to you literally loses his head. Then it becomes real. Then it takes us beyond where we ever thought we could be.
Such it is with death, and because death is an integral part of life, such it is with life itself. We cannot handle the truth, as the movie character says, and so we bury it in platitudes and the obscurity of time. Heck, the young guy says, I’ve got fifty years before I have to worry about death. Heck, says the older guy, on average, I still have fifteen to twenty years left. But the old, those who still are sharp, do not say “heck” when they suffer another stroke, or another heart attack, or lose a leg to diabetes, or go blind or fall and break everything. “Help!” is what they scream. The preparation and the simulations were not adequate. We stand near the edge of shore on D-Day waiting for the doors of the transports to drop. The Nazi bullets are hitting the sides like hail. We are going to die, and it can’t be real, now or later. Yet it is the most real thing that we will ever encounter. It is the final, and perhaps only, moment without bullshit in our entire lives.
The importance of the martyrs to religion is not to show us how brave they are, although that is a good thing. It is to show us that we must have faith, and that the faith must be absolute, so much so that it will take us through death. We say we will not be hammered to a cross or roasted alive over a pit, but we are wrong. Go to the hospital and you will see what most of us face. We who are older have already seen it in the passing of our parents, and even our friends. It is beyond belief, these things; better them than us we think, however cowardly that seems, because we know that it can’t be us. It can’t be. But it will be, and most of us have been given nothing more than weak soup, nothing more than placating images, of what death and dying is – and, with that, of what life is. It is because of this that we can continue our lives as they are, vapid and petty in the face of eternity, filled with our cries and complaints that sound all the world like the whiny voices of spoiled children.
No government, no state, will cure this vapidity, for they are all and only us. It is only faith that can. Faith is something that is more real than real, because the “real” of our lives falls off into an undefinable black hole of nothingness. The real behind faith does not. If you think this eternal world of spirit does not exist, then ask yourself how it is that we can percolate up from nothingness, then disappear into it again. I mean, really ask, because if you are honest, you will admit that you do not believe in this blackness at the end. You also do not believe in death. Yet, there death is, inevitable, and no sadly sweet story dripped from the cinema or the pages of a romance novel will comfort. Because they are incomplete and imaginary. Because they are not real.
Spirit is real, so real the faithful died for it, as some still do, and some gladly. There are also the others, the involuntary near-death survivors, who often no longer fear death because they understand, not just that there is an afterlife, but what this world is. For most of us, the world is an image of reality that will never be the real thing, at least not until death; a dream, not because it is a dream, but because that is how we live it. For those others, they understand that reality has infinite depth and time, that it is in fact timeless, and that we are only on a stage here, playing our usually tiny part, and that there is so much more. But most of us aren’t there yet. We keep reality at bay because we can’t handle realty –a self-fulfilling prophecy that the great spiritual teachers have tried so hard to waken us from.
We are too frightened and lost, most of us, to waken to reality, and so we need faith. It, not work, will set us free. It, not success or government grants or anything of the like, will open the way at the end. We will still fear the real thing, the flying saucer of our lives that is death, but we will know for sure that it has not come to exterminate us. It has come instead as an evolutionary moment, to bring us forward to something we cannot conceive but that is, at last, the reality behind the dream.
Of the last, as we drove past the airstrip, I recalled what my professor friend had told me in a hushed voice nearly thirty years ago: that the wolves were back in northern New England, not just a few, but in breeding pairs and packs. He said this in a hushed voice because the powers that be had decided that no one should know about this. Even to this day, Vermont has a lot of dairy farms, and New Hampshire and the Maine coast are filled with semi-rural communities where nearly every household has a cat or a dog. Wolves eat calves and dogs and cats. If the people new of the packs, the reason was, they would panic and demand their eradication. And so, for the betterment of ecology, the public was kept in ignorance for decades. This is still going on with wolves and cougars and bears in other areas. Keep the panic down; don’t tell the people what many hikers and hunters already know – that in many areas, the big predators are back.
And that’s the thing; we all kind of know they are, from those hunters and hikers who know they are. With that, the mass panic the smart people fear might happen slowly becomes attenuated. That, I believe, is the plan. Bit by bit, we become used to the idea, until, finally, when the big boys decide to tell us their big secret, we already kind of know. There is no panic, just interest, and comments like “I knew that all along!”
This seems to be what the government is doing with the UFO phenomena. The labeling of unidentified flying objects began after WWII, and ever since, we have been titillated with possibilities that are soon poo-pooed, or just left to drift into the ether. We have gradually gotten immune to it all, to the point that about half of Americans think that UFO’s are alien visitors (or there abouts. I can’t remember the exact percentage). Recently, several videos taken from Air Force fighter jets have substantiated that something physical is being directed by intelligence to fly in ways that are now either beyond our technology or are thought to be impossible with any technology carrying living beings (high-speed right-angle turns). They do not have to be directed by aliens – these could be experimental craft that are being hidden from us for defense purposes, or those of another nation whose technology has far surpassed our own. Since the latter is highly improbable, the truth would fall to the former. But if even Air Force pilots see something beyond their understanding, that would be quite a leap for our hidden technocrats; and if it is our own technocrats, why would they fly in front of our aircraft? They would, after all, know that our Air Force fliers are there. Why, if they wanted to keep it a secret, would they show off like that?
The simplest answer for me is that these UFOs are vehicles directed by an alien intelligence. Apparently, the Air Force has no qualms about the pilots showing their films on U Tube. So what we have here, I think, is a government that is willing to slowly let the cat out of the bag. I don’t think they know what these things, or intelligences, are, but I think they are finally willing to let the chips fall where they may. We have been prepped for this for seventy years – a lifetime, or three generations. Maybe now, the big brain people think, is the time to open things up. It could even be that they think others might understand what they obviously cannot. At the very least, though, our unofficial managers seem to finally believe that we can take the news, just like we have learned to accept the idea that the big carnivores are coming back to our woodlots and backyards.
But there still is a problem – wolves are not aliens. As we looked at that big landing area, we envisioned a 200 -yard diameter flying saucer landing there. We both pictured it clearly in our minds, and it was as if it were there. We were frightened, and that was only using our imagination. I believe that if it were real, we would be terrified and almost literally petrified. I have had dreams of spaceships coming, and at first I am wonderfully amazed as the saucers appear, knowing that a new phase of human evolution is now upon us. But then, the aliens themselves start to descend, and they kill. It is the most horrible thing imaginable, this alien death, and I think the dream captures the reality of our fear – that is, that an actual landing on, say, the White House lawn, would not be taken with good humor. We would be overwhelmed, and the old Air Force psychologists would be justified.
Which is not to say that this essay is all about UFOs. It is not that I find them unreal, but believe in the back of my mind with a near certainty that we will not come face to face with alien craft (at least not most of us) in nearly everyone’s lifetime, if ever. What the psychological phenomena really tells us is that huge, life-changing events cannot be duplicated in simulation. In warfare, the attempt is made to turn the reality into a sort of simulation, which apparently works until the bayonets are fixed, or your buddy next to you literally loses his head. Then it becomes real. Then it takes us beyond where we ever thought we could be.
Such it is with death, and because death is an integral part of life, such it is with life itself. We cannot handle the truth, as the movie character says, and so we bury it in platitudes and the obscurity of time. Heck, the young guy says, I’ve got fifty years before I have to worry about death. Heck, says the older guy, on average, I still have fifteen to twenty years left. But the old, those who still are sharp, do not say “heck” when they suffer another stroke, or another heart attack, or lose a leg to diabetes, or go blind or fall and break everything. “Help!” is what they scream. The preparation and the simulations were not adequate. We stand near the edge of shore on D-Day waiting for the doors of the transports to drop. The Nazi bullets are hitting the sides like hail. We are going to die, and it can’t be real, now or later. Yet it is the most real thing that we will ever encounter. It is the final, and perhaps only, moment without bullshit in our entire lives.
The importance of the martyrs to religion is not to show us how brave they are, although that is a good thing. It is to show us that we must have faith, and that the faith must be absolute, so much so that it will take us through death. We say we will not be hammered to a cross or roasted alive over a pit, but we are wrong. Go to the hospital and you will see what most of us face. We who are older have already seen it in the passing of our parents, and even our friends. It is beyond belief, these things; better them than us we think, however cowardly that seems, because we know that it can’t be us. It can’t be. But it will be, and most of us have been given nothing more than weak soup, nothing more than placating images, of what death and dying is – and, with that, of what life is. It is because of this that we can continue our lives as they are, vapid and petty in the face of eternity, filled with our cries and complaints that sound all the world like the whiny voices of spoiled children.
No government, no state, will cure this vapidity, for they are all and only us. It is only faith that can. Faith is something that is more real than real, because the “real” of our lives falls off into an undefinable black hole of nothingness. The real behind faith does not. If you think this eternal world of spirit does not exist, then ask yourself how it is that we can percolate up from nothingness, then disappear into it again. I mean, really ask, because if you are honest, you will admit that you do not believe in this blackness at the end. You also do not believe in death. Yet, there death is, inevitable, and no sadly sweet story dripped from the cinema or the pages of a romance novel will comfort. Because they are incomplete and imaginary. Because they are not real.
Spirit is real, so real the faithful died for it, as some still do, and some gladly. There are also the others, the involuntary near-death survivors, who often no longer fear death because they understand, not just that there is an afterlife, but what this world is. For most of us, the world is an image of reality that will never be the real thing, at least not until death; a dream, not because it is a dream, but because that is how we live it. For those others, they understand that reality has infinite depth and time, that it is in fact timeless, and that we are only on a stage here, playing our usually tiny part, and that there is so much more. But most of us aren’t there yet. We keep reality at bay because we can’t handle realty –a self-fulfilling prophecy that the great spiritual teachers have tried so hard to waken us from.
We are too frightened and lost, most of us, to waken to reality, and so we need faith. It, not work, will set us free. It, not success or government grants or anything of the like, will open the way at the end. We will still fear the real thing, the flying saucer of our lives that is death, but we will know for sure that it has not come to exterminate us. It has come instead as an evolutionary moment, to bring us forward to something we cannot conceive but that is, at last, the reality behind the dream.
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