A Friendly Call From The Neighbors?

It seems that SETI Is Investigating A Possible Extraterrestrial Signal From Deep Space (and Gordon White already wrote about it). Which would normally find its way among other interesting things from around the web in my next weekly dose of magic post, if it wasn't for the fact that it reminded me of my work with "The Inner Guide Meditation"  that I did last year.

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So last year, while working with the archetypes of the tarot, The Tower asked me to download SETI@home and run it for specific periods of time on my laptop. Which I found strange, but I did it anyway. I hadn't used SETI@home in over a decade and wasn't even sure if the programme still existed. It was one of the first programmes I had downloaded when I got my first PC and internet connection as a child.

Back then, I had a fascination with space.

Which is how I developed a fascination with both science and magic. In my mind, there was no real separation between the two.

Magic didn't invalidate science, and science didn't invalidate magic.

If people such as Isaac Newton could focus equally on math and physics and on decoding the Bible, then the belief most people around me had (who wouldn't understand science if you hit them with it on the head) that "there is no such thing as magic, because if it was, then we would be able to measure the energy of ghosts and other such stuff" sounded like complete bullshit. Just because we don't have the instruments to detect or measure something right now doesn't mean we'll never develop technology that can detect it or measure it.

If of course we decided that we wanted to explore it instead of doing everything in our power to disprove it. Few people realize just how many scientific theories over the years have been based on deliberately altering numbers and hoping that by the time people discover the "mistakes" in calculations, the scientist who achieved fame and recognition for said theory will already be dead (Newton was guilty of that.

In fact, I'd be hard-pressed to find someone who isn't guilty of that to some degree). That doesn't make the theory wrong. What it means though is that -in an effort to prove something- things that don't fit are often swept under the rug. Which is also what -very deliberately- happens when you go into an investigation of an unexplained phenomenon with the sole purpose of disproving it instead of exploring it to see where that takes you.

Which brings me to my next point: as a child, I firmly believed that the ways we use to investigate the existence of alien life were extremely limited*.

The attempts weren't focused on looking for life; they were instead focused on looking for life like ours.

Why would all life forms have to be carbon-based?

Why would we need to find water on another planet to think it's possible to find life on it?

Why would we need to find earth-like planets to believe there might be life on them?

No matter how likely or unlikely it seems for life to have developed as it did on our planet, why would we assume that this is the only possibility for life to exist?

What if -on planets that we consider so impossibly hostile to life as we know it- forms of life could develop that looked very different to what we know as life? It's not like we have absolute proof of how conscience develops (or what it is, for that matter) that could be used as a basis for proving with absolute certainty that life is this and that and that, so everything that isn't on the list of what life is or what it requires to exist would definitely be unable to sustain life, so there would be no reason to investigate it.

And why do we even think that life on other planets would necessarily have a physical form (or something we would recognize as a physical form)?**

Humans didn't develop to be able to observe everything with their physical senses.

There are sounds that we can't hear (while other animals can), colors we can't see with the naked eye, all kinds of things that -had we not developed some kind of technology to detect their presence- we wouldn't even believe exist.

What if there are alien civilizations out there that -maybe exactly because they may not even be carbon-based- are so different to anything we humans have ever encountered and perceived (either via our physical senses or through our technonogical means) that we are completely unable to perceive them?

We look and we see nothing. We use our telescopes, and we see nothing. Our current instruments don't report any unusual disturbances because how can an instrument report something that it wasn't built to detect because we don't even know it exists?

We aren't looking for alien life. We are looking for alien life that resembles us. We have a scale to measure how advanced an alien civilization possibly would be based on how we measure our civilization.

As if the way human history and technology was shaped is the only way for progress.

Maybe it would be a logical assumption that a civilization that developed on a planet that closely resembles ours, in a solar system that closely resembles ours, has high chances of developing the same way as ours (I still think this is truly not a safe assumption, but anyway). But it seems to me that if we are investigating the possibility of life on planets that are extremely different to Earth, then we should be looking for something completely different than what technology and civilization looks like on Earth.

It seems crazy to say "if an alien civilization has done this (sent this type of signal, made this type of structure, traveled that far, whatever) then it means that it is an X type of advanced civilization, because humans have just started making progress in that same thing".

Different planet, different life forms, different life conditions would mean very different limitations that need to be overcome by a species. Who says that what looks very advanced to us isn't achievable in just a few generations of primitive life on another planet (or that something that seems easy here on Earth wouldn't be almost impossible over there, for that matter)?

It looks like I'm being nudged (if not directly pushed) to re-enter that logic of my childhood.

To re-examine the thoughts I had back then, to see how they tie with my current thoughts.

To see how it all fits into my magic (which is the same as saying "how they fit into my life", as there's not real separation between the two).

I didn't really understand why The Tower Archetype wanted me to run SETI@home, but looking back into the last few years, I had an unusual rise in astral experiences involving alien life forms, non-corporeal life forms (either native to our planet or from other places in the universe) and glimpses into alien civilizations and the kind of spirituality and magic they have available there.

There was my recent dream about a more advanced species on earth that is invisible to us, there was the man in the sky (that I also wrote about in the same post) and there is also the time when I was in the astral and got sucked into an invisible wormhole-like structure that was somewhere in the outer edges of our solar system, which spit me out on earth but in a totally different part of the universe, only to find out that in one timeline earth itself had been sucked into the same structure and an alien race (which I got to meet and spend almost a whole day with) used their technology to stabilize it into their own solar system and maintain an atmosphere that would ensure our life could continue in that remote place of the universe.

And that's to name only a select few very weird experiences of the last few years.

I get the feeling that this isn't a random nudge, just as I can't call the visions brought to me by St Cyprian around the same time that he made an entrance into multiple other people's lives and when three major works on him where written and published a random event.

And all this makes me wonder: just how different would magic and spirituality be in these alien civilizations? It would make sense to assume that some parts would be the same (even if approached very differently). But it makes me wonder about the universality of gods and spirits that we on earth believe are indeed universal in some way or another (can travel anywhere in the universe in an instance, have dominion over everything, have knowledge of everything etc).

During my visit in this earth-in-a-new-position, I spent hours calling every spirit I knew, every spirit who knew me. I knew I was in the astral, but damn, this new earth felt 100% physical and I couldn't find a way to get out of there and back home! I spent hours trying to will myself back, and I was repeatedly told that there's nothing to go back to, that what I called "my world" is now forever gone, lost years ago when it was sucked into the hole.

And in almost a day of calling every god and spirit I could think of, nothing answered. No one showed up. I kept reaching further and further away, expanding my consciousness as far away as possible, trying to detect anything familiar, anything I could call on for help, and nothing was there.

It seemed like -by changing earth's position on the universal map- the spiritual biosphere was completely changed too. It suddenly felt like all the (supposedly) almighty powers I knew on old earth had proven to be much more local than I ever thought. They had no reach that deep into space. They could not hear me calling.

I could feel different things, things that I could recognize as gods and spirits and powers, but none of them were beings that I had ever met before. And the environment was so different and they felt so impossibly alien to me that I didn't dare reach out to them and ask for their help. At least not until I could learn what was considered proper protocol in that remote place of the universe.

The good thing is that eventually, some of my familiar spirits did show up to help me get out of there, even though it took them a very long time and I would have sworn they couldn't hear me when I was calling them. But even though I did manage to get back, this was the only time I have ever actually felt the distance between the place I was and my physical body. This is the only time that it has taken actual time (even while traveling at impossible speed) to fall back into my body.

So, aliens. I guess there's a time for everything, so this may just be the time for aliens. Who knows? We'll see...

* That was back when I still believed that the stuff that hits the news is the whole truth, that no one is hiding stuff from us for any reason, that the masses actually know exactly where we are technologically and get a say in what kinds of projects our tax money go towards etc.

** Nikola Tesla wrote the same thing, and when I discovered it at age 12 it truly rocked my world to discover that someone, somewhere, had had the exact same thought I had.

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