Homily On Home Boys; Excursions Into The Cosmic Neighborhood

Essay by Edward Carlos

Close encounters happen on more than one level simultaneously, concordant with mystical experiences. Although the intention of this essay is to in some sense relate such experiences, the recent UFO sightings in Texas propel me to attempt bringing this current discussion to another level. From television shows to other media presentations, the discourse has been limited to what has become the usual and, thus, the stereotypical format: the question remains why is the military and government hushing or denying that thousands of people witnessed something physical that no one understands. The conspiracy fomentation has lingered too long in the ufological commentary. A question arises as to why are we so government obsessed, especially when something as fascinating as this topic is offers many potential levels of provocation to be explored.

The intercourse between the mystical experience with significant changes to consciousness and the close encounters that arbitrate messages through a metaphorical language is between neighborhoods--for instance, between other worldly phenomenon and the cosmic space that includes the human earth-world. Each involves or manifests (sometimes in the metaphorical and poetic/aesthetic sense) on the physical plane sensual/sensible aspects while incorporating perception of the real as objects. Through such manifestations humans grasp meaning for their life and their surroundings. Yet the other world, considered by many to be unmanifest and invisible, incurs physicality for encontrants, nonetheless. Witness the large vessel blocking the starry sky with its low movement over the Texas terrain. The vessel in such an instance represents something between what we are used to seeing and where we are. The close encounter with its momentous specificities and enriching elements exemplifies an inbetween stage rich in pathos and possibilities regarding the probable.

A tendency to mythologize about encounters exists throughout societies; almost any mention of encounters or the world beyond invites mannerisms of dysfunction, destruction, and abject denial, often stereotypically encased. The discussion on the recent (and earlier, notwithstanding) Larry King's television presentation ended by an attempt to deal with the usual denials ("the so-called necessary balance"), thus wasting, yet again, most viewers' time. Terminology, such as used in the discussion, suggests the personal and/or wider myth; e.g., what in my own encounters I referred to as beings of light, others have called, e.g., angels, guardians, archangels, watchers, radiant beings, along with other related nomenclatures, and to the group on television--aliens, plus children have used names such as the owl people, space brothers, pops (because they pop in and out), little mister, and the like-i.e., in some sense neighborhoods, whether in street culture or in the earth-cosmological realm, invite the thought of who is and who are not home boys and what nomenclature defines one from another for the moment.

Via vessel sightings and visitations/encounters, the coherence of appearance offers substance to the phenomenon, at least for a large range of persons seeing and believing. Doubting apostle Thomas renews the concept of skepticism regarding otherworldly events and mystical revelation. With encounters such disbelief remains demeaning regarding what is seen by some while others claim it to be an unreality. Theirs is aversion to knowledge beyond their limits despite modern science (quantum physics) verifying a variation on what is seen (via lenses) that previously remained invisible to the naked human eye. Any effort otherwise is belied and denied; such is a sordid picture of human empathy, unless something happens to allow the homeland critic to switch gangs, and to consider a broader allegiance. The encounter mechanism, however, does not rely on belief by anyone including the denier-skeptic and those who premise the event with the current fiction and usage, including those who believe and thus buy into the myth of the era and unwittingly reinforce the stereotypes that come into the discussion.

When encounters occur, within an altered state of consciousness by degree, the human is drawn from day-to-day regularity of discourse with the world (human to human relationships extended to the neighborhood interactions and communal ethics), and human mediation with earth is continually informed through earth's heavenly surrounds: moon, stars, sun, planets and galaxies in the greater universe, and weather closer at hand; the latter directly acknowledges that the encontrant is within the world in that the human interacts constantly within the inclusive surrounds even as the universe expands. Like gravity, the expansion is not usually or overtly impressed into the human body interaction with its immediate concerns. This interaction is for the human being an inseparable aspect of that world being a part of the universe; empathy thereby ignited by a vast scale. Are such-empathy ignited by close encounters, awareness igniting a wider range of thought, consciousness foisted into the sensibility of conscience-- unworthy of discussion? Scientifically, perhaps, understanding implies local terrain-the community of peers, and non-local: the universe with the added distinction of microbiological sub-layering that signals physical, psychic, and mental interiorizing.

The empathy between a human with each level of interaction confers some dawning of ultra-consciousness and the rise, remarkably, of conscience. The close encounter may be the catalyst for widening consciousness, a cosmic sense of import and meaning. Yet history, over and over, indicates a distinction between the fabric of awareness and an empathic sensibility or conscience, and between consciousness and mystical consciousness. Conditions are generated for the fomenting of consciousness and conscience-empathy at any level. Within mystical consciousness empathy forms through a seminal residue from a series of close encounters.

Close encounters reaching the stage of mystical awareness integrate by personal emphasis the encontrant with the other world by way of a shifting in the human's consciousness. The surreal effect is that of an altered state of consciousness, not induced by human activity other than, perhaps, a sleeping state. Augmenting the encounter effect of surreality is a metaphoric language involving what is remembered as a narrative, and sometimes dream-like visual imagery. The metaphors will shift, occur as image overlays, offer a transparent effect of form over form, form within form, and changes in form. The shifting involves a multileveled imagery with diversity of aspects; thus the viewpoint is widened and broadened, but only if the human chooses to examine what is happening, to look beneath the surface, to think beyond the stereotypes, and attempt to understand values wrought from the encounters. Awareness deepens and a mystical consciousness arises from within the person if wisdom and creativity pervade the human quest to understand. The mystical element may appear in time but also is pre-figured and present in all previous encounters, and perhaps is, for the individuals so conditioned for such response, inevitable. Although the encounter is properly understood as a given (i.e., not human caused), human responsiveness is not such. Human will-determination and capacity for insight conditions the degree of the challenges.

At the level of human dialogue within the regular world, dichotomies pronounce themselves by way of the language used as a means to knowledge. Yet, the dichotomies must be overcome and grasped as illusory; language is as illusory as it may be definitive and yet definitions are for the main, relative. Although language acts as affirmations words frequently become pronounced as opposites, dualities, polarities, parallels, mirror imagery, and doppelgangers, etc. Such phraseology is oppositional and can be confrontational; an insistent comparison of qualities arises, but the essence of any given situation thereby escapes and hides within the enigma. Turmoil is wrought as much by language and conflicts arising in usage as from the encounter with its strange activities. The concept of mysticism involving a union, martially styled, with the divine offers the same cross-purposes.

For the mystic the inbetween of all such events represents where the mystical occurrence becomes internally contradictory at the level of language, because where the mystic experience is most real and most intimate at the same time distance and abstraction are conferred. The abstraction, though, offers solace for the mystic through language as metaphor, metaphor being the language of mystical consciousness.

Grasping the imagery as metaphor invites an encontrant to consider implications of metaphysics in their encounters rather than literal descriptions. Metaphoric language is not an imposition but, rather, an aspect of the experience molded in specific imagery, personally oriented to the individual history of imagery, and consequentially active through imagery perceived as reality, as actuality through living, and through those altered states of consciousness bringing forth visions, dreams, and memories. A word of caution for the story-tellers hanging onto literal description: stereotypes are not metaphors but conclusive rationalizations for something not well understood; at best stereotypes can only support a myth or otherwise a fiction based on superfluous suppositions. Stereotypes denigrate potential philosophic and poetic implications. Understandably perhaps, we tend to be prone to inventing a mythology based on the stereotypes as exemplified by the history of ufology (note the standard terminology: conspiracy, abduction, aliens, i.e., grays, blonds, reptilians, and the like).

Encounters are endeavors, a drawing forth of the individual into a cosmic wisdom, thus into the mystical affirmation of being and manifest correlates for significant aspects of what is in the inbetween. Texas could rejoice in this marvelous revelation experienced by so many. We in the outer environment, the broader national neighborhood could try to understand something other than the governmental denials and fears.

The inbetween is grasped as a spatiality that confers status on the unmanifest, referred to as the void or as sidh (between worlds in early Celtic theology; in other cultures similar understandings invite regional depictions). The void is the site of the unfolding of being; i.e., the void is non-being out of which creation comes forth, continuously as an evolving significance.

Encounters teach us about potential. Potential manifestations are evoked through the activity of the mystic, drawn into the larger consciousness but whose task is to find the right expression and to understand the nuances that feign order or patterning and chaos or openness. The premise of order incorporates tension about the possible relationship between (in the mix of the void issuance) what is desired as absolute and how this is pronounced. Realities such as cosmic timelessness and the expansive spatiality of the universe are to be incorporated with the concepts of space and time in which the human is relegated. A principle of interdependency binds the mystic and the mystic's realm of physical actuality to what is desired and sought as supernal, that which remains invisible to ordinary perception, even as the supernal remains hidden although often intuited. Hidden, that is, until the encounter.

Myth is a pre-suppositional world defined as an a priori factuality, and all comes to lend support to living the myth. The individual seeking to grasp some sense and presence of divinity or of a spiritual life uncovers revelatory instances, often inspirationally. In the encounter, which is a range of suppositions imposed on the individual (by choice, however), comes the harrowing viability of a supernal world already in significant abeyance, and already wedded to the probable sense of actuality, although differing from the usual expectations.

In speaking of the uncovered realities of those who find themselves in between world and other, Sufi poet Ibn Arabi states as a necessity, the effort "to bring the identity-beyond relation into a relation," (recommended reading; The Mystical Unsaying, Michael A. Sells) thus all relationships become impingements on the manner of relating. In a breadth barely conceivable, the universal tenets regarding becoming/being articulate a cosmic pattern expressing the continuance of the universe but not necessarily so for worlds and other orbs. Whatever is born and lives ages and dies, including stars, planets, galaxies.

Earth has some place in the manifest having survived several world-wide catastrophes in the long past. The cosmic pattern and process is a means for the infinite to find consequence in the finite, in the physical and corporeal manifest. On earth, at least, an instigation of this is a cyclical reoccurrence of form, that of an infinite manifest hidden within the manifest form (sometimes occurring in the metaphoric sense), and that of a dramatic cycle of creations (doings and becomings) and un-doings followed by re-creations over lengthy eons of time as measured by earthlings.

The provocation of a major undoing is the phoenix comet or legendary firebird in its long cyclical orbital adventure that I assess as 26,000 years (13,000 years following the imagined ascendancy of the Orion constellation, and 13,000 years in the descent to the horizon (recommended reading: The Orion Mystery by Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert). The firebird flies on its lengthy orbit through the expanse as it returns to unmanifest what is. World floods and fires precede our present time (note: Plato's reference, the biblical flood, the Mayan Popul Vue). On earth at a "smaller level" defined by galactic boundaries in a circular movement of the planets around the sun, the invention of time augments human day-to-day activity.

The dynamics are, yet, within a measurable spectrum of time (discovered to be a recurring era of 2,160 years, a cycle observed by the ancient Egyptians at Giza expressed as astrological ages. Evidence of the cycles is available through human created artifacts' form-composed structures. The fine arts are clothed in new themes, new disguises, and contents felt to be new as each astronomical era unfolds and as the next era infolds upon the former, all of which provides measure in a fresh and embedded (in the former) communication system. Recommended readings: The Orion Mystery by Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert; and, The Sirius Connection by Murray Hope.

Within the scope of one era, various creative phases define forms hidden as patterns in the compositions of the given fine arts, and are discoverable in almost all other modes or idioms of human expression, equally unconscious in manner of delivery. When I first discovered continuities in these art structures from era to era I realized the structural integrities of the form tend to be hidden in the expressive power of the art, for the sake of the intent as unfolding. I realized, too, that each era is astronomically designated with a new development in how folks communicate with each other, for example: we have passed from an era centering on the printed and published word to an era whose communication system is electronically oriented.

From an initial geometric simplicity and repetitiousness of form (my estimate of this geometric phase is between 200 and 400 years before the era evolves into a longer time frame - an archaic modality). A leap, somewhat midway through the era, brings artists to rendering an ideal format (akin to Hellenic culture and to the Renaissance) that is equally interwoven into the substructure of the era. Perhaps these phases indicate an ascent, or perhaps not, but this ideality confers then an expansion following in the intellectual modality and a creativity maintaining continuance. After the ideality gives way to an expansion of form (e.g., Renaissance art forms moved into Baroque-Rococo art; Hellenic art forms likewise moved into the Hellenistic) comes an artistic realism that develops richly into a myriad outpouring of more intimate and personal relationships based on perception between the artist/s and the event/s and external object/s. This one-to-one grasp of the relationship between the human perception and the varied environmental objects in the artists' surrounds creates a final phase, a development of the sense of realism, until once again this reach of a certain vastness is enveloped within a new geometric phase already forming in the next 2,160 years cycle. We are now within the second hundred years of the geometric phase of the Aquarius age. As with the encounter metaphors, overlapping occurs from phase to phase.

In the evolution through the era is found a shifting of metaphors, as in close encounters. A principle of expression is found within the correlate of the mystic to what is imagined and wished for as the divine; thus, a new transcendent identity comes forth, again and again, as the mystic and artist enter into the nomenclature of the encounter, becoming the verb of its manifest and the subject of its fomentation.

The cycle renews and reincarnates. The neighborhood changes from phase to phase, as performing through era after era, but beneath it all, is the instigation of the human affinity for the supernal creation, and as the vessels appearing over Texas might indicate, vice versa: the supernal affinity for objective form and the incredible variations in substances and species. The cosmic expanse is that place called home for which we yearn. Encounters teach us that the neighborhood--the universe--has its own biologically evolving life and is where we all live, again and again.

Sewanee, Tennessee. USA

January 27, 2008