The Drive

    A long drive seems to always become a chance to do things that you just don't seem to have time for...like listen.  You watch scenery, you pay attention to the roads and dodge the cars moving in and out; but before long you are out in the open and your driving is now inevitably four or five hours ahead and not just thirty or forty minutes.  So you listen to new music, new podcasts (we thoroughly enjoyed Kristy Young's extended interview with the laughing enigmatic artist, Academy Award winner, photographer, and former Talking Heads front man, David Byrne) and new thoughts between yourselves.  Then, after a short overnight break, we arrived back in Sedona and not unsurprisngly, my phone went out; WiFi was there and linked, but nothing worked, no 4G, no web updates, no personal beeps, nothing for 4+ hours.  My phone had become little more than a camera -- it was perfect.

    Part of this acceptance by me was because it thus became a time to just read in those quiet hours, to catch up on that backlog of articles and a few books that were meant to be read eventually but were now pushed to the fore front.  One piece that took me away from my normal line of thought appeared in The Atlantic concerning the new SETI dish nestled in the remote southwest mountains of China, one five football fields across and two times bigger than the giant Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.  Is anybody out there, China is now asking since the U.S. and most other nations appear to have moved onto deeming other projects more important.  So if they make contact with other beings the article asked (SETI stands for Search for Extra Terrestrials Intelligence), would China share any of the information; but more importantly would advanced beings even want to make contact with humans?  Probably not was the answer to the latter (our warring history of the past would all be visible and likely an advanced civilization would have moved well beyond wanting to reintroduce that style of expansionism to its peaceful world).  Infrared energy would be visible (...even a civilization that captured a tenth of a galaxy's stars would be easy to find, and we haven't found a single one, despite having searched the nearest 100,000 galaxies.)...unless the beings cloaked themselves, their planet, or their entire galaxy.  An even more advanced theory was that of the universe possibly being too hot for the beings' massive computing needs (even our own limited servers now are projected to use 13% of all of our world's electricity by 2030 so imagine the computing needs and resulting heat emanating from a computing galaxy...It might cloak itself from observation, and power down into a dreamless sleep lasting hundreds of millions of years, until such time when the universe has expanded and cooled to a temperature that allows for many more epochs of computing.)

    This somehow merged nicely with the recent book by Dr. Victoria Sweet, Slow Medicine.  She talked of her early readings of Carl Jung and how he talked of the other parts of us: He was describing the components of the inner world that make up our Self...There was, for starters, the shadow, our own personal shadow -- which is everything we reject in ourselves and love to hate in others.  Jung called it the "shadow" because it is cast by the light of consciousness which is why we can't get rid of it.  In dreams it appears as a dark figure pursuing the dreamer down a dark path, or sometimes as an animal.  It is made up of the parts of yourself that are your self but you don't like them.  Denying our shadow, projecting it onto others, leaves us frayed and incomplete, he believed, on the alert for the badness of others.  Acknowledging our shadow allows us to be whole.

      But, the SETI article asks, suppose we do contact an advanced species, one that would feel that we are little more than dogs or chimps in their world?  Even if no geopolitical strife ensued, humans would certainly experience a radical cultural transformation, as every belief system on Earth grappled with the bare fact of first contact.  Buddhists would get off easy: Their faith already assumes an infinite universe of untold antiquity, its every corner alive with the vibrating energies of living  beings.  The Hindu cosmos is similarly grand and teeming.  The Koran references Allah's "creation  of the heavens and the earth, and the living creatures that He has scattered through them."  Jews believe that God's power has no limits, certainly  none that would restrain his creative powers to this planet's cosmically small surface....Christianity might have it tougher.  There is a debate in contemporary Christian theology as to whether Christ’s salvation extends to every soul that exists in the wider universe, or whether the sin-tainted inhabitants of distant planets require their own divine interventions. 

     So there we were hiking, surrounded by both dry desert land and riparian oasis, life and death glimpsed in forms right below our hiking boots.  What if this search for some alien life forms millions of light years away, far beyond our capable lifespans at this point, was really just sitting there cloaked inside our bodies, shadows mixed with all sorts of other pieces of us, power hidden inside like pieces of light (not that long ago who could have imagine the almost uncontrollable power of the laser?).  And imagine if we realized that, that we didn't need Avenger-like heroes with super powers because that was already all within our capabilities.  There was such a group that both preached and practiced this, becoming so large that it's followers were recognized as radical and perhaps soon to become a bit too powerful.  They were, after all, having meetings with this new person Jesus and writing about what he was saying almost immediately and not some 60 years later when they (as writers) would be in their 80s, an age quite rare in that day and an age when many died before they turned 40 and memories could be rearranged or remembered incorrectly.  No, this group could not and should not preach such a thing; to think that a single being, no, every single being, could be all powerful, that there was much more to our inner workings, our souls, than we could imagine (one of their writings allegedly tells of Jesus saying almost exactly this).  Why, it was almost alien the thought, an invasion and infection that soon wouldn't be able to be controlled.  So, by order of the emperor, all of its leaders, all of its monks and preachers, all of its teachings, all of it written records were ordered destroyed.  Armies and warriors were sent throughout the world to ensure that nothing remained*...it was deemed essential to destroy such far-flung beliefs at any and all costs, even if one needs to kill in order to wipe out this thought.  And to think, this truly was our history and really did happen...to an advanced civilization millions of light years away, this would all be visible.

Even in the desert, thousands of feet can destroy a habitat...

   So step back and reverse roles.  You are the alien species, the one watching our world develop, perhaps gazing at what once was your own growth and history (and whose idea was basically encapsulated in the almost-hated-by-critics movie, Valerian).  Imagine access to the Internet or parts of it being denied (as recently happened to both Russia and Iran, although little reported in everyday media)...and what happened to my phone in Sedona.  Think of yourself, communications disrupted, routines a jumble, now just "out there" with thousands of others...would you feel frustrated, angry, trapped?  Or blissful...welcoming of another part of you, your "shadow?"



 *Luckily  they appeared to have missed a single one group of buried records, and you can read about this exciting discovery in the classic study and book from Elaine Pagels some twenty years ago.