The other day, in the swimming baths at North Woodside, I got talking to an elderly gentleman who was handing out leaflets (and accompanying psychobabble) about Maitreya, the Buddha Messiah, who will (according to your man) descend upon us at some suitable juncture and save us from ourselves. Though I have my reservations I was willing enough to accommodate him until he started talking about little green men. He was rather confused I surmised. Here's a man who has, to all intents and purposes, spent his whole life doing and thinking what others have told him to. And then, suddenly, somewhere in the polar regions of living, there comes an epiphany that seems to negate that 'whole life' and propose the shocking revelation that your life has been anything but 'whole'. The fragmentation of self, the loss of 'God' and religion, the absence of the sacred, combined with the rise of logical positivism, scientism, and an economy that is just not economic (and which exploits, violates and rapes the essence of the human), has led to a great deal of confusion and alienation for those people unwilling to work it out for themselves, and instead rely on manipulated truths vomited forth by the media.
It strikes me as alarming the amount of people I meet who cannot actually think (and thus be) for themselves, and who act upon super-imposed templates garnered from a hotch-potch of media, social networks, and their own prejudices. This 'unthinkingness', the readiness to accept conventional truths and ways of being in the world, means that the same forces that led to horrific events like the holocaust are still at work today, even though we like to convince ourselves that they're not.
Our education system too is, in the words of the art critic Rudolph Arnheim, (if not in the words of Einstein or any number of free thinking philosophers): a fifteen year apprenticeship in aesthetic alienation, (the aesthetic being according to the pioneering cyberneticist Gregory Bateson, 'the patter that connects 'you' to 'it'). With so much alienation going on, from processes and patterns, it is hardly surprising that we are surrounded by aliens.
Anyway, this elderly gentleman suddenly proposed that aliens (he never actually made the link between Maitreya and the aliens) were amongs us and that one way of detecting their presnece was through strange light markings on the sides of buildings. When I suggested that these were perhaps optical phenomena, reflections and deflections of light, he told me of his 'experience' in Glencoe when he saw what he believed to be some sort of alien aircraft. Again, I asked him if he had ruled out the possibility of the Aurora Borealis, or noctilucent clouds, or any range of nephologic effects. He hadn't. Indeed, he struggled to even understand what I meant by these words. I suggested then that before he start imposing his rather undefined revelations upon others, he should really try and ascertain that what he is in fact saying is provable. I suggested also that he look at some of the earlier photgraphs on this blog where I have captured shots of various light motifs on the ground and walls (having being reflected or deflected through glass and by shiny surfaces). He wasn't interested. Indeed, after about ten minutes listening to him, I quickly realised that he was so absorbed in his own meanderings, that anything anyone else said that wasn't a total acceptance of his story was ignored. When he realised that I would be too difficult to 'convert' he simply turned away from me mid-conversation and started on a young boy who had been listening in to his wild claims. Naturally, this young lad was much more open-minded, he suggested. Before I left, I told him that having an open mind is all well and good, but not so open that your brain falls out.
The alien hypothesis (which is arguably a lot more popular across the pond that it is here) is simply a mark of the extent to which we have lost touch with the authentic sources of reality, and alienated our selves from our selves. It is the extent to which we have 'lost "God"', and the sacred; the extent to which we have lost the connections to the processes that nourish us (the universal powerhouse). I wanted to urge him, this confused old man, to go into the hills and discover the aliens for himself, not as optical phenomena splashed across brightly lit walls, but as the myriad species of animal and elements that he had allowed himself to become estranged from.
The alien hypothesis is a reflection like these lights themselves of the unoriginal human. It is a perversion of the original human. A facsimile of man. To be sure, undoubtedly, there exists life outside of the planet earth, elsewhere in the universe, but to focus on such a thing instead of your own world, indeed, to anthropo-morphosize these very aliens into our own image, simply reveals the extent of our own delusions, and perhaps worse still, of our own boredom with our own world (as if we somehow knew its every move). I once wrote a short poem up there in the moors above the city about this very subject, about the alien and the aborigine (aliens being aborigines who have simply lost their way), upon uncovering a boulder with all manner of 'alien' life beneath it:
ALIEN
The search for UFOs,
the case of alien abduction,
the extra-terrestrial hypothesis,
indictments
on man’s estrangement from his greater Self.
Close encounters are all around us. The extra-terrest right in front of us.
We
are the alien.
The luminous frontline of Parnie Street and the Trongate, a smorgasbord of visual delight (especially in winter).
The light is not without but within me, and I myself am the light.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
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